I know people talk about how Tumblr is great because you can view the dash chronologically and use the search pages chronologically and such, and I love this about it, but I worry that we've set the bar so low.
And I worry that these days, Tumblr is still driven more by algorithm than not.
How many users on the site have their dash configured to display chronologically and non-algorithmically? How many people take that extra step of hitting the "Latest" tab instead of defaulting to the "Top" tab any time they do a search? How many people discover the bulk of their posts through these non-curated, non-algorithmic methods, vs. through top posts, recommended posts, or the curated/algorithmic posts that appear at the bottom of the screen when you view a post on someone's blog.
I look at the notes on my posts and I have a sneaking suspicion that it is still algorithms that are driving which posts blow up and which ones don't. People don't seem to discover my old posts as much as I'd like and as much as people used to back before curated feeds were a thing on Tumblr. But certain posts seem to go viral without a clear reason of how or why, it's almost like people are being recommended the posts somehow.
And I don't like it. It scares me that here, this one weird site that seems spared from the worst of the entshittification of the social media sphere, that it still seems a bulk of the people here are still ruled by the algorithm.
So what about you? Do you reject the curation and algorithms as wholeheartedly as I do? Or am I in a small minority here?
