do you ever feel like people are less themselves on this site than on any other? i mean like, everyone on here is driven by standards, even though everyone says their totally against that. I feel like there's less diversity on this site than on facebook. Maybe its not white girls with starbucks, it's just a different kind of enviroment.
I'm not really sure what you mean?
Facebook (at least my corner of Facebook, since it's so goddamned sprawling) is much more homogeneous for me, since it's mostly family or IRL friends, so they're largely straight people, the majority of them white followed by black. On Tumblr I'm following people from other countries I might never meet, people who might not even speak English fluently. The majority is still probably white, but it's more evened out. I don't know any Native Americans on Facebook, but I follow multiple NAs on Tumblr, for example. I might not have found them otherwise were it not through Tumblr.
There does seem to be a gathering towards a homogeneity of thought, which lends itself to some of the uglier aspects of Tumblr mob rule, but for the most part that thought seems to be in favor of equality for gender, sexual and ethnic minorities, which is good. Often I get the feeling that Tumblr seems to have women in its majority, but I don't know the site statistics, and I certainly think the Tumblr experience is influenced by who you follow. I follow a lot of women just due to following a lot of fandom blogs.
And as for "less themselves," if you're suggesting people are putting on a front for their own personal web brand, I suspect that does happen to some bloggers, I'm sure. I'm sure to somebody new on the site desperate to fit in in a sometimes quite insular community, that might happen more and more. But I certainly don't feel like I'm fronting on this site. I'm usually pretty frank, and most of the people I follow have been on the site long enough that they don't strike me as phony or pandering at all. I think the majority of users view Tumblr as a safe space and are more themselves than they would be anywhere else. (I could get into how Tumblr is not actually a safe space at all, and blogs are public and anybody can reblog any post so it's safer to keep some things guarded, but I digress.)
Who you follow on the site shapes your experience. I follow a lot of people, so I get to see a pretty wide section of Tumblr, and I'm not getting the same experience as you. But then again, "white girls with Starbucks" doesn't dominate my dash so much as "artists struggling with young adulthood."
I hope this helps.
