Vent

[citrakayah]

The existence of social media that allows you to reblog things has been a plague upon the Internet.

Back before those sites gained traction, if someone had a blog, you'd be reading their thoughts. Maybe their thoughts were personal, maybe they gave away very little about the person's life but were about some scientific topic. Maybe their thoughts were not well put together or maybe they were really good. But you were reading their thoughts. You could actually form some sort of connection with people. It might not be super deep, but it could be. I met people who I got to know well through Dreamwidth, and I know people have formed even deeper connections.

That's not totally disappeared, but now when I look through Tumblr and Twitter blogs it's mostly reblogs or likes. I'm not actually getting to know the person, I'm getting to know what they like. If I want to find an original thought by this person, I have to trawl through a bunch of reblogs and likes to find it. There's exceptions but that's the rule. And it's not that these people don't have original thoughts (I know that isn't true; I know and respect many of them). It's just that I'm not seeing them.

But it still makes me feel like I can't actually get to know them, which is unfortunate both because there's people who seem cool that I don't know and people I do know that I only really see on Tumblr and Twitter now. Other people somehow manage to form deep connections through Tumblr and Twitter, but I'm genuinely not sure how they do it--whenever I look at the average person's blog, it just seems like a jumble of assorted stuff.

Comments

[professionaljaywlker]

Oh i feel you a LOT on that. A "personnal post" section is sorely missing on tumblr, and even with my own blog i tend to get... weirdly detached? It doesn't feel that much mine, moreso a way to just... talk with others. But worse than a forum, because it's indescribably hard to search stuff up on tumblr, so it's really only the current happenstances. I *guess* it's nice for art, though? It's much easier to find new stuff through tumblr or twitter than say, furaffinity, for me. But i prefer posting on furaffinity because it's better as a personnal archive.

Honestly mostly came on this site for this reason, but I'm kinda balancing between dreamwidth and pillowfort at the moment since both have decent journaling features, and the search feature feels easier on pillowfort than here. Bit of a hard time with how to find new people, with this one.

[the_broken_tower]

How active is Pillowfort? That's a new one to me

Tumblr's always been hard to search... And the chances of reblogged posts randomly disappearing is way too high to be comfortable. It isn't really within the user's control and I definitely don't like that.

- Rosen (he/him)

[professionaljaywlker]

It's definitely slow. Only a few posts i've been interested in, in the span of a few days. I assume it's approximately as active as on here, but it feels a slight bit more active due to the more tumblr like disposition of the blogs : you do by default see anything other blogs reblog, so that gets more stuff on your page, for better and for worse. I've been able to comment on stuff and get responses, but it's not like i've gotten a lot in return on my stuff.

Quite frankly, the activity isn't really what i'd be recommending it for. I just like the way it's set up quite a lot, and few posts is better than none, i suppose. I also find it prettier for the sharing of picture : i found that dreamwidth makes most image posts a little bit wonky, but it might be me not being used to how i'm supposed to format yet. Additionally, there's a tag search on pillowfort, which isn't a thing here : i'm getting used to that as tumblr user, so it's more intuitive in there for me to find the blogs i want.

[citrakayah]

There's a way to search for only original posts on Tumblr, but some blogs are excluded (probably because they're not visible to the third party website that does it) and I don't think it catches things like reblogs where the person whose blog you're searching added a comment to the reblog chain.