Day: December 11, 2018

dragon-in-a-fez:

apricops:

apricops:

It’s quite likely no coincidence that that most ‘mismanaged’ and least profitable social media site is also the one that turned out to be most amenable to the formation of actual communities

To clarify, Tumblr is indeed horribly mismanaged, but notably, it’s mismanaged both in ways that harm us (e.g. doing little about pornbots, nazis, etc.) and ways that have greatly benefited us – not asking for real names, hiding our follower counts, a chronologically-sorted dashboard, etc. are big draws, but in the eyes of other social media monarchs, they look like unforgivable mistakes. If I don’t have to give my real name, that’s that much less information to sell to advertisers. If posts are listed chronologically, Tumblr can’t shove the posts of ‘influencers’ in front of me willy-nilly. Tumblr was a ‘success’ because it was too poorly managed to sufficiently atomize us, and so we actually had conversations and communities instead of being the best products for advertisers.

as someone who wrote my dissertation on tumblr and community: consigned. there’s a reason people talk about facebook as a tool for keeping up with people they already know, and tumblr as a place for forming new connections, and it’s that where other social media is specifically built to profit off of sticking as many virtual tendrils into your offline life as possible, this place lets you generally just be the person you came here to be. the fact that tumblr has built such a great space for community by making decisions that are ultimately bad for their business is a great illustration of how the negative social impacts of social media giants are because of capitalism, not inherent in the category of technology.