Social media gets noisy

[beccaelizabeth]

Tumblr has a funny sort of pattern to data dissemination and the rewards thereof.

(People who mostly make new stuff are not what I'm thinking of here. I mostly reblog, and save long writes for here, because tumblr eats words and hangs up and is no good to me.)

You start on tumblr, follow some people who look interesting, and reblog their stuff.

So then people follow you, because they think you have nice stuff, and you look and wonder if you want to follow them back, because they clearly like some same things.

And sometimes that works great, though now you see the stuff you already saw, liked, and reblogged, when your mutual again reblogs it. But also you see other stuff, which is cool.

But some of them turn out to be, like, downstream? So everything they have posted you have seen. It's not just your stuff, it's somehow all the stuff. Sometimes on a really long delay. Posts can just keep going forever, and tumblr doesn't date them, so you never know. Mysteries solved back when the site was new are still being signal boosted. It's really messy.

But, some people are downstream, so you don't follow them back.

But others are posting new to you content, only not all of it, so you look up these interesting people they are reblogging, and follow them to get a less filtered version.

And lo, your dash gets more interesting.

But your followers are doing the same thing. So they start following all the interesting people you reblog from. And your notes kind of wear off.

So now you're seeing all the same stuff you already reblog - already a hazard of echoey friends - but you're not getting that notes induced happy moment from having provided it any more.

And then it is less interesting.

So you go looking for more people to follow. Even though you follow a lot of people already. Because the noise content goes up relentlessly, just because of this follow and reblog thing.

Communities used to work much better because all interested parties saw the thing at once, and could comment on it without everyone seeing the whole thread a bazillion times. Solved mysteries had a note right there, and all ETA remained visible to everyone. Much tidier.

But they work worse, because how did we ever find we were interested? How did new people all end up in the same places? ... as I recall it was cause there was only the one place when googled, but it's not like that happens much.

But tumblr still has the endless how do you find it problem, only with a hugely noisy wrapper. You can be on it all day without finding out anything. It's a problem.

And stuff like the recent Legends of Tomorrow rewrite hit a snag because everyone in one particular loop heard about it in advance, and that loop was people writing it. People who might want to read it found out when it hit Ao3. And then got loudly snarky about conflicting headcanons and not being invited. Because it was social, a group thing, but despite the originally iirc open call it had not reached that particular corner. Some felt actively excluded when it's simply the structure of like an reblog in play.

Everything is particular ship and character focused, you find people by following authors and the people they reblog, and there's no central fandom newsletter.

And if there's meta fandom any more anywhere I have yet to find it.

Hugely frustrate.



It do mean that I, an effective lurker on tumblr, can feel I participate just with my clikcs and reblogs. Which is nice. Reading and forwarding is somehow the social norm. Which is weirder.


And you'd think with more people in the world there's more of us in fandom, but I still am seeing a lot of the same names as ever, and it's as hard as ever to find a new circle.



And I don't have a solution to any of this

but

tumblr is noisy

and I wonder where the content has gone

or a lot of the people who made it.

Comments

[ironymaiden]

I feel like MySpace and then Facebook murdered centralized fandom. Fandom and friends were both on LJ. then people who weren't fen fell for MySpace and that chipped a bit off. Then LJ had various failfests and that started waves of fandom migrations to the clones and that fragmented communities, then Facebook drove the last spike.

I think the best communities for meta are now on Reddit, but there's no relationship building there.

[mekare]

Hi there (*waves from the network page*). I read your post and you summarized why I didn’t like Tumblr enough to stay a part of it beautifully. Especially the “staying there all day and not really finding anything worthwhile” problem. Plus, as a fanartist I was wary of posting my stuff because I had heard of so many artists whose pics were reposted without credit. I am quite happy here on Dreamwidth which has grown and some folks from LJ have gathered, new communities get opened all the time so I kind of feel like this is a small haven for some fandoms at least. I like the community model for the reasons you pointed out. The interaction is great and not confusing at all. :-)

[lokifan]

YEP.