signal boosting friending meme!
theladyscribe is doing a Dreamwidth friending meme! Head over there and find more people to follow! I have just gone through and subscribed to a bunch of people from those posts with shared fandoms (D&D Cartoon WHAT *waves to
alessandriana*) so if you have just seen me pop up subscribing that would be why! Hi!
This is awesome timing for me personally because I have had to block myself from Tumblr almost completely. I just feel too rotten when I stagger off to bed after two hours and I literally don't have a single thing to "show" for it but having scrolled endlessly along my dashboard, reblogged a handful of things.
Actually, I mentioned this to a friend --
serialkarma was it you? -- that it's not the lack of posting, it's the lack of commenting that's the real source of the falloff on LJ/DW, and IMO that's died down not because people have stopped journaling, but because tumblr is really appealing to people who didn't journal very much, but did comment once in a while -- who I suspect were nine-tenths of the fannish iceberg.
That is, in the heydey of LJ fandom, if you were willing to put in the time to regularly post good content to your journal, people followed you and read your posts. If you didn't put in that time and effort, either because you didn't want to or couldn't, then you could really only participate in LJ fandom via commenting in other people's journals.
That created loads of incentive to comment, which in turn encouraged the posters to post more, and posts regularly became awesome conversation spaces where loads of people would interact and where you could get to know people. But the journal owner obviously had primacy and the loudest voice and could delete comments, and if you were primarily a commenter it was harder to get known, and if you wanted to post an occasional cool thing, it was really hard to get it seen.
On tumblr, reblogging means you can have a substantial presence even if you don't have original content to post or much time. And because people follow tags, even if you post just one cool thing, you can put it in the tags and people will generally find it and signal boost it so everyone sees it. That's a really big incentive to move for that big group of people who previously only had the option of talking in other people's spaces -- on Tumblr they can have their OWN spaces.
So IMO that's why it now feels a bit quiet and lonely as a result journaling, but you can't blame people because they want their own space and that sense of ownership and active participation. I don't think it's that people actually adore Tumblr so much as that's a really BIG plus to someone who didn't have it before.
Of course, the sucky part of that is Tumblr mutes people's voices because so much of a Tumblr is NOT created by the owner, and mostly you can't look at someone's Tumblr and know anything about them or even (unless they've been careful about their tagging) what they themselves made. And the less said about their horrible direct communication tools, the better. So it's relatively much harder to build friendship and community there.
I think there's something to be built that will do all of these things well -- a space that easily lets you build your own presence and reputation out of even small interactions, curate rather than create, but still helps foreground creation and encourage it, and build community and conversation. And when it comes along, we'll all move there! :P
Anyway for now I am happily following a bunch more people here -- I am actually myself part of the underwater iceberg and terrible about commenting these days, but I'm reading when I can! <3
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