Tumblr vs. Dreamwidth as content platforms
These days, when I think of a new analytical essay I want to write about fandom and other stuff, I think first about DW rather than Tumblr where I spent years. Part of it may be Tumblr's structural and management problems, such as getting burned by the Tumblr dogpile (see a post with some informational links if you want to know the completely ridiculous context) and the possibility of my posts being mislabeled as "adult." (My appeal of the flagging was successful so no harm done to me personally, unlike to sex workers and adult content creators who really did lose the spaces they cultivated and at least part of their income. Meanwhile pornbots and Nazis continue to roam free smh)
However, even without the toxic culture and the architecture that enables it, and even without Tumblr seeking profit at the expense of their userbase, Tumblr is fundamentally not an effective platform for publishing and organizing content. Its search function utterly sucks, its tags are not meant for organization, and any original content gets buried in a torrent of reblogs and miscellany.
Contrast that with DW which has an effective search function for paying users and a tag system that is nearly as good, if used well. Perhaps best of all, what you find on a person's blog is going to be their own content or at best links to off-blog content, not 30,000 popular and often image-heavy reblogged posts. After spending years almost exclusively on Tumblr, drinking from its neverending and intoxicating firehose of content, the orderliness and sanity of DW are mind-blowing to me.
It isn't necessarily easy to find the good stuff on DW, that's true, but that was true of Tumblr as well. The need for curation, recommendation, and sheer luck to find the good stuff has never gone away, Tumblr simply helped numb that need by throwing a torrent of replicated content at its users.
This is not to say there isn't good content on Tumblr, far from it. It attracted talented and creative users that have made it into an amazing place, almost in spite of itself. The problem is that the place is so disorganized you need to wade quite a bit to find it and spend way more time there than you should have needed to. And that's the point, I suppose, since all engagement is good engagement in for-profit social media.
Dreamwidth entry URL: https://ljlee.dreamwidth.org/76297.html
However, even without the toxic culture and the architecture that enables it, and even without Tumblr seeking profit at the expense of their userbase, Tumblr is fundamentally not an effective platform for publishing and organizing content. Its search function utterly sucks, its tags are not meant for organization, and any original content gets buried in a torrent of reblogs and miscellany.
Contrast that with DW which has an effective search function for paying users and a tag system that is nearly as good, if used well. Perhaps best of all, what you find on a person's blog is going to be their own content or at best links to off-blog content, not 30,000 popular and often image-heavy reblogged posts. After spending years almost exclusively on Tumblr, drinking from its neverending and intoxicating firehose of content, the orderliness and sanity of DW are mind-blowing to me.
It isn't necessarily easy to find the good stuff on DW, that's true, but that was true of Tumblr as well. The need for curation, recommendation, and sheer luck to find the good stuff has never gone away, Tumblr simply helped numb that need by throwing a torrent of replicated content at its users.
This is not to say there isn't good content on Tumblr, far from it. It attracted talented and creative users that have made it into an amazing place, almost in spite of itself. The problem is that the place is so disorganized you need to wade quite a bit to find it and spend way more time there than you should have needed to. And that's the point, I suppose, since all engagement is good engagement in for-profit social media.
Dreamwidth entry URL: https://ljlee.dreamwidth.org/76297.html