Let's Debate
I guess it's back to work on Monday. I'm still on 40% sick leave, which means I'll be working 4,5 hour days next week. The following week, I'll be on 20% sick leave - I'll probably just take one of those days off as a sick day and work full time the rest. Mind and body permitting.
Related, I love my new doctor so far, and I am thrilled with how this turned out. Especially since I instigated all of these changes myself. I chose this doctor, I went through the process of transferring to her practice, I set up the appointment, and I spoke up about my issues. I can't help it, feeling like I'm in control of the shit that happens to me makes me feel better about everything.
Skipping over to something entirely different. Debates on tumblr. How do you feel about them? I am not talking about the content of the debates, but the way in which they are conducted. See, the thing that always bugged me about tumblr was the limited user interaction. I still to this day do not understand how people can meet others and develop meaningful friendships through tumblr.
It's fascinating to me - what's preventing me from understanding the basics? Because I really do feel like I've missed out on something fundamental here.
Let's review; there are no comments (unless you activate/implement/sign up for an external commenting service), there are no user groups or communities, it's meant as a place for creatives to share their work - but most of the tumblr posts I see are not OC - most posts are memes or gifs of popular TV shows or films.
I DON'T GET IT :D
Tonight I got involved in my first tumblr "debate", and it was the clunkiest, most unpleasant user experience I've ever had to endure. No wonder the social justice warrior tumblr people seem so pissed off all the time, they have to go to hell and back just to post their text post outbursts.
And then of course there is no real way for people to reply. To reply to a text post, you need to reblog it, include all the participants' usernames in the tags, remember to click the "post as text" option, post it, and wait for notifications about other people liking or reblogging. It's a nightmare. And don't even get me started on the scenario of two different people "replying" to the same reblog. Do you reblog each individually? Cutting and pasting both replies into a single reblog could lead to icky drama about proper reblogging etiquette, plus it just looks messy. But not really as messy as two long ass reblogs of THE SAME DAMN POST just to answer two different replies, let's be honest.
..... phew. I am all out of breath just writing this. How do people keep up with this on a daily basis?
Tumblr may be many things, but it's definitely not a platform for proper debate. I wonder if this is why the teenage social justice warriors have made it their home? It's easy to feel like you've "won" an argument on tumblr, and it's extremely easy for people to jump in at any point during the "discussion" and simply share the side they agree with (and ignore everything else). It's a sort of passive debate that will more or less always cater to an audience that agrees with the statements that are made. And I think it's alarming that this is what online debate is evolving into. With its fancy reblogs and likes.
LJ really has something special with their commenting system, threaded comments are so rare these days - I hope they'll never move away from threaded comments, it's what keeps this site going. Could you imagine LJ without a commenting feature? What are people really looking for when they leave LJ for tumblr? I am genuinely interested.