I actually think the real advantage tumblr has over other websites is the ability of “reblogging” to create posts with contributions from multiple users. This allows people to build on others’ posts, whether that’s derailing them with a terrible joke, drawing the scenario proposed as a comic, answering the question posed originally in lively essay format, or rewriting the previous interaction as a scene in Shakespearean iambic pentameter.
This is also why Tumblr is hard to make profitable. Individual users have relatively little power to create good content. It’s interactions between users that actually creates the good content, and therefore, no one involved in the good stuff on Tumblr can really claim to “own” it or be the “creator.”
Posts have to navigate through Tumblr to pick up the people that can add to them in a constructive way, and then when users interact, the whole interaction can spread across the website as a new evolution of the content. There’s no way to simplify this process.
Theres a whole ecosystem running here. It’s not as simple as Creators and Consumers, and you can’t simplify it to that. That’s not how ART works, let alone posts. There’s symbiosis. The users that do the nitrogen fixation aren’t the ones photosynthesizing. The detritivores can’t also be the predators. The “rappers doing normal shit blog” has a different niche than the person that asks why Lil Wayne has socks on in the jacuzzi, who has a different niche than the person who says “those are his hooves, you bitch!”
It’s like bioavailability, you see. The user that responds “Those are his hooves, you bitch” is like a predator on a high trophic level, unable to directly feed on producers, needing primary consumers to convert the post into a form that makes a punch line possible.
This is what I love about Tumblr. It feels more like discussing a common matter with the people you meet while out for a walk than trying to hold a conversation with twenty people at once in a crowded room
I have seen a lot of these “how Tumblr works”-posts going around lately, and I think this one says it really well. I’m not necessarily here for the original post but for the snowball effect of a reblog chain that hopefully follows
College dorms in the late 90s early 2000s had poster boards everywhere and everyone stuck random notes on, some that continued a conversation. Tumblr makes me think of college posterboards.
Tumblr is improv. We’re constantly yes-anding each other.
Reposted from https://lies.tumblr.com/post/673821076046970880.
Tags: tumblr dot com.
