If I had stayed there I would have to contend with these repetitive conversations, either people aren't engaging with these criticisms in a way that helps them develop their ideas, or new waves of people are entering the convo and making the same mistakes
Yeah, while a lot of my own personal animus towards Tumblr is about the sheer breathtaking wrongness of a lot of the popular takes, it's definitely in common memory that other people were bothered by the same waves of discourse being repeated again and again and again. Especially people here who remember Usenet and mailing lists. (Well, technically I am part of that slice of people, but I didn't get to engage with those things a whole lot before being forced into an in-system coma.) Those were places where discourse would, like... actually evolve over time, and while new people would continually join the group, there were usually mods, and there were guaranteed to be enough people dedicated long-term to the fandom (or whatever the topic of the group was) that they would invest time and effort into maintaining a FAQ. And if they did end up with less time or inclination to maintain the group, they'd hand the duties off to other people. We wrote a half-serious FAQ once for a mailing list we contributed a lot of years and effort to, summarizing the various standards, rules, and consensuses that had developed so far and why. It was even fun, I'm told.
The lack of mods is, I think, one of the big problems with Tumblr. We did a terrible job of modding on Livejournal, which we want to say was mostly our ex's fault, though I know it doesn't erase the harm people suffered. But when LJ communities worked, it was often due to the mods being competent and devoted like the mods on some of the better mailing lists and newsgroups we remember. A community can live or die by its moderation or lack thereof. And Tumblr is... yeah, absent of any way to moderate meaningfully (except when the admins decided to purge all the porn because they couldn't be bothered to investigate individual reports of CP being posted to the site, they just took the nuclear option). Which means that you don't get community elders, or the only thing close to a community elder is people with the patience to post the same things again and again and again in response to the continual waves of newcomers joining the community and starting the same discussions repeatedly. People in that situation are more likely than not to burn out eventually. They just can't take it any more. I don't blame them for a minute.
Plus that slice of Tumblr people don't really have a developed theory of ethics or justice or epistemology. That feels so corny and self-serious to express, but I genuinely think it's part of the problem, and that engaging with more formal philosophy would help people think better.
I mean... it's not corny to me. It makes total sense. We also remember being concerned about the way people on Tumblr didn't seem to be able to formulate their own ethics and worldviews, they just took them from whatever everybody else was linking to approvingly. Ethics (in that worldview) isn't what you think is a rightful path to follow, it's what an Authority says is True. Which is a dynamic that a lot of people from authoritarian backgrounds, I think, like fundamentalist Christianity, end up easily sliding into, because it feels familiar to them.
And re: the ideological diversity-- there's an imaginary Tumblr user in my head who is like wait a minute, dark hinting/dog-whistle alert, that means you are on the chud Internet, why are you on the chud Internet, and that's not so.
Oh lord, that's a familiar experience to me. The "imaginary Tumblr user in my head," that is, not the specific example, and having them get freaked out or angry that you're even listening to someone who doesn't have All The Right Opinions.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2025-08-20 01:43 am (UTC)Yeah, while a lot of my own personal animus towards Tumblr is about the sheer breathtaking wrongness of a lot of the popular takes, it's definitely in common memory that other people were bothered by the same waves of discourse being repeated again and again and again. Especially people here who remember Usenet and mailing lists. (Well, technically I am part of that slice of people, but I didn't get to engage with those things a whole lot before being forced into an in-system coma.) Those were places where discourse would, like... actually evolve over time, and while new people would continually join the group, there were usually mods, and there were guaranteed to be enough people dedicated long-term to the fandom (or whatever the topic of the group was) that they would invest time and effort into maintaining a FAQ. And if they did end up with less time or inclination to maintain the group, they'd hand the duties off to other people. We wrote a half-serious FAQ once for a mailing list we contributed a lot of years and effort to, summarizing the various standards, rules, and consensuses that had developed so far and why. It was even fun, I'm told.
The lack of mods is, I think, one of the big problems with Tumblr. We did a terrible job of modding on Livejournal, which we want to say was mostly our ex's fault, though I know it doesn't erase the harm people suffered. But when LJ communities worked, it was often due to the mods being competent and devoted like the mods on some of the better mailing lists and newsgroups we remember. A community can live or die by its moderation or lack thereof. And Tumblr is... yeah, absent of any way to moderate meaningfully (except when the admins decided to purge all the porn because they couldn't be bothered to investigate individual reports of CP being posted to the site, they just took the nuclear option). Which means that you don't get community elders, or the only thing close to a community elder is people with the patience to post the same things again and again and again in response to the continual waves of newcomers joining the community and starting the same discussions repeatedly. People in that situation are more likely than not to burn out eventually. They just can't take it any more. I don't blame them for a minute.
Plus that slice of Tumblr people don't really have a developed theory of ethics or justice or epistemology. That feels so corny and self-serious to express, but I genuinely think it's part of the problem, and that engaging with more formal philosophy would help people think better.
I mean... it's not corny to me. It makes total sense. We also remember being concerned about the way people on Tumblr didn't seem to be able to formulate their own ethics and worldviews, they just took them from whatever everybody else was linking to approvingly. Ethics (in that worldview) isn't what you think is a rightful path to follow, it's what an Authority says is True. Which is a dynamic that a lot of people from authoritarian backgrounds, I think, like fundamentalist Christianity, end up easily sliding into, because it feels familiar to them.
And re: the ideological diversity-- there's an imaginary Tumblr user in my head who is like wait a minute, dark hinting/dog-whistle alert, that means you are on the chud Internet, why are you on the chud Internet, and that's not so.
Oh lord, that's a familiar experience to me. The "imaginary Tumblr user in my head," that is, not the specific example, and having them get freaked out or angry that you're even listening to someone who doesn't have All The Right Opinions.
-Istevia