So, a number of social media sites seem to be simultaneously imploding.
I will mention at the outset, because it will become relevant as soon as the next paragraph (not counting the one-word paragraph saying only "Anyway" that I then decided to insert), that I'd started writing this post long before it was posted; it's been languishing unfinished and unposted for a few weeks because I am a procrastinator who seems incapable of getting things done. This means that much of what I'm discussing in this article will be kind of old news by the time it's posted, although of course it's still almost six months till the hard launch, so by the time anybody actually reads the article it will be even older news. I suppose prior to the hard launch, getting blog posts up promptly when they refer to current issues isn't much of a priority, because nobody is reading these posts at the time they're posted regardless, but after the hard launch when (if all goes well) people are actually visiting the site, it... may actually still not be that much of a priority, because who's going to be getting their news from this blog?
Anyway.
Twitter seems to be pioneering exciting new ways every day to become more broken and useless. Still, while Twitter was already a disaster when I started this post, in the last few days it has already managed to become even worse, first requiring visitors to be logged in to a Twitter account to see any tweets, and then imposing a limit even for logged-in users of seeing six hundred tweets a day—or six thousand for those foolish enough to pay for the ridiculous "Twitter Blue". This count includes not just posts users click on, but any posts that show up on their feeds including replies, so even the higher six-thousand-post limit will run out quickly enough to throttle any use of the site. Jehosephat. We'll see how long this lasts. Heck, we'll see how long Twitter lasts.
(I've seen conjectures that the purported purpose of this policy to address "data scraping & system manipulation" was just a cover story, and it was really a patch to cover issues stemming from a scramble to remove data from Google cloud services or a problem with the code that was supposed to restrict viewing tweets to logged-in users. I'm not sure whether there's any truth to these rumors, but if there is, that's... not any better.)
Now the Reddit CEO has decided that he'd quite like his site to also self-destruct. (Well... this was actually before Twitter's rate-limiting fiasco, which, again, hadn't happened yet when I started writing this post, but Twitter had already been careening precipitously downhill long before that). It was announced that Reddit would start charging obscene amounts of money for the use of their previously free APIs. (The announcement did not put it in those exact words.) Now, I don't know enough about either Reddit or about computers to fully understand why this is such a bad thing, but apparently it was enough of a bad thing to lead to widespread outcry, with many moderators making their subreddits inaccessible in protest. The Reddit Powers That Be then decided to make a bad thing worse by threatening to replace the protesting mods if they didn't open up the subreddits again, and ay chihuahua, you don't have to know much about Reddit or about computers to understand why that's a terrible idea. ("We have not threatened anyone," a Reddit spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge, despite the widely disseminated evidence of the Reddit admins very definitely threatening people. Perhaps he was under the impression that it didn't count as a threat if you weren't talking like a mobster from a Bugs Bunny cartoon.)
In malicious compliance, and in reference to an utterly bone-headed statement by the Reddit CEO about Reddit's unpaid volunteer moderators being "landed gentry" who did not represent the broad userbase, many of the protesting moderators reopened their subreddits but held votes about whether the subreddit should return to normal operations, or reopen allowing only images of John Oliver looking sexy (or similarly absurd restrictions, but sexy John Oliver was a common theme). Belying the CEO's out-of-touch claim, most users showed their support of the protests by overwhelmingly voting for the restrictions, and Reddit was overcome with sexy John Oliver pictures, even in some more specialized subreddits. Now, Reddit isn't quite at Twitter levels of dysfunction and dilapidation, and it may turn itself around, although the statements the Reddit admins have made in interviews have admittedly not given particular cause for optimism. Still, yeah, things aren't going great there at the moment.
Other social media sites have also been getting into the act to a lesser degree, that act being making things worse and ticking off their users. Discord is mandating a highly unpopular change to its system of usernames. Even Stack Exchange (though I'm not sure that really counts as a social media site) angered users and triggered a moderator strike with a new policy relaxing (or perhaps de facto eliminating) restrictions on AI-generated content. Still, it's Twitter and Reddit that are currently winning the Alienate-Your-Userbase contest, which is a contest that nobody should probably want to be winning. However, not everyone is a loser here. The Tumblr userbase has been growing as disaffected users first from Twitter and now more recently from Reddit have sought new virtual homes there. And that circuitously brings me to whatever semblance of a point I had for this post. Namely, as it says in the title, I am going to rant about Tumblr.
Though when I say I'm going to rant about Tumblr, I don't actually mean I'm going to rant about problems with Tumblr itself. Not that Tumblr doesn't have them. It's going through its share of issues too. To name just one current source of vexation (and this really is just one of many), it would be nice if the Tumblr admins would stop trying so hard to make Tumblr Live happen. It's not going to happen, and having to "snooze Tumblr Live" every seven days gets annoying. (Although marginally less annoying than leaving the damned thing unsnoozed.) There are also apparently accessibility issues with the Tumblr app, which doesn't affect me directly since I don't use the app, but I'll take the word of those who are affected that these are serious concerns.
Still, while Tumblr may be very far from perfect, it's still I suppose my favorite social media site, or at least it's the only social media site I'm anywhere near active on... and that was true long before Twitter started on its current hellbound trajectory. I do have a personal Twitter account, but I rarely use it. (Actually, it's entirely possible I don't have a personal Twitter account anymore, given that inactive Twitter accounts are now supposedly being deleted, and I haven't used my account in long enough it probably qualifies as inactive. I don't care enough to bother checking whether it's still there.) And I've been on other social media sites. I have a Facebook account, but I don't think I've posted anything there in years. I have a LinkedIn account, but I've really only used it to wish a friend who's not on other social media happy birthday. I had a LiveJournal account, way back when people had LiveJournal accounts, and I think I had a MySpace account once upon a time, but if so that was long enough ago that I don't remember for sure. I haven't used TikTok. (I don't even know its [[Wikipedia:URL|]]. Is it just TikTok.com? That's a rhetorical question. I don't care, and could very easily find out if I did.) I can't honestly say I've never had a Reddit account, because I once had a part-time job for which I was asked to create a Reddit account because it might prove useful, but it never actually did prove useful, so while I guess I do technically have a Reddit account I've never logged into it.
But I've been on Tumblr since 2012, and while I haven't always been super active, I've at least been more active there than on any other social media site. (Yes, I am several standard deviations above the mean age of Tumblr users. I feel like I should be apologizing for that and I'm not entirely sure why.) I'd already planned even before Twitter's self-immolation to create a Tumblr account for the Wongery—and in fact I've now done so, and linked it on the Wongery main page. There's nothing there yet, of course, and won't be until after the hard launch, but hey, wongery.tumblr.com now exists.
(There was supposed to be an image here (http://wongery.com/w/images/d/df/Wongery_Tumblr.png, with the caption "The current Wongery Tumblr blog, in all its glory"), but it didn't show up. This was my first time trying to insert an image in a blog post; there are some glitches with the way the site code currently parses Wikitext in blog posts, and apparently displaying images runs afoul of another such glitch. I could maybe figure out a workaround to get the image showing, but since I plan to redo the site code to use the MediaWiki APIs, and since nobody is likely to be reading this blog post until then, I may as well just leave it for now and replace this paragraph with the intended image once the recoding is done and image embedding (hopefully) works.)
So no, while the Tumblr staff has done and is doing some things that are certainly worthy of criticism, what I wanted to rant about in this post is an appalling attitude by some Tumblr users. I don't know if the people pushing this view are in the majority or just a very vocal minority, but there's a pernicious idea going around Tumblr that liking posts is a bad thing, or at best an empty gesture, that you should never like a post unless you also reblog it. (For any readers unfamiliar with Tumblr, I should explain that as on many social media sites, you can "like" posts on Tumblr by hitting a button, so when I refer here to liking a post, I mean hitting the like button, not just... having a positive mental reaction to the post.) I've even seen posts saying that anyone who likes the post but doesn't reblog will be blocked. (Don't worry. With that horrible attitude, you definitely won't be seeing any of your posts liked or reblogged by me.) And the main reason that this has risen in my attention lately is that in the wake of the influx of new users in the form of Reddit refugees, there are posts circulating around Tumblr of advice for new Tumblr users, and many of these posts specifically advise new users not to like posts.
There is a twofold rationale often given for this advice: That likes don't do anything except send a notification to the poster, and that Tumblr has no algorithm that would be influenced by the likes. Both of these statements are blatantly false.
First of all, even if it was true that all a like did was notify the poster that you liked their post... that's still not nothing. You're telling them that someone liked their post, and that's a nice thing to know. I mean, as a long-term Tumblr user myself, I like it when people like my posts. Would I like it even better if they reblogged my post? Well, sure, of course, but there may be good reasons they didn't do so. Maybe they don't want to reblog too many posts and drown out their original content. Maybe it doesn't match their blog aesthetic. Maybe their blog is devoted to a specific topic, and while they'll like posts unrelated to that topic they don't want them on their blog. Those are all completely valid reasons, and if they liked my post I'm not going to get upset that they didn't also reblog it. That's like being given a free cookie, and then throwing a fit because you didn't get an entire cake.
But in fact that's not all a like does, and there is an algorithm.
Tumblr has a feature called "Based On Your Likes!", where it will occasionally show you a post in your feed that may be from a blog you don't follow. While I am not privy to the internal workings of Tumblr, I think it is a relatively safe assumption that the posts that show up as "Based On Your Likes!" are selected by an algorithm that bases the selection on your likes. This single feature therefore simultaneously falsifies both the common reasons given for objecting to likes on Tumblr.
On the other hand, the "Based On Your Likes!" feature can be turned off in your dashboard settings, and the same posts that advise new users not to use the like button often also advise them to turn it off. Personally, I kind of like seeing the occasional post from a blog I'm unfamiliar with (though their connection with my likes is occasionally tenuous), but okay, not everyone may feel that way. That's not the only place that the algorithm takes your likes into account, though. There's also "Include stuff in your orbit", and "Include followed tag posts", which also probably use likes to prioritize which posts to show. (Okay, technically there's also an option to show "Best Stuff First", but that one I absolutely agree should be turned off.) These can all also be turned off in your settings, and maybe the anti-like people turn them all off (actually, I suspect they do follow tags, and just don't consider the fact that the tagged posts they see are probably also influenced by likes), but even if so, the fact that you don't use the algorithm doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
(The increasingly desperate-seeming official account of the Tumblr store recently claimed that "As you know tumblr has no algorithm or targeting of any kind", but was rightly called out for lying. To be charitable, the Emporium account may be run by someone not involved in the programming and implementation side of Tumblr, who might have picked up the idea that Tumblr had no algorithms from the anti-like posts without realizing what an algorithm is or how clearly false this statement was, so it's possible that this post wasn't a lie, but that it was just ignorant.)
There's yet another purpose likes serve, too. Other users who share similar tastes can look through your likes to see if there are any posts you liked that also catch their attention. Except that the guides that tell you not to like also tell you to make your likes private for some reason. They don't explain why they think people should make their likes private, so I am left only to speculate. Are they ashamed of the posts they like? Are they afraid that people will see that they liked a post the viewer disapproves of, and judge them for it? I get a desire for privacy, I guess, but this seems counterproductive.
So, okay, sure, likes don't do anything if you turn off all the settings that make likes do something.
Except no, of course even that isn't true. There's the already mentioned fact that likes tell the poster that you liked their post, which shouldn't be ignored. But besides that, your likes also affect what other people see. The "Based On Your Likes!" feature, for instance, almost certainly works by checking the likes of other posters who have liked similar posts to you. That means it's not based on just your likes; it's affected by other people's likes as well. The same goes for the posts from followed tags, and so forth. So maybe you don't use the "Based On Your Likes!" feature, or follow tags, but other people do, and your likes help shape what they see, and help them to see more posts they're interested in.
So likes don't do anything if you turn off the settings that make likes do something, and if you don't care about anyone's Tumblr experience but your own.
Since starting this post, I have finally seen posts pushing back against this anti-like attitude ("likescolding", as one of the posts put it)—maybe there were such posts all along, and I'm only now noticing them, but in any case it's good to see. Those people who are telling other posters not to like posts are making Tumblr worse for everyone, and likescolding (sure, I'll go ahead and adopt the word) needs to stop.
Anyway, the Wongery's Tumblr account won't be posting anything until after the hard launch, but when it does, please feel free to like our posts. We won't get mad at you for not reblogging them, I promise. I mean, sure, we'll like it even better if you reblog them, but we understand there are reasons not to reblog every post you like, and we still like likes. For our part, we probably will be reblogging any posts we see related to the Wongery. Unless they pull that awful "no likes, only reblogs!" garbage, in which case the only thing they may be getting from us is a block.
Now, granted, since the hard launch is still six months away, the current spate of new Tumblr users won't be seeing this post in the near future, and so I guess its utility as advice for new Tumblr users will be limited... unless it happens that in or after January 2024 another social media site decides to shoot itself in the foot and there's another mass exodus to Tumblr. Still, in case anyone new to Tumblr is reading this, it should be noted regarding the frequent Tumblr newbie advice that while "likes are useless" is complete horsepucky, the advice about "Reblog, Don't Repost!"? Yeah, that one's absolutely correct.
