#Does this trend have a tag or is it only being circulated by reblogs?

[theaterdisneynerdsunite]

Joining on the hyperspecific poll trend cause it looks fun

[peachdoxie]

I get where you’re coming from on the likes/reblogs post but also you aren’t really a content creator (correct me if I’m wrong) so this issue doesn’t effect you as much? I don’t think it’s wrong to ask people to think about how we as a community interact with and support artists on tumblr and to consider if there’s anything else we could be doing. It’s really hard to make it as an independent artist and I don’t think it’s wrong for artists to advocate for themselves

It's not an issue of content creators advocating for themselves and asking people to reblog their posts. I take issue when they basically guilt trip people into reblogging posts by saying things like "We're doing this for free. The least you can do is reblog our content." or "Tumblr has moved from a culture of sharing to a culture of consumption." or "People aren't reblogging original content anymore which is why tumblr is dying."

The first statement is technically true in that engaging with content encourages creators to produce more, but so often the posts I see act entitled about it, that if I see something I like I should automatically reblog it. No. There are any number of reasons I or anyone doesn't want to reblog something, and they're all completely valid.

The latter two statements are complete bullshit. Consumption culture has always been part of the internet. Having the ability to share something doesn't change that. We consume so much content every day on the internet and it is literally impossible to share everything we like. Tumblr has a post limit. Twitter has a post limit. I'm not certain if Facebook does, and to my knowledge Instagram doesn't, but there are other restrictions in place for posting activity on various sites. It's far easier and economical to like posts than it is to share them.

As for "tumblr is dying," I've seen this repeated for at least half a decade, and it's still debatable whether or not that's true, or even what "dying" means. And even if tumblr is "dying," I doubt much of that has to do with people not reblogging content so much as people leaving due to shitty policies implemented by the staff or people spending more time on other, newer websites that offer different styles of interaction. Like, maybe people not reblogging things is a small part of it. But the posts I'm arguing against often act like users not reblogging things is entirely due to the users being only about consumption and not about sharing, which is a take that entirely lacks a nuanced perspective on what impacts people's reblogging choices.

And also, the popularity of different websites waxes and wanes. There's a limit to how popular a website can get before something changes and users navigate to somewhere else. Yeah, those of us who like tumblr want it to stay popular and functional, but how many other social media sites popular for content creation with fair lack of corporate oversight have "died" in the last thirty years? A lot of them. That's just how the internet works, whether we like it or not.

My exasperation with those posts are that other people are trying to dictate how I and others cultivate our tumblr experience, which is very antithetical to my personal stance on internet activity as well as antithetical to a lot of other ethos that circulate on tumblr. I'm not so ignorant as to pretend that tumblr is one cohesive whole in terms of how people approach posting on this site, but there's a common trend of posts that talk about how to shape your tumblr experience. "If you don't like something, it's best to unfollow people that post it or block tags." "If you aren't seeing a lot of something you think is important, you should probably search for blogs and tags that do talk about those things." "Be careful sharing and engaging with depressive posts because constantly surrounding yourself with things that dwell on your depression is a dangerous coping method." This goes all the way back to my early tumblr experience in the early 2010s with the fandom vs hipster divide and the push against it that encouraged people not to feel shame in reblogging posts from the "wrong" side of the divide. It's likely existed before I joined in 2012, and has probably existed since like, the beginning of time, actually.

Like I started this post with: it's not an issue of people advocating for others to share their content. It's entirely true that more engagement with content encourages people to create more. That's part of how content creation works. But I take issue with five specific things that I see constantly arising in the posts I'm criticizing:

That if people enjoy something, they should reblog it no matter what

That users no longer care about sharing content, only about consuming it

That tumblr is "dying" because of bullet point 2

The guilt-tripping that blames users for bullet point 3 because they don't always reblog certain things

The utter entitlement that these posts have that users are somehow obligated to share things in order to support content creators posting things for free on tumblr

I don't like people demanding I reblog specific things. I don't like people acting entitled to attention because they're doing something for free. I don't like people making claims about tumblr's userbase that lack nuance. And I certainly do not like guilt tripping. It's a shitty, shitty thing to do.

Sharing content is good! Engaging with posts is great! It helps encourage content creators to make more content, which benefits both the creator and their audiences! But don't you dare demand that someone must reblog your posts just because they like them. Don't you dare solely blame other people for why you aren't getting the attention you want. And don't you dare guilt trip people into reblogging your content.

For what it's worth, I am a content creator. I don't draw or paint, but I do produce a fair amount of content. I make gifs. I make memes. I make videos. And I write, a lot. the difference is that I don't use tumblr as a way to market myself, and I don't get upset when something doesn't get the number of reblogs I want it to. I love it when something I make gets a lot of notes, yeah, but I also understand that there is an inevitable amount of randomness that dictates whether or not a post becomes popular, no matter how "good" it is or not. That's just how content creation works, and it's not unique to tumblr.

I'm not saying any of this to go "oh look at me, I'm so much better than all those other people" because I'm not a pretentious douchebag. I'm trying to model an approach to tumblr that I believe is considerably more realistic than the one found in the posts I'm describing. People seem to think, since tumblr is good for sharing content and helping users establish themselves as content creators, that that's how tumblr users are supposed to use it, even though there's inherent obligation on how people should be using it. One of the best things about tumblr is that it's very easy to shape your own experience and what kind of content you see, and I think it's wrong to demand people act otherwise.

[thisselflovecamebacktome]

I’ve been seeing a lot of those “there’s a real person behind the screen you’re sending hate to” posts circulating around the Swiftie community and it’s made me reconsider my place, or more lack of, in the community both past and presently and how online hate from this fandom has influenced that.

I guess in short, and to poke a little fun before getting into the serious part of this post, for a good 90% of my time in this fandom, I’ve felt like that Squidward window meme where I’m inside alone watching from afar as seemingly the rest of the fandom is out having fun together.

Now for the more serious stuff. To start this story, I want to take you back to a time that feels like lifetimes ago now; the beginning of 2015. 1989 had only been out a few months, I had successfully rebuilt my life and finished high school at the end of 2014 after having my world crash down over the span of 2011 - 2012, had amazing friends and what I thought was a ride or die family given how many major fights we had had yet still had each other’s backs. I was on a gap year and my then boyfriend of about two years and I were talking about leaving town and starting our lives together. Things seemed pretty amazing. But easy they come, easy they go as I soon realised.

Within the year of 2015, almost every part of my life was taken away from me. Even with volunteering and my usual day to day life, being on a gap year while not doing paid work messed with my mental health and sense of self worth within months. Not long after, I lost a friend without warning/explanation that I genuinely thought would be at my hypothetical future wedding. The rest of my friends were all at university and/or working everyday and it became real that I wasn’t as close to some of them as I thought and that school was the thing keeping us together. Around the same time, my family fell apart for the last time. My sister was removed by the police over her behavioural issues and I haven’t spoken to her since. Not long after, it was uncovered gotten us in thousands of dollars worth of debt and, despite their marriage breaking down, expected my mother to fix the damage. He moved out at the end of 2015 and despite everyone heralding how I was his favourite child for my whole life, went running back to my sister who mistreated him and would spend months at a time not talking to me only to call me when his parents were in town right up until I cut him off in late 2017. My extended family on both sides sided with him and my sister despite, again, them spending 20 years acting like I was the golden child. Again, I have not spoken to them for the last five years. The destruction of the family left my mother suicidal and bitter to the point she still says she cannot love anything, my brother and I included. It also pushed my brother to work up to 48 hours a week, meaning he wasn’t around. Given all of this, I stuck with my mother and decided to put off moving away, attended university here and ultimately based every decision around her not killing herself; a choice that put strain on my romantic relationship until it broke in late 2016. Once my father moved out, Centrelink refused to give my mother money, and so, despite my brother working full time and me part time, my mother, brother and I were only eating an average of once a day for about 8 months due to financial reasons and the debt my father left us in. It also meant that I wasn’t medicated for my bipolar/ptsd or going to see my psychiatrist like I should because we just could not afford it.

During this time, there felt like there was exactly one unchanging thing in my life; being part of the Taylor Swift fandom. And I’m well aware that some of you see that as unhealthy and stupid; god knows I see just how unhealthy it was now, but that’s how it felt. 

So I spent so much of the 1989 era trying to do all I could to interact with people in the fandom, get Taylor’s attention, become a “big blog” and everything else the fandom was doing at the time to no avail. But, alongside this when I held opinions that are now seen as popular surrounding the era feeling like it was made for outsiders, 1989 as an album feeling less personal and not liking Tayvin, I expressed them here. In return, I received dozens of hate anons a day for over a year ranging from “Fuck you you fucking whore” to “Nobody, especially Taylor, will ever love or notice you so you may as well kill yourself now”.

Likewise, in the Reputation era, after I felt I had found my connection again with Taylor and honestly, loved her more than ever, I mentioned that I loved how much of a recovery album Reputation was as well as saying that I thought the Delicate music video was the perfect representation of not only the song, but Reputation as a whole. Despite Taylor talking about her mental struggles, I still receive anons along the lines of “Taylor’s not fucked up like you, you crazy bitch”.

In the seven or so years I’ve been in this fandom, I received ONE apology for anon hate. In early 2017, I was privileged enough to go away to a spot without wifi for a week and returned to a bunch of hate messages alongside one simply saying “Please do not have actually killed yourself. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Please just answer this”.

Thankfully, somewhere in between the 1989 era and the Reputation era, I reached a point where I was healthy enough to just block anon hate and moved on with my day. Additionally, thankfully I learned that my value does not come from the opinion of others the first time my life fell apart. Honestly though? I fear for the day I hear about someone like me who hasn’t come to that realisation being targeted like I was because I know in my heart that things could have gone very differently for me and that anon hate could have been the thing that pushed me over the edge.

Despite being able to block it however, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel like it had an impact on me. And some of that is on me. When I decided I wasn’t going to be an active member of the fandom anymore in the middle of the 1989 era and in the years since, I went from following over 1000 blogs to 50. I no longer try to reach out to people to be friends. At best, I go through relevant tags once every few weeks when I’m bored instead of daily like I used to. But they’re choices I wouldn’t have made if I hadn’t felt unwelcome in the fandom.

I’d also be lying if I said it didn’t make me sad to think about the what ifs of if I didn’t make those choices. Like sometimes it feels like I should have just “played the game” and followed the fandom trends, but it upsets me to feel like I had to be someone I’m not years ago just to participate properly in the fandom now. I mean I know this sounds up myself, but I honestly feel like I could add so much to this fandom. There’s so many ideas I have for cool interaction nights and so on, but honestly it just does not feel like it’s worth doing because I’m not a big enough blog to pull it off on my own and I’m not close to any of the people who hold these kind of things to try run it through them. And again, that just makes me sad.

Anyway, I’ve written a novel here, but I just want to reestablish that yes, every person that has received hate messages on this site is a real person with real feelings and real circumstances happening behind the screen and this is just one case of that.

I also want to end it off on a positive note, so to anyone who has ever messaged me non hateful messages anon or otherwise, been my friend or even just reblogged my posts with tags or liked them, I see you, I love you and it means more to me than you will ever know.