#I'm not trying to say 'arghh you've made me upset no more writing for you'

[silverskye13]

different anon. it does for some people but not everyone. (also, some people may find the feature annoying in certain cases because the length it decides is Too Long is kiinda arbitrary and peoople have differnent lines.)

So in the spirit of Under-The-Cutting, I guess.

First thing of address, I guess: I can't control if people turn off the auto Tumblr readmore function. If it doesn't work for you, you can't control that either. But I find it a bit unfair that someone might, hypothetically, turn off the useful tool for cutting back on longposts on your dashboard, and then come into my inbox and be passive-aggressive about me not doing the function for them on my side of the equation. If that's the circumstances that kicked all this off, it's a bit... ahm... self-centered. I personally have it turned on, less because I want to filter long written posts [I like reading the fics posted on Tumblr] but because I like to filter long image posts, and those generally don't get censored under a readmore.

For that matter I also can't control someone's scrolling speed. I get what the second anon is trying to say: maybe only censor posts of a certain size. The issue here is what I think is long isn't the same as what someone else does. For me personally, I think long is a written work that tops out around 10k words. I'd get annoyed scrolling through that on my dashboard. The fic I posted yesterday was a rare 5k-ish. Most fics I've posted here in the past are around 2-3k, but I've posted an 8k fic here before with no resistance. Something I'm learning from this is other people think 2-3k is fine enough to scroll through, but 5k is a lot. So... noting that for the future.

So I personally don't like censoring my posts under the readmore function for a couple or reasons:

It cuts back on engagement, noticeably. It's the side-effect of social media that you want instant gratification as quickly as possible. When someone is given the choice to either click a button and sit on a post for awhile, or continuing to scroll through their dashboard for something quicker to engage with, normally they'll pick the second option. That's how social media was made, and while the Tumblr platform subverts this a little by it's nature, it still buy-and-large holds true.

Read mores, as far as I'm aware, can only be added on desktop. The snippets that make it to Tumblr, barring when I archive them for myself on a separate document, are all written on mobile. If they aren't completely mobile, they're at least started/drafted there and then moved to desktop later - but I want to say 9/10 of these are written and posted completely from my phone. And they're going to lean even more into that, since for various reasons, it's currently easier and more reliable for me to write on my phone. I won't be able to continue writing fics here if I have to wait until I have access to my laptop every time before posting them. Which leads me to my incredibly me-only dilemma:

Writing these quickly and posting them rough to Tumblr is the only reason these quick fics get written in the first place. I started posting written work to Tumblr because I was tired of abandoning so many ideas in the shuffle between "Is this good enough for AO3?" and "Is this good enough to be written at all?" But if I have to re-add roadblocks that make posting here more trouble than it's worth, I know myself, I will end up not posting fics here anymore. I'm sure it sounds silly. It sounds silly to me. But it's less of a "readmores make me not want to write" and more of the mental gymnastics of: Is this fic long enough to need a readmore -> If it does need a readmore, when will I have the time to add it -> Do I post it now and edit it in later? Probably not, because I won't remember to add it later -> Since I waited to post it, do i even remember hours later that I had a fic I wanted to post -> Would it have been easier to post this on AO3, even though it doesn't meet my standard of craft of AO3 fics? -> Why am I bothering to do this when I have so many other things I'd rather spend my time on? If you've ever done that thing where you got nothing done on a free day because you had (1) thing you had to do in the afternoon, and all your mental faculties were taken up going "No I can't do X, I have to do that thing in 4 hours!" That's kind of the odd cascade the whole readmore thing is doing for me right now.

My thoughts on this currently is I have 2 compromises and 1 definitely-not-a-compromise. And the one not-a-compromise is I ignore all this ever happened, and continue doing what I have been doing. I don't want to do that because I like to be accommodating? I'm very community focused. I like building an atmosphere that's welcoming when it comes to the blog. But that might also be what I resort to just because, as I said above, if this turns into more trouble on my end than I think it's worth, I'll just stop posting fics here, and I don't want to do that. Which leads me to--

Compromise 1: I stop posting fics here. It's not really a compromise, but it's easy. Ish. Eh. Not really. Tagging everything on AO3 is a pain in the butt for something quick and dumb you wrote up because you thought it'd be fun. But being able to post a link to a fic like with my LongFics is a think I could just fall back on. I think it also means I'll probably stop writing this stuff though, because I'll get bogged down in things like trying to edit them, or link them together cohesively when they're out of chronological order [Like the Hels/Wels fics, which currently are all over the place in their timeline, and will continue to be so probably]. Regardless it's an option.

Compromise 2: We can go back to the old standby which is me tagging anything longer than 3 paragraphs as "long post" and then if anyone doesn't want it popping up on their dash, they can filter the tag. I also don't like this option because it blocks even more than a readmore does. But it's quick and easy for me, and maintains the integrity of "I wanted to post this to Tumblr and not worry about it anymore."

This is all stuff for me to stew on. I don't expect people to weigh in on these options, though you're welcome to if you think you have some good input for it. But that's about where I'm at right now.