#and the philosophy behind tumblr etiquette

[gh-0-stcup]

Tumblr 101

Since the post about reblogging, I'd thought it'd be a good idea to make a little guide about how to use Tumblr effectively. You know - gaining followers, increasing meaningful engagement, and keeping the site healthy.

If you saw the post on likes vs reblogs, you probably have gathered that Tumblr's core feature is reblogging. If you didn't, let me tell you now - Tumblr's core feature is reblogging. It's what allows your posts to circulate, to cross over to different communities, and to keep being seen 10 years after you initially posted it. It's how users find you, how you find them. It's how communities are built and what allows them to thrive.

Why is this?

To get the most out of Tumblr, it's important to understand the main way this site differs from other social media. We are not algorithm driven. On Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and many others, the main feature is likes. Or whatever happens to be their equivalent to likes. Liking is what lets the posters know you enjoyed their post and what helps get it seen by other people.

If you're coming to Tumblr having spent a lot of time on other sites, it's likely you're instinctively relying on the like feature. As a long term Tumblr user, the like button on this website is largely meaningless. The improvements to searching and browsing by tags, which now allow users to sort based on likes/reblogs, have made the feature a little more useful. But it's still pretty much the least important feature. It's just a nod to the poster.

You have to change the way you think.

Step One: Follow!

Your personal dash is where you should be spending most of your time on this site. The search functions are superfluous and if you're relying on that for entertainment, I'm sorry to say you are not using the site properly.*

To make your dash more interesting, follow more people. Yeah, yeah you know! I hear you scream out. Stop talking to you like you're stupid, you get that you're supposed to follow people you like. But here's the thing - if your dash is so boring you're not even using it, you don't know.

Go into that search function, look up some stuff you like, and whenever you find a good post follow that person. The time for pickiness comes later. Just follow, follow, follow. Keep going until you get bored. Start with quantity over quality. The more you follow, the more you'll see on your dash.

When somebody new follows you, check out their blog. Do they share an interest with you? Follow back. Even if it's not the greatest blog, just spend some time focusing on increasing the number of people you are following.

Step Two: Effective Design

Your icon and description are very important. Other people will look to your icon when it pops up on your dash or their searches to judge whether you're a kindred spirit they can follow. Set your icon to something that relates to a fandom or ship you post about often or like a lot. It will attract others who enjoy the same thing.

Your icon is (generally) not about creating an identity for yourself. It communicates what your interests are, your aesthetic, and/or what kind of things you post about. Every time your blog shifts gear, crosses over to a different fandom or gets into a different ship or starts posting lots about something else - change your icon.

Your description is also important, though less so than your icon. Something very important thing to keep in mind - this is a content driven site, not a personality driven one. In essence, nobody here gives a shit about who you are. Your real name, face, age, gender, location? Superfluous information. Nice to know sometimes, but completely unnecessary to share.

Like your icon, your description should be a summary of the content you post. It should describe what you like and possibly convey the tone of your blog/your sense of humour (if that's important to your blog). Update your description when your blog changes what it posts about. People will look at your description as well as the content you post to determine whether they want to see you on their dash. You are their source of entertainment, they care about whether you post things they want to see.

Step Three: Reblog

Now that we've (somewhat) fixed your dash and helped you get seen by others, it's time to get into actual site usage. Browse your dash, which is hopefully now buzzing with content.** Pretend the like feature does not exist. Every time you find yourself going for that like button, hit reblog instead. Okay, you can hit the like as well - just make sure you're reblogging every time too.

Reblogging should be the main thing you're doing. It produces content for your followers. It advertises you as a person who posts things to people who post things you like. It helps you find things you'd like to see on your dash because they'll find you.

If a post is good enough for a like, it's good enough for a reblog.

When the mood strikes, add to what you're reblogging with your own commentary. If you have something to say, say it. Even if it's just a "wow awesome gif" or "i loved this scene!"

On Tagging

Tagging is important. Yes, it gets your post seen. But the biggest benefit to tagging is that it allows your followers to NOT see certain things. Say you mostly post about Blorbo from your shows, but you also like Xorbo. If you tag appropriately, fellow Blorbo lovers will be able to follow you even if they hate Xorbo. They'll follow you for the content they like and filter out the content they don't like rather than unfollowing.

For fandom content, you want to tag the fandom and character discussed in the post. Simple. If you notice most people use a particular acronym for a fandom, adopt that over the full name. Optionally, you can tag for both.

Don't over tag. If a character or ship is mentioned in passing but is not even close to the main focus of the post, it is not necessary to tag it. Overtagging clutters tags for people who are completing step one. If you're unsure, imagine you despised xyz character or show. Would this post be annoying to see? If so, tag. If not, don't.

Now, tags are for people who enjoy the thing. If you're posting content that is against the thing, tag with "anti-[x]" instead. This is where things get a little complex - is a take that is critical of a character "anti" that character? You can also tag as "[x] critical" in cases where the take is not motivated by disdain/frustration for the thing.

Similar to how tags are for people who enjoy the thing, anti tags are for people who do not enjoy the thing. When judging whether something is anti or simply critical, consider who it would annoy more to see the post. If it would annoy people who hate the thing, go with critical.

Basically, it's all about politeness and the ability to curate our own experiences. Keep this in mind as you tag your posts.

A time honored tradition on Tumblr is to put commentary in the tags. Many new users have question what the etiquette of this is - when do you add to a reblog vs when do you add to the tags kind of deal. The simple answer is - there is no longer a rule to judge this by. I don't care what tips people have tried to tell you. Tag commentary was brought about by the way the site used to function. The reasons are now obsolete and thus make zero sense to anybody who's entered Tumblr recently. Feels and vibes are the only way you have to judge it.

What do I mean? In the long long ago when Tumblr's culture emerged, tags did not show up in the activity feed. Things that were added in the main text of reblogs would. So people could add random comments, jokes, or things they didn't want the OP to see in the tags. This is where the phrase "why would you hide this in the tags?!" comes from. Tags were difficult to see unless you saw the post on your dash or were browsing the person's actual blog.

Step Four: Queue

Reblogging everything means your blog is going to get pretty crowded real quick. Spamming can be fun once in a while, but if it's happening regularly it can be annoying. There's a chance people might start unfollowing you, which we do not want. So you should make use of Tumblr's other main feature - the queue.

The queue is a chest of posts that get released at regular intervals. You can adjust when and how often your queue posts, but it's fine to leave it at the default for now. It allows you to reblog a lot without cluttering the dash. It also ensures you're posting consistently, which will help you gain followers better than spamming 20 posts every Saturday.

To start making use of your queue, choose an arbitrary ratio of reblog/queue. For example, reblog two posts and queue the third. I also tend to queue things that I don't add commentary to. If I'm adding commentary, I want to be around when/if people respond to it so I can have a conversation. You don't have to do that though. Just build up a queue however you feel is appropriate to your needs.

Step Five: Pruning

Okay, at this point a lot of your Tumblr problem should be fixed. You're barely using the searches anymore, your dash keeps you busy for days, you've started to gain followers, and people are engaging with your posts. You've probably noticed a downside to the whole "follow everybody" thing I had you do in step one - there's a lot of stuff on your dash that you don't want to see! It's starting to get annoying. You just want to sit in the glow of all that content you adore.

Well, the time for pickiness has finally come. You see one person on your dash keeps posting stuff you don't know or care about? Unfollow. This other person is spamming and that was fine once upon a time, but their stuff isn't that great and it's blocking you from stuff you really enjoy? Unfollow. Go on a very small unfollow spree, focusing on clearing your dash of things that are preventing the joy from sparking.

Don't bother with sentimentality. Remember: this is a content driven site. It is not insulting to unfollow somebody who isn't posting things you want to see.

Start being a little more choosy when hitting follow. If somebody follows you, visit their blog. Are their posts something you'd like to see on your dash? Follow. Do the same for people who reblog your posts. Doing this in tandem with getting rid of things you don't want to see will allow you to further tailor your dash to your interests.

Misc. Tip: Reblog vs New Post

Adding commentary to reblogs is generally better than creating an entirely new post because it's continuing a conversation. You already have two people who are guaranteed to see your post (the OP and the person you're reblogging from), which is two more than a new post is guaranteed to have.

There are, however, times where creating your own post is best etiquette. If you are starting to stray pretty far from the original topic, feel free to make your own post about it instead. You can link and/or screenshot the post that inspired your own for context.

Other times, etiquette warrants a new post. Go by the same metric I described in the tagging section - if you created this post, would the commentary annoy you? Make your own.

On Tumblr, we must curate our own experience. Therefore, good Tumblr etiquette is all about allowing others to do the same.

*Meant in terms of keeping this site functioning, not dictating how you should have your fun. This post is about boosting community building, making friends, and helping Tumblr not get shut down for sucking ass.

**If your dash is not buzzing with content, repeat step one.

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[ark-of-eden]

R is drunk and raving (not in the party way).

(R:) Additionally, I’m procrastinating like a fucking champion at working on fic construction, so you know the best use of my time is going off about random social media crap on the internet.

tl;dr: Putting all commentary in tags on Tumblr makes R cry and shit thousands of words into the Internet.

Every social media site inevitably develops sets of unwritten social conventions. Some of them actually make sense as being derived from meatspace etiquette and therefore you don’t really have to stress about remembering them as long as you play nice like a decent creature.

And some of them just don’t make any fucking sense that I can see. Folks on Twitter using a deliberately space-limited form of media to write a page’s worth or more in a string of 30+ rapidfire tweets? This is just how it’s done over there? (Tweetlonger exists but for some reason these massive chain-tweeters never seem to use it. Same with posting the whole thing in a long-form site like LJ/DW/Tumblr and just linking it to a tweet.)

And Tumblr has things that I literally had to put effort into learning after I migrated here, and after I learned about them I frankly decided to ignore them because I couldn’t see the point in them. Tumblr has this bizarre allergy to commentary and, likely derived from that, the practice of instead commenting by putting it all in awkward tags that render the tagging system not especially useful and are harder to get to if you’re actually interested in an individual’s thoughts about a thing and not just the twelfth instance of the same post crossing your dash in a day or two. It’s not like you can’t engage with people, because asks and messaging and such exist, but like...there’s this strong sense that it’s Terribly Ill-Mannered to weigh in with your own impressions right there, in the body of the post, typing your own words in that seductive, wide-open text box that appears all on its own when you go to reblog something. The properly-socialized Tumblrite eschews that tempting text field and instead posts weird sentence fragments in tag form (interspersed with actual tags that might serve to usefully categorize the post’s content), to the extent that some people can add on a good couple paragraphs of material down among the hashtags where others need to go looking for it on purpose if they want it. (I, at least, haven’t been able to find a plugin or something that automatically expands full tags on all posts so that I don’t have to fuck around with extra interface elements to get to them. I admit that I haven’t looked super hard, though.)

Preserving the original form of the OP’s post is a noble practice that I heartily support, but how is adding commentary a problem if you’re only adding a separate thing, not taking away or altering anything in the original...? This was already a practice/convention/code of social interaction on Tumblr when I got here, so I was never in the front row to witness this element taking shape. I suppose it must have made good sense at the time, but every time I see ten people reblogging the same post with no additions and a paragraph of tags appended to it, it’s like a splinter in my brain that has been digging into me for years now.

And I’m not hating on people who do that! I get that that’s The Way It’s Done Here and I am the deviant weirdo for continually adding comments directly onto things that I reblog. Tags are where individuality lives here, unless you’re producing your own original posts, which I guess other people are then supposed to reblog without commentary so that you have to go hunting after all the reblogs individually if you want to get an actual sense of what these people were all thinking when they reblogged your thing. It all just seems...so...WORK INTENSIVE, refusing to use site functions as they were intended??

Look, I absolutely know that my commentary is not the work of incisive genius that unfailingly adds value to every post I find worthy of my attention. We’re pretty much solid shitposting on this blog. Because I’m a little loaded at the moment and that gives me a handy excuse to run my fingers like an idiot (plus I put that readmore up there, so if your eyes are actually consuming these words, you have only yourself to blame for being here), let me run down relevant history of how we got here.

LJ was home for a good long while. Then shit got seriously messed up and Dreamwidth was created as a better LJ, so we migrated all our stuff over there. And journaling sites along those lines still feel like a native environment. I, in particular, am the most long-winded piece of shit we know and I am honestly incapable of talking about anything of worth in short form. It’s a sickness and I just sort of have to own it. :/ But that’s why journaling sites are a good place for me to live, because that’s where people go when they have the inclination to read meandering scrawls about the depths of other people’s lives or whatever.

We went to Twitter for a good while because all the cool people we knew from LJ were going there for some unfathomable reason. These people wrote things that were complex and fascinating to read, so all of them jumping ship to a place that limited them to 140-character chunks made no damn sense, but we loved those people and wanted to trust that they knew what the hell they were doing. And they probably did, and a couple of us were actually okay with Twitter, but I, being the long-winded shitpiece, spent a lot of time frustrated and kind of overstimulated.

Then things started going to hell more and more consistently for me personally (and us generally by extension, but that’s unnecessary detail). Bunkering down specifically to protect people that you care about from the fallout of your crazy is a fairly common thing for mentally-ill people to do, I think. So I’d shut up online until I felt stable enough to talk to people again. Those periods lasted a few days, then a week or more, then a month, then eventually I stopped talking entirely. I missed the LJ/DW format, but in the past I’d written about life events and things I was thinking about and such, so...at the time, all I really had to write about was the bad stuff. So LJ/DW was basically unusable as well.

I literally came here to be as shallow as I could possibly manage. Tumblr had a rapid, chaotic flow similar to Twitter, but could hold longer content like LJ/DW. We’ve never really used the site’s full functionality at any point, though. For at least a year, all we were following was the most lightweight, zero-calorie entertainment that we could find. (We actually came here for Flight Rising content, so there was a lot of that.) Being engaged with fandom in any consistent respect is an extremely recent thing.

And I’m not saying that fandom hasn’t got depth and complexity because it absolutely does and that’s one of the beautiful things about shared fan experiences. I kind of got into that sort of fandom by accident after getting here and rediscovering Transformers. But the unvoiced policy that I’ve always had here is to avoid the Too Real and dodge serious topics whenever possible. Thus, no gender theory, no neurodivergence or multiplicity, no nonhumanity, no religion or UPG, nothing with real substance behind it that bared real vulnerabilities. (Apparently this was a good move anyway because the nonhuman and multiplicity situation here on Tumblr is a bit of a clusterfuck? I honestly wouldn’t know, as I haven’t made a lot of effort to link up with those folks.) That’s still the policy. That might remain the policy forever until I reach some vaguely-defined threshold of sanity that makes me worthy of talking about those things in places and formats that other people can interact with.

And I’m sorry for all this talk about mental illness, but it’s simpler just to explain things clearly. I likely won’t go into any more detail about it on Tumblr. Or anywhere else, because I care about people even if I’ve never met them or talked to them at all and I still want to keep it all in the bunker to protect good people from the crazy. Sometimes, all you can do is just prevent the damage from spilling out into other people’s lives, and that’s the place that I usually operate from.

I’m still pretty drunk, so I’m allowed to ramble from too much truth serum, but all of that explanation was to get around to saying that the format of online communication that is most intuitive to me is the long, oversharing gut-spill of random people talking about things that are really meaningful to them - not in the sense of elaborate philosophy or artsy epistles to the cosmos, but just people being super real about things that are meaningful to them and going into lots of detail about them because gushing about things you love is great. And it’s possible to get that sort of discussion and gushing in Tumblr fandom, and I love it because it reminds me of better times, and the fact that I love it is WHY IT MAKES ME SO GODDAMN FRUSTRATED that Tumblr culture is basically stifling discussion and feedback and RESPONSE to things that people find interesting!!

Like, here’s how I see it. Unlike on LJ/DW, where you were limited to hyperlinking to a cool post in one of your own posts if you wanted your readers to go check it out, on Tumblr, if you find a super cool thing, you can pull it directly into your space and let other people experience it directly, exactly as you experienced it. But the thing is, I also subscribe to the My Blog My House concept. If I pull a thing into my “home,” I do it because there’s something homelike about it; it belongs in my home for some specific reason. I don’t take “ownership” of an item in the sense that I’m claiming it in place of its creator, but I’m taking ownership of it in the sense that it’s part of my Stuff now and it’ll get my fingerprints all over it and be blended into the general morass of Stuff that I recognize as my home. I don’t just pull random crap into my home for no reason at all.

And I just figure that other people are similar in the sense that they reblog things for distinct, unique reasons, not in the sense that they have some master plan for their blog content (some do, but it’s not necessary), but just that they have compelling reasons why they pick certain bits of content out of the larger river of their dashboard and put it in their own space for people to experience with them. I follow people based on the interesting things that they find interesting. I’m interested in why they’re interested in those things. They seem like interesting people to me because they’re interested in what they’re interested in.

But the WHY is a really important part of the equation for me. Did this person reblog that photo because they’ve been to that place themselves, because they like that kind of tree, because they reblog photos with that color scheme every Thursday? Did that person reblog that piece of art because they love that character, because they’re studying that art medium, because it reminded them of something funny they saw somewhere else? People attach their own context to things that they latch onto. It’s so freaking weird to me that people have to hide their interpretations or impressions in tags here on Tumblr, making them unimportant and optional in the process of sharing things they like with others. (Okay, people also share a lot of things they hate, but reasons for outrage are still part of the context that one adds to content.)

I WANT TO KNOW WHY YOU CARE ABOUT WHAT YOU’RE SHOWING ME. I WANT TO KNOW WHAT MAKES IT IMPORTANT TO YOU. I WANT TO KNOW WHAT IT MAKES YOU THINK AND FEEL. Even if it’s a blurb about how giant robots fuck or a cute kitten video, I NEED TO KNOW THESE THINGS.

Not in excruciating detail or with insightful analysis or even a lot of text at all. Mostly, the things that people put in tags are things that, to me, are a really crucial part of the experience of being able to go into someone’s “home” and see the Stuff that they chose to put in it. Reducing oneself to a glorified signal repeater is...okay, I guess, though it turns a Tumblr blog into a kind of faceless stream of other people’s material a lot of the time. The personal touch is what makes it all interesting. And I’m just unutterably frustrated that, somewhere along the line, it was decided that personalizing an experience by sharing one’s own impressions of it became rude enough that polite society decided that it had to be hidden away in tags. I want all of it, so I do go looking for it, but omg it requires MORE EFFORT and BURNING CALORIES and BODILY MOVEMENT and WAAAAH, you know what I mean. :P

And possibly Tumblr society is right and it’s done for a good, decent purpose and I’m being pigheaded and uncool by insisting on doing things my way without bothering to try and understand the local customs. I’m not usually that much of an asshole, but I am about this, for some reason. And I admit that my craving for those personal touches could very well spring from how utterly isolated and lonely I am, so maybe normal people really don’t need all the extra info and actually do just want mostly-impersonal streams of content. And that’s fine, since I know I’m kind of a weirdo even on my best days.

I’m pretty sure that that was all that I really wanted to say. I’m probably overreacting about the whole comments-in-tags thing. Like I said, it’s kind of an irrational irritation. Also, I need to stop before I write myself sober and no longer have an excuse for all of this. If you actually read all of that, you are an awesome, generous person and I’m pretty damn certain that I love you even though I have no idea who you are.