#anthropology meme | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

krakenartificer · 2 years ago

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Basics of Tumblr-based memetics for reddit refugees

When people arrive at Tumblr, they are generally unsure about how to handle themselves. The buttons are easy enough (I mean, the UI sucks, but it's 2023, we're all used to sucky UIs by now, so....), but what are the social implications of each one? What does a reblog mean?

This is very difficult to explain to people for whom this is their first social media site, or are arriving here from (eg) Facebook. But for this round of refugees, from Reddit specifically, I actually can explain. Because!...

....As you have no doubt noticed ....

.... in a world where we all use 4 websites, and each of them consists of content screenshotted from the other 3....

...there is not an equal distribution of who's making content and who's copying it. Facebook generates almost none of the content for other websites; Twitter generates some; but nearly all of the content on the modern internet is generate on Reddit or on Tumblr.

There is a reason for this: all "web 2.0" sites have the ability to generate new memes, and new variants on those memes. But only Reddit and Tumblr have an evolutionary pressure that forces those memes through a natural-selection process. On Reddit, that pressure is applied by the voting system: if an addition to a post doesn't get enough upvotes, it's hidden from view, which means it has limited ability to affect the next generation of posts.

On Tumblr, the equivalent evolutionary pressure is applied by reblogs: each version of a post, each set of additions, is seen in proportion to how many people reblog it, and thus cause other people to see it. Lack of reblogs -> lack of visibility -> limited ability to affect the next generation of posts.

So with that in mind, let's look at some nuances that are specific to the Tumblr ecosystem.

1) Reblogs are direct visibility; upvotes are indirect

On Reddit, when you upvote something, it's a signal to the algorithm that -- in your opinion -- this thing is useful/valuable/funny or in some other way worthwhile. The algorithm takes that into account along with everyone else's votes, time since it was posted, and so on, and makes a decision about what to show by default vs what to hide by default, and how to sort things. Upvoting does affect visibility, but it's only one factor.

Whereas on Tumblr, reblogging puts the post on your followers' dashboards directly (assuming your followers have chronological order turned on, which most of them probably do because fuck corporate decisions about what I should and shouldn't see). One reblog = one post on everyone's dashboard; it's as simple as that.

Reblogging is therefore a much stronger evolutionary boost than upvoting is.

2) Likes have very little impact on visibility

Most people have "based on your likes" turned off. Even for those that keep it on, it doesn't affect what other people see, it only gives Tumblr some idea of what you might like to see. Of course behind the scenes that's somehow accomplished with some kind of correlation coefficient about which posts are most likely to be "liked" by the same person, and in that sense a "like" on this post increases the likelihood that someone else who has "liked" other posts that you have "liked" will see this post as well, but it's a very tenuous and wispy impact,.

Liking is therefore a much weaker evolutionary boost than upvoting is, and should be considered more along the lines of a high-five, or a hug, or a "I would give you gold for this if I could afford any" comment.

(Also, you cannot "like" only one section of a post. When you "like", the notification goes to everyone in the chain, from OP to the latest reblog. If you wish to give specific high-fives, the mechanism you're looking for is replies.)

3) Replies have no impact on visibility one way or the other.

Only OP gets notifications for replies, but you can tag people in the reply to notify them. This is the place for "@most-recent-commenter I would give you gold if I could" or for tagging a friend that you think would enjoy the post.

So, with the underlying mechanics of the ecosystem out of the way, let's look at

memetic engineering

There are two ways you can add your thoughts/ideas/opinions/snarky commentary to a post: in the text of the post, or in the tags.

a digression on tags

Tags -- of course -- can theoretically be used to organize content, although if we're being completely honest here, they're not ... great. for that. Tags can be handy as a textual handle to simplify your google search when you use an external search engine to search your own tumblr blog, but their use as an archival tool is mediocre at best. Likewise, no matter what the Tumblr UI says in the tag section, they're not gonna be that helpful in allowing people to find your content.

Tags can also, as sometimes they do on Twitter or Instagram, provide context to a post. This is less important here, since without a character limit there's no need to trim down your commentary and trust #wgastrike2023 to fill in the missing details, but it can be very handy when you're trying to determine whether this "Bruce and his buddies" post is talking about The Hulk or about Batman, or whether this thread is dissing Harry Potter, Harry Styles, or Harry Prince of Wales.

Tags are also very handy for allowing people to continue following you even when there's some sort of interest incompatibility. If you love spiders -- especially pictures of spiders -- and I'm arachnophobic, then I'm probably not going to be able to keep following you, no matter how excellent your Anarchist Star Wars takes are. But if you love pictures of spiders and you tag every single one of them #spiders, then I can block that tag and still keep following you. Similarly, a temporary block on #The Witcher Spoilers can allow the fandom to all discuss a new episode at whatever time they're able to watch it, without having to completely avoid online spaces in the meantime.

And finally, tags can, and are, used for commentary that you don't want to put in the main post. Where that line is -- what to put in the post and what to put in tags -- is something you'll have to decide for yourself as you get experience, but as a general rule, the post is for something that you believe contributes to the memetic fitness of this post, and the tags are for things that you believe are not necessarily of memetic value. Additions to the post are integrated into the DNA, and will be passed on with subsequent reblogs; tags are only added to your instantiation of the post, and will not be included on future reblogs (unless the person who reblogs it from you is on iOS Tumblr Mobile app and hasn't adjusted their settings, in which case it'll go into their tags... but at any rate it'll die out in a generation or two.) This feature makes it good for adding meta-commentary that will be interesting/funny/valuable to your immediate circle of friends, but won't be useful to the population as a whole -- it allows you to be as snarky, in-joke-y, and obscure as you'd like, without having to spend any of your mental RAM calculating what will and won't have an impact on your Brand as an Influencer.

Influencers

There is no easy mechanism for people to see your follower count. There are many easy mechanisms for people to make it impossible to see their follower count. No one cares about how many followers you have or how far your "influence" spreads. No one is going to offer you a Tumblr sponsorship deal.

However, for assorted underlying-code reasons, Tumblr blogs are disproportionately useful for manipulating search engines. So.... we have an ongoing problem with SEO scum making a whole bunch of bots and using reblogs etc to generate fake signals to Google.

The combination of those two things leads to a general Tumblr tradition of Block Bots On Sight. The extra followers aren't helping you, and the mere fact of their existence is hurting all of us. If you've seen people strongly urging you to change your profile picture, add a bio, and reblog a couple things, that's why -- because we don't want you to get caught in the crossfire of our ongoing guerilla warfare.

Other Notes

One of the places that Reddit is much better than Tumblr is in the viewing of an entire memetic population as a whole: you just look at a post, scroll through the page, and Reddit helpfully shows you want you want to see, and hides what you don't.

On Tumblr, each memetic variation is functionally an entirely separate entity. This is great for memetic diversity, but it means there's a LOT of duplication, and it means there's really no good way to get all the variants together. The closest you can get is to "check the notes" -- click on that number at the bottom left of a post, and look through the replies, reblogs, and tags. Those are in chronological order and in no way threaded, so it's not very useful, but it is what we've got.

Let's see ...

One thing Tumblr does much better than Reddit is the ability (because of aforementioned fragmentation) to have an arbitrary number of any fandom. No more "Well I don't like the takes in r/polyamory but it's the only place where I can talk about it so idk" ... nope! Here we can have as many Spider-Man fandoms as there are Spider-Man fans. Really like someone's headcanons? Follow them! Really dislike someone's OTP? Unfollow them! Really hate someone's take on your favorite character? Block them! This is a fabulous feature of Tumblr and I encourage you to take advantage of it.

uh...

tags can be 140 characters, but they can't contain double quotes (") or commas (,) because those are delimiter characters and Tumblr will break your tag at those points in the string

...

If you think someone has mis-judged the value of their tags, you can copy them from their post and paste them into the main comment of your reblog. This is known as the tags "passing peer review". Copy-paste is preferred to screenshotting for accessibility reasons (and also the fact that sometimes Tumblr just doesn't feel like loading pictures), and it's considered polite to credit the person whose tags you promoted.

...

Contrariwise, if you think they mis-judged the value of their comment, you can go back to the person they reblogged from, and reblog without their addition. Tumblr made this harder recently, but I have confidence that we'll defeat them eventually.

...

I know that I said reblogs are much stronger than upvotes, but when you've got infinite monkeys generating infinite reblog streams, it all gets lost in the noise. Reblog anything and everything you feel like upvoting -- if people don’t want to be subjected to a bunch of random shit that lights up the dopamine receptors in your brain, they shouldn’t be following you on Tumblr.

...

IDK what to tell you about Tumblr polls. We're just like this 🤷‍♂️

...

That's all I can think of. Deities bless and keep you for seeing a problem in our online ecosystem and actually doing something about it. Looking forward to seeing what we can do together.

(Author's Note: All statements about how Tumblr works ("works") are as of 14 June 2023. God only knows what changes staff will have rolled out by time time you read this)

#welcome reddit refugees #meme mutation #memetics #long post #sociology #anthropology #tumblr culture #the tumblr experience #seriously people tag your fandom if you're going to talk about bruce! Or Harry! Or Steve!

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