#if you have mutuals you're not a lurker you're a worm

[bread-tab]

being a member of the 244-729 bin makes me feel very special uwu

i also have a vague theory as to why this happens

There are essentially two broad types of tumblr blogs; let's call them worms and funnymen.

(These types operate on a more basic level than the "theme" of a blog; personal mishmash blogs, fandom blogs, studyblrs, aesthetic blogs, etc. etc. can all fall under either type depending on how they are run.)

Worms make up a majority of the userbase and have anywhere from single digits to a few hundred followers.

Funneymen have followers in the thousands. They're the "influencers;" meaning, they produce a disproportionately high amount of the viral posts on the site as a whole.

If you plot both of these types in a graph they're going to look like two overlapping humps. (I like to picture a nice symmetrical pair of bell curves but in reality they'd both be wonky. I don't know enough statistics to tell you what kind of wonky.) That 244-729 bin happens to cover the dip between those two peaks.

As an inhabitant of that valley I can describe it with my blog as an example:

I have a couple dozen active mutuals, a handful of moderately popular posts per year (i.e. in the 100-1000 notes range), and one (1) viral post (over 10k notes). This is just enough traction to make me a fairly popular worm. If I put a little bit more effort into networking, posted consistently and made more "viral content" type posts on purpose (and if the whole idea didn't give me heebie-jeebies) I could become a low-tier funneyman.

Funneymen gain traction quickly enough that their following doesn't stay in the 300-1000ish range for long. Worms rarely get to that range—and once they do get there, face the ever-increasing risk of being converted to funnymen. In general, worm followings exhibit gradual, steady growth; funneymen get large spikes/waves of followers when a post goes viral, plus steady trickles from the circulation of previous posts.

There's a subtle but distinct difference in behaviors between worms and funneymen and a corresponding difference in how they are received by the userbase. It's a bit of a feedback loop. i have more thoughts on that, and ideas on what factors increase the likelihood of funneymanism and how tumblr differs from more influencer-friendly or algorithm-based platforms, but that's a different ted talk