#im genuinely tired of this ngl you're just hurting yourself obsessing over social media behavior

[zenala-art]

Reblogs sure are important as hell for everyone and we should encourage them more, but people that are overly petty over people who only like and don't reblog/comment/whatever are a little silly imo. As someone with a little marketing knowledge, in ANY form of work or interaction or anything in your life you're gonna see views and simple likes as WAY more common than reblogs or similar tools. Everywhere ever. Not all people seeing that billboard are gonna get your number to talk about your service, but if one or two of them do, it was already pretty good.

Most people enjoy showing simple, not very deep support as they scroll through. You do that consistently in your day to day life - do you go leave a personal comment on every piece of media you've ever consumed and mildly enjoyed? Do you leave a comment about every good web design? Have you shared every youtube video you've ever liked? A quite good fanfic like/comment ratio is 1/10. If your reblog ratio is similar you're doing fine. It's totally fine and natural to want more recognition, and the only way to get more here on Tumblr is with reblogs; but damn some of yall get TOO pressed over this that it's damaging to your mental health AND your own work.

No amount of "don't like if you're not going to reblog!" is gonna change that ratio significantly, if anything, you're just gonna make people avoid liking your art lol

It's like a restaurant that's like "only eat here if you're leaving a review!!!", it simply feels forced and awkward to have this expectation put on you. Maybe I liked the food but I didn't want to necessarily give them a review, they kinda just forced me to? So I'd rather just go eat somewhere else to avoid the issue, and go review it with a clean conscience if I decide to do it. Is it good to create the habit to review the places you go? Absolutely!! Can you remind them somewhere that they can review? Absolutely, that's only natural!! But forcing or guilt-tripping them into feeling bad for not reviewing won't do it chief. Forcing people to interact with your content artificially will never give you the recognition you're thinking it will