#tagging for visibility not because i want internet clout but because i wanna say hi

[ollipaj]

WOE ‼️‼️‼️ ollie art be upon ye. this is the first time i’ve posted art online in months i think. feel honored 🔫

i’m mainly posting this in the hopes that the person i met at the combination frozen yogurt and boba place who said they would follow me on here sees it and it makes finding me easier. if you’re reading this im sorry for my shitty handwriting i realized once i was halfway home that maybe i should have spelled it out clearer or asked for your tumblr @ too before i left but i had been so caught up in the high of having a semi successful human interaction that i briefly lost all sense of practicality

[thechekhov]

hey! as an artist do you ever feel discouraged by the like/reblog ratio here? ive been postin art here for some time and ive found for every 20 likes i get maybe 1 reblog and while i dont wanna come over as greedy it like kinda discourages me :( i would rlly like to stay on tumblr bc it feels much more anonymous than insta/twitter but i also crave Validation ykno. ty in advance!

Okay, but I fear you won’t like my answer... 

My reply is - no, I don’t, because tumblr actually makes it super easy to ignore the reblog/like ratio. The two are lumped together into a category called ‘notes’ so unless you are looking for it, you won’t know what your reblog/like ratio is, and it’s super easy to view it as a lump sum of people who saw your art and smiled.

Here’s the thing; liking vs reblogging is not personal. And it isn’t something to try to change the tide over. I’ve seen my fair share of posts on here AND twitter, with most of them CONDEMNING liking - going so far as to call it useless. But I disagree. Strongly. 

My opinion on the matter is this - if people wanted to reblog the post, they would reblog it. If they don’t, the cards weren’t right. The stars didn’t align. It isn’t a matter of quality - it’s a matter of the right content being there at the right time for the right audience. Because let’s face is - PLENTY of stuff gets reblogged.... when the circumstances are right.

But the circumstances HAVE to be right. EXACTLY right. There has to be a CHAIN of the exact right circumstances. That’s how sharing ANYTHING works. 

Let me put it this way - say we have a hypothetical follower called J. 

J is scrolling his dashboard and comes across a post he likes, say, of a frog picture. He likes the post and has to make a decision - to reblog or not reblog the frog?

Say he likes the frog enough to reblog. It’s  a natural thing - he wants to show it to his followers. He may not think of it consciously, but he’s following an instinct to share information with people. 

But what happens after? Well, it’s not RANDOM. The thing is, J’s followers are NOT the followers of the blog he reblogged it from. They’re a degree of separation from the OP, and are therefore that much less likely to share interests that align with the OP’s content. 

SO what happens is this:

Some people on J’s follower list see the frog and like it. 

Of the ones that like it, a percentage are just liking out of habit and politeness.

A few are liking it to find it later and show it to their irl friends.

A few are liking it because they DON’T want to reblog it, because it doesn’t align with what they want to show to THEIR followers (who are, let’s be honest, even MORE removed from the OP’s frog-centric content).

And who’s to blame? 

ABSOLUTELY NO ONE. Because you cannot force people to reblog stuff any more than you can force people to show their friend their phone when they see a funny meme. 

Can you imagine something like this happening?

This is ridiculous, right? We cannot presume that people are not reblogging because they’re out to be malicious on purpose. Most likely they just aren’t motivated enough to share it in their own social circles for their own reasons - and that’s FINE. 

Look, I get it. People not sharing your stuff gets you less notes. I get how that is disappointing. But if you put ALL of your motivation into internet clout, then you have to put effort into making your art VISIBLE. That’s the only way to get more reblogs. 

For example, if you’re prioritizing visibility:

Get more social media accounts. Make sure the usernames are the same, or at least recognizable, across all social media. 

Organize your art tumblr and twitter. Make a pinned post that shows off your best work. TAG! Learn common tags used for artwork similar to yours.

Interact with other artists! Comment on posts! Reblog others’ artwork! 

NETWORK!!! That is the only way to guarantee that the flowchart of reblogs gets more than once branch.

Twitter circumvents this issue by shoving likes in your face as often as Retweets and that’s certainly one way to give your reblog-tree a boost, but it’s not foolproof. Tumblr has tags you can follow - and that DOES give you more of a possibility of getting reblogs of the content because if people are in a tag, they are LOOKING for stuff. On purpose. They already like what they see.

I feel your pain, I really do, because it took me literal YEARS to find an audience that consistently likes and reblogged my stuff. And your audience deserves to find you - but your followers aren’t your agent. It’s not their job to advertise on your behalf. 

They’ll reblog when they want to - and that’s a good thing. It’s more genuine that way. 

[jaeyong]

hi! i read your tags in the monsta x gif and wanted to share my experience. i became a kpop fan in 2011 after seeing Boys Before Flowers and became a SS501 fan because of KHJ (2nd gen fan). i'm an american. and i can honestly say i've never seen a kpop group as popular as BTS here, just based on what i've heard on the radio and seen on TV. yes, other groups are getting visibility too, but i would say it shadows in comparison to BTS. again, just from what i've seen. i could be totally wrong lol

Hello~ thank you for taking the time to share your experience and perspective on this ( I also became a kpop fan in 2011 ,though I was exposed to it as early as 2009!)

Actually there is no disagreement from my side that there has ever been a kpop group more visible here in the west than bts , from radio to tv ...everything !! It’s to the point that other groups will promote here in the U.S. and people will just assume it’s bts :/ ( which is disrespectful to all the groups involved ) I agree that BTS is the most known group here by locals and kpop fans .

But my comment wasn’t on what the most visible group is because I think that pretty obvious but more about the implication of what ‘ paving the way’ means and how people assume or imply that just because the most hypervisible group ( bts) got the spotlight by the American media it means that somehow the fanbase that other groups have and the opportunities they have to promote here are overwhelmingly because of bts and not because other groups already had solid fanbases and tours which had nothing to do with them (bts). From my recollection as a former Army that got into them during their debut year in 2013 and started to become less invested in them during 2017 ( when they were starting to get attention from the American media ) I got to experience firsthand how they become so popular , and imo it was because Armies were especially persistent in promoting and even spamming BTS everywhere. ( this is where the infamous ‘ aNY ARmiES hErE’ spam jokes come from idk if you are familiar with it???) like you could find them on any corner of the internet even in unrelated content and yeaaahhh this fandom advertises everywhere and grew so it’s no surprise any media outlet sooner or later would pick up on this ( and then proceed to put ALOT of emphasis on these over enthusiastic fans for clout and stuff). And so my guess is after the media recognized that this kpop group ( bts) had a lot of fanatics , they find out that oh there are other ones and gave them some spotlight as well ( and I wanna point out that they did this immediately ) . This is important to note because usually when someone ‘ paves their way ‘ you would think it would take a while for another act to come up after its predecessor but various groups were Immediateley invited on these talk shows and radios and had tours, meaning they already had some presence but they just were recently picked up by mainstream media and not like...idk born out of bts’ influence or something ( gained their fanbase ) . So imo opinion bts didn’t ‘pave the way’ they were just the first to get media attention because their size and then seeing how reactive fans were—> some of that attention was directed at other existing group