(Hmm, that ‘mysterious minor ailments’ tag has become a bit inaccurate now, hasn’t it? Oh well.)
Argh, I’m normally quite good at pressing ‘answer privately’ or ‘publish’ accurately but this phone-based tumblin is all different. Sorry for the confusion, folks.
Oh, I’ve caught up. I was less far behind than I thought… Confusing.
And if I’m still following you now, you were not one of the people mentioned in the previous post.
Gonna do a little bit of unfollowing, just three or four people who I don’t really interact with and whose main topics of discussion don’t overlap with mine. Very nothing personal! I like you! And some of you don’t even follow me anyway!
And maybe, just possibly, I’ll find that that makes space on my dashboard so I can start following one or two of the gazillions of you I’ve been wanting to follow for ages. Fingers crossed!
Okay so I made a post a few days ago that I initially saved as private so I could have a think about it and now I’ve made it public but I can’t get the time-stamp to update so it will appear on your dashboards among other posts from 9 January.
Matters arising:
- This is the post in question (a response to an Ask asking ‘can a person really call themselves queer when they dont face any of the systematic oppression queers do?’)
- Does anyone know how I can fix the problem?
3 NICE THINGS, AND WHY YOU CANNOT HAVE THEM ON TUMBLR
OR
WHY TUMBLR IS THE WANKIEST PLACE THAT DOESN’T REQUIRE A CREDIT CARD NUMBER
That awkward moment when you’re backreading your tumblr dash and you find yourself in the middle of yet another spiraling fandom argument involving from all perspectives people you enjoy and respect.
And you think, not for anything like the first time, that tumblr is TERRIBLE for this. It is. It is an awful, bewildering venue for
fandomany conversations and I’ve yet to see signs it’s ever going to improve.Before I get into why, I want to make a disclaimer, because people have been hurt, and I 100% do not wish to add to that. I’m not admonishing people for taking tumblr interaction too “seriously”, or that the offense caused isn’t “real” enough, or arguing that if you know what’s REALLY going on you’d see that everyone is blameless in everything and no one is behaving badly ever (lol, right).
I’m just going to talk about a pattern I’ve seen repeat itself over and over again, and suggest a possibility for why people have been getting so hurt, so quickly, in tumblr interactions specifically. We’ve been in a persistent state of COMMUNICATION FAIL (yes, more than I’ve ever noticed in past fandoms, and that’s a high bar as it is), and any attempts to solve this via communication have been of little use because they are lost in the underlying COMMUNICATION FAIL.
(Note: Sometimes people really can’t communicate with each other! Their world assumptions are too different, or one or all is not interested in listening! That’s no surprise, and not what I’m talking about here, which is why people who *generally agree* and are to some extent interested in allowing other opinions end up upset and attacked by each other.)
(Q: So why are Homestuck fans so terrible?)
(A: I don’t believe that they are, but what they are is part of a feral fandom that has reared itself largely in tumblr space.)
My History:
When it comes to means of (open) fandom conversation, I started out in a mailing list based fandom, then message boards, then (live)journals, and lastly tumblr. (Jeez I sound old. I guess I am, comparatively, but in my defense I found the holdover LISTSERVs when I was like 11? I have no “before I fandom” story.) So those 4 things are what I’m going to compare for my argument!
And my argument, which I will argue on tumblr, is that tumblr is the worst for arguing productively! Oh, this is going to work so well.
So this is a very interesting piece about how Tumblr structures (and distorts) communications, which is something I tried to think about once with less success than this. In particular I like the conclusion that it could potentially be a positive thing that Tumblr creates ‘conversations’ that are outside any one person’s control, but only if Tumblr didn’t insist on messing us about in a bunch of other ways.
Why do ‘<sup>’ tags work on the dashboard but not on my tumblr, while ‘<u>’ tags work on my tumblr but not on the dashboard?
Gah.
I always get a bit stumped about whether or not to Like posts that consist of somebody saying something not-okay and then somebody else reblogging and pointing out that it isn’t okay. Because I feel like if I Like it then nobody who doesn’t know me will be able to tell that it’s got an extra Like because someone supported the original post or the rebuttal. And I worry that the original poster will interpret the large number of notes as support. Especially when it’s a post that has been reblogged in agreement as well as in disagreement.
Sometimes I just Like it and then instantly unLike it again. Don’t know why that makes me feel better. There’s no logic to it really.
Flurgh.
curiosity has driven me here to inquire whyfor the new posting style (with the summaries and the read mores etc.)?
Hi hi, sorry for not getting to this for a long time (though actually there are messages that have been waiting for a reply for much much longer than this because I’m totally rubbish).
Yeah, it was kind of for a mess of reasons. One was that I’ve never been very confident about knowing what sorts of things needed trigger warnings, especially since although I’m aware of the most common things I’m also aware that some people get triggered by really unexpected things, and some people aren’t exactly triggered but just don’t want to read about some types of thing, and it seemed like possibly a super-safe bet was to just put everything behind a cut and give a summary.
And then also I know I sometimes (though not so much these days because I have no time ever) write really really long posts and feel guilty about taking up so much space on people’s dashboards, and that factors in to the way I just a lot of the time worry that I’m forcing myself into people’s awareness and I’d really rather be quite unobtrusive and give people as much opportunity as possible to not pay attention to me if they don’t want to. Which doesn’t make a great deal of sense on Tumblr because if people are following me then I suppose they probably don’t want to ignore me but I don’t know, stuff.
And I did do a sort of consultation thing before I started doing it, to see what people thought, and I think basically one person said it seemed like a good idea and nobody else said anything at all about it, so that seemed to be 100% in favour.
But I know it’s really pants for you because you hate ‘read more’ cuts because of phone reasons (sorry, by unfortunate coincidence my brain has decided to shut down for the night while I’m doing this reply, so I’ll try to finish it while I can still spelling), so now I’m thinking of maybe just doing the summaries but without the cuts, which should have mostly the same advantages except for the silly one that was only really ever an advantage because of my irrational desire to take up as little space as possible anyway. Would that be better?
Summary: plea for help with a CSS accessibility fix that people are recommending.
(via rollingforaye)
A continuing conversation about bookmarking / favouriting things straight from the dashboard.
(via iuwaehfoaiuwhefoiaulfjqn)
What I’d find quite handy is a way of saving Tumblr posts to my browser bookmarks / favourites straight from the dashboard without having to open them in new tabs / windows. That’d be nice.
a) do you use Missing E?
b) you should be able to right click the upper right corner of a link, and ‘bookmark this link’ should be an option
a) Yes — has it got a function that helps?
b) As in the upper right corner of the post, where it folds over if you hover over it? Right-clicking that only gives me ‘Open link in new tab’, ‘Open link in new window’, ‘Open link in incognito window’, ‘Save link as…’, ‘Copy link address’ and ‘Inspect element’. That’s in Chrome; maybe it’s different in other browsers?
Also 
dinoquark replied to your post: What I’d find quite handy is a way of saving…
I don’t know what browser you use, or if this is a good solution or not, but on firefox I can just click and drag the upper right corner of a dashboard post to the browsers bookmark button.
Hmm… In Chrome I can get drag the corner to drop the URL into various places but I haven’t got anywhere I can drop it to make it a bookmark. It is a neat new way of opening a new tab, though, so thanks for that!
(via iuwaehfoaiuwhefoiaulfjqn)
What I’d find quite handy is a way of saving Tumblr posts to my browser bookmarks / favourites straight from the dashboard without having to open them in new tabs / windows. That’d be nice.
I did the Tumblr Blackout thing. I wasn’t organized enough to actually do a post saying that I was doing it, but hopefully I at least contributed to whatever dip in usage their stats will show for the day.
I hope at least some of you did it too, or I’ll have to spend all day tomorrow catching up with my dashboard. ;)
