already got a blazed marvel post. the adpocalypse is closer than we think so heres your daily PSA
don’t interact with corporate tumblr accounts
yes even to dunk on them. i don’t care if you have the sickest burn of the century lined up, don’t even give them the time of day
the eventual and inevitable fall of twitter marks a change in the advertising industry, and tumblr is unclaimed territory. if we want tumblr to remain the social media bastion it has become, it needs to remain as unappealing to corporations as possible. do not engage. in a marketing strategist’s eyes, any kind of attention is good attention. don’t “silence, brand” them. don’t kungpowpenis them. don’t send them hate anons. don’t hate-follow them. corporate tumblrs are not a single entity and they will not be harassed off this site. we only have a shot at repelling them because of tumblr’s lack of an algorithm. so turn off recommended posts on your dashboard, put it chronological order, and install an adblocker. if you don’t seek out these blazed posts and actively ignore them when they happen upon you, the corporations will starve. in this case, the best kind of protest is a silent one
i dont know exactly how to articulate this in a way other people havent but everything is too fast now. 24/7 news cycle, online focuses that last for hours instead of months or years, songs written just so ten seconds can go viral. movies and books churned out to meet some nebulous income quota. idk. im motion sick
Bill Watterson, 1995
You’re not alone or the first to feel like everything is going too fast
Hey, let’s talk about anons like this, because I know some people haven’t been in a position to see the patterns these play out in on broader scale and may indeed not spot the trap.
And it is a trap.
An ask like this has several purposes.
First, it uses social justice language in passive aggressive and manipulative ways to try to coerce a behavior. In this case, the desired behavior is usually for the recipent to participate in community shunning and/or harrassment. The language above is intended to put the recipient on the defensive where, in the haste to disassociate themself from the Bad Thing, they quickly disassociate themself from the bad person, often with no particular fact checking or evidence.
The message is also intended to create a sense of being surveilled and judged by an unknown amount of people with unknown amount of social power and an unknown amount of relevance to your life.
Notice that these asks are usually framed as if they are coming from a follower or potential follower, someone who is addressing you personally and who cares about your opinion and who your blog has an effect on. However this is usually…. very much not the case. If you’ve ever had the misfortune to watch a gossip campaign from like this from the outside, you will very quickly notice that messages like this get sent in mass batches to dozens and dozens of strangers. (You can often turn these up with a tumblr search, if you look.)
The sender does not know you and probably does not follow you. They have a person they don’t like (possibly for their stated reason and possibly not), and they are going through the reblogs of a post from that blog and mass messaging *everyone* with a form letter. They will not see your response and they will probably never even see your blog again.
Which brings us to the second goal of whisper campaigns like this:
Notice that I blacked out the names above? That’s because when the recipient answers anonymous asks like this, they provide a platform for the opinion on their blog. An anonymous message like this that gets posted doesn’t just spread gossip and apply pressure to the recipient, it is spread to the recipient’s entire community.
The *goal* is to get access to your community. The *goal* is to use you as a soapbox.
Is the information accurate? Did anyone check? Does the anon have an ulterior social motive? BIG SHRUG
If you go into the comments on one of these whisper campaigns you will see that *most people never bother to check.*
They assume good faith from a follower, they’re off balance defending themselves, and they jump straight to conciliation.
It’s a really, really effective form of social manipulation, and really really commonly misused.
