It’s funny how whenever a major media site publishes a bloviating thinkpiece about The Rise and Fall of Tumblr, their elaborately justified list of things about Tumblr that modern social media users hate just happens to be perfectly, one-to-one identical with a list of things about Tumblr that make it difficult for advertisers to harvest personally identifying information about individual users. Like, exactly who do y’all think you’re fooling, buddy?
“Tumblr died because people just hate websites that don’t have intrusive advertising built into the platform!”
I especially like the ones that frame arguments to the effect of “having no functional ability to curate your user experience is actually a good thing because people are inherently lazy and content recommendation algorithms can be trusted to act in everyone’s best interests“.
How to curate your user experience on Tumblr:
- Start off and follow people for content you like.
- If you notice you reblog something reblogged from the same user often, follow that person.
- If someone catches your eye in a reblog chain, follow them.
- You can unfollow anyone at any time if their content changes or they aren’t what you expected.
- Suddenly find yourself following hundreds of people and you have no idea how it happened.
Word of mouth and rec’s from friends or mutuals (either verbally or because they frequently reblog the same person) are more likely to give you a good experience compared to an algorithm, too.