I honestly don’t give a shit about Tumblr blogs that are like 95% reblogs, which most blogs on Tumblr are. I end up giving up trying to follow what people post because there are just way too many damn posts; on a typical blog, one page (if any) is equal to about five minutes. I’d rather see media and text that was created by the blog author themselves; one’s own words and creations, if you will.
There is also the various problems that come up if I send the person an ask message; I will most likely have to nag the person to respond privately so I get a notification that my message was responded to. No such convenience provided for a publicly-posted response; I have to pray that the person tagged me and check manually, or dive into tens if not hundreds of pages of posts to find the response if they didn’t tag me, especially if I sent the message a few days ago; every day I forget to check is 250 more posts to shuffle through. Sometimes I may go through this effort only to find out the person did not respond at all.
Plus, I’m a stickler for organzing things (maybe to the point of mental disorder), and reblogging en masse is anathema to organization because I have to stop and apply necessary tags, lest everything gets lost in an unsearchable mess.
That’s why I don’t post much, why I rarely reblog material unless I have more than tags to add to it, and why I generally don’t follow blogs by even people I’m close or best friends with unless they pursue the same “use Tumblr as a personal blog” philosophy.
Comments
What exactly distinguishes Tumblr from other blogging sites like LiveJournal? I've never used Tumblr before. Is reblogging a Tumblr-specific feature, I guess?
It's an amalgamation of twitter, facebook and a regular blog, that has been largely taken over by a variety of internet fandoms.
My experience with it (that is, looking at other people's tumblrs) is that it's either a dumb reblogging central, or a makeshift facebook for your internet friends, but I guess some cool content comes from it.
I hear Tumblr's reblogging feature also makes things like having a conversation tricky, since the stuff each person adds will be on their own blog instead of concentrated in one place. Unless you install a comment box with something like Disqus.
@glennmagusharvey reblogging makes a post from someone else appear a a post on your own blog, and you can add "responses" or whatever too.
My sister's blog is mostly reblogged stuff (a huge backlog queued up, from what I'm aware), with occasional comments about herself. I reblogged one or two things, decided 'ehhhhhhnope', and now I only post once in a blue moon with world-building stuff for a project or two I'm probably never going to complete.
I used Disqus and got roughly about 10 comments per year. Then it stopped functioning on my blog so I just nixed it. I guess if people want to go beyond Tumblr's reply system, which is more restrictive than the most hardcore of bondage suits, they're free to shoot messages that I'll respond to in private, or reblog-reply to me.
Raydere,
I think that some of the things people reblog on Tumblr are worthwhile and I am alright with following people I sort of know even if they mostly just reblog, but otherwise I pretty much agree with your approach to Tumblr. While reblogged posts can be interesting, I feel like it can be a bit excessive when many of the people you follow end up reblogging the same thing because they have similar interests and identical or near identical posts clutter your dashboard.
Honestly, a lot of the time I am more interested in what the actual people with the tumblrs think about stuff, i.e., the blog author's own words and creations you mentioned. I kind of wonder if Tumblr might be better served by having reblogs be separate from normal blog posts, so you could still share them with followers and maintain a personal blog with posts that would also appear on a person's dashboard. Perhaps the reblogged posts could appear on the blog itself in much the same way that some Tumblr styles display likes on a sidebar. I am not really sure how feasible or popular that would be though.
The issue you brought up about publicly answered asks being buried seems like a legitimate problem to me. I guess some people tag those answers with the name of asker's blog to make things easier, but having some notice in the inbox when someone publicly responds to a question might be a good idea. Being able to actually see sent fanmail is also a basic feature that I think might be nice to have.
In any event, I tend to have the same blogging strategy you do, but sometimes I wonder if it would be better to adapt to post more in line with Tumblr norms or just go to another blogging site altogether for personal posts.
I wonder that a lot as well, but then people who follow me on Tumblr may miss out on my "real" posts unless I tediously copy-paste. I had a WordPress blog for this purpose that hasn't been touched in a few years, and a Posterous blog (conveniently, Posterous allows crossposting for Tumblr even down to tags) that got destroyed because Posterous was bought out by Twitter and then abandoned afterwards. (there's now a "sequel" to Posterous known as Posthaven but at $60/year it seems like a bit much, unless I cancel my Crunchyroll subscription or something.)
I always pay attention to the original stuff that the folks I follow make.
I don't know, it's gotten easier, I guess.
> a "sequel" to Posterous known as Posthaven but at $60/year
sounds preposterous.
No, silly, it's a sequel. That makes it postposterous.
*sneezes*