Why I Don't Use Tumblr

Big news over the weekend. Yahoo has announced a deal to acquire social networking site Tumblr for over a billion dollars. They see it as a great new platform for selling ad space, a move that is probably going to make its core user base unhappy, including a significant chunk of media fans who use it to share various contributions. However, I'm fairly ambivalent towards this news because I never got into Tumblr, though not for the lack of trying.

I think I may have fallen victim to a generation gap of sorts. When I was really active in media fandoms, the major activity was fanfiction, and the bulk of fandom interaction was centered around message boards, mailing lists, private sites, and finally some of the social networking platforms, specifically Livejournal. I migrated from one platform to another over the years without many problems. Then, a couple of years back, we saw a major shift from Livejournal to Tumblr, where the fanwork became more graphics based, centering around artwork, memes, icons, gifs, and videos. Tumblr, classified as a microblogger site, was great for sharing this kind of content, but I found it difficult to hold any kind of conversation there, and I couldn't make heads or tails of the navigation. Tumblr is closer to Pinterest or Twitter than a traditional blog, and it's all about finding similar content through various tags. While you can leave comments on individual items or posts, these can be difficult to follow from one to the next, and usually requires digging through a lot of links.

I think the appeal of Tumblr is that it's quick and simple to use, and participation is easy. A significant amount of user activity amounts to "reblogging," posting interesting items to your feed that other people have uploaded to Tumblr, the way people use Pinterest boards. This is easier to do with simpler fanworks like pictures than it is with multi-chapter fanfiction or long, involved, analytical discussions about the character development on "Doctor Who." A couple of months back, someone commented on my blog that I ought to be using Tumblr, because I'd get a much bigger audience that way. However, I don't think that Tumblr is a good fit for me, because my contributions are almost entirely text-based, and many of my posts run over a thousand words apiece. Tumblr is better suited for smaller, bite-sized chunks of text information, like quotes and snippets of chatlogs. There are plenty of other places and spaces online for the kind of fandom activities I prefer, the reviews and meta, which is why I've decided to stick to Blogger and Dreamwidth. I think if I were to use Tumblr, it would be similar to how I use Twitter. I'd just post links to my blog entries.

Initially it bothered me when Tumblr became so popular, and the Livejournal and Dreamwidth-based fandoms started to shrink. Sure, the blogs weren't the best places to have good discussions about media, but at least they were pretty good about attracting a significant number of likeminded fans to the same places, so they were worth keeping an eye on. The problem was, or course, that these little communities became insular very quickly, and there were high barriers to entry. If you didn't have a good grasp of writing or you weren't good at socializing, it was difficult to get involved. Tumblr removes or significantly lowers a lot of these barriers. You can follow the tags instead of specific users or carefully delineated communities, and you don't have to interact much in order to be an active user. The kind of Tumblr content that is the most popular often involves remixing or manipulation of existing media, activities that seem to be easier for younger fans to pick up. Tumblr is made for a different kind of media fan than the ones who prefers the older blogging sites, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Anything that keeps the fandom world going should be supported in my book.

I am a little bit worried about the Yahoo acquisition having an impact on the Tumblr fandom community. It's not the ads, but the potential changes in management and oversight of the content that may have the most negative impact. Fandom is notoriously anti-commercial because of the difficult IP issues that monetization usually brings up. Changes in ownership were among the major reasons that Livejournal and Delicious fandom user bases both fell apart. If the Tumblr-based fans move on, though, as fans inevitably do, my guess is that they're going to pick another microblogging service, since that's kind of interaction this group is used to now. Or they could pick something radically different. Even the people most heavily involved in fandom have no idea where fandom is going. That's what makes it so exciting to follow.
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