Old woman yells at cloud

[sholio]

Reading Tumblr's post on upcoming changes (kinda long and very vague in specifics, there's a reblog addition in which they claim nothing is changing in the core product but WE'LL SEE) made me think about changes to the general style of social media over the last decade or so, especially this part:

The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Historically, we have expected users to curate their feeds and lean into curating their experience. But this expectation introduces friction to the user experience and only serves a small portion of our audience.

[...] Tumblr encompasses a wide range of interests, such as entertainment, art, gaming, fandom, fashion, and music. People come to Tumblr to immerse themselves in this culture, making it essential for us to ensure a seamless connection between people and content.

To guarantee Tumblr’s continued success, we’ve got to prioritize fostering that seamless connection between people and content.

I hadn't really thought about this before, but the whole experience of looking for things used to be the basic experience of getting on a new social media platform. You have to go find stuff - accounts to follow, tags to search. Ideally you can search without an account and just read the content on the site for a while before you get on, and you can spend lots of time lurking and searching before you join in, but *you* fill up your feed with the things that you want to see.

But this trend toward having the social media platform itself fill your feed/timeline/reading page with a ton of content it thinks you want rather than leaving it up to you to find things on your own is just ... I feel like it's actively antithetical to the social media experience I want to have. And it's recent, not the suggesting stuff per se (lots of sites do this in a sidebar, all the way back to the mid-2000s or earlier for places like Yahoo News) but the expectation that what's going to happen when you go on a social media site, you'll have a cascade of random crap thrown at you - that's new, it didn't used to be like that, it's completely ridiculous to say that it's the only experience users want when it's literally only the last few years that any site has done that.

In Tumblr's specific case, if they want to show off the contents of the site to new users, maybe they could try focusing on building a search function that isn't total donkey crap.

(This is more like musing and gripey nitpicking rather than me being hugely annoyed at any of this, but it's fascinating how the above quotes, and some other parts of the linked post, made me consider how there's been this general turnaround from having a slow ramping up on a new social media, where you start out with a somewhat barren experience and spend some time having to seek out content to engage with, vs having it firehosed at you - it's *new*, it's not inevitable, and I don't even think it's inevitable that every new content platform is going to be like that; there's still plenty of interest in Medium-style, Reddit-style websites, where there might be a What's New section or suggestions offered to you, but mostly you go there because you want to see specific things and have at least a minimal, Google-assisted-if-necessary ability to search for them.)

(I also just kind of resent the above-quoted bit where "curating your experience" is equated to "picking blogs you want to follow" - because *that's not how that's used,* it refers more specifically to blocking blogs, muting tags, and generally cherry-picking from the available content on your dash for a better experience, not the basic underlying mechanism that you choose what blogs you want to follow vs having the site pick for you.)

Comments

[sheron]

That really is a generational divide because I hate video instructions so much, they're so SLOW.

[philomytha]

Oh, me too, I can read so much faster! Also it's so much easier to go back to and double-check something. Though there are times when a video is invaluable, I find with DIY jobs that seeing somebody doing it while talking about what they're doing is really really helpful. Actually I think it depends on my level of knowledge of the task as to how useful a video vs written instructions is, if I know nothing at all about it then a video can be more useful. (Perhaps this has just explained to me why a kid who has much less experience than me would want a video...)

[sheron]

Yeah when I'm looking for 'how to do X' it is totally different than 'learn about X or how it works'. I often don't need the pre-/post- steps of the specific thing I want. However when working on something I'm not familiar with, e.g. new piece of tech or something a video can be helpful. I just wish video makers would be more considerate of people's time and not make videos that talk forever about what they're going to be doing later in the video.

[yhlee]

Hard same. There are rare instances where seeing the video is helpful (e.g. watercolor painting technique walkthroughs, I really need to see the process, and even then I appreciate it when they speed it up or selectively edit so you don't literally watch paint dry for an hour lol) but otherwise? Written instructions and screencaps/pics as necessarty.

Cynically, my other guess is that at present, video content is slightly harder/more annoying/more space-taking to pirate/repackage/resell for people who are trying to monetize it. I'm sure that'll change very soont hough!

[silverflight8]

It takes forever. Especially if they pad them out to make them long enough to monetize, and have all these introductions saying what the video will do. Aarggh. I think they're useful for teaching some things like how to knit or how to fold this origami where it can be confusing visually, but most things I just want text and maybe a few pictures.

[sheron]

Yeah one big problem is that the financial incentives (longer more monetary profitable video) diverges from user interests (give me info as fast as possible so that I can move on from it).

[sholio]

Yeah, I find videos useful for, as you say, situations where you need to see how the thing is done, but mostly I just want the information and don't want to have to listen to someone talking about it! It's especially frustrating to me that so many Photoshop and other computer how-tos are in video form, because it's usually like 5 minutes of video for that one single shot of which menu item I need to accomplish whatever I'm trying to do.