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Old woman yells at cloud
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:
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.)
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.)
no subject
--also comments are fun, I should do this more often! I actually think I can blame the modern "social media" for some of that -- because they've moved the emphasis from the "social" to the "media side. And I've never been great at being a passive consumer (what fan is?) but when the default ways to engage are either "liking" (which is barely interactive) or else argument. I never was that great at posting regularly on LJ/DW, but I always was active in comments all over the place, I loved the discussions. But they're less fun when it seems you're actively fighting with the platform to have them...Tumblr was never great at that anyway, but a "For You" rather than a "Following" page makes it that much harder to keep track with anything ongoing.
...Here's to hoping Twitter brings down the other big players when it goes down, and we get something new? can we dare dream??