Tumblr and Social Strata
jgh:
Don’t assume snark is a sign of a disenchanted user base. On the contrary, I think snark can be a sign of an engaged, vigilant and enthusiastic community.
A community that doesn’t suffer fools - and wouldn’t want to. Personally, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Web publishing sites create community; intentionally or not. It used to be the case that startups like Blogger focused on the technical platform (coding and design) before the idea of community even entered the picture.
Tumblr, while a great platform, instead decided to focus on the community. Artists were valued for using the site to showcase their talents, while also allowing users to follow those artists.
Still, I’m not sure that Karp/Arment initially understood that communities function like organisms — they grow to the limits of their environment. Reblogging created new territory in blogging where a very low threshold was needed to comment on another person’s work. The same tool that allows users to give praise to people in small doses would also allow them to heap criticism on others.
Still, the initial stratification was like this:
- Creators (artists, writers, etc) - very few
- Users (for lack of a better term, people who used the site like a traditional blogging platform) - majority
- “Rebloggers” (negative nellies) - few
While not as blind as Myspace users, most Tumblr users like to be blissfully ignorant of the organizers. (Far from being a negative, I would say web communities succeed when the medium becomes transparent — that is the point where a service becomes an extension of the user.) They have their own sub-communities and cliques and usually have better things to do than worry about than Terms of Use.
Another thing worth noting is that the Tumblr community is full of young liberal minds, which is not shocking considering that it caters to artists. This is a group that hates to feel like their freedom of expression is cut off, even in theory. So while targets of the eminent rebloggers hated what they said, most valued that even critics could speak their mind (some, though, expressed this after the fact).
The moment Tumblr blogs were deleted and the Terms of Use retroactively changed, a lot of people saw the way things actually were, with “Organizers/Moderators” above even the Artists in terms of strata. Immediately the medium was at the center of attention.
Getting to the heart of the matter, the pure rebloggers were a small minority, but even they were a part of the larger community. Removing them in this fashion only created a schism where even casual users were upset; disrupting the experience of the majority.
Still, I have to give the people at Tumblr credit for doing something new with web publishing communities. The fact that they actively use their own platform in a way that isn’t walled off is admirable (and something that Mark Zuckerberg can’t say). This should be a learning experience for everyone. I truly hope for the best for this community.
