I just reblogged this post over on Pillowfort (“It’s only until you move away from tumblr for real that you understand how utterly passive and almost disenfranchised you become as a fan…” but it’s something I think about a lot and find very interesting.
I had this experience with Tumblr too–in a slightly different way. I very determinedly used it to communicate with people and carry on conversations, against all odds and user interface. I reblogged to comment. I reblogged to converse. My Tumblr was full of longass reblogs wherein I stubbornly kept on with socializing and discussing–and people got annoyed as hell. I actually got yelled at sometimes. I’d always be unfollowed by some folks when I’d do it. Because the UI is set up so that doing this puts the same post in front of your followers over and over, longer and more annoying every time. This kind of usage is disincentivized.
This isn’t a commentary on the people who use Tumblr–or even Tumblr in particular. It’s not even a complaint. I just think it’s informative to look at the entire ecosystem of currently popular platforms and apps and recognize the traits they share, and how those are different from what came before, or what’s trying to come up after.
These platforms–e.g. Twitter and Instagram and Tiktok and Snapchat–are designed very specifically as social media platforms BUT NOT social networking platforms. They are NOT designed for communication and interaction, or to help facilitate socializing or community online. They are designed to be content-first (and in some cases, only). They’re made for content to be posted and spread. If there happens to be some commenting functionality, it’s just in the way of feedback and reward for the content creator–a largely one-way street that isn’t designed or intended to support extended discussion. Posts are content vehicles. They are not conversation starters.
And the thing is, it doesn’t satisfy their users’ desires or needs. People are still looking for somewhere to talk. They want it so badly that they resort to Facebook groups and Twitter group chats in order to manage it. Discord is excellent and increasingly adopted–but it’s largely synchronous communication, which drives some people off because it feels overwhelming and can instigate a lot of FOMO. By the time you get done with class, the conversation has moved on.
Older platforms tended to be social networking first, and social media second. The current generation in ascendancy is the exact opposite.
So now we have a couple generation of internet users who’ve learned to use social media as a vehicle for virality and exposure, not interaction. Each style of platform comes with its own user skillsets and expectations. When you grew up with algorithm-driven content machines, you don’t come into a place like Pillowfort–or Dreamwidth, or Mastodon or Cohost–and have a pre-existing knowledge of how you can go about finding people. It isn’t intuitive for a lot of people to start with an empty dash and fill it themselves through work and discovery.
It’s not like people are robots. They CAN do things differently, but when you grow up doing things a certain way, your first instinct is not necessarily “but what if I went and changed all my habits and expectations and used this tool COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY?”
And as user bases shift away from Facebook and Twitter and try their hand on Pillowfort and Mastodon and wherever, I see a lot of friction caused by this. Adoption of this new generation of retro-style social media platforms requires some elbow grease, especially if you’re not experienced at it. And for people who haven’t experienced something different, they encounter it the first time and are real damn confused, because it doesn’t work anything like what they’ve been trained to expect.