“
There’s a lot of incentive and positive reinforcement when you use Tumblr,” said David Karp, proprietor of the platform. To “like” someone’s post is to click on a heart-shaped symbol—an easy, “friction-less” gesture, he said—but there is no way to express the opposite if you find the post vaguely illiterate. (Similarly, on Facebook, there is no thumbs-down symbol.) There is however plenty to gain in terms of followers for your own blog if you opt to re-post people’s posts and add your own witty, positive commentary. Unlike many vicious Web commenters, users of these social-media platforms can be de-friended, unfollowed, ignored and potentially silenced by the platform itself.

My Town of Kind! | The New York Observer

My only response is that I appear to follow all the wrong tumblrs.

(via culturefink)

“Witty, positive commentary” = never saying anything of substance. Which is fine! Just not how a bunch of us are wired to communicate.

(via aceterrier)

A lot of the time the first “hostile” reblog I see of something is also the first time I see it, and it’s someone like Maura or Mike Barthel saying “hold on, this is ridiculous”. This is awesome of them of course, but even then their primary audience is going to be people who agree with THEM and greet the post with a shower of “likes”. It’s an effect of decentring the conversation. The effect filtering your sources of information has on what information you get is fairly well talked about (if not entirely understood), but Twitter and Tumblr (less so Facebook) offer a model of conversation where what you’re seeing is incomplete by design.

And that’s newer. You CAN work to see the “whole” conversation but it takes effort - on Tumblr it even takes extra clicks to see what non-followers reblogging you have said. If Tumblr is designed for ‘niceness’ that makes some level of sense, though the effect is to turn conversations into hedge mazes.

Notes