prixmium | (Reply)

There was a 60 Minutes segment that I watched a long time ago that got me thinking about it. Someone had worked for one of the big social media companies talked about how they literally designed notification delivery like a slot machine. He had walked away from it in order to create some kind of effort to counteract the brain-hacking that no one ever actually consents to.

Again, I don't really have a hard-line about hating the things, but I firmly believe that one of the only reasons that tumblr has kept the space it has had is its unique formatting for displaying creatively arranged gifs and images. I remember during several of the times when there was a discussion of a mass exodus in the past when I was a daily and avid tumblr user that essentially there simply were no alternatives that didn't necessitate leaving behind a specific, developed skillset for creating evocative images / posts that people had learned on tumblr.

It is sort of a mixture of picspam and fanvid, to have these huge-file-size gifs arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way. I made fanvids late in high school, and I basically got left behind by the technology that people were using when Windows made the decision to stop supplying Windows Movie Maker with its OS. It now has a movie editor, but it is literally just for trimming or filtering phone videos basically. I think that even when the end-quality was, by necessity, not as good, fanvidding was a healthier community and hobby for some of the reasons I have mentioned above that tumblr photosets essentially create a middle-way between.

It just takes a little bit of coding, though, to create something similar on dreamwdith and I even made base-codes to do just that over on

tumblrmigration.

The issue is still that a person can't just reblog it to show support. They would have to actually comment and engage with the person rather than the product, so I think that this all really just boils down to the rapid acceleration with which we are all suffering under dystopian, late-stage-capitalism vibes.

tumblr wasn't always terrible, in my opinion, though it has changed for the worse and always was pretty ill-suited to conversations. The thing was, people used to just ignore that it was shit for conversations. Now they actively discourage them.