6 underground ☆

A pun post crossed my dash, and I reblogged it with an equally bad pun in return. A couple of my followers find it funny, it's a good day for everyone.

That was on July 7th.

Virality on Reddit was entirely algorithmic. You could garner a couple crossposts, but the success of a post was entirely dependent on whether or not it hit r/all--the main page of Reddit. If your post does that, it's immediately exposed to 10x the number of people and immediately gets upvoted.

On my pun post, I get a couple reblogs. And those reblogs get a couple reblogs--nobody really adds any content to the post, it just gets a couple reblogs here and there.

There's a specific chain of reblogs that I'd like to focus on. The most popular post on this chain has about 25 reblogs on it. Half the posts have three reblogs or fewer. Five posts in this chain have just one reblog total.

But the reblog chain keeps going. And going. It breaches containment many times over. And finally, after a chain THIRTY SIX posts long, at 9:30 AM, July 22nd this morning, it hits a popular account.

99% percent of the people who have seen the post--virtually unchanged from how it left my dash--have seen it because it was curated by 36 different people. That's insane to me.

None of those 36 people know that they're part of this chain. They saw a post, reblogged it, and moved on. If any one of these people had not reblogged, the post would have a fraction of the impact it has.

And yet, after two weeks, the post has effectively hit the main page of tumblr. It was picked up, only because people liked it enough to show it to their followers. There were no algorithms necessary.

The most important things we've lost on websites is curration, remixability and the upstream.

One of the bigger issues with reposters on other sites is they often do it from lack of curation otherwise. That's not to say there wouldn't be any but I have seen plenty of "X Fandom Daily" accounts (mostlh on instagram) reposting (especially art they shouldn't) that do so because there is no way to curate their fandom account otherwise. It's not to say there never wasn't reposters but even back in the day, I'd say that it specifically was more common to see when the content wasn't easily accessible off platform, ie Pixiv fanart or niconico videos that had a language barrier on their native site being reposted in photobuckets or on youtube. Reposters are definitely still going to be an issue due things like financial incentive now introduced in online content but there is definitely still a consumer population that would benefit from more curation features returning to social media sites.

Remixability is the ability to add on or change the contexts of posts. Older people might remember back when YouTube allowed you to reply to videos with your own videos that would be linked in a section of the comments. Sadly something removed due to exploitation, I think there still was more value in it because you could follow a chain of a concept both forwards and backwards in the process. We see this being a wildly successful aspect of TikTok now with the ability to Duet, Stitch, and video comment on the website. I don't think it's much surprise a lot of the most memorable moments from TikTok tend to be things like "It's me or the PS5", "That's enough slices", "Its under the sauce", or say any of the controversy videos like couch guy as the content is specifically created by multiple unconnected parties adding to the creation. A lot of other social media has downplayed interaction on their platforms and we have been worse for it. Rarely is good media made in isolation. As an artist, your work is often improved or changed through the process by communicating with others if not just outright a collaborative project. TikTok thrives because of that community collaboration and remixing of content, it adds complexity to the work in the same way you have to add salt to a cookie recipe to make it taste better. When platforms don't support that they are dulling their content.

And now most importantly, the upstream. I put to the idea that your post is a salmon swimming towards the top of the feed. In a pre algorithm world, your post got one chance to start at the top of the stream before is was pushed down the way. However, every user who saw it had a chance of reblogging it so that it was pushed back up to the top. With the vastness of social media, sometimes it's not just about getting into someone's feed but also getting seen on a feed you're already in. How many things might have you missed just because you didn't scroll down far enough to see it? Reposting by a mutual who maybe had a smaller list of people they follow or who saw it at a time you weren't on would increase the frequency and therefore likelihood you could have seen that post and by extension your mutuals/followers having the same experience by your repost. An last minute addendum to that is the uniqueness of Tumblr's is in blog tagging. It's give us an easy chance to curate a tagged section on our blog for our mutuals/friends/loved ones where we can share things specifically to them or say maybe a follower like the content you post and wants to find more of it on your blog so they can search through your tags to find it. While it's not exclusive to Tumblr, it's one of the few popular places that include it. Especially in the age of the algorithm, the ability to be seen is one of the greatest struggles of creation as you don’t even get a guaranteed chance at the top at post. A lot of site’s just lacking feed control for the user has absolutely harmed user interaction and community. A new user essentially is constantly pressured by social media to become an influencer just to gain a better chance at interacting with others due to the algorithm controlled feed.