Have you ever tried to explain to someone not on tumblr the tumblr tagging ecosystem? You sound bonkers. They look at you like you explaining a 5 lane highway designed by frogs to optimize lily pad travel.
like youβll be like okay so the tags are kind of for your own blog sorting, right, like #myposts or #reblogs so you or someone else can find them later, hopefully, or people can just wander into a tag for a show or character and see a bunch of posts about that
but also sometimes the tags are just⦠commentary, like a little side whisper you attach to the post that only lives in your corner of the swamp unless someone else decides to pick it up and carry it with them like a note in a bottle that has somehow developed opinions
and there are actual comments, which follow the post, but tags donβt, so tags are like speaking into a parallel dimension where only people who specifically go looking for it will hear you, and also the original poster, sometimes
so you can react to something without technically adding to the post in a way that propagates, unless someone sees your tags and goes βno actually this deserves to be part of the textβ and manually copies them onto the post like a form of peer review, tags so good they achieved publication
and then it can also function as a PS on your own post, like an afterthought that didnβt quite fit into the main body but you still needed to say it, so you just tuck it into the tags like βalso btw [unhinged addendum]β and send it drifting downstream
and at this point the person youβre explaining this to is just staring at you while the frogs continue building their infrastructure in the background and youβre like no I promise it makes sense once you live here long enough
