No cloud, no squall shall hinder us.

This is a spot from an italian estate agency (we are governed by the right-wing party)

The woman says "Ridiculous..."

Tumblr turned fandom content into mindless consumption instead of community. I’m no expert on human behaviour, but I’d put money on this.

Even “Tumblr conversations”, where you reblog each other’s posts back and forth and it turns into a dialogue, extremely limited. You can generally only do this a few times.

But there’s another, insidious layer to this, which is how reblogs work: it’s easy to create new “realities” or versions of post…without people realizing that other versions exist. If two differnent people reblog from the same person to add a comment, then other people reblog from them adding further comments, you’ll get something like this:

That is 14 different versions of the same post someone could see. Fourteen separate realities right there!

You might be seeing this:

While someone else will see this:

Now repeat things over several years and hundreds, if not thousands, of posts, and you can see how this can quickly lead to separate realities.

Even if people know each other, or are in the same fandom!

Something to note about how and why this happens. See those gray lines connecting the various dots? Those are profitable to the social media companies. That nebulous gray blog encompassing the two stars/fans, or the invisible hypothetical line connecting those two stars? That is not profitable. So companies are not only disincentivized to facilitate that connection in the first place, but actively try to prevent it too!

Compare this to how journals, forums, listservs, and other older fandom platforms operated:

Now, this is a very vague visual representation of multiple different platforms, but there are three main things I was trying to indicate.

tl;dr

Social media removed reciprocation, communication, and agency in content consumption. Fans react to either passive consumption because that’s the only way to stay sane in such an overwhelming platform, or to extremism because that’s the only form of agency they can truly have in their fandom experience. Fandom isn’t something you participate in, it’s something that happens to you.

And if this sounds familiar to any social science majors out there, you might’ve taken a course about group dynamics, ideological persistence, and/or had to study about the proliferation of social and/or political movements. Nicky Case has a lovely interactive webapp that lets you play around with these concepts and experience this in just half an hour of playing around:

The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds

Those three things in detail (put under a cut due to length):

I think that what we’re experiencing now, as a reaction, is a resurgence of individual communities. More often than not these days, I see that individual fandoms or groups within fandoms have a Discord or other place to talk away from Tumblr.

I think that may also explain why some people tend to like more than they reblog. Reblogging means leaving yourself open to (often extremist/purity-motivated) criticism of your choices - or leaves the OP open to similar criticism from your followers, with you as the involuntary middleman whose reblog made that connection possible.

Movie Promotion in Shinjuku Station, Tokyo, Displays All 7649 “Yu-Gi-Oh!” Cards

“Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions” hits Japanese theaters on April 23, 2016

But yes, sometimes mentally ill people are violent. Sometimes we are bad people. And even those mentally ill people are in need of advocacy, maybe even more so.

More realistically: go take a shower because it’s been three days. Wash the dishes that have been in the sink since last Friday that you can smell as soon as you open your door because rotting food stinks. Pick all your clothes off the floor because that’s where your entire wardrobe is and you’ve already cried today because you tripped over a sweater and realized the cat puked on it. Call someone who can give you enough courage to pay that bill you’ve been ignoring. Put away the crackers because that’s all you’ve eaten for two days straight. Apologize to the friends who are worried sick about you, and if you can’t at least let them know you are ok and need space. 

One of the most empowering types of self-care is responsibility, but tumblr just wants to sit in a closet strung with fairy lights and read their favorite fic.