actually iām reblogging this again with commentary, fuck it.
Thereās people in the notes talking about ānot basing your worth off numbersā, and like. that isnāt what this post is about. Itās not a threat, either, itās a comment on how this site works, at a mechanical level.
Likes are worthless. Let me say that again.
They donāt do anything. Theyāre a bookmark. They were never part of how tumblr works - in the early days we didnāt even have a like button, and the site still more or less acts as though we donāt. Theyāre personal bookmarks and the only people who āgetā anything from them are you (you bookmark the post) and the OP (maybe a very slight serotonin boost), but they donāt keep the post in circulation, they donāt keep it alive.
Without reblogs, a post will be dead in the water within an hour. No matter how good it is, no matter how many hours of painstaking love and attention its creator put into it, it will be dead within an hour and never seen again. It gets pushed down the dashboard and nobody aside from the followers who were online when it was posted will see it.
And thereās a huge difference in engagement on posts that get even one lucky reblog from someone with wider reach - that one reblog shows your post to five, ten, fifteen other people, and if one of those people also reblogs it, and so on and so forth, thatās how posts stay alive and in circulation.
Itās like a contagion, but weāre sharing creativity instead of disease.
And that matters. That ālifespanā of the post matters, artists and writers give up on this site and go to sites where posts have longer lifespans because it sucks to spend hours of your life, maybe even days, to get two notes and some fucking pocket lint for your efforts.
We create for ourselves, but we share because we want people to see it, because that engagement offers positive feedback and encouragement to continue.
But more than that, if every post (whether art, fic, gifset, whatever) is dying within an hour or a day of being posted, that means itās not making it onto your dashboard. And if itās not on your dashboard, you wonāt see it. This kills the site, after a while. You stop seeing the posts, because nobody is putting them on your dashboard, because this site doesnāt have an algorithm like twitter and instaās and it shouldnāt, itās the last bastion of chronological timelines.
Forgive my giant fucking rant I am so tired right now and full of the plague but like stop acting like artists and writers are just being whiny little babies, or āthreateningā to withhold our fucking work (youāre not entitled to it! itās ours! if we get nothing out of sharing it weāre well within our rights to keep it private!) when we say this site will dry up without reblogs. Weāre just stating facts.