#perfect commentary

It makes posts longer - it physically takes up so much more space

it’s less cleanly aligned - though it could became a problem on VERY long posts, the old format allowed the eye to follow the words and clearly see who said what (*)

it interrupts the flow of words -  it’s so much choppier now and much harder to follow various comments as parts of the same whole 

it looks really bizarrely ablist to me (**)

organization is too chaotic - the eye cannot follow the comments easily which I predict will lead to valuable middle commentary getting skipped for convenience sake

its a step backward - this new format is one of the most primitive in terms of arranging comments (***)

its too much like twitter - in that conversation and interpersonal communication will still technically be possible but it will be a lot more complicated and hard to follow than it has any reason to be

its too much like facebook - these sites are not two of a kind they are set up very differently, for very different purposes right from their conception. (****) 

* this was a problem on posts with several replies, but an easy fix (much easier than rearranging the whole entire system) was my personal favorite x-kit solution: different color or thickness for the the different bars leading to the name of the the poster

** I’m struggling with following the commentary on posts now. i cannot believe how hard this must be to make sense of for some people. I have dyslexic friends and ADD/ADHD friends who don’t use facebook explicitly for this reason. Ironically facebook recentlyish added a thing where you can directly reply to a comment and create a (limited but still much more functional than it used to be or what tumblr has now) tiered comment conversation that makes it easier to read.

*** I’m pretty sure this is what we did back in the early days of the internet. Like…this is literally how the neopets forums and fanfiction.net reviews are organized and have always been.We have evolved past this; don’t get me wrong its Good if you want disjointed individuality in comments, but is really impractical for involved conversation and commentary. And y’know blogging. Which this site is allegedly for doing. Almost every other blog platform I can name worth using has tiered comment trees. This stacked and isolated comment set up works on fanfiction, where what one person is saying in regards to a story has almost no bearing on what the next is saying (if it has any at all) or even facebook which primarily exists as a photo album and pseudo planner or micro journal (unless you want to hold a conversation in comments and then every holy thing be with you you’re gonna have yourself a headache). Tiered commentary conversation is much easier on the reader and even youtube utilizes a better system than a barely distinguishable stack of disjointed comments and that site isn’t a site where the intended use is conversation and interrelated commentary, unlike this one. 

Having actually seen Age of Ultron now I want to toss my two cents in a couple things that’ve got Tumblr in a froth:

namely the “monster” line

For full disclosure, tumblr had me fully expecting to come out of Age of Ultron full of righteous fury and a desire to publicly flog Joss Whedon and kick him out of nerd club. And while there are a few things I’m distinctly unhappy about, I wouldn’t count Widow among them.

For some reason this guy's commentary spoke to me.

"If you like Japanese culture, Canadian pop stars, or HORRIBLE HORRIBLE GARBAGE"

"Here's a little taste, because more might kill you"

"[3 seconds in] - NOPE, STOP, ALREADY OUT, DONE."

"Let us know, do you think it's fun and we're being too hard on Avril or do you have good taste in things?"

Maybe I just like it b/c his dripping sarcastic tone matches my almost constant inner-monologue, but I loved this.