Now kiss 👁️👁️

for your reference, i tracked down one of my original posts; which had a notes section that looked like this:

and here is what it looks like now:

holy shit. by my math, that is not even two percent of the amount of aggregate notes my writing actually has. i am not able to see any of the literal hundreds of replies, comments, or tags.

maybe this is a bit presumptuous but i consider myself to be fairly popular on this site. i still remember the first time a large blog "picked up" my work - how quickly all of a sudden i was getting seen. notes on my poetry jumped from like 10 to 300 to 3k. overnight. that was the magic of tumblr, and the incredible writing community i found here.

but now if i answer any of my fellow writers, if i say please go check this out or even if i add additional context to my own work - the artist is removed completely from their own content.

do you want to reply to an "ask game"? do you want to reply to a story prompt? do you want to just make a funny joke with your friends? well, that sucks - you might be depriving them of literally 98% of their notes.

it isn't about clout chasing. it is about giving creators control over their own materials. even a silly post deserves to be connected directly with the person that thought it up.