jack

tumblr's tagging system is dogshit to nonfunctional. it's purportedly useful for fandom use but the primary method of finding and being found on tumblr is direct networking. i..e. Tumblr is like Hey you follow person A, and they follow person B, so we suggest you also follow person B. etc

homie i've been using this site for a year and feel like i interact with people and comment and try to start a conversation, and nothing comes from it. Honestly the only posts I see often commented or rebloged or whatever are from people who already had some kind of following on another site/platform that already gave them a headstart and people to circulate their posts and topics of interest.

Tumblr does have a pseudo-global feed, it's just opt-out, not opt-in, and it's algorithmically tainted, and thus not a great role model. The For-You-Page is only opt-out-able IIRC if you set your whole tumblr to private, which isn't great. You put in some interests, they don't have to be existing tags or used as tags at all IIRC, and the feed is filled with content along those lines, whether or not you follow those people.

The difference is that the For You Page on Tumblr does not exclusively operate on tags, meaning that the tagging system is entirely supported by a separate feed of gathered content based on general interests specified, not tags.

So there's still something aside from tagging and following that allows for both tag and topic/niche/community discovery akin to a global feed.

I still think if we have any 'set' or standardised tags at all, even introduction/I made something tags, it's gotta either be entirely community made and supported (doesn't seem to be going so well right now), or standardised and suggested in some way by the site itself (Active Tag Suggestions - the post below the top one, is my idea for it.)

From my experience I've mostly found new people on there through reblogs or the occasional "here are some people to follow" recommendations that are inserted in the middle of the dashboard feed, and it would show a preview of one of their recent (or popular?) posts too which often grabs my attention even more.

I think there might be a tag-driven rec algorithm at play, too? I've posted one of my games on there with barely any following/network and still got more engagement than I was expecting from it.

even back in the day tumblr would recommend you a bunch of blogs and tags to follow when you signed up, to get you started finding a crowd posting things you were interested in

during one of many spasms of twitter ""dying"" there was a big influx of twitter users who did explicitly complain about the fact that they couldn't find anyone and no one was looking at their posts, yes. in comparison, most of the reddit users who joined seemed to grok the idea of "search the site for things you like and then follow the communities that exist surrounding the tags that you find from searching."

Tbh most of the reason I tag things with a "global feed" is because I'm missing information. I could describe in words what the post's function is, but with some things if there's a tag people are already using to describe it in practice, that's entirely unknown to me, as is the process of how I would learn it.

Since tags don't have any sort of weight to them based on category, popularity (either posting or following), or even page count, and there isn't much tag discoverability, I often don't feel like I have the information required to make an educated decision. And then I wonder, did nobody acknowledge, say, the times I posted art bc nobody liked my art, or bc I made some unknowable mistake in tagging?

To give an example, "dollmaker" is a relatively popular tag for people who make physical dolls: needlefelting and stuff. "dollmakers" is a rare tag for dress-up games. (Last I checked, anyway.) The only reason I know that is I was writing a post about dress-up games, knew enough about the lingo to know what people generally call them, and individually checked every tag that came to mind in separate tabs. But with other communities someone might not know the lingo. Maybe they've only ever heard dress-up games called "dollmakers" before. The tags that come to mind for them are followed by people who would only be interested by coincidence (the needlefelters) and quite possibly nobody (the rare tag).

On an alt I literally once tagged a post with a feed tag and "is there a tag where people [exact description of how I would categorize content]" bc the only tag that came to mind was, similar to the "dollmaker(s)" example, clearly not the intended audience or close to it.

I know AO3 only manages this by having a dedicated team of volunteers who go through every "Luke Skywlaker" and "friends to lovers tbh" to associate them with their standard counterparts, and Cohost has yet to have 5 employees at once. But idk, it might be nice to let people opt in to sharing their bookmarked tags or something on a per-page basis for non-algorithmic discoverability.

I easily found a bunch of great folk in the tumblr ask blog sphere by being able to

A: search for posts and have the body text bring up something (which works not as much now as it did when this happened)

B: if i found a cool blog, they’d often be answering a question or reblogging someone else, thus creating a chain of people to follow

C: I could easily tell which variation of a tag was the most reliable instead of having to rely on a crapshoot

Tumblr doesn't have an all-purpose global feed tag (that would be a nightmare), but it does have tags that I perceive as having a similar function to cohost's "Global Feed (topic)" tags. Reptileblr, studyblr, (topic)blr all could just be re-tagged as reptiles, study, (topic). But the use-cases of 'reptileblr' and 'reptiles', in practice, are different. You tag something 'reptiles' if your post is about reptiles. You tag it 'reptileblr' if you have a pet reptile and want to talk with other reptile owners.
I think global feed tags serve the second, more social function, while regular tags are more formal and useful for categorization, discovery, content filtering, etc.
I think this is an inherent problem with how tags are set up on both tumblr and cohost are set up. They serve too many purposes that are at odds with each other. Making specific social tags is something the community does to combat the problem, and it's something they'll do as long as the problem exists.
A tag feed lets me scroll through a bunch of posts. I'll go to a formal tag feed if I want to see a bunch of posts on a subject which are floating independently in a void. I'll go to a social tag feed if I want to see a bunch of people talking with each other, though not necessarily in direct conversation.
This isn't a hard distinction - fandom tags often blur the line, for example. The "upd8" tag serves a primarily social function, while the "homestuck" tag is more formal, but both are used in both ways.
I think the closest Tumblr has gotten to a global feed was when reddit shit itself. Several big subreddits bailed and went to tumblr. Surprisingly, tumblr was pretty welcoming, but they gave one pretty bad piece of advice to the reddit users, who were looking for a way to find their old communities: "tags are like subreddits." On the surface, this made sense: if I want to see pictures of cats, I could either go to r/cats on reddit or #cats on tumblr. But Reddit culture places a lot of emphasis on the group identity of a subreddit, and one of the biggest subreddits that jumped ship was 196. The mods had pinned a post in the subreddit itself saying "don't post here anymore, go to tumblr, post like you're on this subreddit, and tag it #196." The #196 tag immediately blew up, and went to the top of trending. It was wild. 196 is basically a hyper-generalist meme and shitpost dump. The tumblr tag is actually an incredibly close recreation of the experience of the subreddit, basically completely meaningless. It's also remarkably similar to the cohost global feed, maybe with slightly less overall posting effort and a lot more stolen memes.

I've also been on Tumblr for over a decade (although "been on" is extremely loose for the past several years) and I actually kind of disagree. From what I understand, in the early days Tumblr sort of did function as a social network for New York media people -- the sort of people who not only knew who David Karp was but likely had seen him at a party at least once. Very similar vibe to here oddly enough, obviously with a different crowd of people. But early on there was the a sense that you had to follow 10 offshoots of certain high-profile group blogs to get even an inkling of what people were subtweeting, which originated in backchannel emails anyway.

Even when it expanded beyond this crowd, there was still a sense that people often knew who each other were, that there were mini-communities -- fandoms, social justice communities (communities, plural, there were hundreds if not thousands of them and they very much did not all agree), etc. The nice thing, though, was that those communities were permeable; you could post in (for instance) the #music tag and gradually be recognized even if previously no one knew who the fuck you were.

A startling number of writers got their start this way, myself included, but it wasn't restricted to things that could get you paid. I have two side blogs with about 20,000 followers who found them purely through my adding a lot of tags. In one case the spike in followers happened within literal days, on a blog that was mostly an inside joke between me and a few friends I never expected to escape that context. That blog was anonymous, too, so it had nothing to do with my previous following. Which is very rare in social media!