Kyle Labriola

...I've begun using browser extensions on Twitter and Tumblr that default my dashboard to "Original Posts Only", and move the retweets/qrts/reblogs to a separate timeline that I have to click to browse if I choose to.

I feel weirdly guilty about doing this, because I understand that retweets, qrts, and reblogs are crucial to discoverability, people getting their work out there, and emergency fundraising, but.................I just can't deal with the endless scrolling and the overwhelming noise anymore. It's too much. It rattles my head.

To be fair, I still see all that stuff on mobile, so it's not that I never see it anymore. But when I'm at my computer, I mostly just look at a clean timeline of original posts that the people I follow actually wrote themselves, not shared posts.

I wish these platforms had been designed inherently differently so that I didn't have to be pushed to this moment, but I legitimately just can't deal with seeing all the stuff that people share day-in and day-out. It's become numbing.

There's something very convenient and very genius about Tumblr's "queue" feature. I never used it when I first started years ago, but as the years went on and now I have a bunch of art (that I still like) and I want to show new followers, it's really handy. It was very smart for them to have a single button you could press to throw everything in a pile and then your account will just autopilot post daily for you. I totally get how people use the queue for like 90% of their posting, so that their reblogs are spaced out.

ON THE OTHER HAND

I also kind of like that cohost doesn't have the queue. Every post has to be painstakingly, deliberately posted. Probably makes the platform feel less "spammy" and more thoughtful?