![]() ![]() Even the commercial model is odd: as well as targeted adverts, the site sells an “ad-free” experience (for $40 a year), offers a Patreon-style subscription services (called Post+), and recently launched Tumblr Blaze, a bizarre promoted-post service that lets users spend $10 to show their content to a completely untargeted selection of 2,500 users, and has been gleefully adopted by the community for a sort of esoteric trolling. It leads to a freewheeling community, where the best posts are enhanced, elaborated and riffed on even as they are shared further.Īnd users can’t simply reply to a post – you either reblog it (sharing it and your comment with friends), send a private message about it, or you send a semi-public “ask”, a reply that the recipient can then, if they want, publish, creating a whole new chain of conversation. Rather than a content model built around posts, images or videos, for instance, Tumblr’s key unit is a thread: a post, its reblogs, their tags and all the content that rides with them. The social network, which launched in 2007 – a few months after Twitter – has always had its quirks. Twitter’s strict text-only, reverse-chronological, 140-character timeline is now algorithmically curated, offering 280 characters plus a range of multimedia Instagram posts can be reshared in Snapchat-style stories, which can also contain TikTok-style videos TikTok pivoted towards political content and now plays a leading role in the culture wars. Over the years, some of the largest social networks have filed those quirks off, pushing for a homogeneity that is more accessible to all, even at the expense of what makes them unique. TikTok – built by people who knew what they were doing – carefully sculpted its quirks to nudge users in its preferred direction, boosting harmless dance trends and discouraging political rants of the sort that litter competitor YouTube. The anonymity offered by 4chan lead, perversely, to a uniformity of tone, as users conform to the zeitgeist of the site, unable to build a name for themselves as an individual. Instagram’s lack of a repost feature pushed users to rely on hashtags to spread their pictures across the network, sowing the seeds of the heavily interest-based communities that still live there today. T he quirks and oddities of a social network affect the community that grows up around it. ![]()
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