Question to the Tumblrites among you

[oloriel]

1. So, like.... what's the etiquette about following other people on Tumblr? Like, do you just "follow" and go on with your life? Or are you expected to introduce & explain yourself? Or what? HELP ME, FLIST-WAN KENOBI, YOU'RE MY ONLY HOPE.

2. What have I gotten myself into?

Comments

[heartofoshun]

One follows them without need of explanation. Some people do not notice immediately (or ever). Others follow one back instantly or when one "likes" or "reblogs" their entries. I do not track who is following or unfollowing me. I do notice new followers when I check my "activity" log. But I have no record of "unfollows." I can just imagine myself handwringing over "unfollows", e.g., 'OMG! what did I do to offend them?' It isn't worth the stress. People can "unfollow" accidentally, but if they are significant, one probably notice and can suck it up or ask them why in a message. That doesn't happen often.

It is useful to "block" offensive looking blogs. Otherwise I would be swamped with blogs in which I have no interest or are creepy to me. Some of those kind of blogs are bots and not real people anyway and can be transmitters of bad stuff--like malware or whatever. Although I never ignore them long enough to find out. It is not constant maintenance task in my case just an occasional one.

Before I "follow" a stranger who follows me I take a quick look at their blog to see if we have anything in common and not that they liked only one landscape or silly joke. Otherwise one's feed will become filled with useless blogs.

I do use Tumblr Savior--wow! It's great! [Google it and find an explantion of how one installs it for one's browser.] One can add anything to it--I do keywords ranging from "cats" to popular fandoms that I know nothing about or dislike. (I Tumblr-saviored "cats" for a while--just not into strangers' pets--and then removed it when my sister introduced me to Felines of New York--totally awesome--of course, my sister is brilliant]. Using Tumblr Savior I am spared looking at posts in which I have no interest blogged by someone with whom I do share only a few legitimate interests. I don't have to unfollow a person that way, only the irritating things they might post.

Don't argue! Unless one is really invested and then try to take a professional/friendly tone. That usually works to keep the experience fairly peaceful. If the person is obnoxious or gets an attitude, just unfollow them without explanation.

[oloriel]

Thank you! That's immensely helpful, including the advice about Tumblr Saviour. It's really stressful how in many ways, it works similarly to good old LJ (check blog before following! opt out of tags you don't care for! don't get into fights!), but it's just different enough to make me worry that I'll do something really wrong and end up with obnoxious "discourse" (which seems to be Tumblrish for a heated discussion? It's clearly not meant in the original dialectic sense. I'll probably end up in a discourse about the meaning of discourse before long...) or offending people I genuinely don't want to offend. Dangerous waters!
Anyway, thanks for clearing that up. From LJ, I'm accustomed to sending a message or replying to a "comment to be added" post when friending someone new, but I was wondering whether that would be weird on Tumblr. Apparently!

[heartofoshun]

I learned one thing about Tumblr too late to spare me most of my pain. Good people forgive differences of opinion, even serious faux pas, and bad people aren't there to share interests but to bully and pick fights. In that sense it is less like old LJ and more like Old ff.net.

It's not a crime to participate in discussion in good faith, and even define a word differently, or use the wrong pronoun with someone, or like a different interpretation of canon. If someone wants to rumble they will find something to object to, so just drop them, as fast as you can. When I started doing that my Tumblr blog became all peace and love and really smart (and even at times disputatious people); but no more assholes! Yay!

[independence1776]

1. What Oshun said: following is literally no expectations whatsoever. It's saying, "I'm interested enough in your blog to read it." Given the nature of the people on there, you may want to double-check their about pages (if they have one) because there are teens who think adults following them is Creepy and Wrong. (No, I don't understand fandom there sometimes.) People unfollowing is a fairly common experience; there's generally no expectation that everyone who follows you always will.

I don't always mutually follow people who follow me; as odd as it sounds, I try to avoid the Tolkien fandom there so I do check people's blogs to see how wanky or black/white morality they are.

The only way I know of to see who unfollowed you is to constantly check your followers page aka no notification.

I second blocking people you want to avoid. Sometimes it's just randomly wanky people; other times it's porn and spam blogs. Blocking them means you won't even see their posts in the tags.

As for a blacklist so you can block keywords so posts with them don't appear on your feed, I use New Xkit because Tumblr Savior quit working for me.

I second the "don't argue:" people there sometimes seem to lack reading comprehension and it's just best to ignore people if you can't make your POV clear after a response or two.

2. I have no idea what you've gotten yourself into. What's your screenname there?

[oloriel]

Well, friending someone on LJ also basically means "I'm interested enough to want to read your blog regularly" but people still tend to expect that you let them know how you found them/why you friended them. So I was wondering whether it was the same on Tumblr or whether it would be weird there. So thank you for clearing that up, and also thank you for letting me know about the age thing. So I'm a creepy old lady now! Yay! ;)

As of yet, I have no clue how to navigate the tags at all (especially as they all seem to go into some kind of big pool? Yet people also use them to comment or discuss stuff? Bzuh?), but I'll probably figure it out? Fingers crossed! Also thank you for the second add-on advice, in case Tumblr Saviour doesn't work for me (I think I read that from Elleth too, a while back, so it seems to be a common occurance)?

Well, I don't mean to argue on LJ, either. I like to think that I've gotten better at biting my tongue, which probably means that I'll get into some major ~discourse~ within a few days? >_>

We will see! For now, I just hope it'll help me bundle the two handfuls of Tumblrs I've come to read regularly. I imagine it'll be easier this way than checking them all separately, as I've been doing these past months.

In true Tumblr fashion, I've picked a lengthy, pretentious yet self-ironic name: nimium-amatrix-ingenii-sui, which is to say, "too much a lover of her own wit". (I just wanted to be Uncleftish Beholding but of course that was already taken!)

[independence1776]

I think it's because LJ had the expectation that there were privacy locks even if general-you didn't use them. Tumblr is 100% public even if half the people there act like it's private and strangers should never interact. (I have seen people freaking out about an anon comment because it meant someone they didn't know read their blog.) So the follower thing on Tumblr never had that expectation of "can I enter your space?"

It's something I haven't seen often, but that was pretty much my response! On one hand, I can see why teens want a teen-only space… but it's invariably been implied that adults interacting with teens (even in gen-based fandom!) is inherantly creepy.

Tags: They're like the AO3 non-relationship tags. If someone tags a fic on AO3 with hurt/comfort, it'll show all the fics with hurt/comfort no matter the fandom if you click on the tag. Tumblr tags are like that-- but only the first five show up in their respective tags and only on the original post; reblogs don't show up in the tags. That's why tags are also chatty commentary; after the first five, they only show up on the post itself, either on someone's blog or in your feed. Or if you don't care about possibly showing up in a tag, you can just comment without actively adding nonsense tags to get over the five-tag thing. People add nonsense tags to keep them out of fandom tags, too.

I'm honestly not sure why chatty tags became a thing. Part of it may not be wanting to add commentary to a post because doing so would detract from it. Another part may be wanting to say something that isn't easily reblogged, though it's difficult (though not impossible) to reblog tags. And the third may very well be at this point that it's simply the culture. I'm sure there are more reasons.

The trick is that using the search bar in the Tumblr dashboard will bring up a search: it'll show a random selection, possibly not not probably chronological, of posts with that tag. You have to change the "search" in the address bar to "tagged" in order to actually see the tag itself. There is also a way to follow specific tags so you can click on the shortcut and it'll take you directly to it rather than the two-step search/change word process. I think just clicking on the search bar will bring them up, but can't say for certain because XKit let me put mine into a handy sidebar.

Good luck about not getting into any! If you want, you can pre-emptively turn off anon comments. That tends to cut down on a lot of potential problems.

Getting a Tumblr for that purpose makes a lot of sense! At this point, I'm following too many blogs to do that, so I'm still reading the handful I check daily when I'm not logged in. (I also shouldn't unfollow half those blogs because they're people I met in person at the Young Wizards con and I'm still active in the fandom so… Unfollowing/unfriending can still be fraught. It's just easier to deal with outside of a tiny group of people.)

I'm following you now. :)

[hhimring]

I just followed you over there (you'll recognize me, I think.) I don't post much over there except links, though.

The wiser and more experienced Tumblrites have spoken already.
All I can add is that once your dashboard fills up it's easy to miss things over there, for anybody, apparently.
Oh, and apparently Tumblr only reads the first five tags and that may even be on original posts rather than on reblogs? Not sure about this, but Elleth told me something like that.

[oloriel]

I think I recognised you, yes. :)

I'm confused already by all those random posts Tumblr apparently wants to recommend to me. So far, it's manageable, but I expect once the Dash fills up, it's going to be impossible to keep track. Which was the original point of getting a Tumblr in the first place. Oh well. If it doesn't work, I can always back out, right? *shifty eyes*