mindstalk | (Reply)

This is indeed the single best trait...about *Tumblr*.

Commenters-as-first-class-citizens, being able (if you want!) to smoothly shift towards writing more OPs as you gain more comfort with writing and more readers to appreciate it, being able to say, as a fundamental action, "this person has interesting things to say and good taste in things to say them about, I want to be shown every thread where she comments".

But better, in that it doesn't strangle you: you couldn't write the above OP on Twitter--at best, you could contort it into a "thread"--but you could on Tumblr. Better, in that it has hypertext, and this makes context easier because you can include as many links as you like (and not just however many URLs will fit in the minuscule space). Better, in that it is more four-dimensional: it is much easier to find (and link to!) an old Tumblr post than an old tweet. (Not as easy as I would like, but still far easier than Twitter.)

After all this time, I still don't understand why Twitter sold for 44 billion dollars--and even the people who think that was overpriced value it in the tens of billions--while Tumblr, infamously, sold for three million. I don't understand why--if you believe the rumours--Twitter had enough weight to throw around to coerce its app stores and payment processors into letting it continue to host pornography, while Tumblr was too small to fight back. I don't understand why Tumblr's current husk, in its attempts to revivify itself, is moving *away* from four-dimensional stability. (Did you know that Tumblr blogs are now, by default, visible only to logged-in people? You can still opt out, for now, but you do have to opt out. Otherwise, no linking a post to just anyone off-site, and no putting it in the Wayback Machine. I'm glad I started making backup hosting plans after the porn purge: it does, in fact, look like I am going to need them in the future.)

((And yes, "is this website Wayback-compatible" is something I always consider. Dreamwidth is archivable by default with individual per-post opt-outs, which is Correct. Pillowfort forbids archiving altogether, and that's why I don't use it. As for Twitter, it's in-between: only directly archivable on short threads, but there are third-party interfaces that are somewhat better (but still require some coaxing to get the archival copy navigable: see here for an example).))

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I do like Dreamwidth, and in particular it *is* nice how the fear of going viral doesn't constantly weigh on one here. But--with significant effort--I make Dreamwidth show the comments I write elsewhere to readers of my own blog, and I miss being able to follow the comments of others.