#idk i'm just a tiiiny bit salty but also very saddened by that sentiment repeatedly making its way onto my dashboard | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

yardsards · 2 years

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i gotta say, i really don't agree with the whole "likes are meaningless!" idea that gets passed around here.

i love when people like my stuff! it absolutely delights me to know that people saw what i made and enjoyed it!

of course reblogs are even better cuz then more people can see (and therefore like and reblog) what i made but. the end result of that is still just... Number Go Up. and liking a post still makes number go up even if it's only by 1.

everyone has different standards for what they'll reblog. for some, a like without a reblog means "i liked this, but i only reblog things i love", for others it's "i loved this, but i only reblog things i'm absolutely enamored with", for others it's "i liked/loved/was enamored with this, but i have a theme that i stick to on my blog and this doesn't fit". either way, someone enjoyed your post even if it didn't fit their reblog criteria

like, each blog has different levels of activity. some blogs are super active (are on this site very frequently and/or have a very high 'posts reblogged'/'posts viewed' ratio) and they're on your dash all the time. other blogs are super inactive (are on this site very infrequently and/or have very low 'posts reblogged'/'posts viewed' ratio). this is how tumblr works. this is a feature, not a bug.

if everybody followed those "likes mean nothing!!! you MUST reblog more" posts and changed their habits enough to start reblogging 2x as many posts, than everyone's dashboards would have twice as many posts on their dashboard. let's say a tumblr user's dashboard normally has 1,000 posts on it every day, and they spend enough time on here to see 500 of those posts; they see about half of the posts on their dash. now everyone starts reblogging twice as much, so there's 2000 posts on their dash every day, but they're still only seeing 500 of those posts (unless they start spending more time on this hellsite, which is generally not a good idea lmao)

now this is, of course, not accounting for the TYPE of posts that people reblog

cuz it *is* true that low-effort joke posts tend to get more notes than high-effort art/writing posts do.

which, in some ways, that makes sense. jokes have a wider audience, whereas taste in art is very personal. (and sometimes this effect can be amplified by people reblogging stuff based off of what they think their followers will enjoy. they subconsciously think "ha, my followers will get a good laugh out of this, i'll reblog it" when they see a joke they enjoy but "hm, i like this but i don't know if any of my followers will" when they enjoy a piece of art/writing/etc.. which, i advise everyone to try to stop doing this. not out of any Moral Obligation but bc you're gonna have more fun on this hellsite if you treat your blog as a little bin for shiny trinkets you enjoy, rather than as a performance)

and a lot of times, reblogging high-effort posts means much more to the op than reblogging low-effort posts does. like, i enjoy when my silly little jokes get notes but i LOVE when my art or long meta-analysis posts get notes.

so i DO wholeheartedly encourage people to reblog more art and writing and whatnot, rather than just jokes all the time. but do that cuz you WANT TO, not out of some weird sense of guilt

i've seen people say they've stopped liking posts at all if they're not gonna reblog it, cuz they're afraid the op will be offended. and that makes me really sad. please continue to like my posts, even if you don't quite want them on your blog! don't feel bad! it makes me so so happy when i know people saw and enjoyed what i made, even if they don't share it with anyone.

(i am saying this as someone with a fairly active blog, both in terms of original posts and reblogs, and who consciously makes an effort to reblog more art/writing instead of just jokes, and who makes both joke posts and art/writing posts of my own)

#eliot posts #long post #idk i'm just a tiiiny bit salty but also very saddened by that sentiment repeatedly making its way onto my dashboard

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