i am begging you all to stop treating this site like instagram if you dont want it to be content free by next year
actually i’m reblogging this again with commentary, fuck it.
There’s people in the notes talking about “not basing your worth off numbers”, and like. that isn’t what this post is about. It’s not a threat, either, it’s a comment on how this site works, at a mechanical level.
Likes are worthless. Let me say that again.
Likes. Are. Worthless.
They don’t do anything. They’re a bookmark. They were never part of how tumblr works - in the early days we didn’t even have a like button, and the site still more or less acts as though we don’t. They’re personal bookmarks and the only people who “get” anything from them are you (you bookmark the post) and the OP (maybe a very slight serotonin boost), but they don’t keep the post in circulation, they don’t keep it alive.
Without reblogs, a post will be dead in the water within an hour. No matter how good it is, no matter how many hours of painstaking love and attention its creator put into it, it will be dead within an hour and never seen again. It gets pushed down the dashboard and nobody aside from the followers who were online when it was posted will see it. And there’s a huge difference in engagement on posts that get even one lucky reblog from someone with wider reach - that one reblog shows your post to five, ten, fifteen other people, and if one of those people also reblogs it, and so on and so forth, that’s how posts stay alive and in circulation. It’s like a contagion, but we’re sharing creativity instead of disease.
And that matters. That “lifespan” of the post matters, artists and writers give up on this site and go to sites where posts have longer lifespans because it sucks to spend hours of your life, maybe even days, to get two notes and some fucking pocket lint for your efforts. We create for ourselves, but we share because we want people to see it, because that engagement offers positive feedback and encouragement to continue. But more than that, if every post (whether art, fic, gifset, whatever) is dying within an hour or a day of being posted, that means it’s not making it onto your dashboard. And if it’s not on your dashboard, you won’t see it. This kills the site, after a while. You stop seeing the posts, because nobody is putting them on your dashboard, because this site doesn’t have an algorithm like twitter and insta’s and it shouldn’t, it’s the last bastion of chronological timelines.
Forgive my giant fucking rant I am so tired right now and full of the plague but like stop acting like artists and writers are just being whiny little babies, or “threatening” to withhold our fucking work (you’re not entitled to it! it’s ours! if we get nothing out of sharing it we’re well within our rights to keep it private!) when we say this site will dry up without reblogs. We’re just stating facts.
also I’ve seen some people in the tags say ‘oh there have always been more likes on posts’ no there haven’t ????
these are posts from 2013, look at the ratio
not to sound like a nursing home resident but back then people know that the point of this site was to reblog things and share them, not to bury them away among your other 23k liked posts
Likes are just to haunt yourself. You read a post and get to the bottom only to discover you’ve been here before.
Every day I am tormented by the fact that I am the mind behind Roop Paul and that people who weren’t friends with me or following me back then almost NEVER believe me. I made this meme in picsart when I was like 14 years old and now at 20 I see it all the fucking time and friends always send it to me on Instagram when a popular meme page reposts it like “didn’t u make this in 8th grade djjsjfjskcjKfn” and almost every time I see a meme involving rupaul the comments are full of Roop jokes . And there’s this one meme page I follow that’s like pretty small but the username is “motherroop” and their followers call them Roop . And like I’m just constantly reminded of my own greatness and the fact that I will never be granted recognition for my extremely powerful and absolutely fucking fascinating mind 💔
I understand. my sister’s best friend made the “imagine troy bolton” meme when he was in sixth grade. It’s a hard legacy to carry
not to be sappy on main BUT one thing that i really loved when studying linguistics was that the more important a word is, the earlier the concept of this thing was given a word. for example, the word water is similar in many similar languages (aqua, agua, água). so, the more important a word is, the more languages it’ll be similar across and the older this word will be, theoretically and generally speaking (many other things also affect this)
AND SO in my years studying linguistics, there was one word that was nearly identical across so many regionally different languages (though there are outliers of course), from europe to most of asia to subsaharan africa to indigenous languages. across nearly all languages this is the first word people learn how to say and maybe the first word humans in general officially named and defined:
mamãe - portuguese
妈妈 (māmā) - chinese
ਮੰਮੀ (mamī) - punjabi
mamah - mayan (yucatec)
мама - bulgarian, russian, ukrainian
ماں (mäm) - urdu
মা (mā) - bengali
mẹ (may) - vietnamese
ママ (mama) - japanese
అమ్మ (am'ma) - telugu
mama - quechua
મમ્મી (mam'mī) - gujarati
അമ്മ (am'ma) - malayalam
amá - navajo
엄마 (omma) - korean
māmā - native hawaiian
onam - uzbek
aana - yupik
mema - tagish
μαμά (mamá) - greek
mama - swahili
أمي (umi) - arabic
mayi - chichewa
माँ (ma) - hindi
mam - dutch
ម៉ាក់ (ma) - khmer
แม่ (mæ̀) - thai
அம்மா (am'mā) - tamil
අම්මා (ammā) - sinhala
amai - zulu
ama - basque
आमा (āmā) - nepali
အမေ (amay) - myanmar (burmese)
אמא (ima) - hebrew
mamá - spanish
mom/mum- english
this isn’t actually the first word because we teach babies this word (most likely), but because the “mama” or “ama” sounds are the easiest things for babies to say, and it’s nearly always the only thing they can say at first, and adults across all languages defined their language around that.
babies all over the world for thousands and thousands of years all started out blabbering sounds like “mama” and mothers everywhere were all like Oh Shit That’s Me! I’m Mama!
i was present a few months ago when my best friend found out that outlier isn’t pronounced “oot-lee-yay” and i haven’t been the same since
“average person thinks outlier pronounced oot-lee-yay” factoid actualy (sic) just statistical error. No person thinks outlier pronounced oot-lee-yay. French Canadian Georg, who has mispronounced word for 39 years, is an ootleeyay adn should not have been counted
the Salem storyline in Sabrina the teenage witch is so so good bc like the wizard supreme court or whatever is like ‘this man is the most dangerous war criminal in history. he has tried to commit genocide and become a dictator in many different dimensions. we can’t give him the death penalty bc he used dark ancient magic to make himself immortal so we’ve trapped him in the body of a feline for eternal torture. it is the Spellman’s duty to hold him prisoner for us’. and then the Spellman’s are just like kitty,,,………..we’re gonna get him a special pillow to sit on and buy him funny little outfits and cuddle with him while we sleep. he’s the glue holding this family together we love him so much
