For the past few years I have had a foot in both the “blogging” and “micro-blogging” campsmaintaining accounts at WordPress and Tumblr. In a curious way they fit well togetherwhere WordPress is suited to carefully authored and curated content, Tumblr is more of a scrapbooka digital cork board with bits of photo, sticky notes, and half written thoughts.
Over the years WordPress has slowly evolved. My history with the platform goes back at least six years, possibly more. I first learned about the emergent blogging platform through a close friend in San Franciscoa web designer who experienced the dot com boom first hand. It was good enough to cause me to drop the blog script I had written, and make the switch. This was still in the days when nobody knew what a “blog” was, let alone how you might go about building your own.
Over the years WordPress slowly improved, growing ever more sophisticated and powerfula web content publishing tour de force silently running countless online newspapers, magazines, blogs, journals, and periodicals. It had become the battleship for rowing across the river.
Some time in 2007 I was listening to This Week in Tech, and Amber MacArthur mentioned a New York startup called “Tumblr”essentially a single guy who had invented the concept of a short-form blogwhich he was calling a “Tumblog”. For years it existed in the quiet backwaters of the blogospherea curiosity that nobody really paid much attention to.
That all changed over the last 18 months though. Tumblr went viral. It became the place to write, to post, to discover, and to share. For the most part my participation in it over the past year has been exciting, vibrant, original, interesting, perhaps even seductive at times.
There has always been a problem with Tumblr though. It’s badly designed, unstable, and untrustworthy. You might think these negative qualities would doom it, but due in no small part to the viral community championing it (in much the same way as Apple Mac users, who are famously armadillo like when questioned over their allegiance), the positives outweighed the negatives. The pain was worth it to remain connected with the community.
Everything has a tipping point thoughand this week I reached mine with Tumblrthe number of negatives finally outweighed the positives to such an extent that the patience and willing required to continue taking part in it’s community ebbed away.
I could begin writing a list of the many and varied failings of the Tumblr platform, but I will refrain. Much as it may surprise you reading this particular post, I am generally an optimistic person, and find negativity difficult.
Leaving a social network or online communty is difficult thoughwe’re not just dropping a piece of software that we don’t likewe’re potentially cutting ties with real people that we have developed relationships with. People just like you or I that are sharing their day, their thoughts, their ideas, their dreams and their fears.
While debating the reality of walking away, something occurred to me. RSS. Really Simple Syndication. We no longer have to be a member of a community to keep in touch with the people within it, in the same way that you don’t have to be driving a car on a race track to observe a motor race.
I don’t know. Perhaps I’m a luddite. I’ve always felt there is something better about personal interactionabout taking the time to share thoughts properly; either through an email, a comment to a blog post, or a live discussion. Clicking a “like” flag, or writing a snarky one sentence comment doesn’t always cut it.