Substack surely will find a way to fix this given their power users are Twitter power users. Even if it means scrapping Notes. Arguably that's an abuse of dominance by Twitter but they were trying to eat their lunch so 🤷♀️
I've been thinking lately about how much of a great thing Tumblr was, in ways I took for granted. Tumblr was a *shoddy piece of shit* as a site, which was very inoculating for how much of a shoddy piece of shit Twitter is (a social media site barely working is somewhere between 'an expected characteristic' and 'a signal it's good'!), but it's something no one else has really pulled off since -- a fully shareable yet not shortform text-based (yet image-focused as well) platform with no pretensions towards the kind of silo-ism that gets people defending the Substack link ban. Not quite Livejournal, not quite Twitter, not quite Substack, not quite Instagram, but a Secret Fifth Thing with the benefits of all and the downsides of none (except being a shoddy piece of shit).
I forget about Tumblr because its cultural relevance is mostly gone now, but it did a lot of special things. Social media is 10% technology and 90% catching lightning in a bottle to form a special community, and though I wasn't there for Tumblr it's obvious it had a special community. It had its own bureaucratic failures with its porn ban that it never quite recovered from.
Substack surely will find a way to fix this given their power users are Twitter power users. Even if it means scrapping Notes. Arguably that's an abuse of dominance by Twitter but they were trying to eat their lunch so 🤷♀️
I've been thinking lately about how much of a great thing Tumblr was, in ways I took for granted. Tumblr was a *shoddy piece of shit* as a site, which was very inoculating for how much of a shoddy piece of shit Twitter is (a social media site barely working is somewhere between 'an expected characteristic' and 'a signal it's good'!), but it's something no one else has really pulled off since -- a fully shareable yet not shortform text-based (yet image-focused as well) platform with no pretensions towards the kind of silo-ism that gets people defending the Substack link ban. Not quite Livejournal, not quite Twitter, not quite Substack, not quite Instagram, but a Secret Fifth Thing with the benefits of all and the downsides of none (except being a shoddy piece of shit).
I forget about Tumblr because its cultural relevance is mostly gone now, but it did a lot of special things. Social media is 10% technology and 90% catching lightning in a bottle to form a special community, and though I wasn't there for Tumblr it's obvious it had a special community. It had its own bureaucratic failures with its porn ban that it never quite recovered from.
Sometimes I leave a comment here, sometimes I leave one under the twitter link. Guess I don’t have to decide anymore.