[…]
People need to vent.
I believe this is something that exists universally and trying to draw the line at the various forms of oppression sorta degrades this, for it’s just a natural state of humanity.
There was a lovely TEDtalk from Christopher Poole, the founder of 4chan, detailing this a bit:
- I mean, for as much good that kind of comes out of this environment, there is plenty of bad. There are plenty of downsides. But I think that the greater good is being served here by just allowing people — there are very few places, now, where you can go and not have identity, to be completely anonymous and say whatever you’d like. And saying whatever you like, I think, is powerful. Doing whatever you like is now crossing a line. But I think it’s important to have these places. When I get emails, people say, “Thank you for giving me this place, this outlet, where I can come after work and be myself.”
Now, of course again, I’m not policing anyone from speaking out, I’m actually encouraging the opposite.
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The current trend on tumblr seems to follow a series of steps where someone would speak out against a specific group, a dissenter would scream from the heavens “not all herpaderps,” then it would be sorta open season from there.
Why is this? I’d like to think I was a decently good behavioural analyser, but to be fair I did go to college and that mighta chipped away at my knowledge a bit, heh.
To answer that question, it seems rather confident that the issue is that those who jump in to dissent are not allowing those talking to vent.
This is a really long post full of cute images so I hope you don’t mind me cropping it down to just the (possibly rhetorical) question near the end. That is, the question of why venting on Tumblr pans out the way it does.
First of all, I think it’s important to note that there are some very significant design differences between 4chan and Tumblr. 4chan, from a pure design perspective, is basically optimized for venting. If you’re feeling negatively toward something, you can barge into a thread about it and start ripping it apart. There are no personal consequences to doing this; no matter what you say, it will not reflect positively or negatively upon you. It’s a safe place to vent, functionally comparable to, say, anonymous venting pages like this.
More important, though, is that it is designed to let things pass. Being anonymous means you start existing at the beginning of your post and cease to exist at the end. If someone replies to your complaints with a really compelling counterargument, there is no social pressure to hold to your old opinion. If you calm down later and realize, no, that movie wasn’t terrible enough to justify a ten page rant, you can just pretend those posts were never yours. It encourages maturation, growth, and change - ideas we don’t necessarily associate with 4chan, though that makes sense given we can’t actually see anyone there changing. To us, people simply pop in and out of existence.
Compare this to Tumblr. Tumblr is, at its core, a platform for spreading and preserving art. The more artistic merit something on Tumblr has, the further it spreads and the longer it lasts. You are encouraged to follow people who post things the you are interested in, meaning everyone on Tumblr - including you - develops an “identity” based on what they post and reblog. The more consistent your identity is, the more people will be interested in following you (after all, people follow you because your content matches their interests; they don’t want your interests to change). In that way, Tumblr is the opposite of 4chan: its design pressures you to stay the same, worry about your identity, and judge others according to theirs. That is what helps art spread.
Consider what this means for venting, though. If you vent on 4chan, you are doing it to a small room of people who will agree or argue with you, and then in like a day it is gone with no traces other than any impact you left on those people. It’s how venting worked back before the internet, with the added bonus that nobody can tie it back to you should you say anything that would reflect on you poorly.
When you vent on Tumblr, it becomes a part of your identity. Everyone who is interested in the content you spread sees it and associates it with you. And not just that, they spread it. If one person agrees with something enough to make it part of their identity, then suddenly more will have the opportunity to take that message and spread it. What started as venting becomes activism. Words spawned from anger and frustration become a fight in which you are expected to defend yourself. People who think your message may be harmful move to stifle its spread, which they can only do by spreading a countermessage. The result is a complete mess that takes people who are talking to no one in particular and actively pits them against one another.
And I mean, it’s not their fault for venting. It’s their fault for venting on Tumblr. It’s a service for spreading art. I can’t even respond to your post without sharing both it and my reply with all of my followers, because Tumblr assumes you have made a work of art and I am reblogging it with a comment like “this is a cool song”. Venting on Tumblr pans out the way it does because Tumblr is not build for that kind of thing. Really, there is absolutely no way this should even be considered a blogging platform to begin with.
Kazerad says, while using Tumblr to vent about blogging.
You’re right though.
“those who jump in to dissent are not allowing those talking to vent.”
That’s not how speech works. If you share your opinion, people get to have their own opinion about it in turn. It’s not ‘policing.’ Its dialogue.
If you want the things you think to go utterly unchallenged, then you probably shouldn’t put them on the internet under the scrutiny of others.
Both excellent responses and discussions from those who are better with words and more direct than I.
Originally, I was to name the topic “In Defense of the Devil of Devils” in order to ease the incredibly harsh mentality of 4chan that most people seem. I simply got lost somewhere along the way searching for images of Christopher Poole in a dress.