(no subject)

[potofsoup]

I have a very distinct memory of 2014 -- I'd just gotten a tumblr recently, because all my friends had moved there and my Reading Page were basically all feeds. I remember thinking, "how do I find fanart of Bucky Barnes?" and then remembering that Tumblr had a search bar. I typed "Bucky Barnes" and so many beautiful fanarts popped up.

And on almost all of them, there was a little blurb: Don't repost.

How do I tell people that I like their stuff, then? Clicking the like button and following the creator didn't feel enough.

Then, at the bottom of one of the fanart, it said "I appreciate reblogs, but please don't repost".

And that was really the moment when tumblr came to life for me. Reblogs is how you show your love. Reblogs is saying "I like your thing so much that I want to share it with my friends." Reblog is on the opposite end of the spectrum as reposting.

I didn't want to spam my RL friends with my new-found Bucky Barnes obsession, so I created a sideblog to reblog the beautiful art, and to post some of my own art along the way.

Then people started following me and reblogging my art. It was so much fun, to read through the tags and comments on the reblogs. Seeing how people choose to tag things, which of their friends they mention, or what interesting points they bring up. The enthusiasm and crying in the tags. Oh god I love tag-yelling so much -- I'll deal with scrolling past the 15th reblog of something if it means I get to read tag-yelling.

As my follower count passed the 1000 mark, suddenly I was more nervous with my reblogs. Every time I came across beautiful art, my hand hovered over the reblog button -- is this something that I want to shove onto the dashboards of 1000 people? What if they've seen it 10 times already that day? But how else would I show my love to the artist? So I stopped reblogging gifsets, and only reblogged fanart that I hadn't seen before.

Then I had a baby, and didn't have time to read my dash anymore, so I stopped reblogging altogether. I'd still post my artwork, and I'd still read all of the reblog tags and comments on my work. The tags on those reblogs was one of the things that kept me connected to fandom as a community. I love the "slams the reblog button" tag, I love the "thinky" tag, I love the "I'm not crying you're crying" tag.

And then my tumblr got deleted, with no warning whatsoever.

Reblogs saved my work. I spent 2 weeks hunting down my old work, and basically, the more reblogged it had been, the higher chance I had of finding it. The one thing I posted with Chinese!Peggy Carter? Gone, because 12 people liked it and no one reblogged it. The other post with racebent!Steve Rogers? Gone. The one with genderbent!Bucky playing stickball? Gone. When I posted them, I was like "oh yay, my peeps like my stuff <3 <3 <3", but because no one reblogged it, it was gone. Reblogging meant sharing. Reblogging meant saving. I had a #humans tag on my personal blog that was just people being their doofy selves, and whenever I felt down I would go visit that tag and feel better about humanity.

So when I moved to DW and some tumblr folks asked me "how do you reblog?" I said: here is how you save cool posts. Here is how you share cool posts. Here is how you express your love.

And that is why, all the privacy and sharing and commenting protocol discussions yesterday were great and invigorating, but an evening of people telling me to stop using the word "reblog" was so upsetting.

Comments

coming in very late...

[sciatrix]

I have to wonder if some of the grar/miscommunication you got hit with (and I too am very sorry it happened!) is because you are an artist and I know that DW's culture has historically not been the best for the fanartists? And on the other hand, Tumblr's reblog function--making it easy to share the entire piece while also immediately pointing back to you, the artist--is really incredibly crucial for visible art and fanart. Before Tumblr, I have the vague feeling that the fanartists were more likely to hang out on DeviantArt, not DW, and neither DW nor the OTW have historically really been sharply attuned to the needs and functions for fanartists.

So you got a lot of people who have been very text-focused in their experience of fandom, with the exception of icon stuff which is really a different art form than fanart... coming in and going "you're going to grab my whole thing and wave it at people???" and being completely horrified and boggled. Which I get, because writing is so much easier to take a snippet of and wave it at people so they click and come to chew it over when they have the time to dig through it elsewhere. You can't do that effectively with a lot of art!

I would love to see a conversation about what folks on DW can do with respect to artwork, and I think that might have been a piece missing in the conversation (which I'm only reading up on now). I'm a very texty person, but I often do exactly what you're talking about as reblogging, only I call it "linkspams" and do it with links and short snippets. Again: great for meta or fic, shitty for visual art.

How can we do that sort of thing to draws folks' attention to good visual art in their networks? I have the hazy feeling that folks would historically have been especially likely to put that sort of thing in comms, but that can be particularly intimidating.

I dunno. I hope you're feeling better. You don't deserve to feel miserable. And I hope you have support and everything so this whole discussion hasn't completely eaten your life.

Wishing you well!

Re: coming in very late...

[potofsoup]

Thanks for the comment! Yeah, I'm feeling much better now that two major deadlines are past (grades and narratives at school, and my desire to finish my recent comic). I totally agree that art has something to do with this. More specifically, whether you primarily create art or consume art. As an art consumer, reblog is just yet another quick way to share artwork, and linking doesn't seem *that* different. As an art creator, the reblog mechanism on tumblr was my lifeblood, and how I interacted with people -- the fact that people could share my work and spread their (and my) love for the fandom in the process was so crucial. Whereas I totally understand that if you're predominantly word-based, tumblr reblogs is just a horrible site-based implementation of commenting that *isn't even good*.

> How can we do that sort of thing to draws folks' attention to good visual art in their networks?

I created capfanart, but I think part of the problem is that there isn't enough incentive for artists to be present on DW, much less post their artwork here. I recently proposed the idea of "reblogging" a thumbnail of the artist's artwork ... let's see if that will catch on? (It still takes a lot of work, though. And before that I still have to make the art...)