♡ Girls, bois n anyone else ♡

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
bellbottom-jeans
absintheanflare

yknow ever since people realized tumblr isnt dead and have decided to flock here from twitter and tiktok ive seen a huge influx of people in fandom spaces who dont reblog anything. at all.

like, i used to have an art blog with 340 followers. not a ton but not a small amount either given how this website works with creators. and in my experience back then even the ones who only left likes still reblogged other things or at least posted their own stuff. literally the only empty blogs were clearly bots.

but on this New art blog, i've had so many people with fandom-specific headers and icons with actual usernames as urls and some kind of title or description, but have. Nothing. no posts. all they do is like things. and it's always public, too. their following list and their likes list.

and honestly all it makes me think is that these people are New and also don't know how tumblr works. how likes don't give exposure. not even in a "oh, i know it doesn't give exposure, but i'm still going to reblog anyways" way, but in a genuine honest to god straight up doesn't realize tumblr likes don't work like twitter's.

PLEASE please if you're from tiktok or twitter or whatever please reblog people's art both fandom and original if you like it!! and maybe actually pad out your blog's content in some way so people won't potentially see you as a bot and block you.

REBLOG ARTIST'S WORK. THIS IS THE ONLY WAY THEY GET ANY ATTENTION ON THIS WEBSITE OH MY GOD. PLEASE. I BEG of you

deathbyotpin123

WAIT THEY'RE REAL PEOPLE?! I've blocked several accounts so far because it was just "blanks space" and I assumed it was a bot.

FOLKS if you're new, please, please, this is not like Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. Reblogging is the way to go. This is how we network on here. This is how you make mutuals. This is how you share new stuff with others.

You are also:

  • Encouraged to add your thoughts to the post
  • Engage in conversation freely
  • Express yourself in the tags if you don't want to write in the post
  • In fact, write a god damn essay in the tags - we old members will read it, I promise - the limit on tags per post is insane anyway
  • Reblog the same thing as many times as you like. Like every time you see it, and you want to reblog it because it brings you joy - go for it!
elfwreck

As some people have noted - you don't have to do any of these things. You can keep an empty blog and just follow people & like posts.

But.

You'll get blocked a lot.

Because that's what the spambots did.

Because having a blog that showed up in "like" lists made them seem like a real person to SEO bots.

It's also what the fake begging accounts do - empty blog, and sending people asks that say "I am in dire straits; here's my sob story; please donate to my GoFundMe." They hope those people will post their ask publicly. Then the post sticks around even if their account is deleted later.

Blogs with no content are considered shady, because we've seen a lot of scams that involve empty blogs.

If you want to just watch quietly, you can do that. Even logged out. (Sort of. That's harder; some blogs aren't visible if you're logged out.)

But if you want to be considered part of the Tumblr community (or part of one of the many Tumblr communities)... reblog things. Comment on them, whether that's by adding comments to the reblog, replying in the notes, or adding tags when reblogging. All three is fine.

You don't have to be social to be here. But if you want access to most blogs, you have to avoid being perceived as hostile or a scam or possibly a data-harvesting bot.

So. If you want to be perceived as "a new person" instead of "probably a scam"... Find some things you enjoy, and reblog them. Commentary is optional. Consider it a way of setting up a public profile: "Here's a list of what I'm into," without having to actually describe yourself.

Pinned Post
breya-etherium-shaper
foone

Does anyone remember what happened to Radio Shack?

They started out selling niche electronics supplies. Capacitors and transformers and shit. This was never the most popular thing, but they had an audience, one that they had a real lock on. No one else was doing that, so all the electronics geeks had to go to them, back in the days before online ordering. They branched out into other electronics too, but kept doing the electronic components.

Eventually they realize that they are making more money selling cell phones and remote control cars than they were with those electronic components. After all, everyone needs a cellphone and some electronic toys, but how many people need a multimeter and some resistors?

So they pivoted, and started only selling that stuff. All cellphones, all remote control cars, stop wasting store space on this niche shit.

And then Walmart and Target and Circuit City and Best Buy ate their lunch. Those companies were already running big stores that sold cellphones and remote control cars, and they had more leverage to get lower prices and selling more stuff meant they had more reasons to go in there, and they couldn't compete. Without the niche electronics stuff that had been their core brand, there was no reason to go to their stores. Everything they sold, you could get elsewhere, and almost always for cheaper, and probably you could buy 5 other things you needed while you were there, stuff Radio Shack didn't sell.

And Radio Shack is gone now. They had a small but loyal customer base that they were never going to lose, but they decided to switch to a bigger but more fickle customer base, one that would go somewhere else for convenience or a bargain. Rather than stick with what they were great at (and only they could do), they switched to something they were only okay at... putting them in a bigger pond with a lot of bigger fish who promptly out-competed them.

If Radio Shack had stayed with their core audience, who knows what would have happened? Maybe they wouldn't have made a billion dollars, but maybe they would still be around, still serving that community, still getting by. They may have had a small audience, but they had basically no competition for that audience. But yeah, we only know for sure what would happen if they decided to attempt to go more mainstream: They fail and die. We know for sure because that's what they did.

I don't know why I keep thinking about the story of what happened to Radio Shack. It just keeps feeling relevant for some reason.