I keep meeting artists who complain that Tumblr Is Dead then when I check their blog they’ve made four posts in six months and all of them were self promo lmao. Influencers whining that “tumblr is useless for engagement” tells me every part of the problem, like sorry you can’t just show up and farm this userbase for clicks by waving buzzwords around the way you can on tiktok. This is the Excited About Stupid Things website reblog some shitty fanart or die
what do you MEAN people don’t want to hang out in your curated space and chat with you and look at your work when your space is uhhh entirely crossposting shop links from instagram. you look like a fucking bot lmao
#i keep vaguely wondering when one of those artists is gonna show up and get indignant about this but #they won’t find it because they don’t use tumblr to look at other posts lol
Waaaay back in 2012 I was confused about how Tumblr worked - I had created a personal blog so I wanted to showcase personal stuff, like the silly little comics I was making at the time. So i posted my comics and followed a lot of people and scrolled through my dash and liked things but didn’t reblog stuff because I wanted my blog to be kind of a portfolio.
And it was really boring, and I didn’t get any attention for my drawings, and having a tumblr felt kind of useless, except now I could see all the memes I’d been laughing at on imgur in context.
But then there was a comic that was cute and funny and it was about Dune (because there are active dune fans on tumblr!) So I reblogged it because nobody was looking at my blog anyway and the floodgates opened. I started reblogging regularly and adding comments and occasionally adding little comics or sketches on the comments and suddenly tumblr made sense. It was “working,” because *yes* tumblr is a blogging platform, but more than that it is a social media site, and to get it to “work” you had to be social.
And that ended up getting me a job as a cartoonist. And it ended up letting me promote my band better than any other site (and thank you so much to the tumblr users who came to our shows!). And it let me build an audience of thousands of readers for my webcomic. And it is a place where I can share my art and get attention for it and promote stuff I’ve got on sale, and a place where i can link people to my website (because tumblr is still bad as a portfolio, even if it’s good as socal media). But that only works because tumblr isn’t just someplace I post, it’s someplace where i hang out and people know me and we have history and a shared language of memes and shitposts.
I’ve had people ask how i get tumblr to work for me and the answer is, unfortunately, it only works if you live here.
@cl0verfall hey remember when you didn’t reblog like anything