How Notes Work on Tumblr
Aug. 16th, 2016 09:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingYesterday afternoon I got an ask on Tumblr in response to a post I made claiming that it was silly for people to attack my fandom, as most people who post work on the tag don't get that many notes in the first place. The person who sent the ask wanted to know why that is. I now strongly suspect it was a troll ask, so I deleted my response (and the original post that triggered it), but I thought it might be worth putting up here. The caveat, which I had included in the tags, is that my answer reflects my own experiences, and I'm sure that other people have had other experiences. Fandom is huge, after all. Still, I've been on Tumblr since 2011, and this is the theory I've developed on how notes work.
Every blog on Tumblr has what I call a "reblog coefficient," which indicates how many notes someone's reblog of a post will generate. If your blog has a reblog coefficient of ten, this means that at least ten of your followers will like and/or reblog any given post from you.
I call the blogs with the highest reblog coefficients "anchor blogs," as they serve as anchors for a fandom. Even when XKit is used properly, it can be difficult to catch everything that comes along in the rapid flow of the Tumblr feed stream, so people attached to a certain fandom will often visit one or two anchor blogs to check for new content, which they will like or reblog directly from that blog.
Tumblr has a category of communities that we can think of as "legacy fandoms," by which I mean fandoms that have inherited a large number of fans from fic-centric fandom communities on Livejournal. To give a concrete example, Hannibal is a legacy fandom of Sherlock, which is itself a transitional legacy fandom of Harry Potter. In the larger legacy fandoms, it's common for fanfic authors to have anchor blogs. Because the essentially visual nature of Tumblr as a platform can undermine the circulation of text posts even within legacy fandoms, however, sometimes fanfic writers will work together to create and co-moderate anchor blogs that are separate from their main blogs.
In video game fandoms on Tumblr, however, the anchor blogs tend to be the blogs of popular artists. An artist's work will generate its own fandom, which will help to propel the broader fandom forward. Perhaps because they themselves are visually oriented, these artists tend to only reblog art. In addition, there are typically several large anchor blogs within any given video game fandom that will reblog anything posted with a certain tag or set of tags, but they also tend to reblog art exclusively.
What this means is that, within video game fandoms, it's rare for a fic post to get more than thirty to forty notes, even if the author's blog is fairly popular. There are exceptions, of course, but they're generally tied to a collaboration between a writer and an artist. This is true for the Zelda fandom, and it’s been true for other game fandoms I've followed during the past five years as well.
That being said, it's entirely possible for someone who isn't an artist (or any other sort of BNF) to have what I call a "bedrock blog," which is a blog that one or more of the anchor blogs follow. Even if a bedrock blog only has a base reblog coefficient of ten, their practical reblog coefficient can be exponentially larger because of their association with an anchor blog. I've noticed a number of commonalities between bedrock blogs, but the one factor that stands out to me is that the people who run them tend to be extroverted and extremely active.
In the end, though, Tumblr is not organic chemistry, and nobody is on the site to try to cure cancer. I think its most important function is to allow people to express themselves while discovering new things. Everybody uses Tumblr in their own way, and notes don't always necessarily have anything to do with any given person's enjoyment of their experience.
Every blog on Tumblr has what I call a "reblog coefficient," which indicates how many notes someone's reblog of a post will generate. If your blog has a reblog coefficient of ten, this means that at least ten of your followers will like and/or reblog any given post from you.
I call the blogs with the highest reblog coefficients "anchor blogs," as they serve as anchors for a fandom. Even when XKit is used properly, it can be difficult to catch everything that comes along in the rapid flow of the Tumblr feed stream, so people attached to a certain fandom will often visit one or two anchor blogs to check for new content, which they will like or reblog directly from that blog.
Tumblr has a category of communities that we can think of as "legacy fandoms," by which I mean fandoms that have inherited a large number of fans from fic-centric fandom communities on Livejournal. To give a concrete example, Hannibal is a legacy fandom of Sherlock, which is itself a transitional legacy fandom of Harry Potter. In the larger legacy fandoms, it's common for fanfic authors to have anchor blogs. Because the essentially visual nature of Tumblr as a platform can undermine the circulation of text posts even within legacy fandoms, however, sometimes fanfic writers will work together to create and co-moderate anchor blogs that are separate from their main blogs.
In video game fandoms on Tumblr, however, the anchor blogs tend to be the blogs of popular artists. An artist's work will generate its own fandom, which will help to propel the broader fandom forward. Perhaps because they themselves are visually oriented, these artists tend to only reblog art. In addition, there are typically several large anchor blogs within any given video game fandom that will reblog anything posted with a certain tag or set of tags, but they also tend to reblog art exclusively.
What this means is that, within video game fandoms, it's rare for a fic post to get more than thirty to forty notes, even if the author's blog is fairly popular. There are exceptions, of course, but they're generally tied to a collaboration between a writer and an artist. This is true for the Zelda fandom, and it’s been true for other game fandoms I've followed during the past five years as well.
That being said, it's entirely possible for someone who isn't an artist (or any other sort of BNF) to have what I call a "bedrock blog," which is a blog that one or more of the anchor blogs follow. Even if a bedrock blog only has a base reblog coefficient of ten, their practical reblog coefficient can be exponentially larger because of their association with an anchor blog. I've noticed a number of commonalities between bedrock blogs, but the one factor that stands out to me is that the people who run them tend to be extroverted and extremely active.
In the end, though, Tumblr is not organic chemistry, and nobody is on the site to try to cure cancer. I think its most important function is to allow people to express themselves while discovering new things. Everybody uses Tumblr in their own way, and notes don't always necessarily have anything to do with any given person's enjoyment of their experience.
no subject
Date: 2016-08-16 11:23 pm (UTC)Reblog coefficients, anchor blogs, bedrock blogs, and the relations between these and how fannish active occurs on tumblr: much headnodding of yes yes yes.
One clarification, though: in this short description of the terms & constructs, I am just a little fuzzy on what you mean by legacy fandoms? I thought I knew what you mean by the definition in the first sentence in that paragraph ("legacy fandoms are fandoms that have inherited a large number of fans from fic-centric comms on LJ"), but then I failed to make the mental connection between that def and the concrete examples in the rest of the paragraph, so now I am unclear on what you mean by the term "legacy fandom."
For what it is worth I have seen all of the same things after coming over to tumblr after years on text/fic based platforms. The thing that struck me straight away wasn't that images receive the highest note counts, which is neither shocking nor unpredictable given the fast-moving visual nature of the tumblr feed, but that canon meta would receive high reblog rates and meta with a touch of unabashed polemic often reblogs like wildfire. So, people will read text including long complex texts on tumblr but not fiction, which comes in dead last, often ranking far behind fanart, image edits, canon meta & analysis, canon speculation, and meta w/polemic. All of this makes the platform so different in feel from LJ or FF.net or other "legacy" platforms. Or, in short, "it is rare for a fic post to receive more than 30-40 notes" and, often, I would guess, the median is more in the 5-10 range. Meanwhile those other categories of fannish posts get 500 to 5000+ notes.
My working hypothesis is that a significant number of fandomfolk on tumblr use it as a slot machine, where they gamble as they scroll with hope and wonder that their next scroll-down will result in direct, immediate, tangible "feels" that match the feeling they want to experience. For instance, sometimes a fan wants squshy-fluff-good feels generated by art/images/edits of their OTP. Sometimes its a desire for other people confirming their crankyhate for a certain character.
While fanfic also provides the reader with emotional experiences, fanfic takes a while to ingest. You need to slow down and settle in, which is hard to do when you are sitting in front of a slot machine that wants you to scrollscrollscrollscroll.
Or, there is something qualitatively different in the kinds of "fannish feels" that are generated by fanfic vs other kinds of text posts that are popular on fannish tumblr. Meta can be ingested more quickly, I suspect because you either automatically agree on the spot because your emotions are confirmed (>>>FEEEEELS<<<), or it quickly teaches you something new and interesting (feeling = "cool beans!"), or you don't care so you scroll past it. Meanwhile, those "image character x..." posts are short textual feels nuggets that require very little time investment but can have large feels payback.
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So sorry to hijack your thinky thoughts post. This is just something I have thought a lot about ever since LJ was "replaced" by tumblr+AO3: a change that leaves me feeling less engaged but, on the other hand, allows different kinds of fans with different goals a far more inviting platform for their way of doing fandom. (and yes, for some people, tumblr or at least a tumblr sideblog is a place to organize things or share stuff with a tiny group of fans, and that has little to do with gaining notes or followers)
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I've noticed a number of commonalities between bedrock blogs, but the one factor that stands out to me is that the people who run them tend to be very chill and friendly – and also extremely active.
I like how your distinction between bedrock blogs and anchor blogs separates highly active curators (the bedrock bloggers) from the highly popular go-to sites that have high reblog coefficients. Technically, a blog could be both?
Also, bedrocks as chill and friendly: I want to say "yes, this, definitely this," but watching DA fandom eat itself alive on tumblr for the past 5 years makes me wonder because, after all, people are human and people have limits. I know/knew of quite a few anchor blogs that were heavy on drama and polemic which eventually spilled over into tag-wide shit stirring which, in turn, in *some* cases, have lead some bedrock bloggers to liberally use tumblr's block feature to clear their dash/tag of the shitstorm, which then cut off parts of the fandom from the bedrock blog after the shit storm cleared. And that required non-trolls who were sadly caught up in the shitstorm and/or witchhunt to delete their old account and create brand new accounts in order to be able to participate, and go back to consuming, reblogging, and (perhaps) contributing as normal.
no subject
Date: 2016-08-17 02:08 pm (UTC)I didn't articulate this clearly, but I'm thinking about "legacy" in terms of a parent and a child both going to the same university.
What I mean by "legacy fandom" in the most concrete sense is that people who were BNFs on Livejournal migrated to Tumblr and brought their followers (and their BNF status) with them. Because the BNFs have a role in tastemaking, if one of them stops writing for Harry Potter on Livejournal and starts writing for Sherlock on Tumblr, many of the Harry Potter fans will get on Tumblr and get into Sherlock. I saw this happen with one specific individual person after another back around 2011 – and in fact I was one such person.
Another concrete example is that people who were in the big anime fandoms on Livejournal, most notably Hetalia, started to jump onto Tumblr after the BNFs migrated and began to talk about Homestuck. It's not like the Hetalia fandom on Livejournal immediately died in 2012, and it's not as if people got into Homestuck just because the BNFs did, but there was a legacy in terms of a large number of individuals crossing over from one fandom to the other. The Livejournal Hetalia BNFs didn't necessarily stay in Homestuck, but their blogs were the anchor blogs as the fandom was establishing itself on Tumblr, and people mimicked the way they used the platform.
I've also noticed that meta posts get a ton of notes, and I want to say that this is partially the result of a group of Homestuck archor blogs circa 2012 that were collectively known as "Homestuck scholars." These blogs would create a feedback loop between themselves, reblogging the same meta post over and over and adding commentary in the tags. Because these posts saturated the nascent fandom, they ended up being widely circulated. I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of the Homestuck people are now into Steven Universe, a fandom whose meta posts have note counts through the roof.
Unfortunately, this lineage is hard to trace or definitively corroborate, and I 100% agree with what you wrote about meta being more easily consumable and immediately rewarding.
For what it's worth, the broader Zelda fandom isn't that large, but a lot of the people who started off writing Zelda meta around 2013 are now writing posts about Dragon Age that get thousands of notes. I stood on the sidelines and watched this transition between fandoms play out in late 2014 and early 2015, and I'm now beginning to suspect that there was major drama involved. It's difficult to write a case study without mentioning names, however, so perhaps that's a topic for another post.
Personally speaking I am nothing and no one, and I use Tumblr mainly as a source of pretty pictures and "this story has now been posted on AO3" notifications, so it's weird for me to catch shrapnel from fandom drama. I'm probably overreacting by writing these long-ass posts, but I also feel like I'm witnessing something interesting which maybe??? has actual historical and social relevance?