I started blogging on tumblr about a year and a half ago, a great move for me given that it’s widely considered a dead platform. In fact, the reaction I get most often when I say that I joined tumblr is a confused, “but why?”

I’ve been a lifelong blogger. I started back in 2001 with a Geocities website, then had a xanga, Livejournal, blogspot, and finally settled on a personal website with occasional updates on Facebook. I remember when we used to call them weblogs. My posting patterns have ranged from infrequent to daily, depending mostly on whether I have anything worth saying; my old rule used to be that if I didn’t want to bore the people in my life with something, I would put it on my blog instead. My current rule is that if I don’t feel like posting something, there is absolutely no pressure to stay silent.

I found tumblr attractive mostly because I like longform text and a casual form of posting. Tumblr supports anything from sentence fragments to multiple thousands of words, along with images if necessary, and there’s a “fire and forget” quality to it that really appeals to me. Setting the thing up took a minute, and then I could just post whatever stray thoughts came into my head. And I was told that people on tumblr will read things, which users on other sites won’t, so I figured it was a great place for me to post stuff, if I wanted to.

So then I posted a lot.

Quantity has a quality all its own

My first post was on May 26th, 2024, and I just hit 2000 posts, which is a rate of ~3.6 posts per day. I think this number is a little misleading, because it includes everything, including back-and-forth reblogs and short replies to asks, but it’s easy to separate out the data, and there were ~1400 “original” posts in that time, for a more reasonable ~2.5 posts per day.

I generally post whenever I find something funny or interesting, and can be assed to sit down at the computer or open up the phone. This is a shotgun approach to posting, and my first style, one where the tumblr serves as a peek into whatever is going on in my brain. These tend to be low effort, only barely massaged for readability and punch, if at all. I would guess that this makes up the vast majority of posts by volume, but it’s hard to say.

That’s not really what I’m there for though.

Microfiction

Formally, microfiction is a story of 300 or fewer words, but in practice I use it to mean any work of fiction I post on tumblr. Most of these are, properly speaking, short stories, especially because they have a defined beginning, middle, and end.

I’ve been cross-posting most of these to a Drips and Drabs story on AO3, though a few sit on their own, and my ballpark figure is that this totals around 50K words.

I have a few tricks that I use to get people to read “microfiction” on tumblr, and calling it microfiction is one of them; they’re sitting down for just a short while, don’t worry about the clock, never mind that they’ve been scrolling for a bit. A lack of heading or title is another one: I want the first thing they read to be the actual words of the story, because if they do that, then they have to consciously decide to stop reading. Tumblr has different ways of presenting long text, with the ability to insert a clickable element that takes the reader to a different page load in order to finish, and I never use that, because this introduces a bump in the reading experience. I want to make sinking into reading a story as seamless as possible. For this reason, I also tend to have my stories have a certain casual quality to them, the way you’d present yourself to a cat who doesn’t trust you. We’re just friends, we’re just chatting here!

It’s my suspicion that maximizing for people falling into reading a story without really meaning to could work even better if I were willing to write short stories in first (or second) person, since then it would disguise the story nature even better, but I haven’t actually tried this.

Is it underhanded to think about how to trick people into reading short stories? No, absolutely not, how dare you.

I think this has been relatively successful, overall, though it’s very difficult to know whether a story will “do well” on tumblr. The most popular of the posts tagged microfiction is a fable about a rebellious daughter, and it presents its premise upfront. I didn’t think the story was very good, and posted it while clearing my drafts because it had been stuck there for a long time, but it got popular enough for me to mute it, which I do with any post that gets significant traction.

Short stories probably have some of the highest effort to engagement ratios of anything that I post, and if I were maximizing for engagement, would probably be a thing that I didn’t post. But I enjoy writing and sharing short stories — er, microfiction.

Personal Stories

The second broad class of things that I write are personal anecdotes, which are cousins to the microfiction. By far the most popular of these was this one, and I can see why it was a hit.

Unfortunately, personal stories are a resource that renews only slowly over time, and if you’re blogging at any appreciable clip, you’ll pretty quickly run out of the best stories you’ve got. I wrote about that time that I ate a bunch of garlic in high school and had garlic seeping out of my pores, and then … I cannot just produce a second story like that on demand. Plus it’s also the nature of writing things that you put your best foot forward, so if you decide that you’re going to post one story a day, you’re going to run out and you’re going to have steadily declining quality.

Maybe it’s possible to live your life in such a way that you’re having interesting things with strong punchlines happen to you all the time, but that sounds kind of exhausting.

The other broad category of personal stories are script format, which is something that I adopted about ten years ago when my son was little: I think kid stuff reads better that way, faster and snappier, with more of a back-and-forth rhythm. These aren’t “stories” really, just snippets of dialogue that I’m taking nearly verbatim from talking to (usually) my wife or son.

I think one of the fun things about doing this is that you can have a sort of established characterization, a way in which someone who has read more than one of these starts to see the running themes and similar patterns to the dialogue.

Anti-Fame

One of the things that tumblr says about itself is that it’s anti-fame, and I think to an extent that’s true. The way that most people use tumblr, they’re scrolling through a feed and not paying too much attention to who wrote the posts, so you can have them read a whole short story and just have no idea that it was written by someone with a coherent identity. And while you can have followers, it’s normal for someone to follow hundreds or even thousands of accounts, so anything that’s not seen within minutes of being posted probably won’t be seen unless it’s heavily reblogged by people, thereby getting more exposure and more of a chance for eyeballs.

So posting about an upcoming book on tumblr, for example, is unlikely to get you much in the way of eyeballs. I think this is fine, it’s not what I’m here for, but when I do make the obligatory “here’s my new book” posts it’s with a sense of resignation.

What’s more interesting in terms of the anti-fame field is that tumblr posts don’t stay on tumblr. The modal tumblr post is short enough to screenshot, and those screenshots get shared to discords and reddits and spread out through the rest of the media ecosystem, sometimes warping and mutating or getting an iFunny watermark added to them.

The most bizarre of these, to me, are when I’ve written things that got screenshotted, then read aloud while someone did Minecraft parkour. That post about me eating a bunch of garlic? It made it big time:

This got 700K views on Youtube, which is unfathomable to me, even if I assume that most of those were tweens scrolling down through the algorithm and not actually paying attention to the words that were being spoken or shown on screen.

There’s a feeling of disconnection that comes with this. Tumblr has its own built-in mechanisms for letting you know that people are engaged in someway, it shows activity and tracks likes or whatever. But if something gets screenshotted and shared to a Facebook group or a discord or whatever, I have no way of knowing about it, no way of reading comments or getting feedback. Mostly, I have no idea that it happened, and of the few times it does get back to me, I think “oh, okay, so it’s just out in the world, living its own life”. I think posting things in anticipation of engagement is a bad way to live, so I try not to do that, but the part of me that hungers for the numbers to go up is throwing up its hands saying, “I don’t even get to see the numbers??”

The other interesting thing about this is that sometimes posts don’t do well on tumblr and find their audience somewhere else. I’ve had posts that get something like 45 notes on tumblr and then 5,000 upvotes on /r/CuratedTumblr. Obviously these are totally different sites with different audiences and different metrics, but it’s interesting to see such a huge difference. I have only vague intuitions about what makes for a good reddit post and what makes for a good tumblr post.

Media Criticism

I’ve noticed that reviews do particularly poorly (with the exception of Cookie Review: Selena Gomez Oreos), but I keep doing them, because I enjoy a good review. Part of the problem is that I tend to review things that just came out, and the audience for a review is 1) people who have seen the thing and want insights and 2) people who have not seen the thing and want to know if it’s worthwhile. You’re not likely to hit either of those categories of people just through random scrolling, and generally speaking, tumblr is a terrible place to put reviews. I was quite pleased with my review of Happy Gilmore 2, and virtually no one read it. I keep thinking that I should get a letterboxd instead, but blugh, I don’t need yet another site to post to.

I do think people crave reviews of popular things though. They want to vicariously relive the excitement they felt when they first watched some particular movie, or they want to reignite some old fandom wars, or they want to leverage the special knowledge they’ve gathered. I am really not there for that: I think writing for that kind of audience is pretty grating, mostly because I picture them sitting there with a smirk on their face saying, “oh man, he’s going to flip when he gets to this part”. I understand the impulse, I just don’t enjoy it, and don’t think that I could ever do a reaction channel or anything like it. So that’s out.

Generic media criticism tends to do well though. If you step back from talking about Madoka and instead talk about magical girls, you’re not demanding any familiarity with the source material, and people can still bring in their special hoard of knowledge, plus score all the old points. If you care about the metrics, it seems to me that it’s better to never mention any piece of media by name. I try to forget this fact, as it’s less fun for me personally, but you can bait people by alluding to things that “some shows” do.

The flip side to this is that no matter what you write, people will think that it’s “about” something specific, and will rush to say what they think that specific thing is. Every now and then they’ll be right, but it feels like they’re more often wrong, and I guess that’s fine too.

I’m More of an Ideas Guy

In tandem with the media criticism, tumblr seems to like when you toss an idea out there, so long as it’s sufficiently clever. In lieu of being clever, you can just throw out an obvious twist on an established trope or genre, and you can also put forward an idea that would be utterly unworkable in a work of fiction. But that’s the secret: it doesn’t need to be a workable idea, because it just needs to exist in the head of the reader for a brief moment.

I think sketching out an idea like this can be a lot of fun, and I enjoy turning things over in my head, finding the cracks and crevices. Sometimes this results in a story, and other times it doesn’t, even if it would result in a story, it’s always much faster and easier to just dump it into a post. I have so many things I want to write and generate ideas faster than I can write them out. So this is a win-win, if people are getting something from the worldbuilding and writing posts.

The “pitchposting” series is for when I’ve turned over an idea enough that I start getting grabbed by the germ of it. It’s an outlet for posting things that threaten to turn into a Project, and I would say that this is mostly successful as a way to dump something out of my brain. I took the term from wadapan, and they’re usually framed as “free to a good home”, but I don’t think that anyone has ever taken me up on that. I guess it takes some time to write a book, so maybe there are pieces of fiction in the works, but it seems unlikely to me.

As with the media analysis, people are quick to rush in with “isn’t this just X?” and sometimes this shows off some pretty over-eager pattern matching or poor reading comprehension. Sometimes it’s something that I’ve never heard of before, and I go to look it up, and the conceptual overlap isn’t nothing, but it’s definitely not what I would call a match. Other times, it really is just what I was talking about, and that’s always a slightly glum feeling for me. I spent time turning an idea over in my head, and someone had already turned over that same idea? Gutting stuff.

A Hundred More Years?

I’m not sure that posting to tumblr has been “worth my time” in any abstract sense, but I’ve enjoyed myself, overall. I think the longer essays, like Literary Greebling or Majority and Minority probably need a different home, and that home is probably Substack, at least for the time being.

I think chasing metrics is a path to madness and also bad posting, but I find myself noticing the patterns of engagement and what gets numbers. I instituted a rule to mute anything that gets more than 1,000 notes, and have recently revised it downward to anything with more than 500 notes, which means that the level of engagement feels smaller than it is, and the numbers become less visible to me, less able to impact what I’m posting.

Laying out the above, I do worry that I’m falling into ruts, and that’s the path to a death of dullness. Having a specific format that I intuitively understand as being the way to package up some thought is probably very bad, but breaking out of patterns is something that’s very difficult when you’re slowly building up those patterns over time. It’s good to have different eras.

I have no idea how long my tumblr era will last, but the ride has been nice so far.