Wow such low-life's, unfollowing just because you're being honest in an ask.

Meta
Title:	"Wow such low-life's, unfollowing just because you're being honest in an ask." is being used on Fanlore as the title of this untitled Tumblr post. It is the opening line of the anonymous "ask" that generated the post.
Creator:	stereowire
Date(s):	December 17, 2014
Medium:	Tumblr post
Fandom:
Topic:
External Links:	online here, Archived version
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Wow such low-life's, unfollowing just because you're being honest in an ask. is an anonymous ask on stereowire's Tumblr. The post by stereowire is the response.

The tumblr post had 65 notes as of 7 September 2015.

Some Topics Discussed

• Tumblr
• warnings and tags
• the politics of Tumblr follows

The Post

Anonymous asked: wow such low-life's, unfollowing just because you're being honest in an ask.

… is this sarcastic? i can never tell with you nonnies. in any case, listen, i’ve been wanting to say this for a while: i don’t give a shit about people following or unfollowing me. you’re allowed to do whatever you want. i answered too many asks in one day and it flooded your dash and you’re annoyed? by all means, unfollow. you just don’t want to know what kind of porn i watch? unfollow away. you like my drawings but you just think i’m a huge douchebag every time i type more than two sentences in a row? unfollow. if you have a post on your blog about how people you follow should tag for [x], i’ll tell you right now i’m not gonna fucking read it and tag for [x]. there aren’t enough hours in the day. unfollow me. tumblr in general needs to stop being so delicate about being followed/unfollowed; this isn’t like LJ where there’s a friends-lock function, and it’s stupid to act like you don’t have a potentially unlimited audience for anything you put on your blog. anyone’s allowed to not want to see something on their dash without it being a personal judgment on you for posting that thing. on the flip side of that, you have the right to decide what you want to see on your dash, but that means taking responsibility for curating it to your tastes and needs. make liberal use of tumblr savior or xkit’s blacklist and postblock functions and then the unfollow button. other people are not responsible for making your dash a ~safe space~ when you are free to unfollow whoever you want. oh, also, just because i’ve gotten messages about this before and i’m on a tear— i’m perfectly aware that my laissez-faire attitude towards tagging means there are people who can’t follow me. and i don’t have any control over whether people tag “noncon” or “hydra trash party” on art they reblog from me, so if that causes problems, the smart thing to do would be to block me and blacklist my url (i promise i’ll never change it, for what it’s worth). “but then i won’t see the sfw art!” them’s the breaks, kids. get a friend to look for you. there’s a capslock link to an about page where i warn for noncon. nothing entitles you to be able to scroll through my personal art blog without running into stuff you find objectionable, and seeing as i’m not some sort of corporation with a responsibility to increase market share or a public service with a responsiblity to be as accessible as possible, i’m okay with losing out on potential followers because i’m lazy with tagging. jesus christ, i promise the next thing i post is gonna be a drawing, this is ridiculous.

Tagged: i'm not saying it's gonna be a NICE drawing but it'll be a picture again: i have no talent for stringing words together and find it tiresome and unfulfilling i don't know why this keeps happening Anonymous assbox

Comments at the Post

[darlingarmadillo]:

You go, Stereowire. Run your blog however the hell you want. No one is forced to read it and no one should tell you how to write it.

[libertinem]:

100000000000x this

[tricksyixi]:

Good.

Comments Elsewhere

[linzeestyle]:

This post of Stereowire's is everything I have ever wanted to articulate about Tumblr and never been able/brave enough to, because I have not yet found the hill I want to die on but I don't think anything involving Tumblr is worth it. It does remind me a lot of that post that was going around a while back, "Why I Left Tumblr," which had a point in particular that's still stuck with me:

This is not your blog, this is everyone else’s blog. [...] Tumblr makes me angry. I went there for the gifs, and I left because of the festering pit of antagonism. I make a conscious effort to remove negativity from my life, and this is why I will no longer be participating on the platform in an interactive way.

Obviously Stereowire's post is talking about tagging and content in regards to their fanart, which is something entirely different: but the idea behind it -- that Stereowire is obligated to tag more clearly (as opposed to a blanket "hydra trash party" tag) so that viewers can see X art but not Y, Z but not A -- and their subsequent response (which I do agree with, very heartily) -- that anyone’s allowed to not want to see something on their dash without it being a personal judgment on you for posting that thing. on the flip side of that, you have the right to decide what you want to see on your dash, but that means taking responsibility for curating it to your tastes and needs -- are very reflective of perhaps what I like least about Tumblr culture. Nothing, not even your own blog, belongs to you: it belongs to the people who view it. It doesn't matter that the blog is public; it doesn't matter that your audience has chosen to be there. If you fail to curate for that audience, you are the one who has failed: because much like in the Goodreads situation, as a content creator, you are subsumed by the importance of the viewer.

I don't know if this is the result of Tumblr's lack of text (it's easier to demand things when you're less aware it's a human you're treating like an output machine), its speed of content, or its larger toxic culture: a friend once referred to it as a massive unmoderated community and I think that's fair. But the idea that you are responsible for moderating your own content for the pleasure of others -- and, in return, those others are welcome to do whatever they please with your content, because "censorship" and "free speech" -- continues to be thoroughly troubling.

I am not a content generator. I am a person who uses (used?) fandom as a form of stress relief. And more and more that is the opposite of what fandom offers me. I do like going back to the blogging platform even if it's just me talking to myself; I'm still in the process of considering how/if I'll be posting fic here, because I do have issues, fannish and academic, with how I perceive the OTW to be ultimately set-up and run, and ultimately AO3 does not feel comfortable to me. But that's another issue for another time.