LJ vs. Tumblr
May. 8th, 2012 11:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
emmagrant01I've had a Tumblr account for almost a year now, though I've used it more heavily in the last four months than I did before that. Several people told me it was where fandom "is" now, and so I thought, all right, I'll go check it out. And after four fairly intense months, I can really only conclude that if that's where the huge metropolis of fandom lives, I'm just going to have to be left behind in the rural stretches of LJ. There are things I love about it, but Tumblr just doesn't feel like fandom to me, somehow.
Things Tumblr does better than LJ:
1. It's a fantastic place to check out multimedia fannish works. It's easy to upload images, audio files, videos, etc., and it's really easy to share them by reblogging. It's a very visual space and seems to be the place to go for fanart these days.
2. It feels very immediate. If something happens in some fandom, it's just instantly on Tumblr and everyone is aware. There are caps of tweets, gifsets of whatever happened in tonight's episode of some show, links to articles in newspapers relevant to your fandom, and so on. When I want to know how everyone reacted to something, I head over to Tumblr.
3. It's a great way to get a quick overview of what's going on in fandom. Scrolling through LJ looking for fannish news isn't always easy because of the fact that it's a set of connected journals, and people write about their lives and non-fannish things along with the fannish stuff. If I just want to immerse myself in fun gifsets and fannish injokes and not think very hard, Tumblr is definitely the place to go for that.
4. It's a great place for fannish analysis and meta, interestingly. Especially for those meta essays that are just put out there as editorials about fandom, without any expectation of disagreement or discussion of the subject. There are Tumblr blogs that read like books in that way, for example, analyzing Sherlock episodes and pointing out and commenting on tiny details. Tumblr is a great place for that sort of thing.
Things LJ does better than Tumblr:
1. Tumblr seems to be terrible place for anything other than multimedia fanworks and fandom news. It's not a good place to post fic (though many people do), and it's extremely difficult to have conversations there. When people reply to a post you make, it's hard even to just reply to them. There's no way of threading conversations that I can tell. I use missing-e, and that helps, but still. The way people talk to each other on LJ via threaded conversations is a huge part of how I've been participating in fandom all along, and it's not the same experience without it.
2. The hive mind memory on Tumblr is extremely short-lived. Posts happen, get reblogged, and then disappear pretty quickly. There aren't really even easy ways to search for things. Tags don't really help as much as I expected them to because people use them to comment on posts, rather than to organize their stuff. People do that on LJ as well, but there are other ways to search for things on LJ. LJ has a short attention span too, but somehow it's not as short as Tumblr. If I want to catch up on a friend's posts, it's really easy to do. I go straight to her journal and navigate back, comment on posts, etc. That's also possible on Tumblr, but not everyone allows commenting on their posts, for example. You can reblog with your own comment, but that's not necessarily viewed as a direct response to that other person; it's more like the equivalent of copying someone else's LJ post, adding your own comments to it, and then posting it on your LJ -- not exactly conducive to conversation.
3. Personal communication on Tumblr utterly sucks. There is a lot of fangirl squee, but there's also a lot of opportunity for anon hate and snark. Just this morning I saw three people post public replies to fairly mean anon comments they'd gotten on Tumblr. The culture of LJ is different from that, somehow. I mean, anon hate happens, but amongst fans, there's a sense of "this is your journal and it's your space to say what you want". Maybe I'm wrong, but in my experience people don't get the kind of hate mail through LJ that they do through Tumblr. Tumblr blogs don't seem to be viewed as personal spaces in the same way as journals do on LJ.
4. Here is where I'll sound like a bit of an old fart, but the average age on Tumblr seems to be around 16. And you know, there's only so much teen angst I can take on a daily basis. The average age on LJ seems to be much closer to 30, and I'm just a lot more comfortable reading about adult angst at this point in my life, perhaps.
I could go on, but now I'm curious to know what others think. How do you use Tumblr and LJ differently to participate in fandom?
Things Tumblr does better than LJ:
1. It's a fantastic place to check out multimedia fannish works. It's easy to upload images, audio files, videos, etc., and it's really easy to share them by reblogging. It's a very visual space and seems to be the place to go for fanart these days.
2. It feels very immediate. If something happens in some fandom, it's just instantly on Tumblr and everyone is aware. There are caps of tweets, gifsets of whatever happened in tonight's episode of some show, links to articles in newspapers relevant to your fandom, and so on. When I want to know how everyone reacted to something, I head over to Tumblr.
3. It's a great way to get a quick overview of what's going on in fandom. Scrolling through LJ looking for fannish news isn't always easy because of the fact that it's a set of connected journals, and people write about their lives and non-fannish things along with the fannish stuff. If I just want to immerse myself in fun gifsets and fannish injokes and not think very hard, Tumblr is definitely the place to go for that.
4. It's a great place for fannish analysis and meta, interestingly. Especially for those meta essays that are just put out there as editorials about fandom, without any expectation of disagreement or discussion of the subject. There are Tumblr blogs that read like books in that way, for example, analyzing Sherlock episodes and pointing out and commenting on tiny details. Tumblr is a great place for that sort of thing.
Things LJ does better than Tumblr:
1. Tumblr seems to be terrible place for anything other than multimedia fanworks and fandom news. It's not a good place to post fic (though many people do), and it's extremely difficult to have conversations there. When people reply to a post you make, it's hard even to just reply to them. There's no way of threading conversations that I can tell. I use missing-e, and that helps, but still. The way people talk to each other on LJ via threaded conversations is a huge part of how I've been participating in fandom all along, and it's not the same experience without it.
2. The hive mind memory on Tumblr is extremely short-lived. Posts happen, get reblogged, and then disappear pretty quickly. There aren't really even easy ways to search for things. Tags don't really help as much as I expected them to because people use them to comment on posts, rather than to organize their stuff. People do that on LJ as well, but there are other ways to search for things on LJ. LJ has a short attention span too, but somehow it's not as short as Tumblr. If I want to catch up on a friend's posts, it's really easy to do. I go straight to her journal and navigate back, comment on posts, etc. That's also possible on Tumblr, but not everyone allows commenting on their posts, for example. You can reblog with your own comment, but that's not necessarily viewed as a direct response to that other person; it's more like the equivalent of copying someone else's LJ post, adding your own comments to it, and then posting it on your LJ -- not exactly conducive to conversation.
3. Personal communication on Tumblr utterly sucks. There is a lot of fangirl squee, but there's also a lot of opportunity for anon hate and snark. Just this morning I saw three people post public replies to fairly mean anon comments they'd gotten on Tumblr. The culture of LJ is different from that, somehow. I mean, anon hate happens, but amongst fans, there's a sense of "this is your journal and it's your space to say what you want". Maybe I'm wrong, but in my experience people don't get the kind of hate mail through LJ that they do through Tumblr. Tumblr blogs don't seem to be viewed as personal spaces in the same way as journals do on LJ.
4. Here is where I'll sound like a bit of an old fart, but the average age on Tumblr seems to be around 16. And you know, there's only so much teen angst I can take on a daily basis. The average age on LJ seems to be much closer to 30, and I'm just a lot more comfortable reading about adult angst at this point in my life, perhaps.
I could go on, but now I'm curious to know what others think. How do you use Tumblr and LJ differently to participate in fandom?
