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Why I don’t tag dive on Tumblr anymore
Archiving/crossposting from Tumblr, mainly so I have a cleaner/easier-to-read version of this somewhere:
This is something I haven't really talked about, but a while ago, someone liked some version of this post:
And it made me remember that I have unfortunately completely given up on going through the Quodo tag on Tumblr in order to find all the awesome posts that were made before I joined the fandom in ~2020ish. Not because I lost interest in that project but because Tumblr basically made it physically impossible for me to do…
Also for reasons peculiar to my own completionist psychology, I have ALSO basically given up on going through recent posts in the Quodo tag too (meaning all the posts that have been posted in that tag since my last reblogging spree, whenever that was).
Let me explain the reason for both of these things.
So the good news is that Tumblr does allow you to chronologically browse tags. This is not the default setting, unfortunately – the default setting is “Popular” (which as far as I can tell seems to be some kind of weighted average of recency and number of notes, but IDK, it is a mystery), because Tumblr is an enemy of reason and all that is good in the world. But it IS possible! However, the bad news: for reasons I don’t really understand, Tumblr will not paginate the chronological tag search.
If you take a look at a chronological tag search (e.g.: https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/quodo?sort=recent) and try hitting next a few times, you’ll notice something: the URL doesn’t change. It remains static even though the contents of the page change. What seems to be happening here is that, when you hit the “Next” button, Tumblr is (I’m guessing) using JavaScript in order to load a new set of posts and is changing the contents of the page on the fly. Therefore, what posts are currently showing are entirely dependent on how many times you’ve hit the “Next” button on your current browsing session.
You’ll notice that this is NOT the way that dashboards or browsing through people’s blogs works. For example, if you hit next a few times on your dashboard (I hope you have turned off infinite scroll!), you’ll get URLs like these:
https://www.tumblr.com/?max_post_id=714110213039489024 (this for me shows posts from people I’m following that were posted recently, April 9, 2023)
https://www.tumblr.com/?max_post_id=71411021303948902 (deleted a digit; this now shows posts from Feb 2020)
Note that if you copy and paste these into your browser a day or two (or a week) later, you should see the exact same set of posts that you see now, as long as you have not followed/unfollowed anyone since you last loaded the page.
Or on blogs that have custom layouts turned on, you can easily jump back to older posts by doing things like this:
https://chacusha.tumblr.com/page/2 (this shows the 11th-20th most recent posts on my blog)
https://chacusha.tumblr.com/page/40 (this shows much older posts on my blog)
Here, the content of these particular pages WILL change as I post more posts to my blog, but there is at least some way to rapidly jump past many pages I know I’ve already seen. (There are also more powerful and quick ways of finding old posts using a user’s archive e.g. https://chacusha.tumblr.com/archive)
As far as I can tell, nothing like this functionality exists for tag searches. Which is incredibly frustrating for trying to find older posts!! Given that I was at around 2018 or 2019 in my last tag search, the number of times I would need to manually hit the “Next” button just to find my previous place in the Quodo tag is ridiculous. And the more time that passes, the harder it gets!
Oh yeah, and to make this worse, anytime you reload the page (you restart your browser, you restart your computer, or you accidentally close the tab and recover it), your progress is reset! That’s right: you have to click “Next” that many times again to find your old place in the tag again!
Let’s make it even worse: Because of that way of loading and replacing content on a single page rather than just requesting a fresh new page from the server, you end up in a situation where your Tumblr tab is now using an insane amount of memory the more times you’ve hit the “Next” button. And unfortunately, one weird property of my laptop (my main computer) is that, if it is not connected to a power supply, it will sometimes do a random emergency shut down if it’s running a program that is consuming too much memory and CPU. Which Firefox is now doing, thanks to that Tumblr tab!
So basically, after trying many, many times to find the furthest place I reached in the Quodo tag only for my computer to shut down, or for Firefox to start getting too sluggish for me to use anymore (thanks to Tumblr 😊), I just gave up: it is literally impossible for me to reach things posted in the Quodo tag prior to ~2019. Which sucks because I really would like to see things like people’s older Quodo art (it’s easier for me to find old Quodo fic as long as it has been posted to AO3 because… AO3 is actually designed to work as a functional archive and it sets up its search/browse functions in light of this fact…).
So that is the reason behind the first thing I mentioned – it is physically impossible for me to reach older Quodo posts now. In some sense, I guess the fact that Tumblr naturally hides older posts from view is nice from a privacy point of view. But from the point of view of a content creator, I find this lack of functionality disturbing. I don’t post things like art or fic or meta on Tumblr just for it to only be viewable within one or maybe two years from my posting it. My intent when posting it is for it to be accessible to people years later if they’re interested. But Tumblr doesn’t let me do this, unless people find my blog and use my blog’s archive features to find the content they want (and I better HOPE I’ve tagged consistently and correctly, which it is hard to do 100% of the time). I really don’t like this model of social media posts as ephemeral.
So what about the second point? Knowing that there is no way for me to go back months or years in the Quodo tag without manually clicking dozens of times through posts I’ve already seen and slowing my computer to a crawl and possibly triggering an unexpected restart has kind of made this activity unpleasant and demoralizing for me. Also, because of my long Tumblr hiatuses, I did and still do frequently fall significantly behind in the Quodo tag. And because I’m a completionist (yes, I am the kind of person who will browse through my dashboard until I hit the last post I saw the last time I logged into Tumblr), the idea of checking out the Quodo tag periodically but in a way I know is very spotty and incomplete kind of annoys me. Deciding not to use the Quodo tag at all and instead relying on other Quodo blogs I watch to reblog stuff from the tag and then reblogging THEM also doesn’t work for me because, again, the fact that posts are chronologically out of order and now I’ve seen and reblogged SOME of the Quodo tag but not other posts is just confusing and one extra thing to keep track of. My brain does not like that at all.
So basically, that’s my sob story about how I gave up on the project of deep diving into the Quodo tag and why I’ve largely given up on reblogging Quodo posts from the tag at all. Now that I’ve written this post up, I realize I am being a bit too neurotic and perfectionistic about this and maybe I should go back to casually reblogging posts whenever I decide to peruse the tag and just accept that there are great posts that exist out there but now are completely “unrecoverable” for me.
The summary is: Tumblr is great for a random stream of content detached from time, but is terrible for archiving content in a systematic, comprehensive sort of way. My brain and my blog is much more that of an archivist than a streamer, so this really doesn’t work for me. This is one of the many reasons contributing to my frequent Tumblr hiatuses, which I haven’t really talked about before.
This is something I haven't really talked about, but a while ago, someone liked some version of this post:
Just a heads up, I am once again going through the Quodo tag in an attempt to reach the bottom.
And it made me remember that I have unfortunately completely given up on going through the Quodo tag on Tumblr in order to find all the awesome posts that were made before I joined the fandom in ~2020ish. Not because I lost interest in that project but because Tumblr basically made it physically impossible for me to do…
Also for reasons peculiar to my own completionist psychology, I have ALSO basically given up on going through recent posts in the Quodo tag too (meaning all the posts that have been posted in that tag since my last reblogging spree, whenever that was).
Let me explain the reason for both of these things.
So the good news is that Tumblr does allow you to chronologically browse tags. This is not the default setting, unfortunately – the default setting is “Popular” (which as far as I can tell seems to be some kind of weighted average of recency and number of notes, but IDK, it is a mystery), because Tumblr is an enemy of reason and all that is good in the world. But it IS possible! However, the bad news: for reasons I don’t really understand, Tumblr will not paginate the chronological tag search.
If you take a look at a chronological tag search (e.g.: https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/quodo?sort=recent) and try hitting next a few times, you’ll notice something: the URL doesn’t change. It remains static even though the contents of the page change. What seems to be happening here is that, when you hit the “Next” button, Tumblr is (I’m guessing) using JavaScript in order to load a new set of posts and is changing the contents of the page on the fly. Therefore, what posts are currently showing are entirely dependent on how many times you’ve hit the “Next” button on your current browsing session.
You’ll notice that this is NOT the way that dashboards or browsing through people’s blogs works. For example, if you hit next a few times on your dashboard (I hope you have turned off infinite scroll!), you’ll get URLs like these:
https://www.tumblr.com/?max_post_id=714110213039489024 (this for me shows posts from people I’m following that were posted recently, April 9, 2023)
https://www.tumblr.com/?max_post_id=71411021303948902 (deleted a digit; this now shows posts from Feb 2020)
Note that if you copy and paste these into your browser a day or two (or a week) later, you should see the exact same set of posts that you see now, as long as you have not followed/unfollowed anyone since you last loaded the page.
Or on blogs that have custom layouts turned on, you can easily jump back to older posts by doing things like this:
https://chacusha.tumblr.com/page/2 (this shows the 11th-20th most recent posts on my blog)
https://chacusha.tumblr.com/page/40 (this shows much older posts on my blog)
Here, the content of these particular pages WILL change as I post more posts to my blog, but there is at least some way to rapidly jump past many pages I know I’ve already seen. (There are also more powerful and quick ways of finding old posts using a user’s archive e.g. https://chacusha.tumblr.com/archive)
As far as I can tell, nothing like this functionality exists for tag searches. Which is incredibly frustrating for trying to find older posts!! Given that I was at around 2018 or 2019 in my last tag search, the number of times I would need to manually hit the “Next” button just to find my previous place in the Quodo tag is ridiculous. And the more time that passes, the harder it gets!
Oh yeah, and to make this worse, anytime you reload the page (you restart your browser, you restart your computer, or you accidentally close the tab and recover it), your progress is reset! That’s right: you have to click “Next” that many times again to find your old place in the tag again!
Let’s make it even worse: Because of that way of loading and replacing content on a single page rather than just requesting a fresh new page from the server, you end up in a situation where your Tumblr tab is now using an insane amount of memory the more times you’ve hit the “Next” button. And unfortunately, one weird property of my laptop (my main computer) is that, if it is not connected to a power supply, it will sometimes do a random emergency shut down if it’s running a program that is consuming too much memory and CPU. Which Firefox is now doing, thanks to that Tumblr tab!
So basically, after trying many, many times to find the furthest place I reached in the Quodo tag only for my computer to shut down, or for Firefox to start getting too sluggish for me to use anymore (thanks to Tumblr 😊), I just gave up: it is literally impossible for me to reach things posted in the Quodo tag prior to ~2019. Which sucks because I really would like to see things like people’s older Quodo art (it’s easier for me to find old Quodo fic as long as it has been posted to AO3 because… AO3 is actually designed to work as a functional archive and it sets up its search/browse functions in light of this fact…).
So that is the reason behind the first thing I mentioned – it is physically impossible for me to reach older Quodo posts now. In some sense, I guess the fact that Tumblr naturally hides older posts from view is nice from a privacy point of view. But from the point of view of a content creator, I find this lack of functionality disturbing. I don’t post things like art or fic or meta on Tumblr just for it to only be viewable within one or maybe two years from my posting it. My intent when posting it is for it to be accessible to people years later if they’re interested. But Tumblr doesn’t let me do this, unless people find my blog and use my blog’s archive features to find the content they want (and I better HOPE I’ve tagged consistently and correctly, which it is hard to do 100% of the time). I really don’t like this model of social media posts as ephemeral.
So what about the second point? Knowing that there is no way for me to go back months or years in the Quodo tag without manually clicking dozens of times through posts I’ve already seen and slowing my computer to a crawl and possibly triggering an unexpected restart has kind of made this activity unpleasant and demoralizing for me. Also, because of my long Tumblr hiatuses, I did and still do frequently fall significantly behind in the Quodo tag. And because I’m a completionist (yes, I am the kind of person who will browse through my dashboard until I hit the last post I saw the last time I logged into Tumblr), the idea of checking out the Quodo tag periodically but in a way I know is very spotty and incomplete kind of annoys me. Deciding not to use the Quodo tag at all and instead relying on other Quodo blogs I watch to reblog stuff from the tag and then reblogging THEM also doesn’t work for me because, again, the fact that posts are chronologically out of order and now I’ve seen and reblogged SOME of the Quodo tag but not other posts is just confusing and one extra thing to keep track of. My brain does not like that at all.
So basically, that’s my sob story about how I gave up on the project of deep diving into the Quodo tag and why I’ve largely given up on reblogging Quodo posts from the tag at all. Now that I’ve written this post up, I realize I am being a bit too neurotic and perfectionistic about this and maybe I should go back to casually reblogging posts whenever I decide to peruse the tag and just accept that there are great posts that exist out there but now are completely “unrecoverable” for me.
The summary is: Tumblr is great for a random stream of content detached from time, but is terrible for archiving content in a systematic, comprehensive sort of way. My brain and my blog is much more that of an archivist than a streamer, so this really doesn’t work for me. This is one of the many reasons contributing to my frequent Tumblr hiatuses, which I haven’t really talked about before.