as small as a world and as large as alone

2:22am June 20, 2015

madeofpatterns:

funereal-disease:

genderfight:

michaelblume:

I can’t remember whether I’ve already made this post. Whatever. I’ll make it again.

Whenever I see a post cross my dash where somebody says something stupid/asinine and others have delivered clever take-downs, I always click through to the hapless wrong person’s blog.

The blog’s almost always been deleted. A lot of times the blog description refers to the specific post I’m clicking through from and asks that people stop giving them shit about it. Sometimes it says they were a kid when they made the post.

I get why people reblog these posts, I totally see the appeal, and I probably forget sometimes and reblog them myself. But since I started clicking through I’ve tried to remember not to.

I mean, in fairness I’ve discovered that clicking through to the top post of most widely viral posts finds you a deleted post or a missing blog.

That said, I’ve made a conscious decision to avoid reblogging these sorts of posts. I’m interested in the way that wrong opinions help me hone my own views, but I acknowledge the toxicity of the Tumblr Hate Machine. My current solution is to limit reblogs or put my commentary in a separate free-standing post.

Also, I trust my followers not to yell at wrong people or increase their stress? Like, I see everything you say in reblogs and I read all of it because I Suffer A Compulsion. Y'all are well-behaved and I like you.

My particular set of followers and followees are a paragon of decency. I like my carefully pruned dash. Their followers, though…it seems that the further you get concentrically, the worse the discourse.

I too have made a conscious decision to avoid reblogging these sorts of posts. I actually don’t like to reblog anything political or philosophical with more than, like, a couple thousand notes. In my experience, the more popular a certain perspective, the less likely it is to have any nuance whatsoever.

There’s nothing quite like getting the same critical comments on a post over and over that you wrote three years ago.

There’s nothing quite like having people tell outright lies about you based on posts you made 15 years ago that weren’t even on tumblr, and having tumblr people (among others) believe it and think it’s okay to shit on you because of things you wrote when you were still a fucking minor (and your language wasn’t even as communicative as it seemed), when you’re now 34 years old and not even the same person barely.

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