The End of Most Things
Until very recently I posted regularly to both Tumblr, and WordPress. I have been a member of Tumblr on-and-off since launch in 2007, and of WordPress on-and-off since launch in 2005. Along the way I have left to experiment with Blogger, Moveable Type, Posterous, Posthaven, Ghost, and a variety of other online publishing platforms, but I always returned to either Tumblr, WordPress, or both.
So why am I walking away from them? There's no straightforward answer to that, but I'll try.
Both WordPress and Tumblr are walled gardensthey have functionality (such as following, liking, and commenting) that are either impossible, or more difficult without becoming a member of the same hosted platform. The result is a huge proportion of the people that might see your posts come from within the walled gardenin the case of Tumblr, almost everybody.
The insular nature of the garden isn't the main problem thoughthe main problems are the “follow” and “like” functionality itself. When you follow a blog, or like a post within it, the natural thing for the platform to do is notify the authorso people take advantage of thisfollowing and liking indiscriminately in order to gain attention such that they might gain more traffic. I've knowI've tried it, and it worked. I gained traffic, but I didn't make any new friends, and those that visited only did so for long enough to hit the like buttons a few times.
Very few people read long-form blog posts, or write proper comments any more – I know, because I don't. If you're spending the remains of your lunch-break reading blog posts, you might not have time to comment, but you can hit a “like” button and move on. Then you realise that person liked your posts in returnand an entirely vacuous network forms.
I don't think the shallow nature of Tumblr and WordPress are entirely the users faultthe behaviours are encouragedor enabledby the platforms. Tumblr goes one further in that it doesn't allow replies to commentseach user is presumed to be a sausage machine, pumping out content, with no provision to connect with others. Even the private messaging within Tumblr doesn't keep track of what you sent, and doesn't quote for repliesthwarting any attempt you might make to reach out to new people.
In the end I chose to walk away from both Tumblr and WordPress, in order to move my writing to a “lesser” walled gardenGhost. The platform isn't really importantit's lack of reliance on local accounts to enable functionality is though. A blog should only really need to support open commenting, and a standards-compliant syndication mechanism (read:RSS). In some ways I guess it reflects back on the freedoms many of the standard protocols of the internet were foundedWhat, Where, When, and How. In terms of blogging it translates to being able to read what we want, where we want, when we want, and through whichever devices or operating systems we want.