Why is Tumblr good at creating lolcows? -

[Ravenor]

So seeing as we have a new Tumbler section, I'll open with a question to users an ex-users.

Tumblr - Why is it so good at generating Cow's.​

My working theory is this, Image blog's let people post lot's of content generated by others an let them feel smart by easily getting lot's of followers. Once that happened a hugbox mentality took over and it got a reputation amongst the community as a safe space an it grew from there.

 

[Ification]

I believe it's due to how the site works. The site's dashboard is where content usually appears. Since you can choose what content you can look at by following and unfollowing different blogs, this quickly leads to tons of people putting themselves in an echo chamber by only following blogs that agree with their mindset. This leads them to believe that their beliefs are right and that all opposing beliefs are wrong, which leads to all sorts of lulzy situations.

 

[Jaimas]

I believe I've surmised this previously...

 

[AnOminous]

So seeing as we have a new Tumbler section, I'll open with a question to users an ex-users.

Tumblr - Why is it so good at generating Cow's.​

My working theory is this, Image blog's let people post lot's of content generated by others an let them feel smart by easily getting lot's of followers. Once that happened a hugbox mentality took over and it got a reputation amongst the community as a safe space an it grew from there.

From what I've seen, that phenomena of reblogging obsessively probably has something to do with it. This is what turned me off tumblr just on first sight. You have maybe a couple lines of tweet-length material, followed by pages of information-free reblogs, usually with no comments at all. At most, you get asspat comments like "how awesome" and so on.

So it's feedback, but without information or criticism.

So with the near taboo on criticizing other users, people get used to a constant stream of attention. It's low quality attention, and really doesn't mean anything, but they interpret it as praise and agreement. Considering the prevalence of people with absolutely abjectly insane beliefs there, it's unlikely they get much positive feedback for this in their real lives, so they get addicted to it.

Then they ramp it up even more to keep getting attention and a vicious cycle of diminishing returns kicks in. The dumb get dumber and the crazy get crazier. And at the apex of that, shit like vade.

Then you throw in the whole demented dynamic of SJWs, who are naturally like this. Tumblr acts as an amplifying lens by positively reinforcing this behavior to the point it is exaggerated beyond the possibility of parody.

In a sense, this is the absolute opposite of environments like the chans, where feedback is similarly nearly instantaneous but is not only likely to be critical but even outright nasty. Every post is an invitation to fight about something, and people don't even care about what. Calling you a faggot and telling you to kill yourself is basically the equivalent of hello.

I greatly prefer the latter, and this is why I hate tumblr and everything it stands for.

 

[DN 420]

i'll try to give a different view than jaimas, but it won't be as well-written.

i used tumblr for years and the best answer i can give is that it's part self-fulfilling prophecy and part pure luck.

there are plenty of social media platforms, ones that specifically use a micro-blogging paradigm even, but they don't come close to having the same userbase or reputation. sure there are negative stereotypes for other major websites (twitter, facebook, reddit) but it doesn't come close to the cult-like mentality.

a few years prior, tumblr was known more of it's obsessive fandoms than it's pseudo-mentally ill otherkin. i think this has been a progression for teens and those with teenaged mentalities—they seek easier ways to gain more and more attention. it's the natural response to the fact we live in a world that fixates on band-aid solutions and quick fixes, this is what these kids are raised on.

and it's easy for these people to hide there. as i've mention the site's entire structure is shitty, especially for the deluded type. the only thing you ever see on the website is the posts from people you follow. this makes it ridiculously easy to succumb to a warped perspective and confirmation bias. (and also makes the whole 'please tag posts' phenomenon fucking stupid since you can unfollow anyone at anytime)

but as time goes on, it becomes more of a parody of itself. you see far more otherkin bashing than actual otherkin because of how much it amuses people. troll accounts are made and people like to think it's because it pisses off the actual sjws—but here's the important thing—it's not. we like to make fun of and parody these people because they're so arrogant and narcissistic we don't have to feel bad about it. of course that extends to all lolcows and not just tumblrites.

tl;dr i have no fucking idea.

for further watching:

 

[Boundman]

You guys have summed it up pretty well, the hugbox, the echochamber and the whole highschool mentality are definitely good players in the reasons why tumblr is effectively a breeding ground for cows. But I've always been of the belief the partial anonymity and customisability play into this quite well.

Every blog is different and unique and special, and when you throw anonymity in the mix it gets worse. You can create a whole new online persona - and what's better, you can look pretty whilst doing it too! Your blog not only personifies your beliefs (which are backed up, however ridiculous) it also personifies who they are. If you deleted my account on here, it'd be no biggie, I'd make another. But if you deleted a Tumblrites blog, they'd freak out. That's not just an account on a site to them, that's a representation of who they are.

For a socially isolated person that interaction and that identity with their blog is pretty strong, as their one and only outlet for their honest feelings, they're bound to attatch to it. Which causes them to be exposed to and echo their own beliefs until they believe some pretty stupid things.

 

[Meowthkip]

You guys have summed it up pretty well, the hugbox, the echochamber and the whole highschool mentality are definitely good players in the reasons why tumblr is effectively a breeding ground for cows. But I've always been of the belief the partial anonymity and customisability play into this quite well.

Every blog is different and unique and special, and when you throw anonymity in the mix it gets worse. You can create a whole new online persona - and what's better, you can look pretty whilst doing it too! Your blog not only personifies your beliefs (which are backed up, however ridiculous) it also personifies who they are. If you deleted my account on here, it'd be no biggie, I'd make another. But if you deleted a Tumblrites blog, they'd freak out. That's not just an account on a site to them, that's a representation of who they are.

For a socially isolated person that interaction and that identity with their blog is pretty strong, as their one and only outlet for their honest feelings, they're bound to attatch to it. Which causes them to be exposed to and echo their own beliefs until they believe some pretty stupid things.

It's funny that you mention anonymity, because selfies are kind of a big thing on Tumblr. A lot of blogs have tags just for their own selfies.

I also think that a major reason Tumblr churns out lolcows is that it's often a lot of users first exposure to a very large internet community. A lot of bloggers either started or are still in their teens, and when they get into that constant feedback loop of "there's nothing wrong with you, everybody else can fuck off," it's hard to break away from that.

Also, the fostering of the "if you don't reblog this news story about some injustice happening in the world, you are literally a bad person and you're part of the problem" mentality tends to scare the piss out of impressionable young bloggers and enable the kind of shitty people who thrive off of manipulating others. If you don't fall in line, you are problematic. You are part of why the world is so bad and you should be ashamed.

It's pretty fucked up. If it were up to me, I'd have Tumblr be an 18+ site.

 

[CatParty]

Autism

 

[Jaimas]

You guys may have seen some sort of permutation of this woman's face used for jokes about "Triggering" and, indeed, Tumblr in general:

Have you ever wondered the source of that? If so, I'll tell you.

Spoiler: Melody Hensley, The World's Most Oppressed Woman

The woman in question would be one Melody Hensley, a woman who claimed Twitter gave her PTSD bad enough that she became bedridden. Fans of our Brianna Wu and Vade threads will immediately remember the likes of this shit:

Were this the extent of her psychosis, this would not be the reason she had an entire meme dedicated to her. No, that award comes because she claimed she had had PTSD harder than anyone, ever, in the history of the world, and decided she was going to talk down to war veterans over it:

....Nothing else needs be said. With that post, she became a living joke about Tumblr self-diagnosed PTSD overnight.

So now you know.

 

[Boundman]

It's funny that you mention anonymity, because selfies are kind of a big thing on Tumblr. A lot of blogs have tags just for their own selfies.

I also think that a major reason Tumblr churns out lolcows is that it's often a lot of users first exposure to a very large internet community. A lot of bloggers either started or are still in their teens, and when they get into that constant feedback loop of "there's nothing wrong with you, everybody else can fuck off," it's hard to break away from that.

Also, the fostering of the "if you don't reblog this news story about some injustice happening in the world, you are literally a bad person and you're part of the problem" mentality tends to scare the piss out of impressionable young bloggers and enable the kind of shitty people who thrive off of manipulating others. If you don't fall in line, you are problematic. You are part of why the world is so bad and you should be ashamed.

It's pretty fucked up. If it were up to me, I'd have Tumblr be an 18+ site.

Oh yeah, I know all about the 'loving yourself' idea around selfies, but with your typical tumblrite dying their hair and cutting it in all sorts of wacky ways, it's easy to run from it on such a big site.

And I almost took the Tumblr bluepill at one point so to speak, it's only when I started making some friends in the real world did I manage to disconnect from the crazy and form my own opinions. I completely agree with the fear factor, a girl I know from my college is something of a Tumblrite and constantly tries to stop people using things like 'OCD', 'Retarded' and 'Crazy' if you're near her. Often by 'calling you out'. Needless to say the only people who wanted to be her friends were people alike her. Their group would often go out of the way to recruit socially isolated individuals, then tell them that whole 'fall in line or be a shitty person' rhetoric and then in a few months they'd be just like the rest. It was a little scary to watch, but honestly, I looked at how transparent it was to everyone else and shrugged it off.

 

[Ravenor]

From what I've seen, that phenomena of reblogging obsessively probably has something to do with it. This is what turned me off tumblr just on first sight. You have maybe a couple lines of tweet-length material, followed by pages of information-free reblogs, usually with no comments at all. At most, you get asspat comments like "how awesome" and so on.

So it's feedback, but without information or criticism.

So with the near taboo on criticizing other users, people get used to a constant stream of attention. It's low quality attention, and really doesn't mean anything, but they interpret it as praise and agreement. Considering the prevalence of people with absolutely abjectly insane beliefs there, it's unlikely they get much positive feedback for this in their real lives, so they get addicted to it.

Then they ramp it up even more to keep getting attention and a vicious cycle of diminishing returns kicks in. The dumb get dumber and the crazy get crazier. And at the apex of that, shit like vade.

Then you throw in the whole demented dynamic of SJWs, who are naturally like this. Tumblr acts as an amplifying lens by positively reinforcing this behavior to the point it is exaggerated beyond the possibility of parody.

In a sense, this is the absolute opposite of environments like the chans, where feedback is similarly nearly instantaneous but is not only likely to be critical but even outright nasty. Every post is an invitation to fight about something, and people don't even care about what. Calling you a faggot and telling you to kill yourself is basically the equivalent of hello.

I greatly prefer the latter, and this is why I hate tumblr and everything it stands for.

I like your take on this, especially this:

So with the near taboo on criticizing other users, people get used to a constant stream of attention. It's low quality attention, and really doesn't mean anything, but they interpret it as praise and agreement. Considering the prevalence of people with absolutely abjectly insane beliefs there, it's unlikely they get much positive feedback for this in their real lives, so they get addicted to it.

I hate the special snowflake syndrome that states "Any critique of my work that is anything other than out right praise is Trolling / harassment / oppression", In this case the Anti-Tumbler is the Replica prop forum, every now an then you get a kid sign up who lives in a less than optimal background in some 3rd world country using a web cafe or a cheep phone, who only has card tape an a blunt knife to work with, they will post a question about making something using what they have to hand go away for a few weeks and will come back posting the results. Loads of people will post "YOU ROCK!" but then give good advice on how to improve on what they have done (in a non ass hole way) the kid often goes away for a bit an comes back with version 2.0 and I have seen people send care packs of material an tool's.

To be honest that's the most Toxic thing on twitter it's a hugbox an hugbox alone, there is no positive criticism.

 

[Meowthkip]

Oh yeah, I know all about the 'loving yourself' idea around selfies, but with your typical tumblrite dying their hair and cutting it in all sorts of wacky ways, it's easy to run from it on such a big site.

And I almost took the Tumblr bluepill at one point so to speak, it's only when I started making some friends in the real world did I manage to disconnect from the crazy and form my own opinions. I completely agree with the fear factor, a girl I know from my college is something of a Tumblrite and constantly tries to stop people using things like 'OCD', 'Retarded' and 'Crazy' if you're near her. Often by 'calling you out'. Needless to say the only people who wanted to be her friends were people alike her. Their group would often go out of the way to recruit socially isolated individuals, then tell them that whole 'fall in line or be a shitty person' rhetoric and then in a few months they'd be just like the rest. It was a little scary to watch, but honestly, I looked at how transparent it was to everyone else and shrugged it off.

I legit had somebody who used Tumblr-brand social justice to keep a Skype chat RP in line, and would turn other participants against each other.

Since then I've always been wary of it, good intentions or no.

 

[LordCustos3]

Summed up in one simple infographic....

 

[NZDROW]

So basically, to summarize all the posts in this thread in one sentence: it's because Tumblr is a poorly built service with a gullible, young, and attention seeking userbase that's so naive about the world that it's painfully easy to manipulate.

 

[100 Whole Bepis]

Tumblr didn't invent social justice warriors, but it certainly gave them an environment where they could thrive.

Tumblr is full of young teens that are just starting to learn the internet. It attracts them because it's seen as a little, for lack of a better word, "classier" than Facebook. More "intellectual" (that's a damn lie, of course, but in the eyes of Tumblr kidlets it certainly seems that way).

Suddenly the SJW idiots that had jumped ship from Livejournal have a wide audience of young people who don't really know any better. So they can spew all the baseless shit they want, but as long as their tone is authoritative enough and they play hard enough to guilt, the kids will fall in line with it. After all, this is Tumblr! The people here must know what they're talking about, right? Suddenly the SJW base is MASSIVE, and even people who were previously critical thinkers start falling in line with SJW ideology because they don't want to seem like the bad guys in front of their audience.

Combine this with how fast reblogging transmits information (99% of the time wrong or misled information, often outright lies) and you have the recipe for an absolute cesspit of morons, babbies, and suck-ups circlejerking to the Panic du Jour.

 

[ghostpranks]

Attention is a powerful drug.

I think that tumblr lolcows are mostly children or attention seekers who realize that slapping a label on their actions will garner them more attention. 10 years ago, livejournal served the same purpose.

I was once an edgy teenager with a semi-traumatic childhood who had some mental instability, and I latched onto every bit of media that I thought I related to.

You think you are a tiger? Great, so do I! That makes me superior to all of the people who haven't accepted me in my life!

 

[Oglooger]

1.- It built was over a cursed indian cyber burial ground
2- the majority of the users are hormone ridden high school girls and hipsters.
3.-It reminds me alot of live journal
4.- What Catparty said

 

[Ouija Board]

There are SJWs IRL as well, I told about the one that I met from OK Cupid in the first SJW thread but there is a transgender group that I go to (I'm genderfluid and no that is not because of wanting to be a "special snowflake.") and some of them there have spouted SJW rhetoric.

 

[Kitlen]

Hooooh boy, I could write a lot about Tumblr and I think I shall due to my small knowledge of Rhetoric.

I barely go on mine anymore, as I have found it to be a complete echo chamber. Like most have said here already, it is a site full of adolescents, SJWs and batshit insanity. I remember being a teen, I remember having a rather traumatic childhood background but I still attempted to regulate myself as I knew I needed to function in society and not sequester myself to an Ivory Tower where no one could touch me. That is the issue with Tumblr, everyone has an ivory tower and consider themselves untouchable because they've had so much "trauma" in their lives. Tough shit, we all have had trauma to one degree or another.

A lot of what contributes to Tumblr drama is the lack of rhetoric and logic. Tumblr has a distinctive lack of logos, ethos, but completely loves pathos.
logos= Using basic logic. Deduction, induction, syllogisms, etc.
pathos= Using words and diction to incite an emotional reaction from the audience, along with knowing their target audience.
ethos= Unfortunately, Greek translates poorly into English, but it's basically showing that you aren't a hypocritical twat and actually abide by your beliefs.

What Tumblr excels at is pathos, meaning that they are able to use diction and examples to create emotional reactions in their readers in regards to social justice or other topics. Most of these people are not stupid, just very misguided which is the most dangerous thing to be. Tumblrinas are quite well educated when it comes to tugging at the heart strings and targeting their audience. They know that the majority of their site members are young, misunderstood, adolescent children who are malleable and still have not formed all of their opinions and are looking for an outlet. They then deceive said members with their pathos, which the adolescents are still too young to fully understand that you need pathos, ethos AND logos for a cohesive and sound argument.

Now here comes the issues.

Tumblr has poor logos in that they almost always use deductive reasoning rather than inductive reasoning. For example: A Tumblrina says "A man looked at me with lust, therefore all men must look at me with lust." This is false of course. The Tumblrina not only uses inductive reasoning but then exaggerates it to ridiculous amounts. For another example, I will use math. x≠z but x+y=z. Tumblr thinks that since they feel like a wolf sometimes they must BE a wolf. This is false, as they have taken only one sole factor and equated it with truth. Bad logic!

Finally, there is ethos which Tumblr has proven more and more as of late to lack. Like I mentioned earlier, ethos is basically proving that you are a good person that is trustworthy and reliable. Tumblrinas have been proven over and over to not have good ethos. Why? Because the majority of them are so focused on their feelings that they lack basic logic and are so concerned with how others are behaving that they never govern their own behavior or thoughts, even if it blatantly defies what they preach.

So there you go, a basic rhetorical run down of why Tumblr is lolcow inducing. Heh heh, inducing. Heh heh, they lack inductive reasoning. Okay, shutting up now.

P.S. Attaching a good map of logical fallacies.

 

[Jaimas]

I made a thing. I hope it's useful.