Unfortunately, the newly-introduced Tumblarity popularity ranking system is only going to serve to bring Marketing and SEO douchebags into the ranks of Tumblrers, much the same as it is with Twitter, thanks to Twitterrank and Twitterholic etc. I expect spam-followers soon, folks out collecting links who are more into self-promotion than creativity. The biggest risk is that I turn into one myself—even though I’ve got nothing to sell.
While I like being validated (or invalidated, as is more often the case) as much as the next guy, and I love the “virtual applause” garnered by making the front page on Favrd (in all likelihood I’ll not be granted the same honor on Tumblr for some time, if ever), my natural tendency toward obsession and approval makes these things unhealthy—I’ll spend my days wondering how to become more “liked” by the masses instead of chasing my own occasionally-bizarre muse, to the delight of the precious few who see life through a similar lens.
It’s distressing for an approval-whore to realize that he’s at best a niche market—my creativity (like most of my other attributes) appeals to a very thin section of the population. Tumblr (and Twitter like it) bring me in contact with many more like-minded folks than I would every conceivably find in a cross-section of the general population: folks for whom proper sentence structure and the use of every word that you’ve somehow acquired over the years isn’t necessarily an attempt to smash other folks with my brains. It’s just who I am—“intellectual” is just a convenient warning word for folks, a flag that says, “careful there, he’s gonna think what he says is really funny and you’re gonna have no idea what he means.” It’s also a recipe for loneliness, but that’s something that I’m slowly getting accustomed to. I guess.
Anyway, I hope y’all will forgive me for thinking I might want to opt out of the popularity contest for a while. Maybe a long, long while. I’m not necessarily going anywhere—still here, still on Twitter, still pretty much everywhere you might have found me before, but probably not “engaged” in the conversation. You’re all great, lovely, charming, hilarious—but I think I need to start performing for myself for the forseeable future and see what that brings.
