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It's the social "flows" of the sites that differentiate them. On Reddit, you subscribe to a number of communities, and then you only see content that a bunch of people agree fits those communities' standards. On Tumblr, you subscribe to a bunch of individuals' blogs, where those bloggers all have 1. a very simple/encouraged inbuilt mechanism for sharing things they see from their own subscriptions onto their own blog, and 2. a culture of "signal-boosting"—a term loosely meaning "passing along chain letters", or more generally, sharing something they wouldn't have posted for its own sake, with an audience that didn't sign up for such content, because "it's important that this spread until it reaches the people who are affected by it." As if it were a local weather emergency or an amber alert or something. The combined result is that, on Tumblr, you'll subscribe to people for one thing, and then inevitably they'll "signal-boost" other things into your feed that you didn't sign up for. The most often "signal-boosted" thing is Social Justice discourse. This is why people get the impression Tumblr is a Social Justice website: if you subscribe to blogs about porn, cats, and tech, you'll end up with a dashboard containing porn, cats, tech, and "signal-boosted" Social Justice. Personally, my problem isn't with Social Justice, but with "signal-boosting" itself. I (very carefully) use Tumblr, and enjoy doing so, but only by strictly following a policy of unsubscribing from any blog that "signal-boosts" anything. I think this means that I end up following only blogs that are completely disconnected from Tumblr's social graph, though, so I don't know how precisely I can be said to be "using Tumblr" at this point, rather than just being subscribed to some blogs that happen to be hosted there. |