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How do you argue with people productively on tumblr?
Recently it's felt like I've totally lost the ability to express disagreement with people I like without utterly ruining that relationship. Part of that is to do with various things going on with my personal life/brain chemistry but I'm wondering how much of it is that a lot of these conversations have moved to tumblr.
Like...in my experience the best arguments happen when you can be open and understanding and try and see the other person's pov, engage with what they're actually saying instead of what you THINK they're saying, and not get all defensive and antagonistic.
But I'm too wordy for asks or replies (and those often get replied to publically anyway) and when I post a reblog I feel very aware that I am engaging not just with that person but with everyone who reads me, everyone following the post, and all of their followers (if they reblog my reply). And that awareness makes it SUPER HARD to be all the things I said in the paragraph above. Even if I trust that person to engage with me in an open and productive way, I don't trust all those other people, and so I put my guard up.
Does anyone else have this problem? And if so how do you deal with it?
Emailing them privately is an option when I have their email address, but it makes everything seem SUPER SERIOUS which puts me off. There's also writing out my argument in a text editor and dividing it up into as many asks as neccesary, I again feel weird about it but maybe it's a better approach. I like that reblogs can feel more like a casual discussion instead of a super serious "taking aside to express private disagreement" but it so easily goes from casual discussion to huge visible argument it seems not to be worth the risk for fraught topics.
"Don't argue with people on tumblr" is not a helpful aproach for me, I have recently tried arguing less but there are some opinions I find too upsetting to let slide and in my experience these unspoken arguments have a tendency to bubble up and explode if you ignore them. "Don't follow people with opinions you want to argue with" would mean cutting out a lot of people I mostly really like. And an echo chamber of people who all entirely agree with me is not entirely appealing. I really like being able to have productive discussions with people with different povs, and I know I used to be better at it.
Thinking about, I have taken the "just don't argue with people and unfollow anyone who makes that unbearable" approach to twitter, because expressing myself in 140 characters is just impossible. But I follow a very different group of people there, and barely post at all.
EDIT: Some interesting responses on tumblr...which of course I can't easily link to because tumblr but at worst you'll have to scroll down a little through that tag.
(going to post this on tumblr too, god help me, but point out that this post exists as a space for conversation for those who prefer it)
Like...in my experience the best arguments happen when you can be open and understanding and try and see the other person's pov, engage with what they're actually saying instead of what you THINK they're saying, and not get all defensive and antagonistic.
But I'm too wordy for asks or replies (and those often get replied to publically anyway) and when I post a reblog I feel very aware that I am engaging not just with that person but with everyone who reads me, everyone following the post, and all of their followers (if they reblog my reply). And that awareness makes it SUPER HARD to be all the things I said in the paragraph above. Even if I trust that person to engage with me in an open and productive way, I don't trust all those other people, and so I put my guard up.
Does anyone else have this problem? And if so how do you deal with it?
Emailing them privately is an option when I have their email address, but it makes everything seem SUPER SERIOUS which puts me off. There's also writing out my argument in a text editor and dividing it up into as many asks as neccesary, I again feel weird about it but maybe it's a better approach. I like that reblogs can feel more like a casual discussion instead of a super serious "taking aside to express private disagreement" but it so easily goes from casual discussion to huge visible argument it seems not to be worth the risk for fraught topics.
"Don't argue with people on tumblr" is not a helpful aproach for me, I have recently tried arguing less but there are some opinions I find too upsetting to let slide and in my experience these unspoken arguments have a tendency to bubble up and explode if you ignore them. "Don't follow people with opinions you want to argue with" would mean cutting out a lot of people I mostly really like. And an echo chamber of people who all entirely agree with me is not entirely appealing. I really like being able to have productive discussions with people with different povs, and I know I used to be better at it.
Thinking about, I have taken the "just don't argue with people and unfollow anyone who makes that unbearable" approach to twitter, because expressing myself in 140 characters is just impossible. But I follow a very different group of people there, and barely post at all.
EDIT: Some interesting responses on tumblr...which of course I can't easily link to because tumblr but at worst you'll have to scroll down a little through that tag.
(going to post this on tumblr too, god help me, but point out that this post exists as a space for conversation for those who prefer it)
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(I realize that this question may be stupid in ways that are not obvious to me because I don't tumbl.)
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I completely agree. I've found actually that for the people I'm really really engaging with, inevitably the question of 'can we take this to email / skype / gchat' gets brought up, because people just want to get away from the Tumblr communication system to something that's private once more - or if the discussion was already private and happening through fanmail - just something where you can keep your sent mail responses. *g*
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For a platform that keeps ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING ELSE, I have never understood why the inbox system refuses to maintain records of conversations held in private. I'm not sure if it's just bad programming or 'encouraging' their users to hold these discussions in public.
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And yeah choosing WHICH people to engage with is super important too.
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However, the latter has always been seen as a very passive aggressive thing to do on LJ and DW, so I tend to avoid doing this. The whole 'well this made me think of stuff that is mostly disagreeing with you and now I'm going to write about it without even cluing you in' was always - at least on LJ - very frowned upon. There was more of a 'deal with that shit in comments, unless you're asked not to talk about that stuff on my journal, in which case deal with it in your own journal and tag the hell out of it in the cut.'
The reason I like taking difficult subjects away from Tumblr, and onto Dreamwidth is that the mutuals I have on Tumblr I don't really know at all. At least here, there is more of a vetting system. They've read more of my personal posts; I've generally read more of their personal posts. I haven't learned about their personality primarily through reblogs; and ironically, people who only link post on DW, do NOT earn my trust, even if I like the links. They haven't earned the right to my personal opinions on a matter or my reflections on my life - so why would I give people on Tumblr the same, just because the communication on Tumblr is so generally against complex communication? So I don't.
That's a pretty hard line. But then I started using Tumblr specifically as a coping mechanism (which is why 'myawesomespace' is just that, and tends to avoid posts that make me depressed or angry or anxious - it was a coping mechanism Tumblr to make me feel better, with the idea that I could go to a random page and find things that I found funny or uplifting or silly).
But my author Tumblr - the one where people do ask me complex questions about things (like today I got 'what is the difference between territoriality and jealousy' as an example) - I just have a general policy to be very very careful about discussions where I mostly just want to disagree with other people. I self-censor more heavily there, because it's public and it's linked to my author name. But I have written very strongly worded posts about my stance as an author who writes noncon/dubcon alongside realistic trauma recovery that isn't intended as kink.
Tonally though, I respond to things differently here. Like, overall. Dreamwidth just seems to encourage gentler responses overall, even when people are strongly disagreeing with each other. You can have comment policies on your profile or stickied at the top of your page. You can warn people in advance - in some detail - what they're likely to see and not see in your journal. The downside, of course, is that sometimes you won't get very many differing opinions because of similarities.
For me, I've never learned much from like...arguing or discussing on Tumblr. I know that's different for others, and I've seen some really enlightened discussion on your page - so I know it happens. I've learned a lot from different articles and images and comics and quotes. I've learned a lot from Dreamwidth and novels. I find intelligent discourse that doesn't immediately make me feel triggered rare over at Tumblr. I think because people are used to communicating in soundbytes, so they try to get across 'you are wrong' as quickly as possible. Here, my response - long and rambling as it is - clogs up Tumblr pages. I think everyone is aware of 'shortening' even in reblogs, even if a response is longer than a reply/ask.
Oh! My third method of discoursing with someone on Tumblr? Fanmail. Like 'I saw your post on X and I had some thoughts about it and here they are...' - Public discussions like the kind that happen on Tumblr generally make me feel awkward and uncomfortable. I wouldn't stand up in a room of 60 mostly-strangers and make a private conversation of discussion with someone else very very public (I just wouldn't, I can barely speak in a room of 60 people), and I struggle to do it on Tumblr too, unless it's a hot-button issue for me. Dreamwidth is easier, because it's a more sheltered environment. Mostly. Even this post of yours - which is public - just has a different 'feel' to reading it over at Tumblr. For me, the sites feel very different, and therefore create different tonal responses, which make in depth discussion difficult and prohibitive in some cases. I think Facebook and Twitter do the same.
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I think the thing that makes it difficult for me is I have all the same problems as you with the medium of tumblr, especially I think because people are used to communicating in soundbytes, so they try to get across 'you are wrong' as quickly as possible. Here, my response - long and rambling as it is - clogs up Tumblr pages. I think everyone is aware of 'shortening' even in reblogs, even if a response is longer than a reply/ask.
but I've met a bunch of really cool people there who don't use dreamwidth (or not as much) My dreamwidth friends are great too but when it's the tumblr people having the specific interesting conversation I want to engage with it feels weird to move it to dreamwidth.
This despite planning on just using the sqbr tumblr as a "whatever cool things pass my way" impersonal reblogging account. I guess I shouldn't compalin about meeting more cool people :)
I do need to get better about privately contacting people. It's a mental block of mine in general, even though public conversations have a bunch of downsides they lack the special kind of self consciousness I get in private conversation (and not in comments. Ah, if only tumblr had them...which I guess ties into your point about different social media having different feels)
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Thanks, me too!
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I've been pretty lucky for the most part, but it can definitely be quite intensely awful.
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Yes, this exactly. Just because I disagree with someone on one topic, and am tired of seeing them rehash one particular topic over and over, doesn't mean that I want to cut them out entirely. Blocking things on a tag level can help with that, but tag block almost always ends up being both too broad and too narrow (especially considering how bad folks are at tagging).
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Yeah, sigh. Good luck!