So there's been comparisons of Reddit and Hubski, but relatively few of Tumblr and Hubski.
I'd like to take a moment to share my observations. I don't want this to become a Tumblr hate-fest, but I do want to be critical.
Userbase
Tumblr's userbase is almost the antithesis of Reddit's. Where Reddit leans toward right-wing 20's-30's males interested in STEM fields, Tumblr users are more often than not teen-20's left-wing females focused on social issues and art. Hubski's userbase appears to hew towards the middle of all of these spectrums. Or rather, there is a certain level of diversity in which various extremes are not over-represented. (I'll admit I'm no moderate in some regards).
There is a certain level of group-think which has developed on Tumblr. Even when I have tended to agree with it, it still has proved a little frightening. The epitome of this for me was the "trans asterisk" episode. People of a certain age involved in LGBTQ communities have been accultured to using the term "trans*" in order to be inclusive of people whose gender identities fall into a gray territory not covered by the male/female dichotomy. This terminology has been used since at least the early '00's to make sure these people's existance and presence was acknowledged and welcomed. Then around late 2013 there was a swift reaction against the asterisk. The Tumblr consensus claimed that the asterisk actually represented the exact opposite of what those of us in our late-20's and 30's had taken it to mean all of these years. Now, there were a few in-depth, well-considered posts that inititated this change in the tide, but they were quickly overwhelmed. What I saw on my dashboard was a sudden roar of posts to the effect of, "If you write 'trans*' you are a bigot and I will immediately unfollow you." What should have been a cordial discussion about a nearly trivial point of syntax quickly mushroomed into a slew of judgemental, malinformed ultimatums. It took months to blow over. By the time I actually found the posts that made some decent arguments against the asterisk, I was already disabused of Tumblr users' pretensions to individuality and critical dialogue. (Runner-up: "Don't say 'stupid,' that's ableist.")
My experience of Hubski so far is that divergent viewpoints are generally welcomed, so long as they remain civil and non-trolling. Indeed, I've already had challenging and productive discussions with people I don't see eye-to-eye with. While that's not impossible on Tumblr, it's certainly not the norm.
Group-think also exists on Reddit, of couse. But it tends to be a product of, and confined to certain subreddits. Which is not to say that talk of transhumanism or "alphas" and "betas" doesn't leak into evidently unrelated topics. When they do they might be carefully considered, dismissed or accepted. The reaction depends largely on the culture of the particular subreddit. The ideas that are widely accepted on a large part of Reddit still don't have the site-wide hegemony of some ideas on Tumblr.
Site Functionality
tags: There's some differences between the ways both sites use them. I find it interesting that Hubski only allows OP to use two. This artificial scarcity seems to necessitate the user to think carefully about which to use. Tumblr users often use very customized tags. These can come in very helpful for looking for a very specifc kind of content. The most infamous tags used on Tumblr are TW (trigger warning). I never understood purpose of putting "#tw gore" instead of just "#gore". This is where the tag functionality on Hubski beats Tumblr's. Hubski has a built-in method for blocking tags. I noticed instant improvement in my feed as soon as I blocked #sillyseason , for example. Whereas, to do the same on Tumblr I'd have to install a third-party browser extension. And then these extensions often break when the site updates. This lack of functionality is due in part to the Tumblr staff's lack of response to user concerns. It took over two years for them to even make a block function, which is a standard feature on social websites.
dashboard: The Dashboard is Tumblr's trademark feature. It is a feed of all of the posts of Tumblogs you follow, listed in reverse chronological order. My first problem with the Dashboard is that doesn't actually provide timestamps for posts. If you follow a lot of blogs you can go hundreds of posts down your "dash" and not know how much longer you have to go until you catch up to where you left off last time you checked it. I get the sense this was an intentional design, tho, again it can be fixed by third-party applications.
Another example of a-feature-not-a-bug is the notification of likes and reblogs. When someone else interacts with your posts, that appears on your dash instead of a seperate notification area. That can be useful, if someone adds a comment, or if your post only receieves a few responses. If you make a popular post, however, your dashboard will be flooded. I made a post that went viral a few months back, and haven't had the patience to use Tumblr since. Last I checked it was closing in on 40,000 "notes" (likes or reblogs).
These two points aside, the entire format of the Dashboard itself is just "flat". Compared to the different content discovery methods on the top-right of Hubski (or subreddits, or StumbleUpon, or even a '90's webforum) the dash just feels like a content treadmill. Even with the aid of a third-party filter, there's still an inordinate number of posts that are just not interesting. So many people that post excellent stuff you won't find anywhere else also post untagged junk. For me the fandom aspect of Tumblr was what really turned me of the most. I didn't know it was possible to be tired of Harry Potter before Tumblr.
Conclusion:
Hubski's interface and users both make it a superior website than Tumblr and Reddit when it comes to general interest topics and current events. There is an aversion, part build-in, part volitional, to trival junk. For the moment Tumblr and Reddit still beat out Hubski in regards to many niche or obscure topics. My prediction is that in the coming years the user experience of the Web will further bifurcate into the quantity-over-quality Stream services like Tumblr, Twtter, and Facebook, and carefully crowd-curated content discovery services like Hubski and /r/DepthHub .
I really dislike when people make judgments about the typical Tumblr user. I was on Tumblr for at least two years, and given my stream (over 300 people) consisted entirely of people I chose to follow, I regularly had conversations with people who were mature, intelligent, nonjudgmental, into all sorts of really cool stuff, helpful, logical, level-headed, and so forth. If anybody is complaining about teenage girls being on Tumblr, why are you following them? (am using the general 'you', not talking about you specifically, OP.) That's the entire point of tumblr, you can choose who to follow and who not, and what is it to you if someone is saying stuff you don't agree with. Just don't follow them. It's not like here on Hubski, where as much as I try, I can't seem to get away from the people I don't want to hear from, they're a toxic cloud.
I think as Hubski gets more and more users, that'll become less and less of a problem. Right now it's like a lot of people in a small room. Hopefullu, with more users and the posts they bring, there will be more room not only to explore, but to avoid the people you want to avoid.That's the entire point of tumblr, you can choose who to follow and who not, and what is it to you if someone is saying stuff you don't agree with. Just don't follow them. It's not like here on Hubski, where as much as I try, I can't seem to get away from the people I don't want to hear from
My issue wasn't with users, necessarily. I didn't have much problem unfollowing people with irksome personalities (unless there were in-person social connections). My issue was more that ~half of the stuff particular users posted would be insightful or interesting, and the other half made me feel like I was wasting my precious time on that website. So the problem came down to 1) the means of filtering undesirable content were ineffective or cumbersome, and 2) people often didn't use them anyway. I'm also with you on the teenage girl hate. I didn't mean to perpetuate it by leading in with those overgeneralizations.
The more vocal users tend to be stauchy anti-feminist. Reddit's reputation has been shaped by it's explicitly racist subreddits. I know those subs aren't representative of the entire userbase, but in terms of the overall impression the site makes it's hard liberal on religious issues, moderately conservative on fiscal issues, and strongly conservative on social issues. The same can be said of Tumblr. The majority are apolitical, but the most vocal users are staunchy left-wing.
Anti-feminist isn't necessarily conservative. The left isn't just progressive identity politics, it's also often upheld values like freedom of speech and individual rights. There certainly seems to be a division between the more authoritarian and libertarian aspects of the left, but taking anti-authoritarian positions doesn't necessarily place someone on the right. In past surveys reddit users have identified themselves as politically leftist.
I think terms like 'left' and 'right' can sometimes be pretty subjective in that political philosophies and ideologies are so very complex and intricate that it's hard to get a solid definition of either 'side'. At least for myself personally, I don't see the Reddit-strain of libertarianism as particularly leftist. I think the extent that a lot of people on Reddit go to extol the importance of free speech and individual liberties over and in opposition to pretty well-documented oppression of minorities and women screams right-wing ideology, though hidden it might well be.
See, I think it's a mistake to decide to start defining people based on how you see their beliefs. Those same people who might not go along with considerations of political correctness may also be in support of issues that are most definitely leftist. Welfare, gay rights, reproductive rights, rejection of religious taboo, environmental conservation, shifting more of the tax burden onto the rich, single payer health-care even. It's certainly true that politics in the US is more complex than simply left and right, but you can point to specific issues that tend to be more popular with one side or the other. Bernie Sanders doesn't stop being further to the left than Hilary Clinton simply because he acknowledges the importance of gun rights. At any rate, I'd say the simplest way of determining whether a group is on the left or the right is to take some surveys. Those surveys have in the past shown that reddit is to the left of the US in general. Maybe not to the left of some areas of Europe, but by the standards of the US it's typically been pretty leftist. Maybe it'd be better to ask a series of questions of each individual regarding a bunch of different policies and beliefs and use that to chart where they're at, but to judge people's position on the political spectrum between liberal and conservative based solely on one issue or another is going to mislead you. Especially when it's something as controversial as feminism. A couple years back a poll by Yougov and the Huffington Post showed 82% of respondents saying they believed that people should be treated equally regardless of gender and only 20% of respondents saying they considered themselves feminist. Clearly there's a sizable portion of the population that believes in gender equality but has some criticism of some sort of feminism. All of those people probably aren't secretly conservatives. It's also important to note that supporting a cause doesn't necessarily mean that you want that topic to be treated with kid gloves. You can be supportive of something and still think that jokes about it are funny or that humorless people are taking advantage of that situation to promote their stick in the mud attitude. Like you said, there's a lot more nuance to it than just left/right. Edit: j4d3 if PC meant "respect" I'd say something entirely different. It's cowardly enough to construct a strawman, are you really going to build it in response to someone who you have blocked?
But I feel like Reddit's broader community (not everyone, mind you) ultimately suffers from the age-old idea of just having a full on egalitarian movement without necessarily identifying that it is actually pretty necessary to focus on specific elements of society in a way that directly helps the oppressed. So what I mean is that, for example, I suspect that most people on Reddit or perhaps even those respondents to the poll you cited probably wouldn't agree that feminism is about full on gender equality (with a focus on specifically eliminating the biases and oppression that women face), but would probably think that it's more a case of incendiary rhetoric directed at men, which I don't really think it is in most cases. For example, I love Bernie Sanders, but some of the more libertarian factions on the subreddit supporting his campaign would probably be the exact sort of people he would not even remotely want to associate himself, or his progressive agenda, with. My point is that it's all very well and good to say that you're all for reproductive rights and equality for gender but then to be so vehemently opposed to movements that are dedicated to that very thing on the basis that they are 'PC' or infringe upon free speech and individual liberty is a bit strange to me. Especially when you consider that something like feminism isn't even some 100% unified movement but rather a pretty diverse thing in and of itself. It's like saying "fuck Islam because it is a cult that is composed of a bunch of terrorist misogynists that follow a warlord"; you're reducing a huge ideology into a few buzz-words in the name of some faux-liberalism. And yes, I've actually seen some comments that are very close to that above statement, from users that had otherwise leftist views. That is the sort of area ultimately where you see the right-wing tendencies of certain Redditors crop up, I think: honestly, if you compare what they say to what pundits on Fox News say (i.e, sure gender equality would be great but fuck those loud women trying to fight for it, those guys suck and are way too hostile and PC) I think you'd find a lot of similarities. Yes, it's a mistake to define people based on how an individual sees their beliefs, sure, but my point was that it's very hard to develop a very objective view of the political spectrum. I wouldn't necessarily say Redditors are rightists, not at all, but they have rightist tendencies when it comes to certain topics, in my opinion.
A fun browser extension for conversations like this: PC2Respect."Those same people who might not go along with considerations of treating people with respect may also be in support of issues that are most definitely leftist."
Well, feminism is about gender equality from a very specific perspective on society, namely one that assumes the existence of patriarchy. You don't need to demonize feminism as inherently anti-male to disagree with that concept and thus disagree with feminism's focus or some of the contemporary rhetoric that seems to accompany it. Likewise you don't need to worry about things like 'cultural appropriation' to be anti-racist. It's all well and good if you disagree with people's opinions on whatever, but it's disingenuous to decide that because someone thinks something you don't feel is very liberal they're suddenly a secret conservative even though they're life-long democrats who've always supported liberal causes. You may remember that back in the 90s it was liberals who were defending art and media that was under fire from religious conservatives. That the same sort of hypercritical attitude is coming from left-wing authoritarians rather than right-wing authoritarians doesn't suddenly push those who oppose it to the right. Again, the question here is how much evidence exists that reddit is leaning to the right. Pointing out redditors who oppose authoritarian positions isn't the same as pointing out conservatives.
The concept of patriarchy arose within a certain branch of feminism, and tho it's permeated it's not a fundamental concept to feminism per se. Well, to characterize anyone as liberal, conservative, or whatever is necessarily going to be a generalization. Capitalist libertarians are hard for so many people to grasp because they tend to be "liberal" on social issues and "conservative" on economic issues. Hence, it's useful to have a seperate term to describe them, because there are so many people that can be characterized that way. Maybe what we need is a new term to for people who tend towards what's usually considered to be liberal positions, except on identity issues.feminism is about gender equality from a very specific perspective on society, namely one that assumes the existence of patriarchy.
it's disingenuous to decide that because someone thinks something you don't feel is very liberal they're suddenly a secret conservative even though they're life-long democrats who've always supported liberal causes.
"Left" and "Right" shouldn't be subjective. The Left has been liberal and the Right has been conservative since 1789. The problems of definition come from muddy thinking and misapplication. It's tricky to say that the right is "anti-feminist" when the right predates suffrage. It's trickier to say that feminism is leftist when the earliest feminists were also closely tied with prohibition. HOWEVER it's easy to say that requiring parental or partner consent for abortion is a conservative idea and anti-feminist. Case in point: no one on the planet would argue that Libertarians are leftist. On the political spectrum, Libertarians are so right-wing that they loop back to appear somewhat like anarchists.
Libertarians in the sense of the third party that had Ron Paul as a front runner? I absolutely agree. Libertarian as a second axis of the political spectrum (libertarian/authoritarian as well as liberal/conservative)? Not at all. That second meaning of libertarian, defined by its contrast with authoritarian ideals, can be liberal or conservative.
Reddit has a very severe libertarian, anti-woman, anti-black culture. Overall, reddit doesn't mind gay people. Of course, any individual reddit user might not fit that at all, but the defaults are absolutely littered with overt bigotry directed at a variety of groups, although the one that is conspicuously missing is bigotry directed at gays. Which makes sense, since younger people generally don't view homosexuality the way people over 30 do (the line might be 40, but old vs. young being the key thing.) At any rate, that much bigotry bubbling up to the top of reddit isn't an accident; it is upvoted heavily by a very large swath of reddit users.
Yeah, when it first started to show up I wondered if I had just never noticed it, but now the whole site is liable to have a racist/misogynistic circlejerk completely out of the blue. Seems like over the last 2 years there has been a strong sea change and the site is pretty much unusable at this point.
But are those just loud voices, or are they actually the majority? I mean, if we're talking about reddit as a site we ought to be talking about the users themselves not the impression we get of their amalgamation. We already know that the vast majority of reddit users don't vote or comment, even those that do comment aren't going to participate in most threads. FPH managed to completely dominate the front page with just a few thousand people, relatively little compared to the overall numbers on reddit. Given that, I don't see how we can think we can gauge reddit users' political compasses simply based on what the front page looks like.
A very interesting analysis. I used to be a pretty avid user of Tumblr, but I stopped because 1. People I knew in real life were using it as a soapbox for personal issues and there was all sorts of drama there, and 2. As you mentioned, there was a very, very virulent strain of group-think. I think that second issue is actually becoming a big problem all over the Internet, in a sense. It seems to me that not only are people very willing to fall in line with a certain view (and, bear in mind, I'm a lefty that definitely agreed with a lot 'mainstream' Tumblr thinking, sure) without necessarily critically thinking about it, but also people are very keen on absolutely demolishing others' views in a pretty ad-hominem manner. It's pretty worrying to me actually. I think Hubski is probably one of the better places that I've found where you can have a discussion with someone who has a differing view without it turning into flinging shit at each other, but there's still some of that same condescension to be seen.
Really great breakdown and fairly insightful. I wonder on this thought though. It seems that when sites get overburdened with the mundane and the inane, people who want to avoid that material eventually wander off until they can find some new obscure site to call home. I know when the makeup of the patronage at my favorite bar changed, I hopped from bar to bar until I found someplace new to call home. I've behaved similarly when it comes to websites. At the same time, I think through the filtering and share system, for the time being Hubski will be able to insulate itself from such a problem. With a few exceptions here and there, the site seems to reset itself quite well from Reddit influxes.My prediction is that in the coming years the user experience of the Web will further bifurcate into the quantity-over-quality Stream services like Tumblr, Twtter, and Facebook, and carefully crowd-curated content discovery services like Hubski and /r/DepthHub.