enoughtohold:

something i’ve been thinking about is how the older, more mature, and better adjusted a person is, the less likely they are to be on tumblr, especially the parts of tumblr that revolve around subcultural drama and “discourse.” obviously, there are exceptions to this. but the general trend stands. this applies to many offline scenes as well.

i don’t mean to attack these communities; i’m speaking from experience and in particular, i want to stress that a community in which most people are struggling or in crisis at any given time is not automatically a “bad” community, nor are its members at fault. it makes sense that many people would leave such a community once it is no longer filling a need for them.

this is just something to take into account. look around your scenes at times and notice whether the people you might need most as mentors or role models are being selected out. whether there are people around you who can give you a sense of perspective and a view of how someone like you might be happy and ok in the future. it may not be possible to change this, but at least you can be mindful of the ways in which your community may be showing you a limited range of experience, even when it can feel like the world.

I think this is definitely true for people who engage in discourse, it’s almost like interacting with the people who read and write comments sections of news articles. That type of environment attracts people who like picking fights and arguing.
Not sure if this is true of tumblr at large. I think the reason why people are on tumblr has more to do with if they are in a socially isolating environment IRL instead of maturity. Thus, there’s a lot of socially anxious people and autistic people who don’t fit into RL social spaces easily, there’s a lot of people who are cut off from their RL environments due to, say, being in a conservative family or a small town and not being cishet, and there’s a lot of people who are in a stage of transition where they just aren’t socializing as much offline. I’ve noticed I use the site less when I’m in a more social environment compared to when I have, say, just moved to a new place or about to move to a new place. There’s a job I’m applying to in the middle of nowhere in Arizona and I think if I take that I will probably be on here a lot when I’m not camping out in the desert just because I don’t think I would fit in well with the RL environment there. I think if I got a job at another university or a large city instead, I would be on here less once I had found another peer group in addition to my online one.