Ever since the abandonment of my old tumblelog, I’ve been receiving some entertaining feedback and questions from former followers and friends, through emails and just talking. It’s always the same sequence, and it goes a little something like this:

1. “Dude, why?”
2. Upon hearing precisely why, “Oh. So, anything new happening?”
3. Upon hearing what exactly is brewing, “Eh, the old zetahydrae was better. Bad move.”

It’s happened often enough now that I felt I’d finally use this new medium to talk about it. Just the fact that I can do this, sit down and write, is something that’s nigh impossible with the tumblelog platform. For the unacquainted, Tumblr is something of a del.icio.us dump with a design, as put by Revista in his abandonment of tumblelogging. It’s not only that that bothers me now; I love del.icio.us. The problem is that Tumblr advertises their platform as “the easiest way to share yourself.” That’s a lie.

It’s not even realistic to think that a series of pictures, links, and reblogged content (which is heavily endorsed by Tumblr) is “sharing yourself.” No, that’s just like someone looking through the history of books you’ve checked out at the library and thinking that they know you. Nothing posted on a tumblelog is original content. Tumbleloggers are a bunch of people sitting on the internet, expending just enough effort to click a button on their bookmarks toolbar and typing in “Awesome, found on Digg.” And through that, you’re “sharing yourself.”

If I, or in the case of the older zetahydrae, the reader, wanted to find links that I found interesting on the web, I wouldn’t visit a tumblelog - why would I? There’s absolutely nothing that a tumblelog adds to the experience of say, sifting through del.icio.us pages, looking through top Dugg stories, or even just mindlessly using StumbleUpon. At least those are personal; you have control over what’s being shoved in your face - you only pursue topics of interest to you. Why, then, is a middleman necessary? To dress up the experience with their vast expanse of XHTML and CSS knowledge? Or to “share themselves” through the three or four lines that accompany each of their tired, regurgitated links?

The only reason for me to visit a blog is to read matters as seen through the eyes of the author, to culture myself by exposing myself to differing points of view; that’s character-strengthening, being able to do that. There’s nothing of this sort being added in a tumblelog; the content is cold, distant, and unemotional - the author has barely a role in his own site. For all I care, it could be maintained by an RSS feed of some dude’s favorite del.icio.us tags. And that’s precisely why I have no problem with del.icio.us or even Pownce, even though the latter doesn’t really have a real use for me yet. Unlike Tumblr, which puts an emphasis on the author, you, and the tumbling community, del.icio.us is plain and dry: bookmark what you like, and look at what a lot of people bookmarked - maybe you’ll like that too. Pownce, on the other hand, emphasizes the opposite end of the spectrum, sharing links with your friends. There’s no real emphasis on authorship; you’re just showing your buddies things you thought were cool. The only reason I’m not active on Pownce is because I don’t have enough friends who are into the whole intertubes thing.

On the subject of emotion and author’s point-of-view, both which make even the most inaccurate and vacuous sites fun to read (see: Valleywag) and which tumblelogs are lacking, I think that most t’loggers have recognized the problem. Many of the most popular tumblelogs — Marco.org and cameron i/o are examples — all have “articles” sections, where longer posts are written. And, oddly enough, these longer posts are much more fun to read than the short little stubs of emotionless links. Even in the traditional tumblelog, the longer posts are the better ones, affording the author’s insight into the topic and a unique outlook on certain issues, but in the world of Tumblr, long posts are bad etiquette. The way the Tumblr dashboard is set up, something like Twitter’s homepage, with multiple subscribed feeds indexed, long posts are large, ugly, unwieldy, and whore your screen real-estate. So, tumbleloggers stray away from them, thereby eliminating anything and everything that makes visiting a site worthwhile.

And that’s why I quit. Because, simply put, I just don’t have the patience to sift through twice-regurgitated news and I don’t feel like maintaining something that’s supremely useless in terms of lasting value. This, this blog, this new platform, allows me to actually expose myself, and that’s why I switched. Want links? Look at the middle column, go read my del.icio.us links. Better yet, go visit Digg. Want spur-of-the-moment, undeveloped thoughts? Look at my Twitter page.

But if you want real content, this is where you should be