In about 30 days’ time, I’ll disable the “Ask” box, put some kind of notice on the front page, and the blog will be left to float. I’ve already got the notice up stating that the blog is dead, as of November, 2013.



This is the second time I’ve quit Tumblr, and I suppose my reasons were more interesting the first time around…





The first time that I quit (only a few months into this blog) was when I figured out that the attitudes within the website would make it impossible for almost anyone to make friends here (I’m only talking about “vegan Tumblr” here… so my generalizations don’t go beyond that subculture).



I was the only one using my real name, and I was almost the only one writing about my real life… everyone else was wearing a mask, and while there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, I realized that the particular type of masquerade going on here makes it impossible for people to connect with each other (even to the minor extent that’s normal in meeting a stranger at a coffee shop and discovering, “Oh, you’re vegan too?”).



When I met people who were writing about their real lives (i.e., a minority), they would be putting information online (front and center) that you normally wouldn’t learn about someone until you’d known them for many years.



What I saw was the intersection of three things that made it impossible for anyone to be real with anyone else: (i) anonymity, (ii) confessionalism, including the public confession of things that might be dangerous to have attached to your real name, and (iii) phony radicalism of various kinds, generally attempts to project an image of who the anonymous person felt they should be (rather than who they really are).

Once people get into that cycle of fronting, it’s hard for them to get out of it. There’s a sort of insuperable combination of the confession-of-sins with a lot of boasting that they can’t back up. This is one aspect of the “special snowflake” cycle of fronting hard, but then collapsing into weeping and self-pity at the slightest criticism.



In general, I don’t think people get stuck in this rut if they meet someone at a coffee shop, or in classes at a university. On the other hand, people generally don’t meet strangers and immediately present them with nude photographs of themselves –nor even with photographs of how their bedroom is decorated.



There isn’t anything morally wrong with knowing what posters someone has on their bedroom wall, but it is weird; knowing that kind of overly-personal detail on day one can be disconcerting to both parties, and I think it does disrupt people forming any kind of “political friendship” through Tumblr (and, most often, the common ground vegans have to work with is political).



It is very hard to move from the “phony intimacy” created by Tumblr to a real friendship. When I meet someone in real life, I may learn a lot about who they are now before learning that they’re an ex-anorexic, ex-drug-addict, what video-games they played when they were children, or what kind of porn they watch (in fact, I don’t know any of this stuff about my friends and colleagues in R.L.!)…



…but the way vegans use Tumblr reverses that equation entirely. The first thing you know is what would normally be the last thing you’d learn (long after gaining someone’s trust).



And, at the same time, people are extremely defensive (and thin-skinned) about exactly the things that would be pretty casual coffee-table conversation (e.g., in politics), perhaps because of the soapbox-confessional format that prevails, and perhaps for other reasons.



As the link on the front page of my blog explains, my reasons for quitting now are more straightforward. I created this blog when I had just moved to France, and I didn’t have any friends in France. Finding other vegans is extremely difficult here, so it was a means to an end.



For a few months, what I tried to do with this blog was to create the type of articles that I would want to read myself. I had already given up on making the type of friends that I was looking for, but I had a big following already at that point, so… as an experiment… why not?



If you know me in R.L., you know that I really am the type of guy who looks up the statistics for meat production in China, and then makes his own graphs to display them (click) –and, believe it or not, I would have done all that stuff anyway if I didn’t have this blog (I would have sent charts of that kind to a few friends as an e-mail attachment instead).



And then, a few days later, I’d wonder how the statistics differed for Thailand, and make a chart for that (click).



That’s not someone I was pretending to be on Tumblr; although it’s unusual, I’m not fronting, that’s who I really am. That one course in social statistics has been most of the value I’ve gotten out of my university education. ;-)



The long story short is, however, that everyone else I meet on Tumblr is hiding behind a mask, so putting this stuff up on the blog is a waste of time even relative to doing the same work, and sharing it by e-mail, and making friends at the coffee shop, or showing up at an academic conference with a stack of business cards.



I’ve taken the time to write this out, because I think that a few of my regulars should re-evaluate why they’re using Tumblr, and for what purpose their online presence exists. If the reality is that your online persona is going to prevent you from making friends (and, perhaps, prevent you from getting a job)… why are you projecting it? I knew the answer (for myself) before I got into this, and it’s the same answer now that I’m on the way out.