tumblr tagging practices on reblogged posts are like marginalia appended to a text someone is copying out to transmit (can my paleography friends back me up on this) . also when a popular post circulates with various different comments and aditions its like divergent manuscript traditions

the reason this is so interesting to me is because reblogs on tumblr do preserve the post even if the original is deleted, and are sometimes (often) the only way one can access bits of website history.. i honestly think this is why tumblr has a history which its users are constantly aware of - twitter never feels like this, although older platforms like forums do. like communities on twitter have histories (which sometimes feel more like oral histories), but they don’t have this textual material continuity that you get from old old tumblr posts which can still be/are reblogged - because once a tweet is deleted it vanishes from the fabric of the site.