Celebrimbor’s Clickbait: How seven year old tumblr shitposts make for 2026 Facebook discussions

[A new column with rants on things that annoy the living Thangorodrim out of me.]

It is one of a gazillion examples.

In the age of AI slop any attention is needed, irrespective of quality (there is a reason for Gresham’s Law of Social Media (Si apre in una nuova finestra) [Medium]).

Facebook has an extraordinarily high amount of groups with hundreds of thousands of followers simply taking other people’s work without declaring it.

If you see a FB group with 100k+ members your default expectation should be one of wariness. Sad but true.

While trudging through the net for another edition of the Roving Ranger I came across this one:

If you happen to have a Facebook account you can have a look at it, with many people joining in the fray, declaring the “Tolkien scholars” a bunch of… [enter favourite expletive.]

If you have been on tumblr at any given time you can instantly tell this is taken from it. And well, here we are:

Given the fact that there is no “Tolkien Historical Society” nor has there ever been one (afaik!) I was immediately sure this was another example for one of those tremendously successful shit posts (Si apre in una nuova finestra) making the rounds to other parts of the internet.

So, more than seven years after the fact a “DND” group takes something out of context to have… fun.

You might be thinking “Why worry about this? It’s just silliness?"

That is very true.

And trust me, tumblr has brought forth an insane amount of such shit posts. Many of them are wayyyy hilarious.

Unfortunately, there is a difference between 2019 tumblr and 2026 Facebook.

And this example is making this clear - as long as you post anything you are getting something.

And not a single person in that “discussion” mentioned that this was simply taken from somewhere else. Written by someone else.

Other people’s work is free to take and (ab-) use. 🤷

Have a good day!