2y ago

Tumblr says it’s going to “fix” its “core experience” to appeal to new users

www.theverge.com

“The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use.”

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2y ago

Tumblr says it’s going to “fix” its “core experience” to appeal to new users

www.theverge.com /2023/7/10/23790050/tumblr-user-experience-changes-reblogs-discoverability-creators

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2y ago

VERGE

Tumblr says it’s going to ‘fix’ its ‘core experience’ to appeal to new users

www.theverge.com /2023/7/10/23790050/tumblr-user-experience-changes-reblogs-discoverability-creators

22 comments

They're bringing back the porn?
- It's disturbing how many platforms would be improved by just making that one change.
  
  As the old saying goes, "The internet is made for porn." I'm not crazy about this whole push to mainstream the internet for the sake of advertisers. I don't give a damn about advertisers, and I don't want them to clean up the web the way Ghoul-iani cleaned up New York or people in Nevada sanitized Las Vegas.
- I thought they softened their stance on that already?
  
  Nah they added a "mature" and "sexual" content option for posts but they will still restrict posts to only be visible to you. And it seems that there's no clear line. I've had posted restricted of women in bikinis
I think Tumblr's brand just got ruined. They were known for their nsfw material and now they don't know what else to do with their lack of users.
I don't understand the comment that it's not easy to use? The tagging system is probably the most functional one for discovering fandom or aesthetically grouped content.
The main gripes I gave are with the constant ui pushes to sign up for their app and their half assed way of dealing with nsfw content.
- Easy to use is defined differently for the guys trying to make money off the site. For us, easy to use means easy to figure out the interface and find our friends. For them, easy to use means easy to find top-rated posts and ads.
  "Why don't we have any influencers?" "Well, nothing pushes popular posts to people's feeds." "That's horrible! We need to fix that to attract influencers!"
tl;dr: clueless tumblr staff want to turn the dashboard into a twitter feed. Needless to say, everyone (including myself) is angry about it.
Tumblr was never easy to use; that was my main issue with the site well before its resurrection by Automattic. (Also, the whiners. Oh god, that place was chock full of bleeding heart weenies who tried to out-white knight each other at every turn.)
- But at the same time, it being weird, clunky, and horrendously coded was also part of its charm.
  Things like the porn ban filter malfunctioning and tagging the post announcing it as NSFW, along with a variety of sand dunes was funny because of that.
- It was better for it, including still being able to have custom CSS. When the internet started to replace custom pages with a homogenized feed, it was when things started to go wrong.
Yeah, this won't go well.
Changing the way reblogs and replies works seems like it’s doomed to failure and will just piss off the people who use the site, but I suppose we’ll see.
Yeah I never really got the notes system especially reblogs. It makes sense when a tumblr screenshot gets posted online, it just looks like a reply chain. But when I tried to use the site myself (it was 10 years ago tbf) I never got anywhere and I couldn't find the funny.
Social media sites have a boner for making their users suffer.
Tumblr staff just haven't accepted that Tumblr users are extremely stubborn, anti-algorithmic feeds and well, anti-normalcy. They're a bunch of weirdos and they prefer that. They don't want non-weirdos in their feeds. They don't want any feed but the chronological one.
If they want to make Tumblr easier to use, they could make it easier to link to a dedicated post without logging in, but the last change they made made it so when you click on a user who has reposted it takes you to the user's main feed rather than the post. So I don't think they understand this.
So instead they add all this shit like "Tumblr live!" and commit the unforgiveable sin of suggesting an algorithmic feed and just piss off all their current users.

22 comments