hope

• When you like or reblog a post, that counts as user engagement for the person you liked or reblogged from, and shows up in their notifications.  
• If the person you liked or reblogged a post from wasn’t the original poster (i.e., you’re liking or reblogging a reblog), it also counts as user engagement for the original poster, and shows up in their notifications as well.  
• This means that user engagement from your likes and reblogs can potential accrue to two different people, the original poster and the person you liked or reblogged from.  
• Consequently, you cannot “steal” user engagement from someone by reblogging their post.  
• This is one of the very few areas where Tumblr is actually functions more reasonably than other social media platforms.  
• Note that this is only true if you use Tumblr’s built-in reblogging function. If you save someone else’s content to your local device and append it to a new post, you effectively become the original poster from that point on.  
• This means that on Tumblr, “reblogging” and “reposting” are two different things; if you see someone complaining about “reposting”, this is not the same as reblogging.  
• Commenting when reblogging does not affect any of this – unlike, say, Twitter, where quote-retweeting causes user engagement to accrue to the quote-retweet and not to the original tweet – and you can and should do so freely.  
• However, every Tumblr user can see who exactly you reblogged a post from, which functions as a soft disincentive against making inane comments; if you make a dumb comment on a reblog, people who see your reblog may “back up” one step in the reblog chain to reblog a version of the post without your comment.  
• Nobody understands tags, and there’s a fair amount of evidence that how tags work changes periodically and without warning.  
• Tags are a divine mystery.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER ↳ “The Puppet Show” | 1.09