Another idea: Communities on Tumblr

For a while now folks have asked us for better ways to connect with other people who share similar interests. We’re listening, and at Labs we’ve been looking into fulfilling that need, Tumblr style.

Introducing Communities, a new place to connect with others on Tumblr:

Here in Labs, we’re working on big ideas that could transform how Tumblr is used, while keeping that Tumblr vibe alive. You can see one of those ideas above. We’re calling it “Communities”, a new dedicated space on Tumblr for people to share and discuss all the content they love. Communities can cover topics like your favorite show, artist, movie, video game, your school, your board game group, friend group, big or small, whatever you want.

Each Community has their own semi-private safer space away from the regular dashboard where you can interact with other Tumblr users who share the same interests and passions as you. There are moderators and members (you!), rules, and privacy settings. Each community has its own feed of posts from members, separate from your Following and For You feeds. Interactions within community spaces stay there and replies will work more like a traditional comment section. Folks will be able to reblog posts into a community, but not out — at least not yet.

We’re very excited for you to try it, and help define the best path forward. What we have is a prototype to help us validate the idea, but there’s still plenty of questions that need answering. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be reaching out to people across Tumblr, and the internet at large, to try our prototype. Based on the feedback we get, we’ll iterate on the idea to see what resonates best with all of you on Tumblr.

If this sounds interesting, please like, reblog, or reply to this post, and we’ll invite you to beta test this feature when we roll it out to a wider Tumblr audience, as a little perk for following the Labs blog.

Stay tuned for more!

A peek behind the curtain at [tumblr] keeping you safe from DMCA trolls.

Grand Central water tower, Johannesburg, constructed in 1996, designed by GAPP Architects.

(Phaidon)

Ah, the good old ice cream cone

Fuck I’m at a fencing tournament and literally a minute after I reblogged this my dad told me that he talked to the point people and I’m probably going to win a medal.

BURN BAGEL BURN

OH WHY NOT?

I need to follow up to say I reblogged this last night, and this morning I got some of the best news of my life, like, a life dream come true news thing.

Bagel what are your powers

FUCK, I though it was just another lucky meme but LISTEN. Since a week ago I was waiting a phone call to confirm me if I got a job or not in my university. I reblogged this yesterday’s night “just for fun and because I don’t want any bagel to be mad with me”, and today’s afternoon, while I was losing my time as always, the professor I was supposed to work with called me and asked me for my personal information to start working with her.

THE BAGEL POWERS ARE WAY TOO MUCH FOR THIS WORLD

I GOT A JOB THE DAY AFTER MY QUEUE POSTED THIS THE FIRST TIME AND I JUST REALIZED IT WHEN I SAW IT AGAIN HOLY GOD

The bagel hasn’t let me down yet!

I got a job offer after reblogging the bagel. Believe in the bagel!

Worth a try lol

i could use some good news or even a good girl 

Go lil bagle! Show me your power!

Okii then!

THIS IS THE FIRST THING ON MY BLOG

I GOT ASKED OUT FOR THE FIRST TIME AFTER I REBLOGGED IT

Ugh I hate superstitions… … not that it stops me, of course

A new way to navigate Tumblr

If you use Tumblr on a web browser, you might have noticed us testing a brand new navigation on your dashboard in the last month. Now, after some extensive tweaks, we’ve begun rolling out this new dashboard navigation to everyone using a web browser. Welcome to the new world. It’s very like the old world, just in a different layout.

Why are we doing this? We want it to be as easy as possible for everyone to understand and explore what’s happening on Tumblr—newbies and seasoned travelers alike.

Labels over icons: When adding something new to Tumblr in the past, we’d simply add a new icon to our navigation with little further explanation. Turns out no one likes to press a button when they don’t know what it does. So now, where there’s space, the navigation includes text labels. Since adding these, we’ve noticed more of you venturing to previously unexplored corners of Tumblr. Intrepid!

What’s already been fixed? Thanks to feedback from folks during the testing phase, we’ve been able to make some improvements right out of the gate. Those include returning settings subpages (Account, Dashboard, etc.) to the right of the settings page instead of having them in an expandable item in the navigation on the left; fixing some issues with messaging windows on smaller screens; and streamlining the Account section to make it easier to get to your blogs.

What’s next? We’re looking into making a collapsible version of this navigation and improving the use of screen space for those of you with enormous screens. We’re also working on improving access to your account and sideblogs.

That’s all for now, folks. For questions and suggestions, contact Support using the “Feedback” category. Please select the “Report a bug or crash” category on the support form for technical issues. And keep an eye out for more updates here on @changes.

Hello, Tumblr. Labs division here!

Back in June, we announced our comeback as a new team that would imagine big ideas for Tumblr—and would build them in public (aka with you).

Today we're very excited to announce our first failure. The first experiment we want to loudly, publicly admit didn’t work. We’re pretty excited about this because trying and failing are a big part of learning.

A little background

A few months ago, we ran interviews with lots of people on Tumblr to get a better sense of what works and what needs to be better. 

Among other things, we heard that people discovering (or rediscovering) Tumblr really struggle to understand how to make it work for them. They sometimes don't know how to follow the right blogs to curate their dashboard, or how to use likes, replies and reblogs to interact with a particular fandom. 

And that's just the tip of the iceberg, really! Some might be lucky and have friends to teach them, but many come here to find friends in the first place, and leave feeling lost and overwhelmed.

So here at Labs we're working on ideas to help people discover what makes Tumblr a unique corner of the internet, making it easier for them to find belonging here.

Our (failed) idea

Our first idea was to simplify certain parts of our interface, thinking through each element and putting what is important to you front and center. We called it "Mini"—mostly because it was a cute name.

We started work on the post interface first, because that's the most important part of your experience on Tumblr, and we wanted to improve some of the problems there.

Our goal was to make labels and actions on posts easier to differentiate, and make each post the same height, so diving into a long post is a choice. To achieve that, we designed a new header, a new footer with separate actions, and a mini version of the post:

As we started to build it, we realized that scrolling through the dashboard after the changes… didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like Tumblr anymore. But we didn’t want to make a decision based solely on our own gut feelings… we needed to ask the Tumblr community. 

An essential part of how we're working in Labs is speaking to people who use Tumblr (and those who don't use it, but could love it) pretty much on a daily basis. So we showed them this idea, and their response was indifferent at best, and confused at worst.

We learned that it's hard to limit the height of a post without sacrificing the magic of reblogs, and that loss was too meaningful for us to pursue this any further. So we're putting it in the trash.

What's next

So Mini didn’t work out! That’s okay. We’ve learned a lot. While minifying posts might not be the answer, there were parts of the idea that worked, and you might even start to see some improvements being tested from what we learned. We’ll see where that goes!

We're working on other ideas at the same time, and some of them are getting a lot of love from people in research. So the next time you hear from us, we'll hopefully have something more successful to share—stay tuned!

With love, Labs division

I need people to internalize that these two things can be true simultaneously:

1) There is a moderation problem on Tumblr that is disproportionately harming trans people.

2) The harm against trans people on Tumblr is not because staff is comprised of secret terfs, but because there is an overall lack of resources to do the moderation as thoroughly as it needs to be, considering the sheer massive amount of posts that are added to Tumblr per day. There are not enough people to look at everything manually.

Curious because this is the Boring Nerd™️ website apparently so I'm interested to see if that started young.

Don't count instances where you didn't get caught, I want to hear about the stuff you did that was stupid and blatant and had repercussions.

i got three day in-school suspension once for doing a very fun prank. i showed up to the place for suspension, a little room with a gruff teacher and a handful of other students, and sat down and asked “what am i allowed to do?” and he said, “your homework, or read, or stare at the wall”.

i was shocked. “i can just read? instead of being in class?” he said yes. “this is awesome!”

i proceeded to read the lord of the rings trilogy cover to cover in those three days, best time in school ever. felt like a paid vacation. kinda wanted to get suspended again.

I once got a week of after-school detention (and failed the class as well) for “refusing to participate in a group homework assignment”.

Except I never refused to participate, I was completely and utterly unaware of the assignment since I was in hospital for a week, followed by 3 weeks of bed rest after having knee surgery, and I was never assigned a group.

"please buy crabs so that Tumblr doesn't have to implement changes we hate to become profitable" right, let me explain something about capitalism.

Tumblr didn't change course because they need the cash and are down on their luck. they did it because corporations want growth.

and that desire for growth is gonna be the same whether they have negative infinity money or positive infinity money. a corporation seeks money and growth.

if Tumblr suddenly became profitable after announcing these changes, it's not even that it would send the wrong message, although it would.

it's that Tumblr wouldn't be taking care of us better if only it weren't for the cruel realities of the world. it's a subsidiary of a corporation. it doesn't care.

it's still going to keep the changes that it thinks are profitable, and ignore changes it thinks won't be. Tumblr is not our friend, it is a website we use, and it wants to profit from us regardless of if that's in our best interest and regardless of if it has "enough" money. that is the relationship. don't get it twisted.

These posts make me so sad. As someone who has worked at Tumblr as a developer for over 8 years and been through 2 acquisitions, I hear your frustrations but we are not some evil mega corporation harvesting your data and selling it to the highest bidder.

Unfortunately as it stands the company still doesn’t make enough money to cover costs, and is losing millions per year to keep functioning. The only main source of revenue is ads right now, and yes we know how you feel about them. We all use Tumblr and the internet too and all share the same views of ads. But that’s the reality we live in right now, people won’t pay for the content itself so that leaves ads or something else.

We are trying out different monetisation strategies, maybe some will work maybe they won’t. We are also trying out new feature ideas to see what resonates and what doesn’t (no we are not removing chrono dash, no we are not removing reblog trails). We need more people using Tumblr to grow the ecosystem (and view more ads ;)

In order for Tumblr to become a sustainable business model it HAS to make enough money to cover costs at the bare minimum. Running this platform requires a huge amount of computing power, storage, bandwidth, maintenance, support, etc, and that’s just to keep the lights on.

We want to build features that our users like and use, and we want to fix the things that are broken/don’t work as well as they should. Truth is some of the problems ARE hard to solve but we are trying. If only folks knew what our support and safety teams have to go through to keep the bad stuff out, as well as responding to user feedback and administering support requests maybe they'd change their tune a bit.

We DO hear your complaints, but we have to prioritise working on things that are going to help ensure Tumblr stays around for a long time.

If you want to help with the longevity of our hellsite then supporting things like crab day would go a long way to helping us move in the right direction.

I hope this post helps clear some things up.

i’m going to keep it real with you tumblr userbase… if we don’t want tumblr as we know it completely ruined you’re probably going to have to flood tumblr on the app store with 1-star reviews. we need to make their ANALYTICS hurt. we need to make management scared. we need to explain in those reviews exactly why we are mad. say what we don’t want changed (or do want changed back). i am so serious.

Here is a handy dandy graph for you!

“Golly gee, lets make this barely surviving website struggle more, Im sure that will fix things, and not result in shutting down”

Fucking hell how do you guys get so butt hurt over UI improvements. Notthing of substance has changed about tumblr you guys. Reblogs, asks, submissions, no character limit, mix of text and image, dashboard, userbase, these, are what tumblr tumblr. Not what shade of blue the logo is.

They have feedback tickets. If you have criticism to give, use those.

Yes thank you for saying this. 1 star reviews hurt Tumblr in the long run and make it harder for us to continue working on this hellsite. Please email support with issues don’t 1 star the app.

Interested in participating in a Tumblr user research interview?

We want to hear from you! Take our quick survey screener for a chance to participate.

Darina Muravjeva, Hole

me kindly asking you to review my pull request which only contains changes to legacy code nobody understands anymore

So, basically every day working on Tumblr?

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