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.
i actually kinda like this but this no longer being apart of the account menu grinds my gears
ALT
ALT
ALTwhy is discord like this
like if you agree
gonna have to agree to disagree with this one
If you write down the results and properly format the paper, it even counts as science!
When I was in college, there was a solid year where our lgbt group did this with two bathrooms at the end of a hall that were used by like, maybe 20 people. They would put up gendered signs and we kept stealing them. And then we started writing random things on the walls INCLUDING full word for word copies of personal ads from the back of 1980′s advocate magazines.
It got to the point where the building management was on a hunt trying to find who was doing this and we had to start hiding our faces so as to not get caught on the security cameras. Our faculty advisor came down to the office one day and was like “do you guys know anything about this” essentially as we’re trying to close a comically full drawer of stolen bathroom signs, and we’re like “no” and they were like “great.”
They never caught us.
i have a very specific memory of a minecraft rendering bug that used to happen on my cracked copy of the game on my dads computer that i just cant seem to find any photos of online but it freaked the fuck out of it it looked like this big ass mass of grainy dark triangles that disappeared when you got close and i only saw it once and it freaked the hell outta me
when i was a wee little boy i was trying to watch cloudy with a chance of meatballs on dvd and when i opened vlc the audio of the movie played but the visuals were a bunch of black and white warbled bars. scared the crap out of younger me and i started crying and assumed that cloudy with a chance of meatballs was haunted and i havent watched the dvd since then
i refuse to close out of onboarding prompts. sorry everyone
elon thinks hes really all that
btw look how crusty this backdrop is
Not people saying “Fandom has always been like this” in that vent post I made. No. It hasn’t always been like this. Fandom has NEVER been like this until recently and if you were in fandom pre-tumblr purge, pre-twitter, pre-netflix boom, pre-tiktok….then you would fucking know it was nothing like this.
We still had the drive to create. We still sold prints and charms and made zines…but it was never like this.
The introduction of streaming, binge shows that drop all at once, tiktok and vine RIP i still love u vine but you were the beginning of a particularly ugly era) creating this bite sized, quick paced ‘content’ era of creation and it bled out into fucking everything else.
Fandoms didn’t die down when the show ended or the season was over. You didn’t mass unfollow artist, writers or moots just because they changed fandoms. There wasn’t this need to please the algorithm in order for your posts to get seen by people and enjoyed.
Fandoms used to last YEARS. Star Trek is literally the oldest running fandom out there and you got people in there that could care less about the new stuff and still have been happily prancing through their fucking fifty year old fandom today. Hell, even SPN after all it’s fuckups and shitshows has a dedicated fanbase STILL creating tons of art and fic.
There is no patience anymore. No calm feeling of taking in fandom and friends at a pace that which doesn’t make you stressed and is still fun.
Do I blame fandom for this? Of course not, but people are complacent with it and start changing their vocab to accommodate and end up making the situation so deep it cant be fixed.
We call Art & Fic Content now, completely stripping the value of what it is to a level of consumerism instead of personal entertainment & community bonding.
Let OP talk, they’re absolutely right.
To illustrate this post by @mayahawkse I would like to visualize to you the difference:
A post in 2023:
A post in 2014:
A zoom out of the same post:
This is what a community looks like.
See how in 2023 almost all of the reblogs come from the OP, from their few hours/days in the tag search. Meanwhile in 2014 the % of reblogs from OP is insignificant, because most of the reblogs come from the reblogs within the fandom, within the micro-communities formed there. You didn't need to rely on tags, or search, or being featured. Because the community took care of you, made sure to pass the work between themselves and onto their blog and exposed their followers to it. It kept works alive for years.
It's not JUST the reblog/like ratio that causing this issue, it's the type of interaction people have. They're content with scrolling and liking the search engine, instead of actually having a reblogging relationship with other blogs in their community.
Anyways, if you want to see more content you like, the only true way to make it happen is to reblog it. Likes do not forward content in no way but making OP feel nice. Reblogs on the other hand make content eternal. They make it relevant, they make it exist outside of a fickle tumblr search that hardly works on the best of days.
If you want more of something, reblog it.
Something I see mentioned often is "I don't have many followers, my reblog won't matter" which is untrue.
First of all, reblogging, commenting and interacting is how you start gathering your own micro community, second of all— you literally do not know how far a single reblog from you could mean in the long run.
For instance, let's say you only have one person reblog from you, and that person only have one person who reblogged from them also, and so on, and somewhere ten reblogs down the line a very large blog reblogs it and boom, the post is getting more and more exposure!
You see, it does not matter if you don't have a large following so long as you cultivate a micro community with the people you do enjoy interacting daily with.
As you can see in the second picture I added, most of the reblogs were between very small groups of people, and occasionally it'll lapse into a large blog that would create a bigger reblog pool. BUT STILL. Saying that you don't have many followers and so it doesn't matter if you don't reblog is UNTRUE.
Even if someone just randomly wanders into your blog one day, it's beneficial for both sides because A. Seeing you reblog content they like might be enough for them to follow you B. They would be exposed to new content creators they didn't know previously and might also follow / reblog from them!
So yes, do not underestimate what your reblogs and words mean, just because you're not 'big' or whatever. It is not how tumblr works!!
P.S IT IS NOT CRINGE TO REBLOG 10 YEARS OLD CONTENT ON TUMBLR. YOU SEE IT. YOU LIKE IT? REBLOG IT. DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU DIG IT FROM THE DEPTHS OF HELL ITSELF. XOXO :'D <3