Tumblr Executives Are Very Confused About Tumblr

Ajouté : 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]We here at Tumblr have noticed everyone has very strong feelings about every post on this site being changed to a picture of Lex Luthther from the CW's Smallville with the words, "Lex, get bald tonight over it." To this, we say, "We're listening. We hear you. And we couldn't give a rat's ass what you think. Get out there and start balding."

[00:00:20]Am I looking fresh and stabable? It's the eyides of March on Tumblr.com, a national holiday. You see, we on the best website ever created like to celebrate the assassination of Julius Caesar. Anytime around the 14th, 15th, 16th, you can expect the Julius Caesar assassination party to be bumping on Tumblr. Why do we love the assassination of Julius Caesar at this point? Probably just because it's our thing. It's a fun tradition. Seeing all the old posts and memes, some of which have been going around for almost a decade now, come up on my dash again on that day every year feels very much like a digital version of getting out my beloved Halloween or Christmas decorations once a year. And when I reblog them, I'm decorating my blog for the occasion. When did Tumblr start doing this? Well, interestingly, about a year ago, this would have been a nightmare to figure out. But now, we can use Tumblr's beautiful, gorgeous, new, amazing advanced search feature. And the answer is some of the earliest popular posts date back to 2014, but it really kicked off as the odds of March that we know and love in 2015. You're invited to Julius Caesar's assassination where Curia de Pompeo when 15th of March 44 BC bring your own knives at staff. Please verify me the real fleshy gas Julius Caesar. Soon I will make my speech to the Senate about how I'm dictator in perpetuity and nothing will go wrong.

[00:01:42]So, I would like to be verified on the 15th to make it official. Drives my knife sharpening mobile down your dash.

[00:01:47]Broadcasting vaguely sinister off-key ice cream truck music. More than three years ago, famous Roman Emperor Julius Caesar passed away. People are losing the spirit of the Eides of March. It's not about just stabbing. It's about coming together to stab in groups.

[00:02:02]Tumblr has been stabbing Caesar for a long time, and we love it. But this year, the Eides of March was different.

[00:02:08]As we were enjoying our silly little posts, little did we know it, but a real betrayal was brewing. Coming from Tumblr itself. But before we go down this rabbit hole, a word from this video sponsor, Helix. Helix Sleep makes premium mattresses and bedding customized to fit your unique needs and conveniently shipped straight to your door. No matter what kind of sleeper you are, Helix has something for you. The Helix lineup offers 20 plus unique mattresses. There's soft, medium, and firm options, plus different options for side, stomach, and back sleepers, cooling options. And if all of that sounds complicated, don't worry, because you can take Helix's quiz that'll match you with your perfect mattress. If you sleep with a partner, you can take the sleep quiz together and find something that's a perfect compromise for the two of you. Based on my results, Helix matched me with their Twilight Lux mattress, this beautiful mattress you see right here before your eyes. It is their firmst mattress. I do tend to prefer firmer mattresses due to the scoliosis demons that inhabit my spine.

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[00:04:24]Tumblr staff announces a change. Reblogs in a chain now get their own notes. The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblog.

[00:04:37]Okay, Julia Caesar back to explain. I know this is confusing for non-Tumblr users. So, when you look at a post, you look at it with your eyes, okay? You see the engagement at the bottom. The fact that anyone can reblog and write their own response on a post means that there's tons of different versions of every post, but they all show the same numbers at the bottom. And if you click those, you can explore all the different responses and all of the different evolutions of the post. The whole labyrinth journey of that post is available to you in the notes. The whole weird and wild ecosystem of Tumblr. A really cool feature that Tumblr has actually is reblog graphs. So on every post you can open this graph that maps all of the reblogs of the post and you can see clusters around bigger blogs and where it travels from every source. It's really quite a cool thing to look at.

[00:05:24]What this change they announced on the 16th does is almost turn every individual reblog into its own post by attributing engagement only to that segment of the post. So if you make a post and it gets liked and reblogged by a few of your followers, you see that engagement on the post that is on your blog. But if someone has reblogged it and their followers interact with their reblog of it, that's their post now. You don't see that engagement anymore and those numbers don't get added to your post. So you now have no idea how many total notes your post has. You have no idea what's being said on distant versions of it. Your post might be an absolute banger with 50,000 notes, but all you'll ever see on your blog is a flop post with 12 likes and three reblogs because every other version of it has just been severed. No more beautiful interconnected ecosystem. You are isolated in your corner of Tumblr with your followers only. So this destroys the entire premise of Tumblr basically. And this change will be rolling out immediately. By the way, some users have already been hit with the update. As you can imagine, uh the mood was apocalyptic. This was not like a silly haha hell site is quirky Tumblr [ __ ] up. This was like bad bad. I found out about this after I had tucked myself in for the night. You planning to soothe myself to sleep scrolling on tumblr.com.

[00:06:46]And let me tell you, I was not soothed.

[00:06:49]I was not soothed. I fell asleep that night thinking, "Oh [ __ ] this is like actually the end. This is this is it.

[00:06:57]They destroyed it. They nuked it." And for like what reason? because the current system apparently doesn't give enough credit to people who write great reblogs and instead gives all of the glory in the notes to the OP. I don't think that's a real concern of Tumblr users. Firstly, what are we catty influencers? Are we slapfighting about who deserves what portion of the post's engagement for why, so that we can negotiate sponsorship deals for our Tumblr blogs? No. No one is No one is doing that. Tumblr users know that when we see a really high note count on a post, it's probably great because it's a conversation between different people.

[00:07:36]You know, the reblogger who kind of steals the show is not forgotten in comparison to the OP. And now you've solved this problem by making it much much harder to have silly stranger interactions and weird conversations on Tumblr. You have ensured that that great post is probably never going to exist in the first place.

[00:07:55]Mice in your home now get their own doors. A door is one of the things that makes a building unlike any other structure. All the doors in buildings are intended for human use, no matter which species actually enter and exit.

[00:08:10]We want to keep encouraging crossspecies interactions and give the smallest members of our communities the recognition they deserve. Soon you'll be able to see, smell, and hear the mice in your home, and they will be able to see, smell, and hear you in return. Each mouse will have its own door instead of one large door intended to accommodate all visitors. And yes, you'll be able to welcome multiple mice through a single door. If a door falls into disuse due to illness, injury, or death, another mouse will be placed in your home. You won't lose mice just because they die. past mice will stay in your home, including corpses. Removing all of those would be a lot. Obviously, Tumblr users are going to be joking even during the apocalypse.

[00:08:57]But people also wrote a lot of really thoughtful, in-depth posts detailing why this is, and I am not exaggerating, the worst idea in the history of Tumblr updates, like ever. The system rewards accounts that have already established a large following at the direct expense of smaller accounts that actually produce the content. It transforms reblogging from a method of sharing into a method of acquisition. The platform is transforming a collaborative ecosystem into a standard social media feed where the person who posts the content last, not the person who made it, reaps the rewards. One of the things that makes Tumblr great is that follower counts aren't visible and don't matter that much to people. And yes, bigger blogs have always had the power to elevate posts to larger audiences, but I think it was good for the the ecosystem in the community that that wasn't quite visible or obvious in the numbers. Whereas this change makes having a lot of followers much more obvious and a much bigger deal because if you're the big blog, your version of the post has all the engagement tied to it. Even if all you've done is add lol or cool. When I was posting about how [ __ ] up this is, I had some passive aggressive people show up in my inbox saying, "Well, you're going to be fine because you have a lot of followers, so it's not going to change your experience of Tumblr that much." If all I gave a [ __ ] about was validation from followers. Don't you think I would be on Instagram or some [ __ ] I love scrolling through my notes on a Tumblr post and seeing that it has traveled far enough that people are just referring to me as OP cuz they don't know. They don't know who I am. I'm anonymous. Now, the fact that post notes as they have been since the beginning of Tumblr have that ability to connect people is that's like the whole point.

[00:10:41]Also, with this change, artists, writers, other creators are going to see the engagement numbers that they're used to plummet overnight. And guess what?

[00:10:50]That's going to be depressing for them.

[00:10:52]It's going to cause another mass exodus of creators from this garbage place when it becomes impossible or at least a lot harder for them to keep track of who's enjoying their work. What kind of conversations are happening around it?

[00:11:03]And then what if there's people sharing their work around who don't like it?

[00:11:07]This is going to make it so much harder to track the source of harassment campaigns. March 16th, 7:04 p.m. It's very clear that you all have strong feelings about Tumblr and about this change. We hear you. The passion people have for how Tumblr works is one of the things that makes this place special. As this rolls out over the next few days and you explore it, we'll keep reading your replies and reblogs. So, please keep sharing your questions, concerns, and ideas. Oh, and did people ever tell them? Oh, THEY GOT TOLD.

[00:11:39]Tumblr is like our elderly dog. And when she makes an especially scary cough, we apparently think, "Oh god, it's the big one." What we wanted, boops, but with knives for the eyes of March. What we got? The worst UI change in the history of Tumblr. What we wanted, something to celebrate the assassination, the betrayal, a knife in the back. What we got? Uh, a betrayal. A knife in the back even. Well, okay. When you put it like that, I guess you deserve all the notes on my post. Looking back into the history of my [ __ ] staff tag, because today's big announcement has me stewing in anger, and I encountered a change from a while back where they removed profile pick for some dumb reason, and the uproar was loud enough to get the decision reversed. So yeah, send those feedback tickets. Make a fuss. They've reversed course before. No reason they can't do it again. It's true. There are multiple examples of Tumblr staff making changes and the backlash being bad enough for them to reconsider. By the morning of March 17th, there was almost 200,000 angry comments on the post and we had broken Tumblr's support page form. I was guilty. I did link the support page form and make it my pinned post. Does anyone want to hold hands until we feel a little braver? The reblog map is us holding hands, by the way. We are each other's night sky. No one is alone here. The night sky continues to get brighter. There's always people here for you. Made a painting of all of us holding hands. New piece called Artists Love the Update.

[00:12:58]When yet another stupid update gets rolled out, although without the spirit of communal posting, now it's more like this.

[00:13:05]March 17th, 4:04 p.m. It has been 30 hours since the update was announced. We rolled out a significant change to how notes work on reblogs, and the reaction has been strong. We're not going to pretend otherwise. First things first, we're reversing the change. Your feedback in comments, emails, and especially reblogs made clear that the roll out created problems we needed to address before moving forward. In the words of my own Tumblr post, I think, holy [ __ ] we actually did it. This is good. This is like really good. They are they are still capable of listening to feedback, and we got to give them credit there. Yes, we we did do the online equivalent of rioting for 30 hours, posting about almost nothing else, but how much this sucks and leaving hundreds of thousands of angry messages and breaking their support page. Yes, we did succeed with a little bit of violence in our hearts. You may recall that when I did my investigation of why Tumblr ads are so weird, the answer ended up being because somehow WordPress users are even weirder than us. I interviewed a former Tumblr employee by the username of Srigs. He worked there for a few years in the Yahoo ownership era, which is a while ago now, but he still understands the way Tumblr works on the staff side of things a lot better than a bunch of flailing, panicking users. On March 17th, as he found out about this update, he wrote, "Lmao, uh, it's all fucked."

[00:14:21]So, that's good. That's encouraging. He also wrote a lot more than that, and it was interesting. So, I decided to reach out again and see if he was interested in discussing how and why this might have come to be perceived as a good idea inside of Tumblr when it is in fact the worst idea.

[00:14:39]>> I was there when they got rid of replies and then put them back. So, kind of a similar situation. They were looking at the number of people who actually use replies and was like a low singledigit percentage. The rationale was like nobody's really using replies. Let's simplify the interface. Let's simplify the codebase. And immediately this response was horrible. Yeah, if I like think about it like how I use replies now, like I think maybe I'll reply to maybe like one out of every 250 posts I see. Maybe less. And so of course that means I have like less than a 1% engagement, but it doesn't mean I don't use replies. That was where part of the disconnect came from. They just looked at the numbers. They didn't think about like the use case. Yeah, they put them back and it was like, okay, lesson learned. It goes to show that there are just so many ways to use Tumblr because there are so many features and such a weird combination of features. Do you have any theories about like the thought process behind this recent update?

[00:15:34]>> I even thought of the same exact idea once while I was working at Tumblr and I like brought it up as a question like, "Hey, why don't reblogs work this way?"

[00:15:41]And I got an explainer. I was like, "Okay, actually, yeah, that would not not be a good idea to do this. Um, it would be completely up uprooting exactly how how Tumblr posts work." I I can just imagine that like somebody had an idea probably it might have been even very similar to my own where they asked the question why doesn't it work this way and now that there's only 12 people left you know really working at Tumblr and nobody had a good answer somebody like a product manager who is not like a Tumblr user they look at it in a different way and are trying maybe with good intentions to improve the experience they have these strategies in their head of like oh we can get more users in if we simplify Tumblr and they just look at other social networks and and say, "Oh, well, you know, on Twitter, did they do this, so let's do it that way because it's more familiar." And it's a really reductive way of looking at it. Maybe part of the reason why people come to Tumblr is because it doesn't work like Twitter. And they thought this will be great. You know, people will now now when they reblog something and they they post a hot take on another post, they'll get all the notes that they deserve.

[00:16:42]I've been in like a scenario where I reblog something and I add something funny to it and that ends up being like the most reblogged version of the post is with my comment on it and I never thought, "Oh, damn. I wish I got those notes. I wish I got >> like Tumblr notes don't mean anything."

[00:16:56]And that's why Tumblr is fun.

[00:16:58]>> They don't If you get a bunch of attention, if you get a bunch of notes, you just want to delete the post.

[00:17:03]>> Yeah.

[00:17:04]>> Has a bunch of notes. Luckily, ages ago, they added the ability to like mute notifications on a post, which has been I use it all the time. Tumblr cloud is an annoyance and nobody wants it.

[00:17:14]>> You know, it goes back to why Tumblr is hard to understand for these product teams. Why they don't understand Tumblr?

[00:17:19]Like, you know, why don't people want notes? It's because it's just like it's different. People don't care about like ratio here. Like, you're never going to get a sponsorship or anything by getting a bunch of notes on a Tumblr post. The notes are they're devalued. Like, a currency gets like really devalued and it costs like $1 million to buy a loaf of bread or something like that. That's what notes are. They're just worth nothing. If there was like a currency conversion exchange for like notes between like Tumblr and Instagram and Twitter and stuff, like nobody would be buying Tumblr notes.

[00:17:48]>> No, no. In the case of this recent update, in the case of the replies thing, like staff is actually open to feedback from users. And I don't know, that's just another thing that makes Tumblr really unique. So, I'm curious, how would you characterize the relationship between Tumblr users and staff since you have been on both sides of that? It's hard for me to say how it is right now, but when I was there, there was a core group of people dedicated to understanding Tumblr, not because they were tasked with doing it, but because they genuinely loved using Tumblr. There were some misses in decisions and misunderstandings, but it was from a place that was like genuinely trying to like improve the environment.

[00:18:28]And so I think that's why that's why Tumblr would respond to feedback. It is good to see that um they will respond to push back even now with their current skeleton crew.

[00:18:37]>> You've probably seen a various Tumblr upheavalss over the years, beef between staff and users and various updates and it feels like Tumblr users are just perpetually upset about changes and it feels like there's always something. But to me, this felt like probably one of the most extreme backlashes from the Tumblr user base I've ever seen. Would you agree with that?

[00:19:01]>> Yeah, that was it was pretty strong. It was the one of the more strongest ones.

[00:19:05]Well, it's because they changed something so fundamental.

[00:19:08]>> Yeah.

[00:19:09]>> Have I seen worse? Um, we changed how reboggs look and that was really funny because it was for the better, but this there was so much backlash to it.

[00:19:19]>> There was backlash against that.

[00:19:21]>> Oh, it was huge.

[00:19:23]I wish I could remember these specific arguments, but there were a lot of people like very passionately arguing how this was a terrible change. It was it was baffling for me to see because this was one of the first times where I was like, "Wait, no, this is an objectively good change." Eventually died down and I think I've seen posts where people were saying, "Remember when we got really mad when they made reblogs way better?" In retrospect, people felt stupid for getting mad about that. Now, there's no getting around the fact that Tumblr users have always been massive cryb babies about changes to the site.

[00:19:54]Every time staff does something stupid, we bring out the heritage posts complaining about changes made in 2013 to, I think, kind of comfort ourselves and remind ourselves that this is an eternal cosmic struggle. There's this staff post that just says, "We [ __ ] up." And I'm pretty sure this is a relic of the editing other people's posts era.

[00:20:12]They didn't actually write this, but every time they [ __ ] up, we get this post out and we ping pong it around our blogs all over again. Like, we're dragging their corpse behind our chariot, and it is cathartic. And I think I reblogged the Sananara, you wee shits one like three times in the past month, which is how you know it's going really good over on Tumblr. Anyway, I'm trying to get around to the point that we got to remember that change is not necessarily inherently bad. It has been proven many times that Tumblr can be improved. The advanced search feature is great. I dreamed of such a thing for so long. Do you do you remember when long posts looked like this? Do you remember when we had fan mail instead of normal DMs? The porn bots are still around, but they're not nearly the plague of locusts that they were 10 years ago. Tumblr was not this perfect paradise in the old days under Daddy Karp. In fact, it was kind of broken in a lot of ways. But updating it has always been a really rocky road because changes tend to be really hit or miss because the people at the top just don't quite understand the product that they own. According to an article that touches on the tension between Yahoo executives and Tumblr staff, one executive walked into one team meeting about Tumblr, saying the popular blogging platform was going to be the new PDF. It didn't make any sense, the employee recounted. We'd walk away scratching our heads. What does Tumblr is going to be the next PDF mean?

[00:21:35]>> The devs were working on the new post format and we regularly abbreviated it NPF. This is when we were changing Tumblr from having distinct types of posts and obviously when you click on create new post it asked for a type still but before you were locked into that type like a photo post was a photo post and a text post was text only. new post format. The idea was like, okay, we want to get rid of these like, you know, locked in post types and we want you to be able to post anything you want, you know, compose a post from different types of things. Content in a post gets divided into blocks and each of those blocks are a type. Whenever you have to do something big like this, like a big change like this, you got to you got to get the higherups to buy into it. There were meetings about like new new post format. What is new post format? Why are you changing it? You know, he had to explain this to people who who owned Tumblr but didn't know how it worked.

[00:22:24]Some Tumblr engineers were explaining it explaining new post format to a director. They were saying stuff like NPF and new post format. They're getting technical and I think someone maybe use like a word processor or something as like an example. And the director from Yahoo, he responded, "Oh, okay. I get it." Like, you know, Tumblr could be like the next PDF, thinking NPF is like a file extension. And >> this is this is a better explanation than I expected. This actually makes sense kind of.

[00:22:54]>> You tried you tried to understand it. A few gears turned in your head, but it wasn't quite ex what we're trying to explain here. That's where that quote came from. And he was thinking it's like I don't know some groundbreaking work that is going to like revolutionize like file like like instead of like sending a report as a PDF, you're going to be sending a Tumblr post instead. I guess that's what he thought. So, he left that room happy and we were given the the go-ahhead to proceed with this project. So, that's all that mattered.

[00:23:20]>> I know the last time we talked you were saying how there's at this point there's got to be an expiry date on Tumblr. We just don't know what it is. It's not working out really. No.

[00:23:30]>> Um, for the people who own it, although the current Tumblr overlords seem to understand it a little bit better than PDF guy. Um, but it's like nobody who owns this thing seems to be able to get their head around why it's good. And eventually that's probably going to cost us Tumblr. Do you have any thoughts on that? As of now, >> I don't I still like don't know. Like I people will ask me like, "Hey, how much longer does Tumblr have?" And I I genuinely don't have a clue because it's it's really just up to automatic and how long they want to keep spending money on it. I don't know when if the day is coming. We can only presume it's it's sooner than it was yesterday.

[00:24:07]>> So the people who own Tumblr don't fully get Tumblr. it's a massive burden and a financial flop, etc., etc., but they haven't pulled the plug yet. And I think that's because they know that there's that even they know that there's something there. Like people are so crazy and passionate about Tumblr and there's got to be a way to extract value from that, right? Somehow they think and these are the moments that prove how much the user base cares about Tumblr.

[00:24:36]Maybe this has been some kind of a lesson that they should work more closely with users on changes, but also what does that even mean? How would that even work? Which users are we listening to? Cuz I've seen plenty of bad takes.

[00:24:50]I've seen posts going around suggesting good Tumblr improvements that users actually want that staff should listen to. And I'm like, ew, these ideas are [ __ ] TOO. I DON'T WANT TO BE ABLE TO emoji react to Tumblr posts. Staff thinks this place needs to become Twitter. My mutualin-law, Rebecca, thinks it needs to become Discord. I'm slapping everyone's hands away. In conclusion, I don't know. I don't know how Tumblr digs itself out of this hole.

[00:25:15]I don't know if there can be a version of Tumblr that is both profitable and still has the Tumblr stank on it. I'm just some guy dressed as Julius Caesar in my living room. Anyway, that's been our update on the impending mortality of my the only website I enjoy going on.

[00:25:31]Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you in another strange very very soon, my friends.