Once again it was Hack Week (more than just a day!) at Tumblr!
This is getting repetitive in the best way. A couple of times per year
we slow down our normal work and spend a week working on scratching a
personal itch or features we want as user and see how far we can get
with our hacks. One thing from the last Hack Week in September made it all the way to a new experiment out to some testers: Tumblr Patio!
Here are some of the projects that got built for our most recent Hack
Week in January. Some of these things you may also end up seeing on the
site…
Spoiler text, spoiler blocks, and centered text!
This one is so obvious and amazing, it’s wild we don’t already have
it. For Hack Week, Katie added the ability to select text in a paragraph
to be hidden behind a wall of black that can be revealed with a tap.
This can be super useful to hide spoilers. And even better: whole
spoiler blocks. And while we’re here, the ability to center text!
A plethora of new default blog avatars
We haven’t updated our default avatars in several years. (Some of you may remember this one
from 10+ years ago.) They’re feeling a bit stale to us, so why not
update them? And while we’re at it… make a ton more variations! Paul
from the Tumblr Design team came up with a suite of new default avatars,
using our latest Tumblr color palette. Here’s a look at some of them, but there are actually many dozens more using different colors:
Notifications and emails about engagement on your posts
This one is for the folks on Tumblr who love numbers and their Activity
page. Daniel, @jesseatblr, and the Feeds & Machine Learning team
worked on some new notifications and emails we could send out to people
about how their posts have been doing lately on the platform, such as
how many views they’ve gotten, and by how many people. We already have
this available (and more) when you Blaze a post, but why not open it up
to more people? It’s really useful to the folks who use Tumblr to help
build an audience for their work!
A new way of navigating the web: the Command Palette
Some apps we use a lot have a “command palette” accessible via a
keyboard shortcut for quick keyboard-driven access to different parts of
the platform. For example, Slack and Discord have Command + K to access
their quick switchers to hop around conversations. What if Tumblr had
one? Kelly and Paul built one! Press Command/Control + K on Tumblr and
you can use your keyboard to jump to your blog, Activity, your recent
conversations, search, dozens of places!
As always, stay tuned to the @changes blog to see if any of these hacks make it on Tumblr for real!
Happy 45th birthday to Dean Winchester, and goodbye to Tumblr Live.
In the spirit of how we’ve all come to communicate the news here on Tumblr dot com, here’s this: As of today, January 24, 2024, Tumblr Live no longer exists.
What does this mean?
The Tumblr Live marquee will no longer appear at the top of your dashboards, the Live icon will be removed, and the snooze option will disappear from your settings. You will no longer be able to go live or watch streams.
Questions?
Here’s an FAQ we’ve prepared for any questions you might have regarding your Live accounts and credits. If you have questions or concerns about this decision, email us at [email protected], and we’ll send you some answers.
Thank you to all the streamers who joined us on this journey. We’ve very much enjoyed watching your LEGO building, wildlife streams, and live draws. And happy birthday, Dean.
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.
There’s some press and publications like Verge asking What’s going on with Tumblr. I’m going to answer questions using the “ask” feature of Tumblr here, so everyone can see the answers. You must be logged in to ask, but use the AMA button at the top of my blog or this link.
We’re rolling out the ability to reply to posts as a sideblog across all platforms. Next to the reply input field, you can click/tap on the avatar to change what blog you’re replying as. All blogs are eligible, including group blogs, except for password protected blogs or blogs blocked by the post’s author. This is rolled out to everyone on the web, and for folks with version 31.6 or higher of the mobile apps.
We’ve also updated our “It’s time to update your app” notification banner in the mobile apps, for folks who are using (very) outdated versions. If you see that banner, then you’re using a version of the app that we explicitly no longer support, and it may stop working altogether until you update.
🛠 Fixed
We fixed a bug in Safari that was causing scrollbars to overlap with content in the masonry view of feeds like Explore, if you have your mac’s “Show scroll bars” setting set to “Always”.
We fixed a bug on the Likes view on web that was causing the expanded post to disappear if you went from Grid view to List view.
🚧 Ongoing
We’re aware of an issue in the iOS app that has broken screen reader support for post content. We’re working to fix this as quickly as we can and release a new version of the app with the fix.
We’re also aware of a technical issue that’s been preventing Trending topics from updating in Explore since Friday. We’re working to get those populated again as quickly as we can.
🌱 Upcoming
Nothing to report here today, you monsters.
Experiencing an issue?File a Support Request and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can!
Quick question and like, my bad if you've got 30 identical, much more hostile asks asking the same thing, but is staff going to do anything about trans people's posts getting auto flagged as "inappropriate"? K thnx drink water
We are working really hard to get all this corrected, but as Zandy points out here, it is a bit of a slow process. Hopefully things will start to seem less broken as we make progress. :)
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!
one of the best parts of working at this place is scrolling throughout the day to test and just finding all the cool stuff people bother to share on this little website
