Algorithmic feeds have always existed here, they’re the ones you can visit in sperate tabs and also turn on/off for your main feed in your Dashboard settings. Those are the algorithms that are being improved.
Algorithms will continue until morale improves – but only if you have them turned on 🙂
Here at Tumblr, we’ve been working hard on reorganizing how we work in a bid to gain more users. A larger user base means a more sustainable company, and means we get to stick around and do this thing with you all a bit longer. What follows is the strategy we’re using to accomplish the goal of user growth. The @labs group has published a bit already, but this is bigger. We’re publishing it publicly for the first time, in an effort to work more transparently with all of you in the Tumblr community. This strategy provides guidance amid limited resources, allowing our teams to focus on specific key areas to ensure Tumblr’s future.
The Diagnosis
In order for Tumblr to grow, we need to fix the core experience that makes Tumblr a useful place for users. The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Historically, we have expected users to curate their feeds and lean into curating their experience. But this expectation introduces friction to the user experience and only serves a small portion of our audience.
Tumblr’s competitive advantage lies in its unique content and vibrant communities. As the forerunner of internet culture, Tumblr encompasses a wide range of interests, such as entertainment, art, gaming, fandom, fashion, and music. People come to Tumblr to immerse themselves in this culture, making it essential for us to ensure a seamless connection between people and content.
To guarantee Tumblr’s continued success, we’ve got to prioritize fostering that seamless connection between people and content. This involves attracting and retaining new users and creators, nurturing their growth, and encouraging frequent engagement with the platform.
Our Guiding Principles
To enhance Tumblr’s usability, we must address these core guiding principles.
Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.
Provide high-quality content with every app launch.
Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.
Retain and grow our creator base.
Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.
Improve the platform’s performance, stability, and quality.
Below is a deep dive into each of these principles.
StreamBuilder: our open-source framework for powering your dashboard.
Today, we’re abnormally jazzed to announce that we’re open-sourcing the custom framework we built to power your dashboard on Tumblr. We call it StreamBuilder, and we’ve been using it for many years.
First things first. What is open-sourcing? Open sourcing is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. In more accessible language, it is any program whose source code is made available for use or modification as users or other developers see fit.
What, then, is StreamBuilder? Well, every time you hit your Following feed, or For You, or search results, a blog’s posts, a list of tagged posts, or even check out blog recommendations, you’re using this framework under the hood. If you want to dive into the code, check it out here on GitHub!
StreamBuilder has a lot going on. The primary architecture centers around “streams” of content: whether posts from a blog, a list of blogs you’re following, posts using a specific tag, or posts relating to a search. These are separate kinds of streams, which can be mixed together, filtered based on certain criteria, ranked for relevancy or engagement likelihood, and more.
On your Tumblr dashboard today you can see how there are posts from blogs you follow, mixed with posts from tags you follow, mixed with blog recommendations. Each of those is a separate stream, with its own logic, but sharing this same framework. We inject those recommendations at certain intervals, filter posts based on who you’re blocking, and rank the posts for relevancy if you have “Best stuff first” enabled. Those are all examples of the functionality StreamBuilder affords for us.
So, what’s included in the box?
The full framework library of code that we use today, on Tumblr, to power almost every feed of content you see on the platform.
A YAML syntax for composing streams of content, and how to filter, inject, and rank them.
Abstractions for programmatically composing, filtering, ranking, injecting, and debugging streams.
Abstractions for composing streams together—such as with carousels, for streams-within-streams.
An abstraction for cursor-based pagination for complex stream templates.
Unit tests covering the public interface for the library and most of the underlying code.
What’s still to come
Documentation. We have a lot to migrate from our own internal tools and put in here!
More example stream templates and example implementations of different common streams.
If you have questions, please check out the code and file an issue there.
Hello citizens of Tumblr! If you’ve been on Tumblr for awhile, you’ve probably stumbled upon those Tumblr Labs settings we’ve had for several years now. Originally, Tumblr Labs was meant to be a way for us engineers at Tumblr to experiment in public, in an opt-in way. Experiments inside of Labs have come and gone over the years, and some have even made their way into the product as real features (soon, Reblog Graphs will graduate to “real feature” status), and some have been discontinued.
Going forward, we’re transforming what Labs means to Tumblr. Before this week, there was no group of staff at Tumblr considered “members of Labs”; experiments were built by anyone who felt like it, and they were usually small ideas. Recently it’s become clear to us that we actually do need a dedicated group of people within the company working on prototypes of big ideas, ones that could fundamentally change Tumblr as a platform.
The core values of Tumblr are good and resonate with people. Those core values are probably familiar if you’ve used Tumblr for awhile: we’re different from other social media, we value pseudonymity and co-creation and safe spaces, folks are here for their niche more than what’s trending. However, the product itself doesn’t always resonate with those statements – we want to make it effortless for folks new to Tumblr to connect with those core values. People who love the idea of Tumblr just aren’t able to “get it” quickly enough. Tumblr needs fundamental change to be sustainable and grow more, all without losing those unique, good core values.
But we’re not sure exactly what that change looks like, so we’ve assembled a new team, called Tumblr Labs, to figure it out as quickly as possible. We’re going to be prototyping ideas, some that may feel very familiar and natural if you use Tumblr and other similar platforms every day, and some that feel totally alien and weird to us as heavy Tumblr users. We’ll be testing these ideas in an opt-in basis with people who’ve been using Tumblr for years, and more especially with people who’ve never even heard of Tumblr (a difficult group to find).
More than that, though, we want to practice “working in public” here. The @changes and @wip blogs have been our first steps in that direction, and we think this blog is the next step. Give us a follow to stay up-to-date on what we’re thinking about, what we’re building, what has worked and what hasn’t, and for opportunities to help. We want your feedback as we work, and we hope to invite many of you to try out these ideas in the future so they can be shaped by you — so stay tuned!
Accounts created after May 8th, 2023 have the “For You” tab as the default dashboard tab. Other existing users’ dashboard tabs are not changed. We are also working on making dashboard tabs even more customizable, including adding the ability to choose which tab appears first.
In the Android app, you’ll now see ads in the image lightbox from time to time.
When you’re using Tumblr in a web browser, typeahead search results will show a Live indicator if the blog is currently livestreaming.
Another thing for web users: There’s a new activity filter that allows you to include or exclude notifications about Tumblr Live.
One more web thing: The sample posts on /customize now include NPF posts so you can check how those look in your theme.
Folks who send anonymous asks will now receive a push notification when that ask is answered.
In the iOS and Android apps, we added a button to insert a read more into a post (typing :readmore: + hitting return still works though).
Some folks will start getting access to certain badges (similar to those important internet checkmarks) based on different actions/accomplishments.
On web and Android, we’re experimenting with highlighting tags that are trending, so you might see a different color tag on a post in your dashboard. That means it’s trending on Tumblr! Here’s an example of what that looks like:
We fixed a bug that could sometimes prevent the post editor from being closed if you opened it using the C key. This bug only happened if you were using Tumblr in a web browser.
Another web fix: Unpublished submissions no longer show a note count.
🚧 Ongoing
Nothing to report here today.
🌱 Upcoming
We are continuing to remove the option to use the legacy post editor. Next week, we’ll begin removing the option to create legacy photo posts.
👀 In case you missed it
On web, clicking the reblogged-from blog name in a reblog’s post header now takes you to that blog, not their reblog. Clicking in the empty space in the post’s header, and in the header of each reblog trail item, now takes you to that specific post in the blog view popup. This is one of a series of updates we’re making to the reblog consumption experience across all platforms to make Tumblr more consistent.
Experiencing an issue?File a Support Request and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can!
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