macmanx:
cyle:
a lot of changes we make won’t be well received by people who have survived the kinda insane ways this site works as-is. that’s the price we have to pay to help make tumblr a growing platform.
i’m sorry, it sucks, i don’t like it either, i’m also someone who’s been using this site for over 10 years and i’m used to the way it’s been working for most of that time. it’s a challenge for me to accept that tumblr isn’t actually working right now for the vast majority of people, who aren’t as vocal as we are.
please do send in feedback, but try to understand that most of what you’re describing is behavior you learned the hard way, and we can’t keep tumblr around if “the way to effectively use tumblr” is learned the hard way.
Just to clarify here, what changed on Web (not the apps yet) is that tapping the blog name in the reblog chain is going to take you to the blog now, not the post.
I get it too, that’s not how Tumblr works, but if you look at everywhere else, that’s how it works over there.
It’s tough to lose this piece of Tumblr’s DNA, but it’s even worse to know that some parts of that DNA don’t make sense to new users. We lose those new users, we lose any funding they would have brought in, and some day, because of that, we’ll lose Tumblr.
But, all is not lost. Tapping the blog name in the reblog chain will now take you to the blog, but tapping any of the white space in the header of the reblog post will still take you to the post.
Can that be clearer? I believe so, and fortunately it’s being worked on.
One step at a time, to a more sustainable Tumblr, where maybe a few more things are less confusing to new users.
Hey @macmanx, thanks for this response. I understand this is still part of a larger change, but I feel like you’re still failing to understand what the actual usecase is here. Tapping on the white space in the header of the reblog post absolutely does not do the same thing that people are talking about.
We’re talking about the ability to see, on our dashboard, the post that the person we’re following reblogged *from*. this post almost certainly did not contain any reblog comments, but it still exists. there is now no way to access it.
This is especially problematic because when users reblog posts, they often add sotto voce comments in the tags and respond to other comments the person they’re reblogging from has added. with no way to see the post someone is reblogging from, there’s no way to understand what those tags are responding to.
Here’s an example at random from my dashboard, literally 5 posts above this one:
Where do I click to see the post by toastling that my friend Estufar is referring to?
In this case, the post was made recently, and it “only” has 237 notes, so I could maybe open up the full notes view and try to piece together which post by toastling she might have reblogged (not a guarantee! maybe toastling reblogged the post three different times, and now I need to figure out specifically which one of those reblogs estufar was looking at—the old link would have made this possible, the new link makes it impossible)
This change isn’t just harder to find, the actual information provided has been removed from the UI entirely and is now accessible only through direct API inspection.
Does that make sense? Do you see how “tapping any of the white space in the post header” isn’t actually solving the problem of being able to go to the *previous* post in the chain? There’s a critical user need that’s been erased with this update, and that’s what’s causing the pain.