It's actually kind of impressive how the new notes widget manages to add at least one extra click to nearly every common interaction while exposing no new functionality whatsoever.
Here at Tumblr, weāve 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. Weāre 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 Tumblrās 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.Ā
Tumblrās 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.Ā
To guarantee Tumblrās continued success, weāve 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 Tumblrās 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 platformās performance, stability, and quality.
Below is a deep dive into each of these principles.
Principle 1: Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.
Tumblr has a ātop of the funnelā issue in converting non-users into engaged logged-in users. We also have not invested in industry standard SEO practices to ensure a robust top of the funnel. The referral traffic that we do get from external sources is dispersed across different pages with inconsistent user experiences, which results in a missed opportunity to convert these users into regular Tumblr users. For example, users from search engines often land on pages within the blog network and blog viewāwhere there isnāt much of a reason to sign up.Ā
We need to experiment with logged-out tumblr.com to ensure we are capturing the highest potential conversion rate for visitors into sign-ups and log-ins. We might want to explore showing the potential future user the full breadth of content that Tumblr has to offer on our logged-out pages. We want people to be able to easily understand the potential behind Tumblr without having to navigate multiple tabs and pages to figure it out. Our current logged-out explore page does very little to help users understand āwhat is Tumblr.ā which is a missed opportunity to get people excited about joining the site.
Actions & Next Steps
Improving Tumblrās search engine optimization (SEO) practices to be in line with industry standards.
Experiment with logged out tumblr.com to achieve the highest conversion rate for sign-ups and log-ins, explore ways for visitors to āgetā Tumblr and entice them to sign up.
Principle 2: Provide high-quality content with every app launch.
We need to ensure the highest quality user experience by presenting fresh and relevant content tailored to the userās diverse interests during each session. If the user has a bad content experience, the fault lies with the product.
The default position should always be that the user does not know how to navigate the application. Additionally, we need to ensure that when people search for content related to their interests, it is easily accessible without any confusing limitations or unexpected roadblocks in their journey.
Being a 15-year-old brand is tough because the brand carries the baggage of a personās preconceived impressions of Tumblr. On average, a user only sees 25 posts per session, so the first 25 posts have to convey the value of Tumblr: it is a vibrant community with lots of untapped potential. We never want to leave the user believing that Tumblr is a place that is stale and not relevant.Ā
Actions & Next Steps
Deliver great content each time the app is opened.
Make it easier for users to understand where the vibrant communities on Tumblr are.Ā
Improve our algorithmic ranking capabilities across all feeds.Ā
Principle 3: Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.
Part of Tumblrās charm lies in its capacity to showcase the evolution of conversations and the clever remarks found within reblog chains and replies. Engaging in these discussions should be enjoyable and effortless.
Unfortunately, the current way that conversations work on Tumblr across replies and reblogs is confusing for new users. The limitations around engaging with individual reblogs, replies only applying to the original post, and the inability to easily follow threaded conversations make it difficult for users to join the conversation.
Actions & Next Steps
Address the confusion within replies and reblogs.
Improve the conversational posting features around replies and reblogs.Ā
Allow engagements on individual replies and reblogs.
Make it easier for users to follow the various conversation paths within a reblog thread.Ā
Remove clutter in the conversation by collapsing reblog threads.Ā
Explore the feasibility of removing duplicate reblogs within a userās Following feed.Ā
Principle 4: Retain and grow our creator base.
Creators are essential to the Tumblr community. However, we havenāt always had a consistent and coordinated effort around retaining, nurturing, and growing our creator base.Ā Ā
Being a new creator on Tumblr can be intimidating, with a high likelihood of leaving or disappointment upon sharing creations without receiving engagement or feedback. We need to ensure that we have the expected creator tools and foster the rewarding feedback loops that keep creators around and enable them to thrive.
The lack of feedback stems from the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed (āFollowingā), perpetuating a cycle where popular blogs continue to gain more visibility at the expense of helping new creators. To address this, we need to prioritize supporting and nurturing the growth of new creators on the platform.
It is also imperative that creators, like everyone on Tumblr, feel safe and in control of their experience. Whether it be an ask from the community or engagement on a post, being successful on Tumblr should never feel like a punishing experience.
Actions & Next Steps
Get creatorsā new content in front of people who are interested in it.Ā
Improve the feedback loop for creators, incentivizing them to continue posting.
Build mechanisms to protect creators from being spammed by notifications when they go viral.
Expand ways to co-create content, such as by adding the capability to embed Tumblr links in posts.
Principle 5: Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.
Push notifications and emails are essential tools to increase user engagement, improve user retention, and facilitate content discovery. Our strategy of reaching out to you, the user, should be well-coordinated across product, commercial, and marketing teams.
Our messaging strategy needs to be personalized and adapt to a userās shifting interests. Our messages should keep users in the know on the latest activity in their community, as well as keeping Tumblr top of mind as the place to go for witty takes and remixes of the latest shows and real-life events.Ā Ā
Most importantly, our messages should be thoughtful and should never come across as spammy.Ā Ā
Actions & Next Steps
Conduct an audit of our messaging strategy.
Address the issue of notifications getting too noisy; throttle, collapse or mute notifications where necessary.Ā Ā
Identify opportunities for personalization within our email messages.Ā
Test what the right daily push notification limit is.Ā
Send emails when a user has push notifications switched off.
Principle 6: Performance, stability and quality.
The stability and performance of our mobile apps have declined. There is a large backlog of production issues, with more bugs created than resolved over the last 300 days. If this continues, roughly one new unresolved production issue will be created every two days. Apps and backend systems that work well and don't crash are the foundation of a great Tumblr experience. Improving performance, stability, and quality will help us achieve sustainable operations for Tumblr.
Improve performance and stability: deliver crash-free, responsive, and fast-loading apps on Android, iOS, and web.
Improve quality: deliver the highest quality Tumblr experience to our users.Ā
Move faster: provide APIs and services to unblock core product initiatives and launch new features coming out of Labs.
Conclusion
Our mission has always been to empower the worldās creators. We are wholly committed to ensuring Tumblr evolves in a way that supports our current users while improving areas that attract new creators, artists, and users. You deserve a digital home that works for you. You deserve the best tools and features to connect with your communities on a platform that prioritizes the easy discoverability of high-quality content. This is an invigorating time for Tumblr, and we couldnāt be more excited about our current strategy.
You know whatās frustrating? When you pour almost six hours into an artwork and you love it. Then you show it to your twin and she immediately takes an issue to the composition, shows what she thinks is a better way, has to be asked for a positive opinion, and then doesnāt go into detail at all for what she likes. You now donāt feel like the art you did is any much as good as what you felt five minutes ago!
I Always love ideas where Lloyd is the Quiet One and Still the Green Ninja, so that was the initial idea.
Canon stays the same until the gap between hands of time and sons of garmadon, where Lloyd begins to feel like heās given up so much for the world, like his childhood, his father and now his uncle. Yet heās never gotten anything back.
He never really acts on this, still feeling like the other ninja are there for him, and ninjago wonāt ever turn on him, so why should he?
until on a bad day, where he finds himself returning to the lighthouse, and meets a certain nindroid who remembers the events of an erased timeline, where everything went worse.
Hey I made fan art for gilded green. Itās honestly the best fic Iāve ever read
go read it, itās a lu ten survives and gets brainwashed one
top 2 pics-
figuring out how id draw lu ten as Xiaofan(around the time of canon
bottom left- another Xiaofan, to the right Tuan, below him enlai, at the bottom is shirong full art is enlai getting the plans and giving them to long feng
bottom right- Shirong, wu sheng and huang, plus Xiaofan. Full art is shirong brainwashing lu ten
Simon Blackquill on tumblr: āThese new checkmarks are an utter waste of time, and distract that Tumblrās own website has many flaws that simply go ignored by its creators.ā
Uendo Toneido, reblogging it with 4 visible checkmarks already. āLook at my verified alters boy.ā
a collection of apollo justice-related drawings and doobles from bird app suggestions or just from when i decided to draw himb :^] he's just a neat little guy <3 āļøāļø
It's Maclura pomifera, commonly known as the osage orange or hedge apple. It is known to be native only to a small area of Texas and the edge of Oklahoma and Arkansas. Before the invention of barbed wire, it was pruned repeatedly and shaped to make dense impenetrable hedges to contain animals.
The fruits are inedibleānot poison, they're just hard and taste bad.
The wood is super-strong, burns hotter than any other wood, and is ideal for making bows!
Actually I like this idea, we should do that. Here's my fun fact contribution; actual old English, what one could call Anglo-Saxon (as opposed to, for example, Shakespearean English, which a lot of people call old English but is actually antiquated modern English), is a Germanic language, and modern English shares a lot of roots with German because of that. It was also, at one point, written with runes.
My fun fact is that birds donāt stand on one leg to prevent themselves from getting hurt when theyāre struck by lightning, as urban legend states. Itās actually in order to prevent heat loss.
jacobvanloon
vaporwave
turnnoffyourmind
andulkaphoto
izzy806
jbbartram-illu
