Conversations on Tumblr aren’t like conversations anywhere else. You can’t just leave a comment on someone else’s post. You have to bring that post, wholesale, over to your own blog, before adding your piece to the bottom of it. Good reblog commentary, in any context, sets off a whole new cycle of reblogging, sending a whole new set of conversations rolling around Tumblr, all of them picking up new comments as they go. It’s like a Katamari.
Transformative commentary in a reblog can completely change the meaning of a post. Old posts are rediscovered, already-weird posts get transcendentally weird.
But there were oddities with the way this commentary was presented.
These blocks of content get smaller as the conversation grows, which in turn increases the distance between the names of the users and whatever they said. It eventually makes the whole thing tricky to figure out—especially in the mobile app, where most people use Tumblr. If you enjoy someone’s commentary midway down a deep reblog tree, you probably aren’t going to follow that thin gray line back to the top of the post to find out who said it. Worse, deep conversations were being pushed completely off the post, effectively shutting them down.
There are charms to that chaos, but ultimately it can make Tumblr hard to approach for new people, and leaves posts vulnerable to being consumed by their own popularity.
So, how do you bring clarity to the reading experience while maintaining the constructive sensibility of reblog conversations? Turns out, a solution to this “who said what?” problem has existed since the creation of online chat. Simply listing the comments one after another was the first way it was done on the Plato Talkomatic, the grandfather of online chat, and it remains the clearest and easiest to read.
Initially we tried preserving the indentation of the original design by insetting the stack in a frame.
Trouble was, it meant that we were losing a tremendous amount of space for people to play with in the context of the reblog. Particularly on small screens, where space is already at a premium, we didn’t want to cut into space for creative responses with images, text, or literally whatever.
At the same time, we played around with including avatars next to commentary. Not only did it further clarify who said what, but it gave people a better chance of being recognized for adding something thoughtful or funny to a conversation.
In the end, we combined our favorite parts of the two of these, hoisting the avatar and username up above the commentary. It allowed us to include a little more interesting detail about the who-said-what, and give people as much space as possible to say anything they like. It also actually reduced the height of very long chains.
Ultimately, creative discourse is one of the things we love most about Tumblr. It’s a big part of the reason we’re all here. The mechanic that fuels that—posts being literally passed from blog to blog—isn’t going anywhere.
With the latest update, we wanted to open up discourse more: simply removing visual barriers allowed interesting, weird, and funny conversations from dying out before they even get rolling.
romaincrisis
janainaart
origamiaround
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baratheonpilled
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