hm. yeah lmao i'm out 👍
find me here. i'll be cross posting some things and archiving the rest, probably
congrats on the reblog chain rollback everybody. in the interest of clarity though i personally am still getting off tumblr because ->
1 - the quantity of major, obvious, easily-reproducible bugs introduced by the rollout is alarming—one thing to change a fundamental component of the platform's core functions arbitrarily and without warning, but to do that and have it... break multiple related functions and also not even work right as described?
i know tumblr has a reputation for being riddled with bugs but this is not normal for tumblr.
disregard the screaming crying throwing up histrionics that happen every time the UI changes. when it comes to new feature rollouts, tumblr has a pretty good recent track record--comments? badges? patio? advanced search? all rolled out smoothly. patio had a limited initial rollout specifically to collect user feedback, i remember that because mine was one of the accounts to get it early.
going further back to the last time a core function received a major update, the NPF rollout caused its share of upheaval and bugs but spanned years and the new editor was initially introduced to the web app through an opt-in beta testing phase. (it was also actually like. necessary)
that is tumblr-normal. it has been years since "the new update Broke Everything again" was the normal state of affairs here. the sense of betrayal i'm feeling is only half about the update itself--what the fuckhappened here? why was this major update rolled out site-wide so rapidly without a beta testing phase in a clearly unfinished state? more to the point, given that the official communications on the matter have said sweet fuck all about anything other than user outrage, why aren't we being offered any assurances that this won't happen again?
(frankly: this was such an egregious mess compared to the level of care and professionalism i have come to expect from tumblr's dev team that my chief concern right now is whether vibe coding was involved.)
2 - official communications seem pretty clear that they're going to continue fiddling with the reblog chain which, sure, i don't particularly care to track note distribution across reblog trees but i think it's a feature with a lot of obvious use cases provided all notes still aggregate to the root post like god intended, jesus fucking christ, but
a) it does not bode well that this promise to keep iterating changes to one of the platform's core functions is paired with a complete lack of acknowledgment that even if everyone had absolutely loved the update, it was not ready to go live and should have at least been rolled out as an opt-in beta first.
b) on reflection i think the most charitable interpretation of this debacle is that the changes weren't intended to hide notes the way they did--"silent" reblogs appeared to behave the same way reblogs with commentary did, contra the intended behavior described in the release notes, so something clearly wasn't working right. if that was the case, though, i would expect that to be communicated--if only because "guys we fucked up and the thing you all hated the most about this was, in fact! a massive bug" would be reassuring to hear--so i'm left with the assumption that it was intended.
i can't for the life of me fathom why anyone would deliberately design that or think it was a good idea, but taken into consideration with the ultimate stated intention of "giving contributors the recognition they deserve" (??) rather than any like... real... use-case for this functionality (such as: giving artists access to more robust information about how their art is found and shared, or letting users filter reblogs-with-commentary by reblog trail for ease of reading on posts with multiple discrete conversations happening at once) does not inspire me with a great deal of trust.
i happen to agree that reblog chains could be improved upon! no system is perfect or inviolable. but if the problem being solved here is "users who add things to the posts of other users don't get Enough Credit" then the solution is going to be about giving more notes to rebloggers. that tumblr's Powers That Be think this is the problem with reblog chains feels to me very suggestive of the platform's probable direction from this point and i'm just not very interested in, well. That.
anyway. i'll be lurking around but as of Right Now my plan is still -> find me here
☝️
*taps sign*
Just an FYI guys, this is also me. Staying gone, that's why.
