Here’s what I wrote in my feedback to Tumblr about the Neue Post Format (NPF) beta...
.. in case you’re interested or want to use any of it as a template (don’t copy and paste it directly because it’ll have much more impact if it’s in your own words). Feel free to add to this when you send in your feedback (if you’re able to). I would highly encourage you to get in touch with them because if they don’t know, then they’ll definitely just roll out the changes anyway.
This was the post that I was tagged in about it (thank you), and it contains a link to Tumblr’s info on it, which you can go to directly here.
I'm sending this feedback in regards to the new (Neue) post format (NPF) which is currently in beta on Tumblr for some users (which includes me).
As a creative writer, I use Tumblr because of its (currently great) post format, which allows for long posts and stories to be shared and seen (in their entirety, in one sitting) by lots of people. The stories that I write often feature a lot of dialogue, and since dialogue requires a new paragraph for (at least) each speaker, this new format (limiting posts to only 250 content blocks/paragraphs) will seriously hurt my blog and content. It may also see lots of creators like me permanently leave Tumblr altogether. After all, if we can’t post our stories without all this extra, unnecessary effort, what’s the point in remaining on and using the platform at all?
If these changes are being proposed in an attempt to ‘drive engagement’ (I cannot think of any other reason for these particular arbitrary limits), I can almost guarantee it will have the opposite effect.
You only have to look at the notes of a story that has been posted in multiple parts to see that the engagement decreases massively with each subsequent part. People naturally lose interest, can’t be bothered to click through to the next bit, maybe miss the posting of the next part, get distracted and never come back, and things just get lost on blogs and dashboards. Not being able to post a whole story in one go any more will have a massive and detrimental impact on the way that blogs like mine function and interact with our audience. And there are a lot of professional writers on Tumblr with significant followings, so the impact on their career would be severely dented by this.
Aside from the inevitable drop in engagement, the extra formatting and editing factors alone would be enough to discourage some authors/posters from posting on Tumblr at all. Where before you could simply copy and paste your completed work into a new post, now you have to go to the extra trouble of chopping it up (regardless whether you actually wanted to post it in multiple parts!) and deciding from an editorial point of view exactly where that forced cut-off is going to be for each ‘new’ part. You may also have to go to the lengthy effort of making sure that each text block does not exceed the maximum character length of 4,096 characters. This is absurd. People don’t have the time or the effort for that. They just won’t bother, and you will actively drive away and lose creators to other platforms.
Please please please, do not implement these limits on content blocks in posts. I understand the desire to limit spam by limiting tags and links (though limiting links will be very annoying for those of us who have a ‘master list’/index post with links to all our stories. Mine number well over 50, so will that post and all the links now break if these changes come into effect?), but the reason users love this site so much is because of the creative freedom it provides its users. Please do not choke creators and writers like this, because you will simply force us off the platform by making changes that do not need to be made.
Feel free to share and add more when you get in touch with them. Just remember to put it in your own words so that they have more impact. x