According to this post by Tumblr Staff, tracked tags have been replaced with a bizarre feature where you ‘follow’ a searched tag, like following a blog.
Meaning, if you ‘follow’ the tag you searched, every post people make that would show up in that search will show up on your dashboard. Luckily, it seems you have to activate this new feature by pressing the follow button when you search something.
I don’t know about you guys but I prefer to go through a tag at my leisure, not have it all shoved onto my dash willy nilly.
@staff you guys do know that people who come to this site to ‘raid’ are gonna have an easier time of it now? When other sites ‘raid’ Tumblr, they post huge amounts of images (gore, porn, anything harmful they can find) in the popular tags. If these posts just SHOW UP on people’s dashboards, that’s worse than before. The flimsy line of defense we had when we had to look up the tag on purpose is now gone.
It also will clutter dashboards way more, in a way that leaves us with less control over exactly what kind of content we want on our dashboards.
If a person were to track a fandom tag, for example, they’d get: fanart (both safe and non-safe, since we can’t block tags without an extension), fanfics (same as the art), people bashing the content the fandom is based on (if they mention the content’s name at all it’s gonna show up on our dashboards now and I personally don’t need that kind of negativity in my life), and every single post that uses that content’s name, which with fandoms tend to be AN ABSOLUTE TON. Many of the latter types will sound almost exactly the same.
In short, it wasn’t broken, it’s less useful and convenient than before. I’m really not sure who makes the decisions to change these features but maybe you should actually ask your userbase before you up and change the larger features? At least to gauge our reactions or get our feedback.