I was just going to comment but I feel I have a lot more feedback to give than can be contained there.
I think your biggest issue here is that the rollout was confusing and sudden. At the initial launch it seemed like the goal was to make reblogs work like Xitter's QRTs, which would have been absolutely disastrous for the site. To this day I'm still not entirely sure how you wanted post attribution to work under the changes because it was not explained well, so users started filling in the gaps themselves (always a recipe for disaster).
Moreover, you have a fundamentally different userbase and site etiquette than the next closest comparable social media sites. Tumblr is still, at its core, a platform that appeals to creatives. Not every post is a masterwork, but there are a lot of people who use Tumblr specifically because it's one of the few social media sites where they can:
Still post long-form text content
Have evergreen engagement on any content they create
You got such a bad reaction because creative people don't like it when they don't get credit after they put in effort to make something, and you weren't 100% clear if they would still be getting the credit if they were the OP. They're worried that posting anything to the site could potentially lead to situations where their engagement (which is really important for, say, artists looking to try and pick up commission work) is cut off at the knees by the alterations.
Your next closest comparable social media sites, which I would say are probably Reddit and Xitter, only function as well as they do because they have fundamentally different purposes. Reddit is the modern internet's closest equivalent to a centrally de-centralized old school forum. Reddit is the parent forum, subreddits are the subforums for specific topics, and each post is its own miniature self-contained forum topic, and everything stays relatively siloed. There is no expectation, when posting on Reddit, that your post will have any sort of reach or discoverability outside of the specific community you put it on. That makes it an excellent website for hosting reality TV fan forums, support groups for specific illnesses, or advice communities, but a terrible platform for promoting your art. I'm guessing this is what you're currently trying to replicate with communities here on Tumblr.
Xitter is designed for low effort, quickfire stream of consciousness posting due to the low character limit and rapid forms of engagement. Xitter only really emerged as a big platform for creatives (specifically artists) because it had so many users and Tumblr dropped the ball so hard with the NSFW ban 8 years ago. Xitter's site functionality can work against creatives. Site etiquette DISCOURAGES QRTing creative works specifically because it siphons engagement from the OP. It still emerged as the go-to for creatives who felt alienated from Tumblr because it still has a lot of the discoverability tools Tumblr did (a tagging system, simple and effective ways to share specific posts from others with your followers without siphoning engagement) and, again, because there were so many potential eyes there. It can get away with the quirk of QRTs removing engagement from OP because the number of potential eyes on your work outweighs that drawback.
So, what users heard was, "we need to take the worst part of retweeting and bring it to Tumblr, which will in essence destroy the only thing Tumblr was still good at compared to other social media sites."
What absolutely baffles me is that Tumblr has a ton of strengths that other social media sites lack, but which corporate seems incapable of identifying or taking advantage of.
Even with the NSFW ban I'd say it's the best social media site for creatives (or it would be, if you had more users) due to the evergreen nature of posts and the ability to create long-form text content.
The reblog system makes it much harder for spam bots to get a foothold in conversations. The current internet is overrun with bots and AI generated nonsense which makes every social media site worthless for what it was originally conceptualized to do -- help us find human connection. For the most part I know that the people screaming in the tags and reblogs of my posts are real people, which is a HUGE plus and makes interacting with people here actually fun and enjoyable.
The level of control users have over their feeds, and SPECIFICALLY the fact that Tumblr doesn't just push you content that'll piss you off because being pissed off = engagement = money, is an anomaly in the modern era of social media sites. That could be a fantastic advantage right now because there are so many conversations happening about how social media is addictive, impacting our mental health, and destroying our ability to connect to other human beings. People are unplugging because it feels like there's no alternatives. Tumblr is already an alternative, people just don't know it
The tagging system has always been phenomenal and has allowed users to control how much reach any individual post has. If I want a post to be seen I can deck it out with a ton of tags, but if I just primarily want my followers to see it then I can leave it untagged or use a personal tag. If there's something I don't want to see I can blacklist easily.
And like, I'm an adult. I understand that we do not live in a utopia where Tumblr can just do whatever it wants without any consideration to metrics. You need users because you need advertisers because you need money because without money there is no Tumblr. Tumblr’s strengths are kind of what makes it hard to monetize and it’s the opposite of what makes a social media site profitable in 2026. Still, I won't pretend to understand what it takes financially to run something like Tumblr, but plenty of niche things are still profitable with the right people steering the ship and the right marketing.
By all means, make changes to make the site easier to use. I think giving users options to sort reblogs in different ways would be a fantastic change (I'd love to see an option where reblogs with the most engagements can be sorted to the top, or I could sort chronologically). I'd love if I could organize reblogs to show me a nested view, where chains could be easily followed.
I'd love to see changes to UI that actually make engagements easier to view (especially on desktop). Why is it that when I open the notes of a post they're contained to a tiny 3 inch box right under the post on desktop? Why not bump it out so it's floating on the side and I can actually use the full height of my screen to view them? Why don't comments nest beyond the parent comment -> replies and every reply to a reply has to @ the person they're replying to? Why do my comments sometimes seem like they don't organize chronologically? Makes it super hard to follow conversations.
I'd also like to see a system that keeps the appeal to creatives intact. People should absolutely get the engagement on their OP. They put the effort into making it! Reward that!
Reblogs are a bit confusing at first blush to a new user, but it's not impenetrable. The site was growing just fine fifteen years ago. I think folks are asking the wrong questions when developing fixes for it. It's like they see that something worked on Twitter and they just try to replicate it here without asking why it worked on Twitter.
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