A brief summary of how user engagement is tracked on Tumblr, for the newcomer:
When you like or reblog a post, that counts as user engagement for the person you liked or reblogged from, and shows up in their notifications.
If the person you liked or reblogged a post from wasn’t the original poster (i.e., you’re liking or reblogging a reblog), it also counts as user engagement for the original poster, and shows up in their notifications as well.
This means that user engagement from your likes and reblogs can potential accrue to two different people, the original poster and the person you liked or reblogged from.
Consequently, you cannot “steal” user engagement from someone by reblogging their post.
This is one of the very few areas where Tumblr is actually functions more reasonably than other social media platforms.
Note that this is only true if you use Tumblr’s built-in reblogging function. If you save someone else’s content to your local device and append it to a new post, you effectively become the original poster from that point on.
This means that on Tumblr, “reblogging” and “reposting” are two different things; if you see someone complaining about “reposting”, this is not the same as reblogging.
Commenting when reblogging does not affect any of this – unlike, say, Twitter, where quote-retweeting causes user engagement to accrue to the quote-retweet and not to the original tweet – and you can and should do so freely.
However, every Tumblr user can see who exactly you reblogged a post from, which functions as a soft disincentive against making inane comments; if you make a dumb comment on a reblog, people who see your reblog may “back up” one step in the reblog chain to reblog a version of the post without your comment.
Nobody understands tags, and there’s a fair amount of evidence that how tags work changes periodically and without warning.
Tags are a divine mystery.
(For those going “how is this not obvious”, it’s about prior expectations, bro. On many major social media platforms, using the built-in sharing tools does divert user engagement from the original post. For example, as noted above, quote-retweeting on Twitter causes likes to accrue to the quote-retweet instead of the original tweet. This is because Twitter is hostile to human life.)
It’s really good for stuff like this to go around every once in a while! Strange as it may seem, people may in fact migrate here from Twitter or Instagram, where this stuff works differently and where there are different expectations of engagement.
DON’T FORGET - *most* Tumblr users DO NOT MIND if you engage with their OLD posts! (Apparently on Instagram they do? this baffles me.)
Many also don’t mind if you “spam” their notifications with a bunch of likes or reblogs in a row.
Tumblr has a rich culture of Very Old Posts continuing to make the reblog rounds, and people become fond of them.
Also, unlike Twitter, you can reblog the same post multiple times. Heck, you can reblog the same post every hour on the hour for days. (Please don’t.) But you do see a lot of “oh this came across my dash again, must reblog” with posts users are fond of. This is fine.
Tags ARE a divine mystery. People use the tags both for organization (inasmuch as this works, sometimes), and for added commentary. Commentary added to the tags will generally be seen by those who follow that person and see their reblog on their dash; but the OP and whoever they reblogged it from can also see the tags in the notifications.
So again – you can use the tags for commentary, and many people do. But people WILL see it. It just won’t “stick” with the post… necessarily. Tumblr also has a culture of people seeing some tags they think are relevant or clever, and reblogging a post with someone else’s tags included. So bear that in mind as well – something you put in the tags could get “pulled up” into a reblog chain by someone else, and this is generally seen as fine.
Adding on, due to current events: Tumblr both does and does not have an algorithm; in a way it’s “opt-out,” but most long-time users have opted out vehemently, and you’ll probably have a better experience if you do the same.
Go to Settings, then Dashboard, and turn off “Best Stuff First,” “Include stuff in your orbit,” and “Include Based On Your Likes.” This will get you a feed based only on people that you choose to follow, and this, arguably, is part of why Tumblr is the least hellish of many hellsites right now.
There are a few blogs that follow me who seem to go through what I’ve liked and reblogged and like and reblog what they like.
And I love it.
Like I see that I have a lot of notifications and get worried and then it’s just like 3 or 4 people enjoying what I’ve shared and I’m like “yes!! Hello!!! I’m glad you’re still enjoying my blog!”
Also there’s a few old posts that are like a year or two old that get liked/reblogged occasionally and im just like “u were probs looking at that tag, welcome”
