Asks- Messages sent to an inbox, anonymous or otherwise.
Tags- The hashtags at the bottom of the post. Used for trigger warnings (tw) content warnings (cw) community tags, Fandom tags, personal tags you can search later on your own blog, and minor commentary.
Comments- the speech bubble at the bottom of the post, for talking about things relating to the post or other comments without interacting with the post itself.
Reblogs- Sharing a post by clicking the little green arrows at the bottom of the post. This shares the post to your blog, so people who follow you can see it. There is no algorithm for seeing posts, so posts are only shared when people interact with them by reblogging the.m.
Likes- clicking the little heart at the bottom of a post. This adds it to your 'likes' list, but does not share it to your blog. (People may be able to see your likes unless you go into settings and make your likes private.)
No Algorithm- Because there's no system for auto-sharing posts "based on your likes", posts must be reblogged in order to gain notes (reblogs, comments, and likes) in order to be seen. As a consequence, you will often see posts that are over a decade old, that happened to get popular.
Notes and notifications- Your activity page will show you every time someone interacts with a post you interacted with first. "Flooding your notes" means a post or re-post of yours got popular and people are interacting with it so much that you have to dig through your notifications to find updates on anything else. You can mute a post, delete a post, or turn off comments or reblogs to make this stop, but keep in mind that people might screenshot the post itself to keep sharing it if you delete it or impair activity. (I am going to ruin your notes by reblogging this. I am sorry.)
Ads- The ads here are wildly unpredictable and often make no fucking sense. There was a common one for a long time with a creepy dude dressed as Pikachu that became a meme. I get a lot of religious Christian ads. Sometimes you get ads where it isn't clear what is being advertised, or why. Tumblr is a famously unprofitable website and most of us just seem to ignore them even when they are coherent.
Crabs- "Crab Rave" is a music video with dancing crabs that reached meme status here. Dancing crab gifs come up usually when someone famous and terrible experiences a deserved misfortune. There was a brief feature where you could send people little cartoon crabs. I don't understand this as well as I would like.
"Blaze"- You can pay money to make random people see a post. This is a combination of "pay to become popular" type thinking and an act of warfare amongst users.
Mutuals- Someone you follow who follows you back.
Followers- The people who follow your blog and see your posts and reblogs. This number is not public. Nobody cares
"Investing at X notes"- A common comment used to imply that someone's post, usually only having a handful of notes, is about to go wildly popular. This is usually regarded as a curse, because having a post blow up means getting your notes flooded and having to see a load of bad-faith messages from idiots.
Staff- Tumblr site staff have made a lot of dumb fucking choices since the dawn of the sisite'creation and people tend to @ staff, much in the way that a helpless peasant may shake their fist skywards to an uncaring god. Just roll with it.
Anons- You can turn anons off, meaning nobody can send you anonymous messages. Because some of these fuckers are hateful cowards, this will cut down on harassment, bigotry, and general stupid talk shoeing up in your inbox. Unfortunately, this will also limit messages from shy people who genuinely wanna be nice.
Bots- If you get a weirdly flirty message out of nowhere by someone who hasn't followed you long and has a weird username, it's it's bot. Flag and block. If you're scrolling through an unrelated tag and suddenly see a supermodel looking person with their tits out and a bunch of random tags, it's spam and it's a bot. Flag and block. It's been a problem for a while, like roaches.
Dipshits- If you see a blog with "rad", "radical", "fem", "female", "vulva", "uterus", "terf", "radfem", or "critical" in their username, check their blog to verify if they're a radfem or a terf. If you don't know what those terms mean, you can Google 'em, but they're weirdly aggressive offshoots of feminism that wrap back around to being mysoginistic, transphobic, and racist, and they aren't very popular here. The common move is to just block 'em and move on. We also have trolls and white supremacists but again, not very popular, pretty easy to block, report them if you can.
Always assume OP is reading your comments.
Reblog posts, don't just "like" them. Again, no algorithm- this site doesn't work without sharing.
Don't share personal information. Always assume you can be doxxed. Keep it vague.
Fact check before sharing info if you can- theres a lot of misinformation and misinterpretation.
Always read twice- Reading comprehension has been so bad on so many posts here that it's become a meme too. If you don't understand, read it twice before commenting.
Have fun, and do it for yourself. This isnt isn't clout website.
Other longtime residents are welcome to add on if I've forgotten anything.
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