Any update on why media looks so tiny on mobile and if it's getting resolved? I thought it was just gifs but it turns out even static images look really compressed. I updated the app and everything (Android)
This is something we touched on recently over at @changes, for which the same answer must apply here: we’re aware that this bug is still happening in the Android app, and we’re currently working on a fix for this. We hope to get it out in the next version of the app!
You're not imagining it -- reblog notifications are broken.
Tumblr's most recent update made it so you will no longer receive notifications in your activity feed when you reblog or interact with your own posts. This is a fine idea, but it has a major issue. If you reblog a post that was originally yours from another person, neither you nor the person you reblogged from will be notified.
Let's say Person A makes a starter, and Person B reblogs it with a reply -- Person A will be notified of that reblog. Then Person A reblogs that from Person B to add their own reply -- Tumblr recognizes this as Person A interacting with their own post, so Person A won't be notified, but neither will Person B.
Considering that interaction I just described is the backbone of roleplaying on this site, this is a problem -- it means that any threads you're involved in that your partner wrote the starter for won't notify you correctly. It is incredibly easy to miss replies when this is happening.
I truly believe this was just an oversight and not done intentionally, but it should still be fixed. I have filled out a support form with staff informing them of the issue and I recommend that you do the same. Please remember to be polite! Simply explain what the issue is and why it's a problem. You can even link them to this post if you want.
In the meantime, the best method to avoid this is to @-mention your partner in replies, so that it will still show up in their activity feed no matter what. You can also use RPThreadTracker to keep an eye on your replies and make sure you don't miss anything.
so as some of you may be aware, i managed to get a response from staff when i sent my feedback about the beta editor change and this was something that came up a lot when i called for screenshots. i thought i'd write a little summary of what i've found out because i think this is incredibly important in how we continue to raise the problems regarding the change to staff.
the number 1 biggest issue raised to me was the change disruption in quality via your blog's desktop theme. the biggest thing is the padding we notice on themes and the resizing of gifs, leading to their quality decrease:
in some cases, this also makes black (or even white) lines appear across the bottom of gifs:
now this is the response i received:
"The issue here is theme actually. It's applying padding to the entire Text post, rather than individual blocks. Because of this, the browser is scaling the proper 540px GIF down to 500px, and once the browser scales things, quality goes out the window.
Under more modern themes, padding is applied only to Text blocks rather than the whole post, so Image blocks receive no padding and serve at their full 540px.
We're working on both a new post to explain this as well as looking into ways to improve this for older themes."
essentially, this is saying that it is an issue with how older themes process the gifs. now this changes things, this is not to do with gifmakers and our process, this is now to do with theme makers. if tumblr turn round, just make a post to explain it, and say 'just use our up to date themes!' this means that all older custom themes will still retain this issue. if you are a theme maker and you have old themes, they now become unusable. additionally from what i've heard (i'm not a coder, but from a brief chat with people who are) coding for this update is tricky. it is possible that this will majorly impact theme makers processes and limit our ability to use custom themes.
this means that we need to factor this into our feedback to staff. it's not enough to say 'we want to preserve our gifs', because the response is going to be 'absolutely fine, use one of our themes or a /blog view and it'll look great!'. we need to direct our feedback into also including that we love custom desktop themes and want to be able to use them to display our work, otherwise these will be sacrificed.
the second issue i received a few screenshots about is the shrinking of gifs on the app, as so:
this does not seem to be a beta post issue and in fact from the screenshots i've received, it affects posts both posted with beta and legacy.
i didn't receive a whole lot of insight on why it's occurring, but staff are aware of this and are working on fixing it. while incredibly frustrating it does not at least seem to be linked directly to beta and therefore shouldn't be something that sticks around!
I hope it's okay to add my two cents as a (much newer) theme-maker (dropping a theme tomorrow hopefully, that has the posts look the same):
I understand lots of people have a concern about being unable to use custom themes after this change. there's no need to worry about being unable to use custom themes, though, it's just the matter of using older custom themes.
the theme-making community has been aware of this issue for quite a while! tumblr's beta editor has been around for years and years. it was originally just for posts from mobile.
if you're using a theme that was made around or after 2020-2021, then chances are your gifsets can look normal! there's quite a few theme-makers making gorgeous stuff that also preserves the quality of gifsets.
I know it might be frustrating to some that don't want to change from their old themes, but I don't believe staff will be offering any solutions to this to make older custom themes display the new editor's posts correctly (since they haven't done so for the years it's been active in mobile posts) so I would say the best bet for gifmakers and gif-oriented blogs who want posts to display correctly is to change to a newer theme.
here's a little list of theme-makers I know have "npf-compatible" themes (this is a word you'll see often if the theme preserves quality of new editor posts) - not comprehensive, so if anyone has more theme-maker recs feel free to add on:
people new to tumblr angry about being blocked or writing huge paragraphs about why they chose to block someone like i promise you it’s not that deep i once blocked someone because their blog was obnoxiously orange and i hate the color orange
Would it be possible for Tumblr to share more financial information? I'm specifically curious about how much revenue is coming from users (Ad-Free Browsing, Blaze, Important Blue Internet Checkmarks, Dashboard Crabs, merchandise, et cetera) as compared to revenue from advertisements, and also how that stacks up against the costs of running Tumblr (servers, hosting, payroll, et cetera). I personally would feel better about financially supporting Tumblr if I had more information about where and how far the money goes, and I suspect I'm not the only person for whom that is true. I want Tumblr to keep existing as the weird and wonderful website it is, so encouraging more user support seems like a good thing.
I can’t share specifics, but I can tell you that it costs many millions more to run Tumblr than we currently bring in via avenues that aren’t advertising (advertising + non-ad revenue also doesn’t close the gap, but advertising makes a significant amount more in revenue than all our non-ad revenue). You’re going to see us experiment a lot this year with different non-ad revenue ideas, because we would like to get to a state where we are sustainable (obviously, that is our most imperative goal) but also where we can turn off programmatic advertising entirely (programmatic ads are the ones like from Amazon or “this one weird trick”; we want to expand our partnership relationships, which are things like our Stranger Things campaign last June, Manscaped, etc). Not everything we try will resonate, but we are going to try plenty of things, because we simply have to. We have a tricky balance right now that I find very interesting - make things our long-time users will find engaging, while also making sense to the next 5 million users who aren’t yet on Tumblr. There are tons of different communities on Tumblr, and we want to be able to provide this space for all of them, and so future fans and folks exploring their identity and the world have a safe space to do so.
To answer your question as directly as I can, the money that users pay to us, and what we make from advertising, goes directly to the costs of Tumblr (including salaries and server costs, but not limited to that), but it costs Automattic a lot more than we bring in to cover the gap (again to the tune of 10s of millions). Automattic can’t do that forever. We have decreased our costs by quite a bit, which helps, but the most significant gains will come directly from users. We have made big improvements in the last year, and if we can keep building on that, we have bright prospects. Blaze and Important Blue Internet Checkmark are doing the best, and we have high hopes for Live and merch, both of which we will keep tweaking.
We take user data very seriously, and that is partly why we're not more financially successful. It's a conscious choice we've made, and it's financially penalized us, and we have no regrets.
Deinfluencing in general can be a huge force for good. It helps to ensure that bad faith products don't go unchallenged. This is an example of attempted deinfluencing, but this isn't based in fact, which is necessary for deinfluencing to be that force for good.
In this case, there are no EU laws against live streaming. But I assume the point here is around data collection. Here's the data we collect: Username, Age, IP location. If you consent, we share this with our partner, and you are able to use Live. If you don't consent, we don't share it, obviously, and you don't use Live.
We will be rolling Live out internationally, and we are currently in the process of getting a DPA (data processing agreement) with our partner to ensure we are 100% in compliance with laws in any regions we open Live up to. We take user data very seriously, and that is partly why we're not more financially successful. It's a conscious choice we've made, and it's financially penalized us, and we have no regrets.
wish i could paint this on the walls of the dashboard for more people to understand. (emphasis mine.)
The streamers promoted in the Live section often have borderline salacious thumbnails that we can’t opt out of seeing
Most importantly, the streamers aren’t from Tumblr and aren’t part of the culture.
Trying to TikTok / Shorts / Twitch-ify Tumblr to chase revenue just because everyone else is doing it feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of this site and its userbase, and critically, the ramifications of its culture of anonymity.
There are so many creative people on this site that have sponsorships or small businesses (art commissions, crafts, writing, etc) that use external platforms like Etsy, Shopify, Patreon, Ko-Fi etc - how much of that is lost revenue that could be captured by a WP VIP-style ecommerce integration? (And that can lead to an organically profitable ecosystem of Tumblr-first creators, brands, advertisers?)
Like, there are so many opportunities for we, the users, to support the site and ourselves, but it feels like Automattic presumes Tumblr is something that it isn’t, or is trying to transform it into something it can never be.
@iheartvelma, these are all good questions, and I think answering them will help clear up some misconceptions, broaden some ideas, and some are just good data points. So let's dive in! I'm going to give a broad answer, and then go in order and reply bullet-style, so I am sure I cover it all.
Why Live - There's two reasons from my own POV. One is that live streaming is a new feature space and it can provide revenue. We really need to explore it, from a financial perspective. The second reason is that I personally think that there's a conception around live streaming being a face-forward, influencer experience, which it doesn't have to be. I think about how Tumblr users are the only users in the entire wide world who can take the idea of live streaming, and make it into something really, truly interesting and wild. Did you know a condition of implementing Live with our partner is that users never have to show their faces? Typically, you need to show your face to verify your age, but we said a flat no to that. That's how we can have Aquarium of the Pacific stream their Jelly Cam every monday. Jelly fish don't have faces (... I don't think). We've seen how other platforms use Live, and it's fine (but honestly, it's not for me, and I think you'll agree, it's not for Tumblr). So the challenge to Tumblr users is: how do we own live streaming and make it something that is unlike anywhere else, something exciting, funny, dumb, supportive of self-expression, etc etc etc? If anyone can turn the concept of live streaming on its head, it's Tumblr users. Y'all are amazing.
Nobody was asking for it - that's a fair statement, but I'd challenge that (affectionately) by saying that we have a responsibility to take swings at big bets and a "big bet" by definition is probably not something that people have asked for.
Our partner being in the dating space - totally true. They'd like to explore the platonic space, and we'd love to support them on this journey (besides our own goals). They've implemented a ton of technical changes based on our feedback to start making that shift. I'd also say, this doesn't matter that much, considering the amount of control we do have. Really, in my mind, this comes back to encouraging Tumblr users to make live streaming their own (and we can probably build out features to suit how users actually want to use it!)
Streamers with salacious photos / marquee - yep, good feedback. I've seen that too - we're working on it. Those photos are people's Tumblr profile pics, for what it's worth. But we're working on making several changes to the marquee to make it less... invasive?
Streamers not from Tumblr - partially true - some aren't! But also I follow plenty of people who go live and are native Tumblr users. Improvement here will come partially from organic uptake, but we're also playing around with the marquee to maybe only show you people you're following, for example (or more heavily weight people you follow or tags you follow, etc).
"Trying to TikTok / Shorts / Twitch-ify Tumblr" - We just fundamentally disagree here, which I touched on a bit in my broad response. Adding live stream as a feature is really only what users make of it. Chasing revenue, sure, we gotta try stuff. If users can't make it something worthwhile (with our support on adding features to live), then we'll have to make some tough decisions with our partner. We need to do a better job of encouraging users and dispelling misinformation, though!
Creative people with small businesses - absolutely agree! This isn't a zero sum game; we have a team dedicated to working on live, but we also have teams working on other aspects of Tumblr. We just added a team to work on the web experience, and we're talking about building more features of TumblrPay (which is built on WooCommerce) for users - which could include one-click shops for users (that is quite a bit of work, so it'll take time - but it's an idea we are talking about).
"Like, there are so many opportunities for we, the users, to support the site and ourselves, but it feels like Automattic presumes Tumblr is something that it isn’t, or is trying to transform it into something it can never be." - I'm listening. I agree with that putting monetization into the hands of users can be significant. We tested the waters here with Post+ and Tipping, and are continuing with exploring the silly space more with TumblrMart items. I appreciate this feedback, because you may know that I have worked for Automattic for 10 years - 9 of them before working on Tumblr. You may also be thinking of Matt Mullengweg, who is the CEO of Tumblr (and Automattic). But did you know that Matt was an early adopter of Tumblr? We ended up purchasing Tumblr because we believe (from Matt on throughout the rest of Automattic) that Tumblr has intrinsic value - as the birthplace of culture (art! artists! fandom! memes!) and as a place for people to discover themselves, trying different identity in a safe space, and then expressing themselves truthfully. I believe in this intrinsic value. I love Tumblr. Really love it. So do my peers. I've spent a lot of time listening to everyone who works on Tumblr, and a lot of the people who use Tumblr (through exchanges like this!), and my intentions for Tumblr are to keep that intrinsic value and make it sustainable for many, many, many more people to find joy, find themselves, and find community. I don't want the honestly, the rough edges, the silliness, the inside jokes, etc to go away. And I mean that both from a product perspective, and from an existential perspective. That's what I come to work for, every day.
Whew, that got a bit long, thank you for hanging with me through that! I appreciate that you took the time to detail your concerns - you didn't have to do that, but you did and it shows you care about Tumblr. Thank you. I hope I've alleviated some of those concerns, or given you some more to think about at least.
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