reysorigins-deactivated20230605 asked:

Hello, team! How do you plan to address the Reblog-to-Like imbalance that has appeared lately? (Reblogs keep Tumblr running, but people are more inclined to "Like" instead.)

wip answered:

Why hello, @reysorigins.

Thanks so much for your question, which allows me to clear up one or two things.

• Firstly, there is actually no imbalance between them, and, interestingly, people have come to believe there’s a problem here.
• Likes are super helpful for organizing your experience on Tumblr, for starters. Some use likes to save something for later, as they are more personal. Which is totally fine!
• For us, likes are necessary to figure out… what people like on Tumblr! That way, we can better recommend other things to them, which helps people use Tumblr daily.
• While reblogs are certainly the easiest way to spread content, they’re only one signal among many, many signals that are all totally valid ways of using our platform.
• Sometimes likes are actually the mechanism that spreads posts: if enough people like something, we recommend it to people who otherwise would’ve never seen it because nobody they follow has reblogged it.
• Sharing a post outside here is actually the most powerful thing a person can do to help Tumblr and spread content—and we don’t even measure that for anyone to see.

For what it’s worth, I recently answered an ask about this very subject on my personal blog. Give it a read if you like.

Love,

—Cyle (Tumblr Engineering)