Thoughts on Tumblarity

I emailed support@tumblr.com this morning. The following (slightly edited) is what I wrote.

I’ve been Tumbling for a week now. I just took a day off from posting stuff, and apparently that cost me almost half of my Tumblarity points.

How can this possibly mean anything? I post something, I get five or ten points. Someone follows me, I get three points (maybe). “Likes” seem to be one point each, though they aren’t counted correctly on the activity page, unless things I “like” count too.

But if I don’t post for a day, I lose 134 points.

What the hell? Is there any point to this metric other than to make us feel bad? Let me elaborate.

There’s a third-party service called Twitalyzer that looks at a Twitter account and computes a score. It tends to reward exactly the worst behavior: frequent posts, clumsy “retweets” of other people’s content, links, chatter, etc. People who get high Twitalyzer scores are often the most unpleasant folks to follow, so my friends in what I call the “creative” Twitter community like to make fun of it.

Now, I’ve been doing this for only a short time, but my plan for Tumblr is to make relatively infrequent—no more than once or twice daily—posts of mostly original content or commentary. That describes the type of people I want to follow, too. People who are very noisy and who reblog everything they see just take up too much time and space in my Dashboard. Yet it seems that with Tumblarity you’re trying to promote precisely this kind of behavior.

Twitalyzer and things like it are easy to ignore because they are external. But Tumblarity is built in, and it sits right there in the corner where the (much more useful) follower count used to be. I don’t know what you’re planning with the Directory feature, but my guess is that you’re going to rank and promote blogs in order of Tumblarity, which means people with what I consider polite habits are going to be buried. The Directory will be useless to me, and what’s worse is that due to the inevitable competition which will emerge, Tumblr will become a noisy, unfun place.

So before you continue with Tumblarity in its current form, please consider: is that really what you want?

Response from Marc:

Hi, Dan. I can’t tell you how much we appreciate your support and feedback. I’ve passed your thoughts on Tumblarity along to our development team.