Uh oh, Maybe I Spoke Too Soon About Tumblr

In the midst of so much social media hullaballoo—most recently Twitter’s seemingly nonsensical rebranding to “X,”—I have been very quick and happy to point out that Tumblr is still a pretty great website. As someone who’s been using it for right around a decade, I still find it to be the optimal social media site: It’s fairly private, user interactivity is limited to whatever you want to see, and unlike most sites that actively try to sell you things, Tumblr’s advertising methods are more memeable than anything else.

However. I might have spoken too soon, as the site recently underwent a massive UI overhaul on desktop that literally nobody asked for. Behold:

No one is happy about this.

Compared to the old UI, this just feels clunky and overly congested for what should be a simple scrolling experience. Moreover, as one user pointed out, much of this UI is just a one-to-one Twitter copycat, with Tumblr features jammed into there:

Considering just how much of a dumpster-fire Twitter has become, one has to wonder: why did they do this? Did anyone ask for this? Because it’s very clear that none of the users asked for it:

The thing is, it’s not even just that the UI is bad. It also doesn’t function properly. For one thing, depending on how you scale your screen, the UI will might scale properly on its own—you will have to manually refit everything so the site is readable. And therefore, you know, useable.

Then there’s the fact that they’ve removed reblog-viewing accessibility. For those unfamiliar with the site, this means that you can no longer view an original post by clicking on the OP’s username, as you were once able to. Some might want to do this to read their tags, where an OP can expand on the topic at hand at further length, or for a variety of other reasons. Removing the ease of this function just adds an unnecessary level of redundancy to the site.

These changes are just the latest in a series of gradual changes to the site that are making it more akin to other, more popular social media platforms. For instance, Tumblr Live launched about a year ago and is essentially what it sounds like: a way to livestream content straight to Tumblr. I’ve never used this function and I don’t plan to, because the essence of what makes Tumblr entertaining isn’t something that can be translated to livestream format.

Users are right to get concerned about this, because Tumblr is still a pretty decent reprieve from most forms of social media. To lose it to corporate competition, the likes of which have proven not to pay off in user trust and overall functionality, would be a major disappointment.

Considering how dystopian the modern online state can feel, the last thing we want is to lose a site that lets its users largely do their own thing uninterrupted. However, I and everyone who’s been around for a while also see the other side of this—not in favor of the changes, but rather, confident in the userbase’s antagonistic zeal in the face of change, which pretty much always takes place whenever big changes happen to the site.

And there’s a lot of salient points in this post! There’s really no data to steal from our accounts on Tumblr. What are they gonna do, reveal to the world that I’m a horse girl and I went through a Britpop phase in my early teens? I get paid to write about such things. Tumblr’s got nothing on me.

It’s always good to be vigilant about such changes, however, because we ultimately want to keep the site this way, and you can never be too certain where a company/CEO’s head is at. Tumblr’s doubled-back on site changes in the past, so there’s a chance they might do so with this UI. Hopefully, though, this kind of change is the extent of what we’ll see in the future, and the site itself will stay largely the same.

(Featured Image: Cinemassacre)