Tumblarity

Leaving aside my own level of affection towards the feature for a moment, I think Tumblarity is just a poorly designed feature for a blogging platform, based on the experience I’ve had with it over the past few days. Some examples:

I lose 10 points for writing 2,000 of my own words, but gain 3 for reblogging one photo.

I gain Tumblarity for reblogging myself from other tumblelogs I’m a part of. This, in particular, seems like a significant design flaw that one could use to easily hijack the directory listings.

I’ve lost Tumblarity from a follower deleting his account.

I understand that the feature is meant to reward participation and popularity within the community, and for the top 10,000 users, where a few points here and there means very little, it probably works well in that regard. But I find it extremely telling that, on a site with more than 1 million blogs, you only need a Tumblarity of 10 or 12 to make the top 50K. So, even when taking into account the thousands of inactive/infrequent users, that’s a hell of a lot of new and inexperienced users with a low “popularity” score being discouraged by the platform to post original content.

David Karp addressed some complaints about Tumblarity/the directory last week, and if you have a complaint about the feature I haven’t mentioned here, it’s probably within that post.

Posted May 22, 2009 | 18 notes