Tag: replies

support:

staff:

Holy moly, replies are back

Your familiar friend for talking about posts is rolling out over the next few days, and it’s learned a ton since it’s been away. Now replies let you:

  • Reply multiple times to a post.
  • Reply to your own posts. 
  • See all of a post’s replies in one place.
  • Decide who can and can’t reply to you. (It’s in your blog settings.)

All that adds up to being able to talk about a post, right inside of a post, even as it travels from Tumblr to Tumblr. So, starting with posts created today, you’ll see a new notes view to help you follow that conversation. Looook:

image

If you’ve been waiting for this, thanks for your patience. If you’re new to replies, come discover their unique flavor. Spicier than a like, sweeter than a reblog, served on a big family-style platter. All part of a balanced diet. Have fun replying, Tumblr.

Want more details? You can get the nitty-gritty on replies and notes over in our help docs.

Replies are back in town

It’s all happening! Replies (and a nice new notes view) are rolling out even as I type this, so get ready to get back to it. Be sure to check our help docs for more on these features.

bobbityhobbity:

Replies were a terribly-designed feature that the tumblr community somehow managed to make functional. The disadvantages of the reply system were myriad:

  • You had to be religiously monitoring your notifications in order to even see them. 
  • You had to fucking screenshot them (or messily copy/paste) in order to reply to your replies.
  • Other people couldn’t really reply to them – it didn’t work as a comments section.
  • They would get buried under likes and reblogs on popular posts, forcing you to scroll through the notes on a post in order to find them (if you even thought to look).
  • The draconian character limit. 

The one, single, sole advantage of the reply system was that it was a form of interaction somewhere in between a reblog and a private message. But the only reason it became that was because users were willing to put up with the stupid hassle of screenshotting their fucking notes in order to turn replies into a conversation. 

Replies are one of the most interesting examples for me of a user-base rising up to argue that a feature that was completely broken from the very beginning is in fact an indispensable part of their user experience that they simply cannot live without, when in fact the only thing that made that feature even remotely functional is the ridiculous work-arounds that the users themselves came up with. What’s more, the balance that replies struck between public and private is a nuance that pretty much only someone who is using this blogging platform to socialize could possibly understand. We developed a culture and set of social norms around a feature that, from a software developer standpoint, is objectively stupid, dysfunctional, and disposable.

It reminds me a little bit of when gamers will rise up to defend the most boring, grind-y aspects of their games whenever they are altered to make them more fun. There are issues of gamer elitism and gatekeeperism involved there, of course, but I think there’s still a worthwhile analogy to be found in that replies were a feature that were accessible as a form of social interaction only to heavily devoted users of this website who understood how to work around their terrible-ness. What’s more, their highest value has always been for popular blogs who want to give their followers a way to talk back to them without the pressure of responding to asks. 

To anyone outside of tumblr (or any new user coming in), replies probably looked useless and terrible, because in an objective sense, as designed, they fucking were. 

But dammit, I want them back.