Yet Another Tumblr Guide For New Users

Yet Another Tumblr Guide for New Users

Change your avatar, header, and put something on your description right now. Do not interact with any post before you do this. Otherwise, you’ll just be mistaken for a bot and blocked.

Post/Reblog stuff before following people. Even with your blog all customized, some people will still block you if they see your blog is empty.

Reblog, reblog, and reblog! Reblogs are not like quote retweets. Reblogging stuff is how Tumblr works, and reblogs actually help OP gain traction.

“Likes are useless” —You’ve probably seen a lot of guides preaching this, but actually that’s only some people’s opinions. People prefer reblogs over likes because it helps OP get more views/interaction on their posts, while likes are just—well, “likes.” It tells OP that you liked their post. Nothing bad with that. Some people also use likes to bookmark posts they want to find later. But if you want to support an artist, consider reblogging their work as well if you are able. If you don’t have enough spoons to use for reblogging, then that’s okay too.

Tags are for categorization, not clout. If you post about one thing but then tag it with irrelevant tags (especially those that happened to be trending), then people can report your post as spam. Here's a Guide to Tagging (edit coz I forgot to link this when I first published this post)

If you see something you don’t like, then just block the user. No need to rally people to cancel said user. Just block and move on.

Use Tag and Post Filters. It’s your responsibility to curate what you see on this site, so add as much filters as you want.

Spell out words. Do not say oomfs or moots. Say “just kidding” instead of “/jk”. Don’t censor triggering words like r@pe. For someone’s filters to work, the content being filtered has to be spelled right. By censoring your words, you’re putting people more at risk to seeing them. More about this on my Tumblr Posting Guide and Best Practices.

Turn off Best Stuff First. We hate algorithms here. Everyone views their dashboard in reverse chronological order.

Tumblr has post limits, but you rarely have to worry about them. I’m too lazy to grab links from the official docs for reference, so take this post limit screenshot (courtesy of XKit) instead. [Ignore the values under Remaining]

Edit: Okay, this is very important for Twitter refugees so I just had to include it:

When your post is reblogged by someone else, then you can no longer completely delete your post.

Unlike quote retweets, reblogs are forever. You may delete the original post, but you won’t be able to delete the reblogs of that post. They will continue to exist on other people’s blogs.

The best you can do to limit views on a post you want gone is to disable reblogs on said post before deleting it. That way, even if the reblogged version still exists, there’ll be no way to spread them further. Just make sure that you won’t regret it later.

Here’s an example of me doing exactly this on a post of mine that got over 10k notes.