How To Tumblr - Blog Posts

Very Brief Guide to [tumblr], for Reddit refugees

Shit You Must Do Right Fucking Now:

Change your profile picture, blog header, and title to something other than the defaults. Do it right now. You will be mistaken for a bot otherwise, and blocked.

Go into Settings -> Dashboard, scroll down to Preferences, and turn off the options in the picture. This will get rid of most of the algorithmic stuff.

Turn off Tumblr Live. You have to snooze it once every 7 days for some stupid reason. It's hosted through another company and will steal your data if you use it.

Go to your blog settings (under the little person menu) and turn off these two settings:

Turn off infinite scroll (lags the site) and turn on timestamps on posts, in the same menu as Preferences.

Basic Features of the Site:

Reblogs drive the entire site. If you'd upvote something on Reddit, you'd reblog it on Tumblr. You can add text, images, or tags to a reblog, but you're not required to.

The dashboard is the equivalent to your Reddit feed, and contains the posts of all the people you follow, with the newest at the top

You can send an ask to someone, and it'll appear in their askbox for them to answer. You can receive them too, or turn off the settings if you don't want.

Tags aren't actually used for finding stuff (search function is dogshit), but are more for categorizing. People also talk in tags. Because Tumblr is weird, you can't use quotation marks (") or commas in them without fucking it up

You can filter both tags and phrases under Account Settings; doing this will put a filter over a post that contains them, which you'll have to click through to see the post itself. Useful for avoiding hate speech or blocking out annoying stuff

You can make polls in posts. Here's one now.

Likes are useless. They literally do fuck-all except send a notification to the OP.

Stuff Tumblr Does That Other Sites Don't:

Very old posts (I'm talking from like 2012) often circulate on this site. There's no such thing as a post being "too old" to reblog

Blocking is highly encouraged; you can block someone for any reason. Even for just being annoying.

If you and someone else are following each other, you are mutuals. Mutuals are fucking awesome and are treasured like friends. Mutuals are a thing on other sites but Tumblr treats em differently.

You can screenshot someone's tags if you like them and add them to a reblog. This is called "peer review"

Sometimes someone will find a blog and go through it and like/reblog a bunch of posts. This is totally fine and not "creepy" like it is seen as on other sites.

Tumblr jokes often rely on Continuing The Bit and a "yes, and?" attitude. Goncharov is probably the best example of this.

We are fucking infested with bots. They will either have totally blank profiles or be filled with porn. Block and report on sight.

Censorship is pretty lax here. I can say "I want to brutally stab Elon Musk to death and watch him bleed out in front of a crowd" and nobody gives a shit.

General Etiquette:

Don't try to do epic clapbacks here, you'll probably just get laughed at or blocked. If someone is bugging you or spouting bigoted bullshit, block them.

Reblog art!!! Artists often struggle to gain traction on here; reblogging will give them a boost.

Not every reblog needs a comment or tag in it

You can go all out with tagging your stuff to organize it, or you can just leave it all blank. Someone might ask "hey, can you tag these posts as [x]?" and you can decide if you want to do that or not. It's generally polite to oblige, but "no" is still reasonable.

Avoid discourse like the plague. Filter it, block people who start it, scroll past it when you see it. Just don't get involved in it. Ever.

Don't put fandom tags or jokes on someone's posts about serious matters or personal shit

You're responsible for curating your own dashboard; if you complain about constantly seeing stuff you don't like, that's probably on you. Don't be afraid to unfollow.

Follower count doesn't matter much here and you don't have to make yours known if you don't want to.

Reblog, don't repost. Reblogging keeps the credit and doesn't "steal" engagement like Twitter retweets.

If someone likes something a LOT, they might reblog it like 30 times in a row. This is normal

Having a post blow up is actually kinda a bad thing, since it floods your notifications. There's a sort of in-joke about how having a big post is awful and people jokingly try to stop their own posts from blowing up, often in vain.

Tips:

Get XKit Rewritten if you're on desktop, it's a really helpful extension

In the little drop-down menu next to the 'Post now' button you can either save a draft, schedule a post, or add it to your queue. The queue lets you post things in order at a certain interval, which you can change. It's good for spreading stuff out over time.

You can use Shift+R to quickly reblog stuff and Shift+Q to queue!

Filter your notifications under Activity - you can also see some neat graphs

Find each other! If you want your old Reddit communities to stick together, seek out other refugees and follow them.

Have fun on [tumblr], everyone!

how to get more views

ok so this is gonna sound dumb but the reason why my old blog only had about 2 or 3 views on each post after being up for a year or two is because I wasn’t adding # and when I was it was only a few so when your about to post put in all the # you can

So, you made a Tumblr blog

You're finally here, after seeing many screenshot on Instagram, and hearing many times this site is dead on Twitter. Here you are, and you got no clue how any of this works. That's okay, this should help

[these are just social cues about how this site works that us old users don't even think about but can feel confusing for users coming from other platforms.]

Let's begin:

How does this site work? Easy! The blood and soul of this site is reblogs (not to mistake them with reposting). Think of it as finding something cool and going "hey guys check out what my buddy did", except way less annoying because you can do it 300x times a day and no one will mind and actually they'll thank you for it. A reblog might sound like a Big Deal but it's the equivalent of an Instagram like, as in the currency of the platform.

What if I don't want to spam the dashboard? Then you can use the queue. Click the options on the reblog window and chose "add to queue", you can configure it from your blog options for when and how it posts. You'll find many users use tags that include the word 'queue' to signal that it isn't an "online" reblog, this is totally optional.

What about the tags everyone treats as sacred? Tags are mostly for your organization, but also for speaking your mind (keep in mind, it's considered rude to diss the creation/fandom/ship in the tags of a positive post! The creator will see it in their activity page and it's a bummer, keep your comments silly or positive. If you wanna vent make your own post and tag it accordingly with anti-fandom/ship/character). If you don't have anything to say on the tags of a reblog don't let that stop you! Reblog without tags, you can always reblog it again later if you came up with something to say (no, OP won't mind).

What about likes? Likes are more like bookmarks for stuff you wanna find easily later, maybe for a personal post of a friend. You'll find you can actually hide your likes page (as the people you follow) on your blog, that's the common practice. Litterally no one will go look at your likes page,,, ever. trust me, it's easier to just have it hidden.

On the contrary, reblogs and original posts tell people what you're interested in, what you enjoy/don't enjoy. This is what it'll decide if someone wants to follow you or not: what kind of content you'll bring to their dash (don't worry if it's not consistent, we'll get to that later). Likes are mostly just for yourself.

What are replies for then? Probably the least used feature. You can use it to reply to a friend's personal post, or if you have a question for OP that needs an answer. This is not like a Twitter or Instagram comment! They won't boost the post and the creator would rather you'd put that praising comment in the tags of a reblog. They'll see it in their activity page for sure 😉

How do I find blogs w juicy posts to reblog as a newie? Search a fandom/ship you like and follow the top blogs there, scroll till you find a post you like and follow the original poster. They might follow back if they check out your blog and see you reblog content they like and congrats! You're mutuals 💕

You can also follow tags and there's always creation hubs blogs that exist solely for the purpose of creating or rebloging gifsets and content of a specific fandom/ship.

Do timelines matter? Is it cringe to reblog old things? An unequivocal no. You'll find its hard to know when something was posted to begin with, and we love that! It doesn't matter if it's from a deactivated blog, if it's 5 days or 7 years old, reblog it anyways, you won't be judged because no one will look at the date it was posted either.

What is it this about "curating your online experience"? Just like Instagram, you can block people, just like Twitter, you can also mute/filter words. On Tumblr you can also filter tags. (They'll appear like posts w a message that they contain filtered content). And like neither, you can turn off all suggestions so you see stuff only from people you follow, in the order it was posted.

How do I do this? Settings > dashboard > preferences > best stuff first/include stuff in your orbit/include "based on your likes!" > Off/on as you prefer!

Next is tags and keywords, these will depend on who you follow and what stuff you're sick of seeing. Filter freely! No one will know except you and the better tailored to your interests your dash is, the more fun using this platform will be. Remember, this site doesn't have an algorithm that hides content from the people you follow based on your activity like other platforms, so don't hold back. (Filtered tags are also great to use like on twitter to hide spoilers or trigger warnings, with the added bonus that tagging those is a popular policy here, it can be more effective than on twitter.)

I'll give you a tip: if you've blocked someone but are still coming across their stuff in people's reblogs, load their URL as a muted word and say bye to their annoying content for sure 😘 I also use it for meme posts that start to get on my nerves.

What about those comments about the likes and reblogs ratios? Well, that's A Thing here. Like I said before, reblogs are the whole point of this site, so when in recent years people seem to have switched to only ever liking stuff (along w many other reasons. It's not one single person's fault), the site traffic has plummeted. This has been very disheartening for creators who started to feel like the fandom communities they loved and interacted with on the daily became silent audiences who are not interested in making the community grow or even engage with it. It sort of escalated from there.

The bottom line is that we all want to support and enrich the fandom/s we're in, so I wrote this in the hopes that it'd give new users an idea of how to best do it in this particular platform 💗

For more info you can check tumblr's official guide

Forced to learn how tumblr works because quotev has officially killed itself ☹️ (please tell me terms and stuff i should know) (and explain it like youre talking to your mom about your favorite media)

Apparently it's time to start posting and reblogging How to Tumblr stuff again. Lots of people are hopping from Twitter to Bluesky. A big thing to emphasize is that "repost" is the term bsky uses for "retweet", and we need to educate on the difference between "repost" and "reblog" here on Tumblr. We have so many things saying "don't repost things!" and that might cause confusion now that bsky has entered the game. I'd hate to see people avoiding Tumblr because they got yelled at for something they didn't do, because lingo is different.

I'll start: on Tumblr, "reblog" is sharing the original post on your blog for your followers to see. "Repost" is creating a new post with something you saved or downloaded or screenshoted from someone else's blog, and that's highly discouraged here. Please reblog to share the original so the creator can get the interactions too.

What the fuck is this??????????

Folks: you CANNOT censor trigger tags. When you block a tag, it doesn't block other "spellings" of it. Writing it as "r@pe" or "r4p3" means that someone who has "tw rape" as a blocked tag will still see that post because you didn't wanna say the word rape. You are hurting people. Do not censor words, because people do not have those filtered out.

And honestly if you can't even write the word rape to protect other people then you probably aren't old/mature enough to be on this website.