Curate, connect, and discover
Anyways, any new people from Twitter, welcome!
Tumblr’s kinda similar in a buncha ways (Tweet = Post, Retweet and Quote Tweet = Reblog), but here’s a short little summary of things that work differently and might help yall to know:
Optional: Go to your Settings, go to Dashboard, and remove “Best Things First”. This is a very recent attempt by Tumblr to include a form of “Likes” based algorythm. It’s somewhat primitive, and makes it very hard for most posts to get any visibility, so it’s highly recommended to just turn it off. If you do, all posts on your dash will be seen in chronological order instead.
Tags work in a similar way to Twitter, except you now add them at the very bottom of a post! They’re smaller and greyed out, so they’re much less intrusive, and you can add in up to 20 tags per post. The first 5 tags are the ones most likely to show up on searches, so keep that in mind when posting!
Tags are more than just a hashtag system! Because you can write spaces and full sentences in them, people will use them a lot to add uninntrusive comments on reblogs. See, direct comments on reblogs will stick under the original post for any chain of reblogs that originates from yours, and might detract from the original post. Only include comments there if there’s something you think is important to point out of discuss about the original post (and please try keep civil)
REBLOG!! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, REBLOG! Tumblr doesn’t work like Twitter. There’s no algorythm here to spoonfeed you the most popular posts based on likes. Things on tumblr only move via two ways: By tags, and especially by reblogs. Always try to reblog posts you like, so they can actually be seen! Likes are nice but don’t actually do anything for visibility! (and no, “Best Things First” doesn’t help expand beyond the people and tags you are already following)
Curate your experience! Blocking is always an option, and because there’s so many possible tags that can be added on a post, it’s much easier to blacklist more specific tags for yourself (For example, blacklisting #gore or #eyestrain). DONT CENSOR WORDS IN TAGS! Stuff like “k!ll” and “s*icide mention” doesn’t screw with “The Algorythm”, because there is none! The only thing it does is make it impossible for people to avoid the tags they’ve blacklisted!
Posts can be as long as you want! Tumblr will automatically “hide” part of a post after a certain point under a “See More” button to prevent cluttering people’s dash (It might’ve even done it for this very post). Just by clicking on it, people will instantly be able to see the full unchanged post, which is very handy!
Anyone’s free to continue adding to this!