You know what’s off about most Tumblr blogs?
People— that means the “bloggers”— on Tumblr are too community-driven or, in some cases, too dashboard-driven. Most people blog with their Dashboard as their target audience instead of the rest of the internet. If someone who isn’t from Tumblr happened by one of our blogs, chances are they probably won’t be able to get what’s in it. They’ll probably have to go through a series of Tumblr blogs to understand conversations-turned-into-posts and all those posts answering people’s replies on another post.
Well to make it easier to understand, most Tumblr blogs aren’t stand-alone unlike most blogs on Wordpress or on Blogger. People would be having a hard time getting what’s going on in a Tumblr blog unless they’re from Tumblr and have access to a rather crowdy dashboard. They’ll probably see Tumblr not as a blogging site but rather a MessageboardXForumXImage BoardXTwitterXChat system kind of site.
Try browsing your blog objectively— I mean as someone who isn’t you or anyone from Tumblr. I’m sure all those 27 “Follow me on Twitter” posts in the first 5 pages of your blog and all of those posts you’ve reblogged a couple of hundred times would be pretty annoying. Most of Tumblr blogs aren’t even formatted nicely. What with all those mega-blockquotes and the lack of sense of punctuation, anyone who isn’t on Tumblr would probably go amuck with all the mess. And don’t get me started with those BGMs.
Anyway, this isn’t meant to be offensive in any way. These things are merely observations. This isn’t exactly a problem to be solved either. I mean, it’s probably close to impossible to remove these things from Tumblr anyway. That would be pretty much like forcing someone to change their natures.
But yeah, one thing that Tumblr could do about it in case they decided that this isn’t healthy for the… err… blogging world, is to add an option that lets users to post something only on their dashboards. It’s going to be like those private posts(which I’ve never used btw). People could post stuff that would only appear in the dashboard and not in their blogs. That could pretty much solve all those issues about people using posts as a chat box.
So right… just saying.
