WAD CITY

Mad Thoughts: 7 ways to make Tumblr better (from a Tumblr addict)

I’ve been working on this list in my head for a while and since I’m so bored tonight, I figured I’d go ahead and write it up. Have I thought it all the way through? No, but when has thinking been germane to the Tumblr experience?

Jason’s very smart and has thought this through more than he’s letting on.

The problem that I see is that Tumblr has had such a hard time just staying afloat, they are missing opportunities to really improve this experience in functional ways. And I find myself spending less time on here because my dash has been taken over by ask box kudzu and by reblogs of the same 10 super-popular tumblrs. Not only has the Tumblr backend failed in the face of growth, but so has the front-end experience.

It’s to the point where I really wish Tumblr would take seriously the need to help us addicts make a bit more sense of all the noise, to put the tumblrs we follow into lists, to be able to filter out reblogs from our feed, to allow a better commenting system so that ask boxes are used more rarely and more interestingly, to allow hashtags or rooms or whatever to group memes (a la twitter), to have an actual search function that isn’t worse than “random post,” and so on.

I think the answer lies somewhere in the API. Why does Twitter have so many clients, but Tumblr have so few? Can you imagine Tumbldeck, with all kinds of feeds: lists/group feeds, search feeds, post type feeds (listening to a feed of audio posts as a mixtape!). I mean, oh my god, I would so be there.

Source: madthoughts