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Tumblr could be the latest platform to borrow TikTok’s playbook. The company is planning a major overhaul of its platform that provides algorithmic recommendations to users’ feeds, according to the company. It was posted on the Tumblr staff blog.
The memo is particularly candid about the reasons for the upcoming changes and what has been described as Tumblr’s current shortcomings. “The fundamental problem is that Tumblr is hard to use,” the company writes. “Being a 15-year-old brand is a big deal because it carries the burden of people’s preconceived notions about Tumblr.”
Tumblr doesn’t provide exact details about the new feature, but it does give a pretty big hint of what’s to come. The company said one of its main goals is to “deliver great content every time you open the app,” calling the current “following” feed “obsolete.”
To combat this, the Automattic-owned platform decided to “improve the algorithm’s ranking capabilities across all feeds” and “make it easier for users to understand where the vibrant communities are on Tumblr.” says it is working on it. The company also notes that building more creator-friendly features, such as improving the reply and reblog mechanics, will also be key to attracting new users.
“Being a new creator on Tumblr can be intimidating, and sharing your work without engagement and feedback is likely to lead to abandonment and disappointment,” the company wrote. increase. “The lack of feedback stems from an outdated decision to only show content from blogs you follow in your main dashboard feed (“Following”), which has been gaining popularity at the expense of helping new creators. The cycle of increasing blog popularity is perpetuating. “
Taken together, the changes Tumblr describes are a lot like TikTok (or Instagram). Algorithmic recommendations from users’ main feeds, creator-friendly features that encourage sharing, and more streamlined commenting and conversation tools. Strategy-wise, it all sounds pretty straightforward in 2023, when users increasingly expect this kind of functionality from their platforms. But given that Tumblr’s core interface hasn’t changed much in its decade-and-a-half birth, the new direction could result in a big shift in the dynamics of the platform as a whole.
The upcoming redesign isn’t the only thing Automatic is trying to breathe new life into the acquired platform. The company is also experimenting with subscriptions and other paid features, introducing Post+. Oppose features from longtime users. Recently, the company has begun selling products that are “totally useless.” Elon Musk sent this message to users shortly after he failed to implement Twitter’s new paid authentication feature.