Maury Postal

Tumbularity

As a matter of principle, I fear and thus despise the new and the different. That said, notes on tumblr’s new feature, Tumblarity.

1. The design is really neat. Keep it up, tumblr designers!

2. The Tumbluality score in my Dashboard reminds me of my mortality. Stop that. Let me hide that rapidly decaying metric or I swear to Christ I’ll never visit my Dashboard again. Consider yourself threatened. (J/K love you, tumblr!)

I know your intent was to incentivize kids to keep on putting change in the slot to watch the number grow, but it makes me all nervous and pukey. What happens when my number shrinks ever towards zero? Do my body parts start vanishing from pictures? Seriously. Stop it.

3. Across the quad at Twitter, we play a little game called Favrd. It’s fun to play because (like tumblr), it’s fun to keep track of how many people faved something you wrote. At the end of the day, Favrd keeps tabs on who got the most faves on the Leaderboard. And a spot on the Leaderboard is a real kick in the pants. Makes you feel good. Makes you want to keep playing. And the best part? It starts all over the next day. Tabula rasa. The only number that persists is the number of people who read your content. If I had a running all-time tally of how many times I’d been faved, synthesized into an ambiguous number that punished my mellow post frequency by dropping rapidly, I’d hate Favrd and I wouldn’t play the game.

4. We’ll take it as read that the name is a play on “Popularity”, correct? So it seems like tumblr had to confront and then conspicuously step around naming the new feature “Tumbularity” which, for my money, from an aesthetic and linguistic standpoint, rolls off the tongue with far less friction.

We’re to assume that “Tumblarity” is a noun, right? What, then, is the adjective form of Tumblarity? Tumblarious? That’s dumb. And there’s no excuse for dumb fake grammar.

Was the avoidance a choice to steer clear of the idea of Popularity while somehow still alluding to it? Because you’re right. Popularity is kind of gross.

5. I haven’t a clue what my Tumblariety score means. Thus, it’s not much of a score, which makes it not much of a game. I stay away from games that I don’t understand. Granted, I’m dense, so this rules out Monopoly, the stock market, World of Warcraft, and dating, but I can’t see myself getting much into a game I feel a near-complete lack of control over.

6. I know there’s something here. I’m not a Luddite. But I’m just not feeling it yet.

7. tumblr never stops innovating and that’s why tumblr is an incredible platform. Keep it up, tumblr!