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by mathewsanders 1069 days ago
Tumblr is the only platform that I’m still active on- I’ve had an account since 2009-ish. It’s a really fun community to be active with and the only one that hasn’t attracted a majority of insufferable people.

It’s great to see the Richard Rumelt format of strategy with diagnosis/guiding principles, I’m a fan of this format but it also feels a bit like strategy-by-committee and just a laundry list of things.

Reading though this I get the sense that no one at tumblr has great insights around the pain points of their own product. I think they need to take a step deeper in their diagnosis and ask “how did we end up with a platform that’s so hard to use?” Otherwise they won’t make progress on the actual underlying issues.
2 comments
macintosh-hd 1069 days ago
As an ex-user who has yet to return, the worst part about using it in 2018 was no post body searching and how bad the home page was. You could be reading a post, it randomly refreshes, and you will never find that post again due to the search being unusable. Considering how much I hear about users searching for old classic posts on the platform, I am doubtful they fixed the search.
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stemlord 1069 days ago
>You could be reading a post, it randomly refreshes, and you will never find that post again due to the search being unusable.

I experience this with every platform that utilizes infinite scroll. Infinite scroll seems deliberately unsearchable in favor of slot machine style "who knows what's next" scrolling. Pretty degenerate.

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macintosh-hd 1068 days ago
I almost never have this problem with Twitter. But for the most part, yeah.
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stemlord 1068 days ago
That's weird. Twitter has been the worst offender. If you let a page sit for a seemingly random period and come back, the page will reload and leave you back at the top. Doesn't happen to you?
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macintosh-hd 1066 days ago
Maybe once every 2-3 weeks but almost never. Tumblr it was almost every time.
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50 1069 days ago
tumblr was really something in the first several years - all due in part to the great early (design) hires. i was in my teens then but i rememeber my time on the platform pretty fondly
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