Tumblarity is unhealthy for Tumblr
Here’s the thing about Tumblarity for me: It’s an unhealthy metric.
Tumblarity is, as it exists now, a gameable system. Not a lot, mind you, but a bit. Here’s how:
Let’s say I’m desperate to improve my Tumblarity ranking. (I’m not, and would happily trade the score’s place on my Dashboard back in for my follower count if I could.) I may not be able to directly affect what others choose to reblog/like in my stream, but I can alter how I interact with others here.
- First, I unfollow everyone that I’m currently following, and start tracking their streams via RSS feeds, thereby reducing their follower counts by one. (It’s quite conceivable that the Tumblr staff could track “followers” via RSS subscriptions — I have Feedburner doing that with my Tumblr feed, for example — but there’s no indication at all that those subscribers factor into any of these calculations.)
- Next, I stop “liking” anything. Who needs to give anyone else positive feedback in our quest for Tumblarity supremacy? In fact, I’ll go back through and actively un-like everything I’ve liked up to this point.
- After that, I start stripping credit out of anything I reblog. After all, if I never tell people where I found my stuff, they’ll be unable to easily discover other Tumblelogs they might enjoy. And if those other Tumblrites don’t get new followers, their Tumblarity won’t go up.
- Finally, I stop actually reblogging anything altogether. If I see something I like, I’ll just save it and recreate the post entry, denying any sort of reblog tracking credit to the original poster altogether.
Yes, these steps are histrionic bullshit, and are definitely not anything I ever want to engage in. But I guarantee you that there are Tumblrites out there right now that are doing these very things. After all, these are the folks that have stripped out credit and saved-and-reuploaded stuff when there were only bragging rights involved. Now, there’s an actual score!
And that, ultimately, is why I don’t like the new Tumblarity system. It shifts Tumblr from a community into a competition.
What could have been better?
How about an achievements-type system? Reward and honor users for positive contributions and successes in the Tumblr ecosystem. For example:
- reaching 50 followers
- being reblogged 200 times
- having a single post reblogged 100 times
- receiving 1000 “likes”
- giving 1000 “likes”
You could even go more esoteric, such as:
- having a post “liked” by users from each of the 7 continents
It’s the same philosophy — additive, non-“zero sum game”1 — approach that made the “likes” system so simple and wonderful.
That’d be the sort of system I think we could all engage with and enjoy as much or as little as we chose to.
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1. Fans of boardgames will recognize this as the schism between traditional board games and the German style of boardgaming: In Monopoly, for me to make money, I have to take it from you; in German games like Settlers of Catan, me building a settlement doesn’t take one from you. An oversimplication, yes, but I hope you see my point.
