You asked for it. Here it comes. Messaging. Real, threaded, instant messaging. It’s in the latest Android and iOS apps, and on the web.
Yep: Now you can talk to a Tumblr.
This is a big launch, and it’s going to take a few weeks to get it out to everyone (we need to make sure our servers can handle the weight of your discourse). If you don’t have it now, you’ll have it soon.
Q: So, how can I tell if I have messaging?
A: Great question. If you see this smiley balloon hanging out on your screen…
…you’ve got messaging. If you message someone, they’ll get messaging. Eventually, messaging will cover the earth.
Q: What if I have other Q’s? What if I have A’s, even?
A: Well dang, we’d love to hear any feedback or questions you have about this thing. What works well? What kind of doesn’t? What kind of features do you want to see? Those are some of the Q’s that could use your A’s. Our support team is listening (and they’ve already put together an FAQ).
but this is not the same this as the ‘reply’ function. Reply allowed people to:
– respond specifically to one post, directly in reference to that post, in a simple way that didn’t spread semi-personal/private posts all over the dashes of our followers’ followers
– start a tangential but public discussion spawned off the ‘reply to the reply’ that didn’t spam people’s dashes with the same image/bulky media post/bulky text OP over and over
an IM/chat function accomplishes neither of those, and does not in any way replace ‘reply’ function.
Marco Arment (Tumblr’s first developer) wrote about this in The One-Person Product. Basically, what makes Tumblr great is the same thing that makes it aggravating: The product vision is driven by a single person, someone who’s young, self-taught, and has no problem disregarding other people’s opinions.
I suspect this is a factor in why Tumblr has both Community Guidelines that explicitly call people who post gore and shock content “dicks”, but still puts sponsored posts for horror movies in users’ dashboards: Because David personally thinks those people are dicks, and has no problem saying so, but he (paradoxically) also thinks horror movies are fine, and lacks the maturity to recognize that his experience isn’t universal.
The site itself, just like the individual blogs on it, turns out to be a huge exercise in individual expression. David didn’t use the Reply feature himself, so he decided it wasn’t important. He wanted a messaging feature instead, so that’s what we’re getting.
This is baffling. We already had more way to send messages than I can keep track of. If this was what the staff wanted to do, it would have made way more sense to get rid of Fan Mail and keep the Replies.
For what it’s worth, I do have Disqus comments enabled on my tumblr, should anyone want to comment on a post directly.
My impression from the FAQ page about messaging on the @support tumblr is that fanmail (at least new fanmail) will indeed be going away, and will be replaced by messaging.
But really, there’s no way to know. They’ve been so cutesy and uninformative in their announcements about the feature that I have very little idea what it will actually consist of. It might be that it does what the old Reply feature did, but does it much better. It might be that it does some things that Replies did, but not others. It might be something completely different that is entirely inadequate. Who knows? (Well, presumably people at Tumblr know.)
So wait and see, I guess. It sounds as if at least some people have started to actually have the feature, and that once one of those people sends a message to you, that you get the feature too. So there’s that excitement to look forward to.
Please hurry up and infect me, someone. I want to be one of the cool kids.
This entry was posted by jbc on Tuesday, November 10th, 2015 at 11:24 am and is filed under Tumblr.
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