Rag Times

The wonderful chick known as spaceships has compiled a wishlist of features she’d like to see coming from Tumblr. My favorite is this one:

• Separate “additional comments/description” box for quotes posts. I mean for the love of god. Some of the most interesting discussions are taking place entirely in bold-face type.

Twitter is a good example of following the user. In the beginning there were no replies, mentions, hashtags or retweets, but it’s all grown organically and intuitively, and Twitter has grown to accomodate the needs of its users. Because people are using the citation box for more than citations, Tumblr really ought to add in an extra text box.

Similar to adding a separate box to the Quotes, I’d like to be able to add titles to all of my posts if I want. I know Marco doesn’t give a shit about blog formalities, but I’d love to get a bit more consistency between post types.

Also this:

• Ability to comment on a post without reblogging it. Disqus is unbelievably poorly integrated. From my dash, I cant tell if any given tumblr has even added Disqus. People have been clamoring for some built-in commenting or communication system (like MeMail) since the dawn of Tumblr to no avail. But the thing is, the broken-ass way people have been attempting conversation with each other via reblogs are some of the most hopeful signs of intelligent life on Tumblr. More and more, Tumblr has become an echo chamber of mindless reblogging and liking — i.e. a center of frantic but ultimately futile activity. You’ve got all these notes, but what are they tracking really?  Nothing substantial at all. But there’s still a good chunk of users who want to use it as a platform to actually interact with each other meaningfully. Do you see Tumblr as a publishing “community” or not? If so, don’t half ass it.
• If that’s off the table, how about a more sensible way to follow an ongoing conversation among 3+ people through reblogs? As it stands, after 2 people have struck up a discussion, anyone who jumps in later gets lost in the shuffle and their comments are not readily incorporated into the running thread, which eventually fragments, and you don’t know which response to reblog and tack on your comments to, and all hell breaks loose and aahh I almost stepped on a baby bird wtf?

I don’t see Tumblr adding a comment system because the staffers don’t believe comments are valuable to the internet as a whole. Forcing you to reblog a post in order to formally comment on it is a way of keeping people accountable and minimizes drive-by snark. Nobody wants to troll someone else’s blog if it’s going to ruin the credibility of their own blog in the process. They could add better support for Disqus, but that flies in the face of the point they’re making.

But while 80% of all comments are shit (you can thank YouTube for that), 80% of all reblogs are shit, too. The internet can ask for a good commenting or reblogging system all it wants, but most people aren’t going to bother doing it nicely. That’s why you get endless pyramids of blockquoted usernames and hard-to-track reblogversations: few are taking the time to actually edit their content into a coherent entry.

A lot of her other points are great. Read the rest of the wishlist.