Habits of highly obnoxious tumblrs

May 18, 2013 6:31 AM

I'm using Tumblr for the first time (link in profile) and posting lots of quotes (as 'text') every day. I don't want to spam people or muck up their dashboard, so please enlighten me about bad or annoying things people do on Tumblr so I can learn from their mistakes.
posted by Foci for Analysis to Computers & Internet (15 answers total)

Best answer: If you post a lot on a certain subject (a TV show, movie, etc), I hear it's polite to tag those posts properly so people who use blockers based on tags don't have to see them.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 6:43 AM on May 18, 2013

Best answer: I'm sure people will come up with a lot of helpful advice, but here is the thing: it's actually impossible to conduct yourself on Tumblr in a manner that will make everyone happy, because people violently disagree on Tumblr etiquette. It really depends on the norms of the particular people who are following you/the community than you're in.

It helps to have a clear idea of what your Tumblr is for -- reblogging things you find interesting? Sharing your art? Staying in touch with your friends? One specific piece of advice I can offer is to keep focused Tumblrs separate -- if you want to run a blog where you post photos of street fashion, don't post anything else there that isn't directly related. Most serious artists on Tumblr have separate art-only blogs so that people who are following them for that content only don't have to wade through a dozen Star Trek gif sets as well.

If you're using Tumblr to post about anything fannish -- a movie, a book you like, comics, whatever -- it's considered courteous to specify the source material in the tags.

If you want to reblog something really upsetting in order to discuss it, consider reblogging it as a link instead of recreating the whole post/thread on your feed.

Generally, though, just follow the example of the other people in your little Tumblr circle and try not to stress out about it. People are hilariously self-involved sometimes about Tumblr, but it isn't really about you and there's not much you can do to keep the complainers from complaining about how their feed isn't perfectly tuned to their comfort and enjoyment.

And HAVE FUN! <3
posted by Narrative Priorities at 6:51 AM on May 18, 2013 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: Drat, I should have mentioned that my tumblr is a collection of comments on Mefi that I like in some sense. That's all it's for.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 6:55 AM on May 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

Best answer: If that's all it's for and all you intend to post there, then my only advice is to 1) make it clear in the header or on an info page what you're doing, 2) link back to the original comments.

Also, consider using be queue to line up a bunch of content to post automatically over time.

I don't think you have to worry about anything else!
posted by Narrative Priorities at 6:59 AM on May 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

Best answer: 2nding 'use the queue'...you can schedule posts between 1 hour-1 day apart...after a while you will discover that tumblr def has a 'prime time' that's prob better to post in (for me, west coast, u.s., it's around 7/8 pm)
posted by sexyrobot at 7:18 AM on May 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Not tagging spoilers for films or TV seems to be the one thing that's universally against tumblr etiquette, otherwise Narrative Priorities is right about etiquette being all over the place.
posted by Coobeastie at 7:45 AM on May 18, 2013

Best answer: If you do decide to participate in the usual tumbly reblogging, the one point that I've most often seen just about everyone agree on is that in about 95% of cases, your personal notes/feelings/comments belong in the tags and not in the text area below the photo/gifsets/video/etc. Unless you have valuable commentary to add (links back to source, factual refutations of statements, saying "actually i was at that event and this is how it happened", etc) then the place for your "LOL" or "omg i love this" is in the tags.
posted by elizardbits at 8:01 AM on May 18, 2013 [2 favorites]

See, that's funny, because I've actually had people say the complete opposite -- that they hate how people use tags for commentary, as they're hard to read unless you have extensions installed, and how they wish everyone would put all content into the actual post instead.

Spoiler tags really are the only thing everyone agrees on, apparently!
posted by Narrative Priorities at 8:26 AM on May 18, 2013

Best answer: I sometimes wish to reblog something specifically because the tags make me laugh (and in fact that's sometimes elizardbits doing it) and then I'm sad that reblogging would lose the tags and I wish there were commentary instead.

And I love and use the queue but get griped at by a friend who wishes I'd just reblog everything at once so he could have a nice chunk of amusement.

So yeah - there's no universal Tumblr etiquette. Go forth and tumbl, eventually you'll figure out what format makes the most sense for your content and preferences.
posted by Stacey at 8:48 AM on May 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

You mentioned that you don't want to muck up people's dashboards, but the theme and formatting of your site, and its mobile version, can raise the occasional ire if it's cumbersome or broken on a user device.

I try to use tags for organization first and commentary second. Ultimately it's your tumblr, and you can modify as you go. Have fun with it.
posted by a halcyon day at 9:16 AM on May 18, 2013

Best answer: I would like to respectfully disagree with elizardbits re. keeping your emotions in the tags. See, then there are people who enjoy using the tags to tag things. With metadata that can be used to retrieve specific things. I'm not a fan of the "Feels go in the tags", it's something I've noticed is big in the fandom end of Tumblr but is almost ignored in the art end of it. All the art and fashion history tumblrs I follow will tag with the era of the item, what movement, the artist, that sort of thing. You can use spaces in tags too, so keep that in mind. First four tags are the important ones, so if it's a lovely painting by Rosetti or whatever make sure "#Dante Gabrielle Rosetti" "#Rosetti" and "#preraphelite" are at the top of the tag list (or whatever's relevant. "#metafilter" would be prime if you're quoting comments from here, and I'd probably add usernames too but that's just me, or maybe a key word about what the quote is about). If you insist on squeeing out in the tags, do it after the actual useful tags. It will help people find you, too, especially if you have a high traffic tag you can use.

Also make use of the tags to put descriptions of triggery material. A lot of folk use Tumblr Saviour to filter out material they find distressing, so #blood #gore #incest that sort of thing are really helpful. You can also put warnings in body text too that will be picked up the same - the tags simply mean people using the add on can see what's being filtered out without having to actually expose themselves to the material. If you're posting animated content, "#gif" "#animated" "#epilepsy warning" is a kindness, too.

Tagging with keywords also makes it easier once you have enough posts to archive. Tags can be used within a tumblr to retrieve all posts with a similar content, for example.

Frankly, I figure if you're reblogging, then you've already declared you like it. If you're reblogging what you don't like, then fuck, explain why.

Gold rule is to always source your material. If it's an image that's original content, I'd say watermark it too. If it's coming from another site, source it with a link - you use the little cog dealy when using photos and quotes. It'll embed the link. I'd suggest also slapping a source on the post itself.

The queue is awesome for you, too, not just for your readers. It means they won't be inundated with your posts, and it means you can plan way, way ahead. If you get a rush of good content you can slap it all in the queue and have content sorted for weeks in advance. I've always just set mine to regular slow intervals, depending on the content, rather than trying to hit a sweet spot. Tumblr is pretty international, so keying it for any one time zone is a bit redundant.

As far as layout goes, for fuck's sake, no autoplaying songs, no glitter, no animated cursors, try and have more than one item per page, don't hide the NEXT and BACK buttons. That shit drives me up the wall. It won't mess up your dash, but if I find a particular user I like I'll go over their tumblr and read the lot, and all of the above will discourage people from doing so.

I suppose the big thing here is that if you are obnoxious, people are just going to unfollow you. Tumblr's pretty big and it has a lot of room for a lot of different sets of etiquette. I follow a fairly wide variety of tumblrs and the differences between the different subcultures are pretty big. The social justice people and the fandom people and the art people all have different approaches and mores, and really no one specific group is "right". My advice re. tagging comes mostly from having curated more focused formal tumblrs and reflects what I've found to be useful. Just go with it. There's not much you can't fix later if you change your mind about how you want to run things.
posted by Jilder at 9:18 AM on May 18, 2013 [4 favorites]

The queue is awesome for you, too, not just for your readers. It means they won't be inundated with your posts, and it means you can plan way, way ahead. If you get a rush of good content you can slap it all in the queue and have content sorted for weeks in advance.

Forgot to mention that I love the queue— I hardly post anything directly; queueing gives me the opportunity to create a post and edit/review before it goes live, and also not have to think about post frequency.
posted by a halcyon day at 10:00 AM on May 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

Sounds like a good idea for a Tumblr. Just don't tag it as stuff it isn't and you're fine. Given the theme of it, anyone who follows you knows exactly what they are getting. I couldn't find the link in your profile -- what is the name of it? (name).tumblr.com?
posted by AppleTurnover at 11:37 AM on May 18, 2013

Response by poster: ThePinkSuperhero, I can imagine the occasional spoilers popping up so I'll make sure to tag them as such.

Narrative Priorities / sexyrobot, I tried the queue today and I'm already liking it. Great suggestion!

elizardbits, I haven't figured out reblogging but good tip about tags, though. The more quotes I create the more I realize how powerful and necessary tags are for providing context to the quotes.

AppleTurnover, the (name) is oracleofmefi.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 2:07 PM on May 18, 2013

I use tags for three things: 1) getting new posts into the tracked tags/providing trigger & spoiler warnings; 2) my own organizational system, i.e. unique repeating tags that others can block or that I can use to find posts later; and 3) feelings. If you want to add to a conversation that's great, but 99% of the stuff on reblogs ends up being "hahah" or "OMG" -- and every one shows up on the original poster's feed. You will discover why people say "feels in the tags" after your first popular post escapes into the wild. It's also annoying when you go to reblog a post and it has a bunch of that pointless clutter apended on by people you don't know -- I tend to delete it, but still always feel vaguely guilty. As for tags, if they're really great then the next person can always copy them into the body of the post (sort of voting that the commentary is good enough to warrant its addition to the post).

Anyhow, that's how my corner does it. But you'll definitely want one of the tag-wrapping apps, and we can cross our fingers that yahoo will make the obvious changes that people have been requesting for years.
posted by you're a kitty! at 3:55 PM on May 20, 2013