minormatoran

[minormatoran]

Copying from this Twitter post but here's how to opt out of the Tumblr AI thing! It is opted in by default so you have to manually say you don't want it on every sideblog as well as your main.

1. Open Tumblr on a desktop browser and click on the blog you want to edit the settings of from the list on the left side.

2. Click on Blog Settings on the right side while viewing the blog you want to edit.

3. Scroll down to the Visibility section (near the bottom) and toggle "Prevent third party sharing for [the blog url]" on.

Sucks that we've reached this point, but protect your work in the ways you can.

[minormatoran]

I'd like it to be known that I was going to use Tumblr as the platform of choice for creating a boilerplate landing page website for my job, as my boss tasked me with creating a basic address to represent the company. We've already got a domain that we've been using for an email address for almost a year, and I know tumblr theme HTML coding pretty well, so I set up an account, but was unable to forward my custom domain. That's when I learned that custom domains MUST NOW BE BOUGHT DIRECTLY FROM TUMBLR.

YOU CAN NO LONGER CONNECT YOUR OWN DOMAIN THAT YOU ALREADY OWN TO YOUR BLOG.

Additionally, if you HAVE a custom domain and it lapses for any amount of time, forcing you to turn it off, you will NOT BE ABLE TO RECONNECT IT.

I will be using a different website instead.

@staff this was a terrible decision. nobody likes this.

I personally advise every one of my 132k followers, as well as anyone who sees and reblogs this post, to NOT purchase a domain from tumblr, as they are more expensive than purchasing from any other registrar, and you are restricted to using it on a single platform.

Change it back.

[minormatoran]

Bringing back infinite dash scroll would be nice too, but we all know tumblr only updates in order to bring a worse experience to a smaller userbase because the site is run by lab-grown marketing execs who think parroting zucc and muskrat will bring them great joy and personal success. 

>issue with converting non-users into logged in users 

You know how you do that? Letting non-users see more content without logging in, then gradually they will create an account in order to help them collate and view said content more easily, as opposed to not at all because their friend shared a link but the link said ‘sorry! registered users only :>’ 

>users from search engines often land on pages within the blog network and blog view—where there isn’t much of a reason to sign up 

Not instantly, no, but this is the reason people like tumblr, as opposed to its competitors. Readers like being able to see posts. Creators like people being able to see their posts. Walled gardens don't spontaneously grow users out of the internet aether. (Well, technically they do, but those are called bots and nothing you’ve done to users in the name of ‘stopping the bots’ has actually done anything about them!!!)

Wasted too much time already reading this so the rest real quick. 3 & 6, yeah no shit your code should actually work, I’m glad there are people working hard to prop up tumblr’s user interface, it’s just a shame none of them work there. 4 & 5, yeah retaining users and creators I wonder how we can do that. oh, I know, let’s keep driving them off by removing features and adding barriers!

Tumblr’s Core Product Strategy

Here at Tumblr, we’ve been working hard on reorganizing how we work in a bid to gain more users. A larger user base means a more sustainable company, and means we get to stick around and do this thing with you all a bit longer. What follows is the strategy we're using to accomplish the goal of user growth. The @labs group has published a bit already, but this is bigger. We’re publishing it publicly for the first time, in an effort to work more transparently with all of you in the Tumblr community. This strategy provides guidance amid limited resources, allowing our teams to focus on specific key areas to ensure Tumblr’s future.

The Diagnosis

In order for Tumblr to grow, we need to fix the core experience that makes Tumblr a useful place for users. The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Historically, we have expected users to curate their feeds and lean into curating their experience. But this expectation introduces friction to the user experience and only serves a small portion of our audience. 

Tumblr’s competitive advantage lies in its unique content and vibrant communities. As the forerunner of internet culture, Tumblr encompasses a wide range of interests, such as entertainment, art, gaming, fandom, fashion, and music. People come to Tumblr to immerse themselves in this culture, making it essential for us to ensure a seamless connection between people and content. 

To guarantee Tumblr’s continued success, we’ve got to prioritize fostering that seamless connection between people and content. This involves attracting and retaining new users and creators, nurturing their growth, and encouraging frequent engagement with the platform.

Our Guiding Principles

To enhance Tumblr’s usability, we must address these core guiding principles.

Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Retain and grow our creator base.

Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Improve the platform’s performance, stability, and quality.

Below is a deep dive into each of these principles.

Principle 1: Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Tumblr has a “top of the funnel” issue in converting non-users into engaged logged-in users. We also have not invested in industry standard SEO practices to ensure a robust top of the funnel. The referral traffic that we do get from external sources is dispersed across different pages with inconsistent user experiences, which results in a missed opportunity to convert these users into regular Tumblr users. For example, users from search engines often land on pages within the blog network and blog view—where there isn’t much of a reason to sign up. 

We need to experiment with logged-out tumblr.com to ensure we are capturing the highest potential conversion rate for visitors into sign-ups and log-ins. We might want to explore showing the potential future user the full breadth of content that Tumblr has to offer on our logged-out pages. We want people to be able to easily understand the potential behind Tumblr without having to navigate multiple tabs and pages to figure it out. Our current logged-out explore page does very little to help users understand “what is Tumblr.” which is a missed opportunity to get people excited about joining the site.

Actions & Next Steps

Improving Tumblr’s search engine optimization (SEO) practices to be in line with industry standards.

Experiment with logged out tumblr.com to achieve the highest conversion rate for sign-ups and log-ins, explore ways for visitors to “get” Tumblr and entice them to sign up.

Principle 2: Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

We need to ensure the highest quality user experience by presenting fresh and relevant content tailored to the user’s diverse interests during each session. If the user has a bad content experience, the fault lies with the product.

The default position should always be that the user does not know how to navigate the application. Additionally, we need to ensure that when people search for content related to their interests, it is easily accessible without any confusing limitations or unexpected roadblocks in their journey.

Being a 15-year-old brand is tough because the brand carries the baggage of a person’s preconceived impressions of Tumblr. On average, a user only sees 25 posts per session, so the first 25 posts have to convey the value of Tumblr: it is a vibrant community with lots of untapped potential. We never want to leave the user believing that Tumblr is a place that is stale and not relevant. 

Actions & Next Steps

Deliver great content each time the app is opened.

Make it easier for users to understand where the vibrant communities on Tumblr are. 

Improve our algorithmic ranking capabilities across all feeds. 

Principle 3: Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Part of Tumblr’s charm lies in its capacity to showcase the evolution of conversations and the clever remarks found within reblog chains and replies. Engaging in these discussions should be enjoyable and effortless.

Unfortunately, the current way that conversations work on Tumblr across replies and reblogs is confusing for new users. The limitations around engaging with individual reblogs, replies only applying to the original post, and the inability to easily follow threaded conversations make it difficult for users to join the conversation.

Actions & Next Steps

Address the confusion within replies and reblogs.

Improve the conversational posting features around replies and reblogs. 

Allow engagements on individual replies and reblogs.

Make it easier for users to follow the various conversation paths within a reblog thread. 

Remove clutter in the conversation by collapsing reblog threads. 

Explore the feasibility of removing duplicate reblogs within a user’s Following feed. 

Principle 4: Retain and grow our creator base.

Creators are essential to the Tumblr community. However, we haven’t always had a consistent and coordinated effort around retaining, nurturing, and growing our creator base.  

Being a new creator on Tumblr can be intimidating, with a high likelihood of leaving or disappointment upon sharing creations without receiving engagement or feedback. We need to ensure that we have the expected creator tools and foster the rewarding feedback loops that keep creators around and enable them to thrive.

The lack of feedback stems from the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed (“Following”), perpetuating a cycle where popular blogs continue to gain more visibility at the expense of helping new creators. To address this, we need to prioritize supporting and nurturing the growth of new creators on the platform.

It is also imperative that creators, like everyone on Tumblr, feel safe and in control of their experience. Whether it be an ask from the community or engagement on a post, being successful on Tumblr should never feel like a punishing experience.

Actions & Next Steps

Get creators’ new content in front of people who are interested in it. 

Improve the feedback loop for creators, incentivizing them to continue posting.

Build mechanisms to protect creators from being spammed by notifications when they go viral.

Expand ways to co-create content, such as by adding the capability to embed Tumblr links in posts.

Principle 5: Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Push notifications and emails are essential tools to increase user engagement, improve user retention, and facilitate content discovery. Our strategy of reaching out to you, the user, should be well-coordinated across product, commercial, and marketing teams.

Our messaging strategy needs to be personalized and adapt to a user’s shifting interests. Our messages should keep users in the know on the latest activity in their community, as well as keeping Tumblr top of mind as the place to go for witty takes and remixes of the latest shows and real-life events.  

Most importantly, our messages should be thoughtful and should never come across as spammy.  

Actions & Next Steps

Conduct an audit of our messaging strategy.

Address the issue of notifications getting too noisy; throttle, collapse or mute notifications where necessary.  

Identify opportunities for personalization within our email messages. 

Test what the right daily push notification limit is. 

Send emails when a user has push notifications switched off.

Principle 6: Performance, stability and quality.

The stability and performance of our mobile apps have declined. There is a large backlog of production issues, with more bugs created than resolved over the last 300 days. If this continues, roughly one new unresolved production issue will be created every two days. Apps and backend systems that work well and don't crash are the foundation of a great Tumblr experience. Improving performance, stability, and quality will help us achieve sustainable operations for Tumblr.

Improve performance and stability: deliver crash-free, responsive, and fast-loading apps on Android, iOS, and web.

Improve quality: deliver the highest quality Tumblr experience to our users. 

Move faster: provide APIs and services to unblock core product initiatives and launch new features coming out of Labs.

Conclusion

Our mission has always been to empower the world’s creators. We are wholly committed to ensuring Tumblr evolves in a way that supports our current users while improving areas that attract new creators, artists, and users. You deserve a digital home that works for you. You deserve the best tools and features to connect with your communities on a platform that prioritizes the easy discoverability of high-quality content. This is an invigorating time for Tumblr, and we couldn’t be more excited about our current strategy.

[minormatoran]

In honor Dahlia getting really popular at a dwarven tavern that one time, I made an entire animated music video out of it using the legendary song, Diggy Diggy Hole of Yogcast fame. Thanks for watching!

[minormatoran]

Sketch Commissions

Sketch animations from the last set of commissions.

In case someone wants one too: https://twitter.com/EpsilonShadow/status/1554517029046075393

[minormatoran]

Am I seeing this right? Tumblr’s dashboard now only goes back 24 hours? Anything older than that just disappears into the aether, never to be seen again? How the hell am I supposed to go back and look at, well, anything beyond hunting down the exact blog it came from?

I guess the site’s finally hit rock bottom. They’ll keep digging, of course, but I never thought we’d get this far.

[minormatoran]

Also in widescreen, thanks to @arhquarium​ again!

Alice Dietrich as a wasteland survivalist. Character of @arhquarium, commissioned by another person.

[minormatoran]

Colored sketch comm. A bunch of bees! @minormatoran’s Mellifera (the tall one), Bananon’s Chrys (flying with the potted plants), and my bee! :D = PATREON - SUBSCRIBESTAR - TWITTER - NEWGROUNDS =

[minormatoran]

Hi! Not sure if anyone’s still using tumblr, but I thought I’d post this here. Originally drawn by request and posted on DeviantArt. It doesn’t look like we’ll ever have enough time to start this project back up again soon, but it will be remembered :)

[minormatoran]

Commission for @Xephr0s for her twitch streams! It’s pretty fun watching speed runs of this game and I was really happy to do this up for them!!

[minormatoran]

commission

Patreon

DA

Twitter

Pixiv

Commission info

[minormatoran]

They said I could be anything, so I became the change I wanted to see in the world.

[minormatoran]

You just gotta believe.

Oh how convenient he’s already been paperized. 

You’ve been visited by the rare LoP Super-secret Alpha invitation.

* WHAT’S THIS ALL ABOUT? *

[minormatoran]

Alice Dietrich, character of @arhquarium

[minormatoran]

Do you have any tips for designing great puzzles?

Sure. When designing a puzzle, a designer must think of the process by which the player interacts with them. Specifically, there are four steps:

The player sees and recognizes the puzzle goal

The player discovers the clues/objects needed to solve the goal

The player associates the relationship of the clues with the puzzle and each other and works out potential solutions

The player solves the puzzle with the proper solution

The designer must make it clear to the player what is happening and what to look for each step of the way. This means that the designer needs to clearly establish context for all four of the elements above. More specifically:

Show the player the goal - a locked door, a treasure chest, an object they want, etc. - but also clearly show that it is not immediately attainable.

Place and advertise the clues to the puzzle goal within the environment. This can be subtle or it can be obvious, depending on whether the puzzle is optional or part of the critical path. 

Provide a way for the player to experiment and learn how the clues interact and behave. This doesn’t have to mean that the player can make attempts until they succeed, but it does mean that they get enough tries with the puzzle to learn the rules.

Create a solution for the puzzle that isn’t too difficult or too easy for the challenge level the designer has chosen.

These are the basic elements that a designer must create in order to make a good puzzle. Missing one of these elements is a recipe for player frustration, and that is something we always want to avoid.

The second layer of designing a puzzle is deciding on the distribution. Puzzles have two primary elements to them - discovering the clues, then using clues to solve some sort of pattern. Some puzzles are 100% clue-finding, such as “find the key to unlock this door”. Some are 100% pattern-solving, such as the Tower of Hanoi. Many are a combination of the two - e.g. the player can play around with this pattern, but is missing a critical piece to finish it.

When designing the pattern, make sure that the pattern is clear and makes sense once all of the pieces are known. If the designer presents a pattern or set of rules to the player for a puzzle, it’s a promise that those rules will be followed. A good puzzle design will let the player make certain assumptions and have a way to test those assumptions. The solution should require some kind of non-obvious, lateral thinking that still satisfies the rules that the designer has set. If the solution breaks the rules or pattern, it will be extremely frustrating to the player.

A good designer will also use multiple solutions to the same puzzle judiciously. Under such circumstances, it’s important to communicate to the player that there are more than one solution and which solution each clue belongs to. Otherwise, the puzzle can cause frustration by making players think that they are missing something when they aren’t, like the nagging feeling one gets when there are leftover parts when building something. One good strategy in puzzle design, in my experience, is to provide a secondary optional bonus puzzle that uses the same rules as the puzzle on the critical path, but provides some additional content or reward to the player for completing it. 

Remember the fundamentals of puzzle design when constructing them. They might seem obvious, but it can be extremely easy to skimp or skip in the creation of one or more of those basic elements. It’s important to get playtesters who aren’t familiar with the puzzle to test it, especially noting any frustration points. Show the player the way first, point out the necessary elements to complete it, and then let the player make those connections and solve it.

Got a burning question you want answered?

Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter

Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr

Frequent questions: The FAQ

[minormatoran]

Yeah, try giving that one a little shake!

[minormatoran]

A bonsai Alice. Do not feed after midnight.