#i have a pattern noticing brain and i've been on this site 9 years

[atalana]

okay i DO know how tags work on this site so here's a primer:

-tags have a character limit of 140 characters including spaces. this has always been a thing despite some people believing it hasn't. if you're blogging from mobile, you'll start seeing red characters past the limit. if you're blogging on desktop, you just won't be able to type past the limit. desktop also works out slightly better for this because tumblr is disastrously coded - you can click outside the tag on desktop to save the tag, and thus have 140 characters to use as you please. however, on mobile, you have to use a comma to end a tag, and this counts as one of the 140. you effectively have 139 characters on mobile bc it will be impossible to save the tag if you don't leave room for the comma i've tried

-this does mean that if you copy a tag in from elsewhere with a comma as the last character, or you copy a tag in that's more than 140 characters with a comma in the middle and then remove everything after the comma, the tag saves automatically. do with this information as you will

-also tumblr mobile has a new update now (at least on my phone), where if your cursor is in the middle of a tag when you save it (like if you've gone back to edit a typo), it WILL cut the tag in two. move your cursor to the end

-(if you use xkit quick tags/quick reblog it won't tell you when you hit character limit it'll just cut you off. be careful)

-you can't use quotation marks in tags. if you need to mimic quotation marks use double apostrophes. what will happen if you use quotation marks in tags is, it will look right in the tag, but as soon as you post it, it'll take whatever was in quotation marks out of that tag and put it in its own tag at the start. if you see tags that seem like utter nonsense sometimes? yeah someone tried to quote in a tag and their speech got shuffled. the upside is though if you wanna add a tag to the start without deleting all your other tags, just put the whole thing in quotes

-where in the order you put tags matters. tumblr has a tag limit of, i believe 50, but only the first 20 count for blog organisation (i.e. they show up on the blog/tagged/tag page). after 20, you can't search for them. so if you have a lot of organisation tags and a lot of commentary tags, put the organisation ones first

-tagging organisation for actual blogs works pretty well! tumblr's still working on a system to search multiple tags at once, so i'll just talk about what i know works, and not what's coming in future updates, but - to search a blog by a specific tag, search [blogname].tumblr.com/tagged/[tag]. this will automatically give you the tag in order of newest to oldest post. if you want to see oldest to newest, add /chrono to the end of that url.

-using the blog search bar on mobile is... hit and miss. mostly it searches post content (including urls of people on those posts) and not tags, but clicking on a tag on mobile will take you to that tag search and will be accurate. additionally, if you're searching a blog on mobile, you can swipe right to filter by post type

-you can search for a tag containing multiple words, just replace spaces with hyphens, so, "example-tag" will search "example tag"

-the basic tumblr site wide search is a disaster of badly written code and it breaks constantly. however, i can tell you, that it only searches for original posts, never reblog chains. therefore, tags you add to any post that aren't the original posted right now by you, won't show up in the main tumblr search. use this as a privacy filter to your heart's content, but don't bother with those

-if you use xkit's blacklist, this just blacklists specific tags, and you need the whole phrase. this is all we had until recently which is why you'll see people post many similar tags to try and properly cover a subject. tumblr's new built in dashboard filtering filters both tags and post content, including partial tags, you don't need to be as specific for that, as long as you've included the word or phrase you wanna avoid

-op can see your tags in their activity but this has been true since at least 2012, xkit had a tag viewer that most people i knew used. for this reason, while it's generally frowned upon to judge people for what they put in tags, it's considerate to not put hate for the post content in the tags on that post, you're just making the author feel bad

-screenshotting/copy pasting tags to add to a post is a tradition as old as this website itself, you can't steal someone else's tags. we have a whole culture around writing our opinions in the tags, and, if other people like them, they'll add them to the post for you. take part in this! write tags, add tags! it is considerate, however (and used to be the standard, less so these days), to write (via @[blogname]) after the tags so people know who they're from and can follow that person if they find them funny

A brief summary of how user engagement is tracked on Tumblr, for the newcomer:

When you like or reblog a post, that counts as user engagement for the person you liked or reblogged from, and shows up in their notifications.  

If the person you liked or reblogged a post from wasn’t the original poster (i.e., you’re liking or reblogging a reblog), it also counts as user engagement for the original poster, and shows up in their notifications as well.  

This means that user engagement from your likes and reblogs can potential accrue to two different people, the original poster and the person you liked or reblogged from.  

Consequently, you cannot “steal” user engagement from someone by reblogging their post.  

This is one of the very few areas where Tumblr is actually functions more reasonably than other social media platforms.  

Note that this is only true if you use Tumblr’s built-in reblogging function. If you save someone else’s content to your local device and append it to a new post, you effectively become the original poster from that point on.  

This means that on Tumblr, “reblogging” and “reposting” are two different things; if you see someone complaining about “reposting”, this is not the same as reblogging.  

Commenting when reblogging does not affect any of this – unlike, say, Twitter, where quote-retweeting causes user engagement to accrue to the quote-retweet and not to the original tweet – and you can and should do so freely.  

However, every Tumblr user can see who exactly you reblogged a post from, which functions as a soft disincentive against making inane comments; if you make a dumb comment on a reblog, people who see your reblog may “back up” one step in the reblog chain to reblog a version of the post without your comment.  

Nobody understands tags, and there’s a fair amount of evidence that how tags work changes periodically and without warning.  

Tags are a divine mystery.