#i like posting untagged stuff sometimes. my bonus features

[the-valiant-valkyrie]

spent ten hours on something that might kill me before i finish it. post diles.

[mishafletcher]

i'm sort of enjoying the influx of new people, but feel like there are a few tips i've seen left out of many welcome-to-tungle posts, so:

unlike most platforms, it's hard to tell who's following you on tumblr! if you have even a moderate amount of activity, it's super easy to miss the notification, and the only other way to tell if someone is following you is to go manually search your followers. sometimes this is a blessing, sometimes this is a curse. (mostly a blessing, tho.)

if you're a writer or a podcaster or an artist or whatever, put that info somewhere obvious! put it in your header, even if it's just "i wrote this thing!" i know you make cool stuff, but some of y'all're making it real hard for people to find out that you make cool stuff.

embrace tags as commentary. if you're adding substantive content to the post, sure, add it to the post, i guess. if it's a post about what you have for breakfast, though, or a meme about which [whatever] are you, just throw it in the tags.

if someone added stuff to a post that you don't agree with, or that isn't adding anything to the post, it's fine to fish around in the notes to find a version that doesn't have that addition.

back to tags. i literally can't overstate how much we love tags here. metacommentary on the post? throwaway comments? vaguely related anecdote? put it in the tags! tags are so much a part of tumblr's conversations that the options for filtering reblog notifications are "reblogs with comment" and "reblogs without comment"—and if you select "reblogs with comment", you'll still get the ones that have had tags added.

side note that you can filter your activity feed, which is where you can see how people are interacting with your posts. i personally try not to engage with mine—not my business—but if you want to look at a specific thing, like who's followed you recently, or replies on your posts, hit the little filter button above the feed and you can be very specific about the types of activity that you want to see.

nope, sorry, i'm still talking about tags. bonus to embracing tags as commentary: you can say whatever weird shit you want! tags are delightfully ephemeral. you want to search the tags? best of luck! you probably cannot. choose to view this as a feature, not a bug.

sometimes your tags pass peer review, as we say, and someone will screenshot or copy them and add them to the post. this is a compliment.

the queue function is the unsung hero of this website. are you posting in real time? are you posting from a queue? are you mixing it up and doing both at once? who can say? congrats, you're ✨mysterious✨!

another important function of the queue is that helps you make *your* blorbos into *our* blorbos. twenty-seven untagged posts about your new hyperfixation in two hours is the soul killer, the thing that makes your followers super tired of even hearing about it. the exact same twenty-seven untagged posts spread out over the course of a day, though, scattered among other posts like seeds on the wind, are somehow charming—compelling, even. wow, that sad wet cat of a man *does* seem awfully sad. i wonder what terrible thing has happened to him!

anyhow, these aren't rules and i'm not the boss of you, but if you were looking for unsolicited advice from a gremlin who's been on tumblr for way, way too long, now you have it.