Tumblr design is not always easy to understand. You post one thing. Somebody reblogs it, adding a comment. Another person reblogs it, and they add another comment. It can be difficult to figure out who said what because it looks a bit like one of those graphs that drove you nuts when you were in school and trying to figure statistics out. Don’t worry, nobody has figured statistics out.
So you would think that a redesign attempt would get a lot of fans, and make a lot of Tumblr users happy. Oh, you naive little thing. Of course not. Tumblr has done some cleaning up and people are angry. Very angry. Tumblr reblogs redesigned, and not going over very well.
Tumblr loved their blockquote system of reblogged comments and posts. They might have complained about it, but it was their thing to complain about. It’s a bit like your little brother – you might complain about him, but nobody else has the right to say a word about him, or you’ll deal with them.
The old version of Tumblr reblogged post and the new version are on the left and on the right:
It does seem like the new version is far easier to read and navigate than the old ones, which needed you to trace the lines with a pencil to figure out who said what.
However, many people are of the opinion that the chaotic nature of the old notes was attractive and one of the reasons why they love the chaotic place that’s Tumblr. It was the charm, if you’d like to call it so. While we don’t think too much of this particular argument, having got the ‘who said what’ wrong a couple of times, we did find another post that made a lot of sense.
But there is a legitimate problem:
A Tumblr user who has dyslexia pointed out that the plain text of the earlier system was far easier for them to read. Now that bolded text and a picture are shown with the actual caption added to the post, it’s far more difficult for them to read it. They also pointed out that Tumblr was pretty much the only social media platform that had a design that was easy for them to read and understand, and with this new design, this will change. This post has got over 140,000 notes so far, so it is something that Tumblr will have to address.
Earlier, Tumblr had changed their reblogging system so that editing of the original caption or note is no longer possible. Earlier, it was possible for somebody to reblog your post and write over your words, as it were, as an edit.
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The advantage of the new design, of course, is for mobile users. As posts accumulated notes, it used to get extremely difficult to figure out what was happening if you were on mobile. Everything shrunk down to the small screen, navigating up and down, trying to keep track of who said what – it was difficult with the old comment tree format. Now, Tumblr mobile is easier to figure out.
But, of course, that is not quite the consensus. Tumblr users who are unhappy with the change have called the new design an abomination. We are not kidding. They said ‘abomination’.
