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.
This probably won’t be seen but here’s my two cents
- Algorithmic feed is only fine as a choice, much like the “For You” tab already is. As a website geared around fandom and community as this post points out, fostering personal relationships between users is a major strength and allowing users to entirely curate what posts appear on their feed is essential to this. This sites’ greatest strength is the personal connections users can form via the irreplaceable ability to curate their feed exclusively with blogs that they care about and are personally invested in following. Having ‘mutuals’ is a big thing here; that personal connection is weakened if the dash you go on to interact with people you care about is bloated with people you don’t even know. By bloating the home tab with algorithmic content, you would diminish the personal connection users have with blogs that they choose to follow and engage with. There’s nothing special about tumblr without that.
- The division of the dash into a home feed and a “for you” tab is fantastic and I WOULD enjoy seeing an improved algorithm on the “for you” tab that doesn’t harm my experience on the home feed. Personally, I use my home feed to do the above (checking in on my homies and blogs that I am personally interested in and choose to subscribe to updates from), and the “for you” tab to discover new content.
- Personally, the biggest issues I encounter with the recommended content on the “for you” tab is how easily it is to taint my feed with a random post I liked. Sometimes I see something outside of my usual interest (like a fandom I don’t engage in but this specific post is funny) and I’m afraid to engage with it because I know it will FLOOD my entire for-you tab with similar posts. This discourages me from engaging with new content because if I do there’s a good chance I’ll regret it and struggle to get my recommended posts back into the genres I actually like. I wish I could experimentally engage with other kinds of content without worrying about completely transforming my for-you tab.
- I think the lack of support for embedding tumblr posts on other platforms has a big effect on making tumblr seem like a distant, unreachable thing to other people. I often screenshot and crop a post I find on tumblr in order to share it with my friends because images and text posts don’t embed well on other platforms (mainly Discord). Improving this would make it easier to share content from Tumblr with others
morphimus
