Tumblarity, revisited

20th August 2009

Post with 46 notes

Tumblarity, revisited

A few months back, I wrote a long(for me) post about Tumblarity, and Marco was even cool enough to give me some feedback about it(though I promised not to divulge anything he said, and I won’t). A couple weeks later, dwineman discovered the same week-long shelf life of Tumblarity points. However, if you search posts by tags, you’ll note that 95% of the posts concerning Tumblarity are by people who are entirely disenchanted with it and the Tumblr staff. cwphoto even went so far as to create a poll, asking them to drop the feature entirely.

The main reasons? Folks don’t understand it, OR, they think they do and believe everybody else whines too much.

So do this for those people. Reblog this post. I’m not begging for Tumblarity. I hover under 50 and that’s fine. Even if you rocket me into the top 5, I’ll drop back to normal-Nathan land in a week. Cut & paste it as your own entry or crop out everything except for the point explanation, even. Just get the word out.

That being said, here’s the skinny (same as before, just adjusted for what I’ve noticed/they’ve changed:

What isn’t worth points:

Original Posts.
Word Count.

What is worth points:

Likes ~1 pt/ea
When someone answers your question post ~2pts/ea
Reblogs ~3 pts/ea (Both when you reblog others & when they reblog you)
New Followers ~3pts/ea

*note that numbers aren’t exact, they’re just more accurate than anything else I’ve seen*

Points received have a shelf life of one week. Shortly(within ~10 mins) after a post is liked/reblogged or a question is answered or you gain a new follower, you will score points which you will retain for exactly one week. After that week, the points are gone for good. That’s why you lose tumblarity over the course of a day even though you haven’t done anything. You earned those points a week ago, now they’re gone.

So you see, Tumblarity is just a metric of your popularity this week, not how popular you are over the life of your Tumblr, or what have you. I think it’s probably a very accurate depiction of who/what is captivating Tumblr users this week. Even if they stopped letting us see the results, it is probably very useful for Tumblr & their investors.

Lastly: I believe this feature is in beta and the staff at Tumblr are pretty fucking cool.

Have a little faith =]

Tagged: tumblarity tumblr

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kitsch frays

Tumblarity, revisited