Stupid Tumblr

[olivermoss]

Tumblr used to let you track tags. They got rid of that and if you wanted to look at a tag in order you had to type in /tagged/buckaroo-banzai or whatever you wanted to see the latest for.

Losing tag tracking ended a lot of small fandom organization and activity. Fandom went from 'everything has a fandom, even if it's small' to small fandoms being squished. Small fandoms stopped interacting as much. Die hards like me could override it to see new content rather than the same damn top content all the time.

Welp, typing out the URL no longer works right. Now you get a search. The search has a 'recent' option but it's nothing like looking at the tag. Also, like with regular search, it's no longer the full posts it's just post previews.

This also screws large fandoms that had meta-fandom blogs. People would run blogs that only reposted the good stuff and ignored all the trolling and antis. That way people could follow the content, but through a filter. That only works with being able to look at the tags in order to pick no things to reblog.

So I can't find new Buckaroo Banzai stuff and people looking for new Buckaroo Banzai stuff can't find me.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

has tumblr made a single decision ever that wasn't tailor-made to chase off its fannish user base?

[olivermoss]

I expect that from the yahoos at Yahoo. Didn't know what Wordpress was going to do to the site, still not sure but it doesn't look good.

[sholio]

This doesn't help with tracked tags, but there is actually a workaround for the tag search, though it takes an extra click. I HATE the new tiled view, and a friend helped me find a way to get back to something pretty similar to the old /tagged dashboard-style view.

Let's say your tag is buckaroo-banzai.

If you go to tagged/buckaroo-banzai now, it redirects you to tagged/buckaroo-banzai/recent, and you get the horrible tiled view.

This LOOKS similar to what you get from the search box (/search), but there is actually a key difference. The search box gives you an option that /tagged doesn't have.

So what you ACTUALLY want is search/buckaroo-banzai/recent. Then go over to the right-hand side, underneath the suggested blogs, where there are two small icons: a cluster of dots and three horizontal bars. Click the horizontal bars, and you're back in something that looks and acts like the old dash /tagged view.

So basically you used to do:
https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/buckaroo-banzai

But now you do:
https://www.tumblr.com/search/buckaroo-banzai/recent

... and click the little bars to get back to viewing it in the old style.

It's not 100% the same because there's still junk at the top, and the extra click is annoying, but it's close enough to not make my eyes bleed.

[muccamukk]

That is immensely helpful. Thank you.

[sholio]

Oh good, I'm glad to hear that! Yeah, Sheron helped me find that. I was banging my head against the new search in epic levels of frustration. The tile view is so awful to deal with.

[olivermoss]

That does show the whole posts, but even /recent is far from post order. I scrolled on the Christian Kane tag for a while and couldn't find recently posted gifs.

Thanks, that helps but most of what I use that site for is gone in the new update.

[sperrywink]

Can't be a commercial platform without screwing over fandom!

[olivermoss]

Can't have communities, everything needs to be as stratified between the big names and the content consumers as possible. Small fandoms can be stratified enough.

[bloodydemonic]

That sounds incredibly frustrating- I hate it when sites make major changes that don't take into consideration how people are using them. I'm sorry :(

[olivermoss]

Sites being less and less useful, cutting functionalities, is a popular business model these days.