unraveled also

Blogging vs. Conversation on Tumblr

timoni:

Tumblr is an awesome platform—I moved my entire blog on here; that’s how awesome it is—but it’s remarkably bad for carrying on conversations, particularly with the reblog tool.

Here’s a sad example of somebody trying hard using the reblog function. There’s definitely a desire to have conversations on Tumblr (not just answers to questions), so: there needs to be a way to elegantly carry on conversations on Tumblr.

I completely agree with Timoni here. The lack of decent conversation tools on Tumblr is a major confusion point for the platform. However, the missing conversation tools are also a big enabler for reblogging, liking and other features that make it distinctly Tumblr. So it seems they’ve made blogging stuff easier at the expense of making conversation more difficult. Given that other services like Facebook manage to do both fairly well, I’m not sure if this is a good approach.