when i say i wish people started using the reblog button more i don’t mean it in a ‘i want more notes’ kind of way i mean it in a ‘i want to read about your thoughts on this particular thing’ and ‘i want to have conversations in the tags’ and ‘i want this to feel like a community again and not like any of those boring social media platforms where artists are content creators and interactions never goes beyond a like’

yayyyy mutuals hiiiiiiiii reblog if you love your mutualssssssss hiii mutuals

me, coming to this website every single day: don't look at the like/reblog ratio don't look at the like/reblog ratio don't look at the like/reblog ratio don't look at the like/reblog ratio don't look at the like/reblog ratio don't look at the like/reblog ratio don't look-

2014:

2024:

Reblog to BITE prev

Reblog to BITE prev

Reblog to BITE prev

Reblog to BITE prev

Reblog to BITE prev

if there's one thing we can learn from this booping experience it's that we need to give people notes and interact with them for tumblr to be fun and thriving

"we need the boop button to stay" no we don't. tumblr already got lots of buttons to press every day. look at those beauties right here ↘

tumblr if people reblogged content as much as they're booping each other rn

i am begging you all to stop treating this site like instagram if you dont want it to be content free by next year

actually i'm reblogging this again with commentary, fuck it.

There's people in the notes talking about "not basing your worth off numbers", and like. that isn't what this post is about. It's not a threat, either, it's a comment on how this site works, at a mechanical level.

Likes are worthless. Let me say that again.

Likes. Are. Worthless.

They don't do anything. They're a bookmark. They were never part of how tumblr works - in the early days we didn't even have a like button, and the site still more or less acts as though we don't. They're personal bookmarks and the only people who "get" anything from them are you (you bookmark the post) and the OP (maybe a very slight serotonin boost), but they don't keep the post in circulation, they don't keep it alive.

Without reblogs, a post will be dead in the water within an hour. No matter how good it is, no matter how many hours of painstaking love and attention its creator put into it, it will be dead within an hour and never seen again. It gets pushed down the dashboard and nobody aside from the followers who were online when it was posted will see it. And there's a huge difference in engagement on posts that get even one lucky reblog from someone with wider reach - that one reblog shows your post to five, ten, fifteen other people, and if one of those people also reblogs it, and so on and so forth, that's how posts stay alive and in circulation. It's like a contagion, but we're sharing creativity instead of disease.

And that matters. That "lifespan" of the post matters, artists and writers give up on this site and go to sites where posts have longer lifespans because it sucks to spend hours of your life, maybe even days, to get two notes and some fucking pocket lint for your efforts. We create for ourselves, but we share because we want people to see it, because that engagement offers positive feedback and encouragement to continue. But more than that, if every post (whether art, fic, gifset, whatever) is dying within an hour or a day of being posted, that means it's not making it onto your dashboard. And if it's not on your dashboard, you won't see it. This kills the site, after a while. You stop seeing the posts, because nobody is putting them on your dashboard, because this site doesn't have an algorithm like twitter and insta's and it shouldn't, it's the last bastion of chronological timelines.

Forgive my giant fucking rant I am so tired right now and full of the plague but like stop acting like artists and writers are just being whiny little babies, or "threatening" to withhold our fucking work (you're not entitled to it! it's ours! if we get nothing out of sharing it we're well within our rights to keep it private!) when we say this site will dry up without reblogs. We're just stating facts.

also I’ve seen some people in the tags say ‘oh there have always been more likes on posts’ no there haven’t ???? 

these are posts from 2013, look at the ratio

not to sound like a nursing home resident but back then people know that the point of this site was to reblog things and share them, not to bury them away among your other 23k liked posts

not now kitten, mommy has to reblog fanart for a show she just started watching

You guys do know you're supposed to reblog things, right

"well i like this post but i'm worried my followers might not" fuck your followers. The entire point of tumblr is to cause irreparable psychic damage to your followers. We are locked in mortal combat on the astral plane. You must win. You Must Win. You Must Destroy Them.

reblog to reblog from the person you reblogged from

To illustrate this post by @mayahawkse I would like to visualize to you the difference:

A zoom out of the same post:

This is what a community looks like.

See how in 2023 almost all of the reblogs come from the OP, from their few hours/days in the tag search. Meanwhile in 2014 the % of reblogs from OP is insignificant, because most of the reblogs come from the reblogs within the fandom, within the micro-communities formed there. You didn't need to rely on tags, or search, or being featured. Because the community took care of you, made sure to pass the work between themselves and onto their blog and exposed their followers to it. It kept works alive for years.

It's not JUST the reblog/like ratio that causing this issue, it's the type of interaction people have. They're content with scrolling and liking the search engine, instead of actually having a reblogging relationship with other blogs in their community.

Anyways, if you want to see more content you like, the only true way to make it happen is to reblog it. Likes do not forward content in no way but making OP feel nice. Reblogs on the other hand make content eternal. They make it relevant, they make it exist outside of a fickle tumblr search that hardly works on the best of days.

If you want more of something, reblog it.

Something I see mentioned often is "I don't have many followers, my reblog won't matter" which is untrue.

First of all, reblogging, commenting and interacting is how you start gathering your own micro community, second of all— you literally do not know how far a single reblog from you could go in the long run.

For instance, let's say you only have one person reblog from you, and that person only have one person who reblogged from them also, and so on, and somewhere ten reblogs down the line a very large blog reblogs it and boom, the post is getting more and more exposure!

You see, it does not matter if you don't have a large following so long as you cultivate a micro community with the people you do enjoy interacting daily with.

As you can see in the second picture I added, most of the reblogs were between very small groups of people, and occasionally it'll lapse into a large blog that would create a bigger reblog pool. BUT STILL. Saying that you don't have many followers and so it doesn't matter if you don't reblog is UNTRUE.

Even if someone just randomly wanders into your blog one day, it's beneficial for both sides because A. Seeing you reblog content they like might be enough for them to follow you B. They would be exposed to new content creators they didn't know previously and might also follow / reblog from them!

So yes, do not underestimate what your reblogs and words mean, just because you're not 'big' or whatever. It is not how tumblr works!!

P.S IT IS NOT CRINGE TO REBLOG 10 YEARS OLD CONTENT ON TUMBLR. YOU SEE IT. YOU LIKE IT? REBLOG IT. DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU DIG IT FROM THE DEPTHS OF HELL ITSELF. XOXO :'D <3

TL;DR

Reblogging is absolutely the only thing that helps the site function. Unlike all other social media, likes are nothing here. They are meaningless. Reblogs are the only way to truly say you like something. The only way to make the site work as intended. I know it feels weird, that likes are soooo important on other sites like Instagram and TikTok. This is the anti Instagram. The anti TikTok. Tumblr needs reblogs to thrive. It's like water to a thirsty critter in the desert. Please 🥺 help the thirsty critters!

I'm actually surprised my posts manage to make it to anyone's dashboard, considering how very few reblogs I get! (I love you guys who do reblog, and am very grateful!)

I just try not to imagine how much better engagement would be if I had just come to Tumblr a few years sooner. Back when, apparently, people still knew how to use Tumblr. Look at the difference in those samples!!!

has anyone else ever noticed how good i am at picking pictures to reblog