Tumblr Develops New Feed to Attract More Users

According to a memo published on the Tumblr Staff blog, the company is set to undergo a significant overhaul of its platform, taking inspiration from TikTok by introducing algorithmic recommendations to users’ feeds.

The memo specifically explains the reasons for the upcoming changes and what it describes as Tumblr’s current shortcomings. “The fundamental problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use,” the company writes. “Being a 15-year-old brand is difficult because the brand carries with it people’s preconceived notions about Tumblr.”

While Tumblr doesn’t offer specifics about the new features, it does offer some pretty big hints about what’s to come. The company says one of its primary goals is to “deliver great content every time the app is opened,” and refers to its current “next” feed as “outdated.”

To address this, the Automattic-owned platform says it’s working to “improve our algorithmic placement capabilities across all feeds” and “help users understand where Tumblr’s vibrant communities are.” The company also notes that building more creator-friendly features, including improving how replies and reblogs work, will also be key to attracting new users.

“Being a new creator on Tumblr can be scary, with a high likelihood of leaving or being disappointed when you share creations without engagement or feedback,” the company writes. “The lack of feedback is due to an outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs in the main dashboard feed (“Followed”), which perpetuates a cycle of popular blogs gaining more and more exposure at the expense of helping new content creators.”

Overall, the changes described by Tumblr sound a lot like TikTok (or even Instagram): algorithmic recommendations in users’ preferred feeds, creator-friendly features that encourage sharing, and more streamlined commenting and discussion tools. As a strategy, this may all sound pretty straightforward in 2023, when users increasingly expect such features from social platforms. But since Tumblr’s core interface hasn’t changed all that much in its decade and a half, the new direction could bring significant changes to the overall dynamics of the platform.

The upcoming redesign isn’t the only way Automatic has tried to breathe new life into the platform it acquired in 2019. The company has also experimented with subscriptions and other paid features, and introduced Post+ in 2021, despite some backlash against the feature. long-term users. More recently, the company began selling “totally useless” checkmarks to users shortly after Elon Musk failed to implement Twitter’s new paid verification.