Ever since the abandonment of my old tumblelog, I’ve been receiving some entertaining feedback and questions from former followers and friends, through emails and just talking. It’s always the same sequence, and it goes a little something like this:

1. “Dude, why?”
2. Upon hearing precisely why, “Oh. So, anything new happening?”
3. Upon hearing what exactly is brewing, “Eh, the old zetahydrae was better. Bad move.”

It’s happened often enough now that I felt I’d finally use this new medium to talk about it. Just the fact that I can do this, sit down and write, is something that’s nigh impossible with the tumblelog platform. For the unacquainted, Tumblr is something of a del.icio.us dump with a design, as put by Revista in his abandonment of tumblelogging. It’s not only that that bothers me now; I love del.icio.us. The problem is that Tumblr advertises their platform as “the easiest way to share yourself.” That’s a lie.

It’s not even realistic to think that a series of pictures, links, and reblogged content (which is heavily endorsed by Tumblr) is “sharing yourself.” No, that’s just like someone looking through the history of books you’ve checked out at the library and thinking that they know you. Nothing posted on a tumblelog is original content. Tumbleloggers are a bunch of people sitting on the internet, expending just enough effort to click a button on their bookmarks toolbar and typing in “Awesome, found on Digg.” And through that, you’re “sharing yourself.”

If I, or in the case of the older zetahydrae, the reader, wanted to find links that I found interesting on the web, I wouldn’t visit a tumblelog - why would I? There’s absolutely nothing that a tumblelog adds to the experience of say, sifting through del.icio.us pages, looking through top Dugg stories, or even just mindlessly using StumbleUpon. At least those are personal; you have control over what’s being shoved in your face - you only pursue topics of interest to you. Why, then, is a middleman necessary? To dress up the experience with their vast expanse of XHTML and CSS knowledge? Or to “share themselves” through the three or four lines that accompany each of their tired, regurgitated links?

The only reason for me to visit a blog is to read matters as seen through the eyes of the author, to culture myself by exposing myself to differing points of view; that’s character-strengthening, being able to do that. There’s nothing of this sort being added in a tumblelog; the content is cold, distant, and unemotional - the author has barely a role in his own site. For all I care, it could be maintained by an RSS feed of some dude’s favorite del.icio.us tags. And that’s precisely why I have no problem with del.icio.us or even Pownce, even though the latter doesn’t really have a real use for me yet. Unlike Tumblr, which puts an emphasis on the author, you, and the tumbling community, del.icio.us is plain and dry: bookmark what you like, and look at what a lot of people bookmarked - maybe you’ll like that too. Pownce, on the other hand, emphasizes the opposite end of the spectrum, sharing links with your friends. There’s no real emphasis on authorship; you’re just showing your buddies things you thought were cool. The only reason I’m not active on Pownce is because I don’t have enough friends who are into the whole intertubes thing.

On the subject of emotion and author’s point-of-view, both which make even the most inaccurate and vacuous sites fun to read (see: Valleywag) and which tumblelogs are lacking, I think that most t’loggers have recognized the problem. Many of the most popular tumblelogs — Marco.org and cameron i/o are examples — all have “articles” sections, where longer posts are written. And, oddly enough, these longer posts are much more fun to read than the short little stubs of emotionless links. Even in the traditional tumblelog, the longer posts are the better ones, affording the author’s insight into the topic and a unique outlook on certain issues, but in the world of Tumblr, long posts are bad etiquette. The way the Tumblr dashboard is set up, something like Twitter’s homepage, with multiple subscribed feeds indexed, long posts are large, ugly, unwieldy, and whore your screen real-estate. So, tumbleloggers stray away from them, thereby eliminating anything and everything that makes visiting a site worthwhile.

And that’s why I quit. Because, simply put, I just don’t have the patience to sift through twice-regurgitated news and I don’t feel like maintaining something that’s supremely useless in terms of lasting value. This, this blog, this new platform, allows me to actually expose myself, and that’s why I switched. Want links? Look at the middle column, go read my del.icio.us links. Better yet, go visit Digg. Want spur-of-the-moment, undeveloped thoughts? Look at my Twitter page.

But if you want real content, this is where you should be.

 

Upon publishing this post, a large discussion as to the validity of the arguments presented in this essay was ignited. The following are the comments that were on the original post:

1. ScottBruin  |  December 11th, 2007 at 11:11 pm

Pad the left side of your content column and title. Everything’s way too hard to read

2. Prashanth Kamalakanthan  |  December 11th, 2007 at 11:16 pm

Not a bad idea, Scott, but I’d rather not at the moment. Maybe if I find it so in time, or if I get a lot of negative feedback on the issue.

3. Andrew Cornett  |  December 11th, 2007 at 11:30 pm

Let me start with telling you how I found your article.

I was in my Tumblr dashboard and I noticed the latest post from cubicle17 about cameron’s redesign. So, being a designer I decided to check out this nice redesign. Really nice. What was his most current link? Voila.

This is a great article. I agree that Tumblr makes it way too easy to regurgitate things you found, and the recent “post my digg rss feed” doesn’t help.

A long time ago I wanted to setup my own homepage with a blog like everyone else, but instead I just wanted to keep it updated with screenshots of interfaces I work on. I wanted the system to be really easy… I just upload a photo, theres a title, a link, description. The easiest thing I could find out of the box was a simple wordpress blog.

The problem for me was wordpress seemed really clunky and over engineered for what I was trying to do. When I found Tumblr I knew right away that this has to be the easiest “blogging” solution I’ve seen. So simple, and exactly what I want.

I like being able to take a screenshot with a firefox plugin, and just email that off to my Tumblr address and have it update without much needed from me at all. Where Tumblr really shines is how simple and easy it is to get content online. But if all you’re doing is “reblogging” like Tumblr heavily suggests, then I agree with you and I wouldn’t be spending any time on someone’s Tumblr looking for cool links.

I didn’t get into Pownce enough either. I’m in the same boat. Not enough inter-friends. I would use Pownce a lot more if they did offer me some of the features Tumblr did. I like being able to email photos right off of my iphone, I like being able to use my own domain, and I think some kind of mix between a Tumblr and Pownce would be awesome. Anyway.

Here’s to meeting more inter-friends.

I really enjoyed your article.

4. Prashanth Kamalakanthan  |  December 11th, 2007 at 11:34 pm

Hey, thanks for the feedback, Andrew. I agree; the usage of Tumblr as a portfolio of sorts seems quite appropriate.

By the way, I took a look at your website - just a suggestion: from where I’m standing, the text is camouflaged into your background.

5. Andrew Cornett  |  December 11th, 2007 at 11:42 pm

Oh man, bad timing.

I was trying out cubicle17’s theme and for some reason it used the color scheme from the default tumblr theme. It’s better now. But I’d really like to sit down and make my own tumblr theme at some point.

And I noticed my Tumblr homepage is messy, I’m taking off the digg feed.

6. alicia  |  December 12th, 2007 at 1:34 am

i have a hard time disagreeing with many of your points. i can’t handle seeing things reblogged endlessly or having to sift through pages and pages of info i’m not remotely interested in just to find something unique. that said, i do reblog some. but much more of what is on my tumblelog is stuff that actually has to do with my life, so much so that i’m guessing it is boring for the people following me (because they don’t actually know me in real life). anyhow, i’ve stopped following tumblr users who just feed in their outside links and status updates in and produce no original content and those who post like 20 times a day.

7. dalas v  |  December 12th, 2007 at 1:35 am

This article seems to make a lot of assumptions. The biggest assumption is that you show up on Tumblr and start following a lot of bad tumblelogs. I follow lots of great tumblelogs that combine original content and content that I would not see on major sites like digg.

Also, think about the concept of “sharing yourself” in real life. If you met someone, would you immediately deliver the huge monologue that is this blog entry? Or would you talk about shared interests, things you’ve both seen, things the other person should check out?

Maybe if your current friends had tumblelogs you would understand the power of the platform more. I started tumbling at the same time as a few of my friends and I have met lots of good people through Tumblr. If someone only reblogs or links to things, it does not give you a full picture of their personality, but many of the best tumblrs throw in enough original content that I do feel as though they are “sharing themselves” with me.

8. Christopher Clay  |  December 12th, 2007 at 2:06 am

I put up some quick thoughts at http://kitchen.soup.io/post/532430

Tumblelogging is just easy, low-overhead publication. What users make of that is their choice: The spectrum ranges from general-purpose tumblelogs with little original content and limited appeal to the world at large (but likely still lots of value within a person’s social circle!) all the way to much more focused or original streams. But who’s to say which usage is good or bad?

That’s not to say that platforms couldn’t do things a lot better: I think one problem might be that right now, the same software is used for both tumblelog creation and reading, and these built-in readers are still very barebones, offering no way to filter content, sort subscriptions into groups of various importance, etc. Subscribing over RSS doesn’t really work either: Just that bold number of unread items an RSS reader will display doesn’t fit with the no-strings-attached mental model at all (see Revista saying he/she kept marking all as read).

But of course if you enjoy writing longer, more infrequent, mostly text posts, then by all means blogging is right for you. It’s not for me – so I’ll keep a tumblelog with a certain amount of quality control.

9. Wolf  |  December 12th, 2007 at 2:53 am

I must be the exception since my Tumblrlog consists of content of my own for the biggest part (http://wolfs.tumblr.com/).

10. David Karp  |  December 12th, 2007 at 2:55 am

Hi Prashanth,

Congrats on the new blog! Long form definitely seems natural for you. I just wanted to defend a few points about Tumblr and tumblelogging that I think you were a little off on.

[Please excuse any typos — It’s late in NY, and I really wanted to get in on this discussion!]

> It’s not even realistic to think that a series of pictures, links, and reblogged content (which is heavily endorsed by Tumblr) is “sharing yourself.” No, that’s just like someone looking through the history of books you’ve checked out at the library and thinking that they know you.

I think this is overlooking something special about tumblelogs. Unlike long form blogs that offer an editorialized voice, we’ve always likened tumblelogs to looking through the author’s eyes. Sure, a person’s library history won’t show you much, but what I decide to put on my bookshelf might reveal a lot about me. Start flipping through those pages and seeing what I decided to highlight, and not only will you know me better, you might discover something you would have otherwise overlooked. Pair this with some photos I have framed in the same room and now you’ve got a window into my mind and experiences. It’s that rawness that makes us love this form. Everything meaningful in your life goes up, without having to explain or articulate yourself. As we usually say: Anything you find, love, hate, or create.

> Nothing posted on a tumblelog is original content. Tumbleloggers are a bunch of people sitting on the internet, expending just enough effort to click a button on their bookmarks toolbar and typing in “Awesome, found on Digg.”

Not sure who you’ve been following that you’ve been having such a forgettable experience on your Dashboard, but making it easier to discover interesting content and individuals is something we’ve started to give a lot of attention to recently. On my Dashboard I’m following about 40 close friends, and 40 other like-minded or generally interesting folks. Sure there’s some noise, but the vast majority of posts I see are extremely meaningful to the authors, and connect me to them in a really magical way.

I’d also like to point out that 10% of all Tumblr posts come from mobile phones where people aren’t anywhere near a computer.

We see so many new tumbleloggers, every day, that are using tumblelogs to share themselves without the mold of the closed platforms (Digg, Facebook, Flickr) and without the overhead of that big empty textarea you see every time you post to Blogger.

> There’s absolutely nothing that a tumblelog adds to the experience of say, sifting through del.icio.us pages, looking through top Dugg stories, or even just mindlessly using StumbleUpon.

Well let’s start with what it offers the publisher. I can have a record of my bookmarks on a public page which I have zero control over, or a page I designed on my dot-com that lets me share absolutely anything important to me.

Now, with that level of freedom of expression, people have begun sharing themselves in a way that was rarely available on the web. Remember how many of us aren’t wordy, or aren’t enchanted by the idea of editing our own newspaper column. Do we really think more than 5% of internet users are bloggers?

So now you have all these individuals sharing themselves and their experiences who would have never even been visible.

When you find one or several of these personalities who truly fascinate you (the first for me was project.ioni.st), the experience of following them can — sorry to repeat myself — be absolutely magical. In large part, I’m sure, because you’re following _them_ rather than their column or editorial voice.

> Even in the traditional tumblelog, the longer posts are the better ones…

Sometimes, sure. But that’s a very unbalanced comparison. Obviously, the long, well thought out, proofread, and formatted blog article is going to be much deeper and more engaging than a single photo of something I was doing today. But those little pieces come together with little effort, and tell the author’s story. Then consider the many, many, many, users who can’t or don’t care to blog, and you can see why tumblelogging has been so empowering for so many people.

> Long posts are bad etiquette. The way the Tumblr dashboard is set up, something like Twitter’s homepage, with multiple subscribed feeds indexed, long posts are large, ugly, unwieldy, and whore your screen real-estate. So, tumbleloggers stray away from them, thereby eliminating anything and everything that makes visiting a site worthwhile.

This has definitely been true when viewing long content on the Tumblr Dashboard. An upcoming interface update will make those posts play much more nicely in this view. Tumblr already takes every form of media, and we always want to support all styles/lengths of text. Meanwhile, long posts should already look great when viewed on your tumblelog. (or at least as great as every other long unwieldy blog post)

> Look at the middle column, go read my del.icio.us links. Better yet, go visit Digg. Want spur-of-the-moment, undeveloped thoughts? Look at my Twitter page.

You might do just as well to put your links and thoughts in a tumblelog to supplement your long articles. Your thoughts won’t be confined to 140 characters, and sharing interesting quotes or media will be just as easy as tossing links on Delicious. Embed that in your center column and you’re set! You can use Tumblr’s Bookmarklet, and it looks like some of your links would be better displayed as photos or quotes anyway.

> I don’t feel like maintaining something that’s supremely useless in terms of lasting value.

Right now on http://www.davidslog.com/archive you can see everything I was doing, every profound thing I heard or read, every funny conversation I had, every neat web page I discovered, and pretty much anything that was meaningful or interesting to me during the last year. That might be incredibly boring to _you_. It might have no lasting value in terms of SEO or monetization. But for my friends, for people who think I or the things I’m doing are interesting, this is a raw look into my life (and back at my life, for me).

No question, long-form blogs are great. Earlier this year we wrote about why we keep the official Tumblr Blog on Wordpress: http://blog.davidville.com/2007/02/23/why-wordpress. But for many people, tumblelogs are just as (and sometimes lots more) fun and a whole lot easier.

Thanks for giving it a shot, and good luck with the new blog!

11. logan  |  December 12th, 2007 at 3:17 am

hey prashanth - i really enjoyed your thoughts. there does seem to be a bit of a buzz going on about whether or not tumblr is worth a damn (in fact, that’s how i came upon the system a few weeks ago). i agree that it’s pretty awful for traditional blogging, both aesthetically and in practice. but like andrew, i think that it’s a very valuable tool for those of us who want an internet presence without necessarily wanting to write.

tumblr is a virtual inspiration board for me. i mostly use it to store pictures i’ve found in my internet travels, but also some quotes that i had cut and pasted and saved to a word doc and some links that i’d normally have bookmarked and forgot about it. i’ve sent the link to a few friends, but mostly i’m the one that visits the site. it’s a consortium of things i love and that are inspiring to me, all in one pretty place.

as far as following tumblrlogs, i haven’t signed up to follow any because having the dashboard clogged up annoys me. but i have found some gems, and it’s interesting to me to get a picture of someone based on this site that they curate.

12. shadowfirebird  |  December 12th, 2007 at 6:05 am

Many tumblogs are indeed a random agglomeration of things that the poster fell over on the internet (with apologies to the tumbler who actually has that as a tumblog title); and at the end of the day, if they are fine with that, then that’s fine. No-one is forcing you to read it. But some of us try, with greater or (in my case) lesser success, to post to a theme or a concept.

I could make the opposite argument to yours, about blogs: that they encourage you to natter on, telling everyone what you think about things.

I see a tumblelog as more like a newspaper than a diary — and like a newspaper, its identity mostly rests in the selection of its stories. For me, this is perfect. I can treat anyone who deigns to read me as an intelligent being: instead of telling them what I think, I can show them what I have found, and leave them to draw their own conclusions.

13. Simen  |  December 12th, 2007 at 6:55 am

Following good blogger etiquette, my comment turned out to be long, so I posted to my blog. Except it’s not a blog, it’s a tumblelog. Sitting there with all this original content on top. Kind of invalidates some of your points.

There is a lot to agree with in here, if you read it as pertaining to a certain class of tumblelogs, but as it stands, it’s full of overgeneralizations and “One True Way”-thinking. As a quick summary of what I wrote in the linked-to post, you’re assuming everyone uses their tumblelogs in the same way, which is wrong, and you’re drastically understating the importance of good editing, and your definition of “original content” must vary drastically from mine.

Apart from that, I’d echo dalas’s sentiments above.

14. squashed  |  December 12th, 2007 at 11:22 am

Following Simen’s example, my comment is a bit lengthy, so it can be found here.

15. Bill Israel  |  December 12th, 2007 at 11:37 am

I figured I’d throw my response into the fray as well.

http://cubicle17.com/post/21413573

You can read the post if you’d like, but it boils down to this:
Blogging is easy; content is hard. As long as you create quality content, your choice of publishing platform is irrelevant.

16. mmm  |  December 12th, 2007 at 4:13 pm

I currently have a tumbleblog and I agree with you Prashanth I switched to tumbleblogging and it’s nearly convinced me to go back to a regular blog. I agree with your points and I’m ready to follow your lead.

17. Prashanth Kamalakanthan  |  December 12th, 2007 at 6:05 pm

Hey, thanks everyone for your feedback and criticisms with your article. After reading each of your responses, I just want to clarify something:

I’m a fan of well-maintained tumblelogs, with large posts, good content, and the author shining through. However, the root of my generalizations in this article are not unfounded, I think. Such tumblelogs are rare, and through the way in which tumblelogging is portrayed and the system is set up, the author is encouraged to revert to a linkdumping mentality, because it’s just so easy. And easy, at least for me, is not fun to read.

And if you’re a proponent of using Tumblr or Soup or whatever the hell you use like this, then more power to you. I’ll stick to del.icio.us and my blog, and steer clear of your content.

Also, I’d like to note that I’m saying neither that blogs are always better nor that tumblelogs always suck. It’s just that the ways that the systems are set up that it tends to be this way. There are exceptions in both cases, and I acknowledge these. Blogging is the better platform for me, and I just figured that out, I think.

Finally, thanks everyone for actually taking the time to read this, even if you disagree with it.

18. Prashanth Kamalakanthan  |  December 12th, 2007 at 7:22 pm

By the way, the wanking analogy was funny.

Tumblr Custom … smackfoo.com  |  December 12th, 2007 at 9:40 pm

[…] that perhaps tumblr is far less a tool designed to regurgitate comment alone, rather it has embraced some pretty nifty features of late that open up a range of options […]

20. Brendan  |  December 13th, 2007 at 1:53 am

Maybe 4-5 months ago, this would have a lot closer to being on the money. The days of tumblr being a den full of thieves, scum and villainy are fast disappearing.

Those who are mindlessly re-blogging kitten pictures and porn are fading out whilst those with a slightly more creative bend are discovering just what tumblr can do.

And really, the platform itself doesn’t make much of a difference. You can find the same sorts of content no matter which engine is in use.

21. SC  |  December 20th, 2007 at 4:20 pm

Glad to see your back.