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Comment by rayalez | Hacker News Reader

Tumblr has a lot of potential, it could be really great, but it's not well done.

Design should be better, discovery system should be better(more like on medium/reddit), it is also ridiculously slow on tablet. Also search is horrible, I am typing a blogger's nickname or the name of the website and his original content is nowhere in the results, only reposts and copies.

If they would just learn from medium and copied a lot of the things they did right - that would already be a huge step forward.

Then they could monetize it by allowing bloggers to advertise their blogs, or by creating a store with ebooks/merch, or a smart donation system.

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There's just one thing I wanna see changed in Tumblr.

The usernames on a post are:

1>The person who just shared the post (in bold, top of post)

2>The person that 1 just shared it from (just under 1's name)

3>The actual content of the post

4>The original author of the post (grayed out and in slightly finer print)

For a site that places a lot of importance on artists (and where you can often find complaints of "art thieves"), it's kind of puzzling why the actual creator is given so little importance compared to the person who clicked the "share" button.

The person who clicked 'share' is the person who caused it to show up on my dash. If my dash gets too low signal-to-noise, I want to know who to unfollow.

Also, the original author isn't necessarily the main 'artist'. Sometimes most of the value comes from the replies.

I could pick words at random out of a dictionary and find something I'd change about tumblr, but that one doesn't seem too bad.

It just seems disingenuous to me. Then again, I do follow several Tumblrs that post collections of art created by others, so there's a lot of confusion.

>Design should be better, discovery system should be better(more like on medium/reddit), it is also ridiculously slow on tablet

We see comments like this all the time for social platforms that are in a mature lifestage: Digg, Reddit, various other forums, etc

These found success with their "poor" design and discovery, why change now, and what evidence is there that such change would alter their course?

>> These found success with their "poor" design and discovery

To be fair, both Digg and Reddit have very simple interfaces which work quite well from a UI/UX perspective. And after Digg's redesign, it's actually much easier to find stuff I want to read. Reddit for better or worse, has stuck with their simple design and the users still love it after all these years.

I will agree however, both sites lack of a decent search functionality, Can't remember how many times I found something interesting on Reddit and tried to come back the next day to find it and only found stuff from a year ago after entering the entire title of the post. Digg is the same way.

Reddit's search is next to useless. Sometimes you can't even use it to find something you know you saw just a few days ago, or even your own comments!

Using Google with "site:reddit.com" is way more effective.

It's one of those things which everybody knows that it sucks, but as soon as you bring it up in an official feedback forum, you basically get tut-tut'ed by other users into accepting it's somehow good enough and we shouldn't ask the developers for something that'd be "hard to code."

One of the major problems Tumblr has is that every user space page can and often does have a different them with wildly inconsistent UX or even bad UX (like the people who play MIDI music like it's 1999 all over again).

it is just slow full stop. Had to sign up an account the other day, the signup process just repeatedly failed for no reason. Eventually figured out, "ahhh the 2mb background gif has to download before can signup"....

Same issue for logins

> If they would just learn from medium

Medium is content "centric" and tries to promote "good" content or writing. Tumblr is 80% porn. There is nothing they can learn for Medium.

Actually, Tumblr is 35% politics, 15% porn, and 50% random gifs of videogames.

And 95% of statistics are made up, too. It's hard to say what Tumblr actually consists of.

I think you will find tumblr is mostly porn

Depends on who you follow. Tumblr is one thing more than anything else: a collection of mostly isolated microcosms.

I never see politics or porn in my timeline.

Thats because you have a well manicured timeline. Tumblr politics are LOUD, ANGRY and tend to show up where you least expect it. Especially the fandoms.

Tumblr is what you want to see. For me you is porn, for my girlfriend was mostly Benedict Cumberbatch and Harry Potter gifs.

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