Why Tumblr Sucks
zachinglis.com
zachinglis.com
About two years ago I made the simple request of allowing me to not auto tweet content when posted with bookmarklet (it. would. just. be. a. checkbox.) but it never happened, i think they replied and said they didn't plan it.
there's no importer for wordpress or any other content.
the way you repost stuff is atrocious. i love the concept, but it has no concept of who originally posted it when you quote something, leading to the worlds most horrendous spaghetti of html for you to deal with (eg: http://grab.by/6iqJ)
Tumblr has got all the hard stuff right, and is seemingly failing at the easy technical stuff :(
When you reach a point when you don't feel that they are perfecting the problem - and have the passion - and just tweaking the back-end, you start to lose hope and consider the alternatives. It doesn't feel like someone who still want to fix a problem and create something that they themselves would love.
This applies to many of my experiences, some of which were Disqus and Forrst.
Also, people using it for posting info that would be much better presented in some other way. I'm looking at you safariextensions.tumblr.com, your site is pretty much worthless thanks to the decision to use tumblr.
It's a Tumblr problem for Tumblr users.
Many people - not necessarily you - tend to forget that Tumblr is (also) a blogging platform when used outside of the - atrocious - Dashboard.
You wouldn't say the same about Blogger or Wordpress, for instance; at least it doesn't look like crap in Tumblr.
Tumblr has definitely created a trend and affected the blogscape with its laudable ease with which you can publish content online, and it certainly has its pros and cons. Most of the cons only exist if you focus on them.
And you know, for all of the weaknesses with code pointed out in this post, the reason that the site has taken off is really its design and functionality. Fact of matter, no other hosted blogging platform offers its mix of simplicity, customizability (you can do a CRAPLOAD of stuff with this platform that you can't do with the free version of Wordpress.com, including ads) and user interaction.
My guess: They'll solve the downtime issues. They'll solve the more technical issues. They'll even solve the customer service problems. The design backbone of the product is why. Twitter had the right design mentality and that's why the technical problems have slowly gone away. Weaknesses in design are harder to solve than technical problems. Unless you're Digg. Then you're screwed.
I really hate to be "that" dude, but... [CITATION NEEDED]
I wouldn't be surprised that the general uptime isn't great, but it's not that often that Tumblr is available an entire day.
The irony isn't lost on me.
[1]: http://zachinglis.com/2010/why-tumblr-sucks/ "What feels like 70% uptime"
Edit: having read this, the guy sounds like a hack. While I don't use Tumblr myself, the author makes a lot of baseless assumptions about Tumblr's systems as if they were fact. For all he (or we) know, there might be good technical reasons why things aren't aligned with his own blogging nirvana.
Having been on the author's side of the table (the customer who is also a developer) along with Tumblr's side (the big company with a probably complex back-end), I want to say that when the author makes totally unverified assumptions about how a site's SELECT queries work, pulls percentages out of thin air, and smacks the table and shouting "BUT THIS FEATURE SHOULD BE SO EASY TO IMPLEMENT, ARG, LOOK HOW THEY 'HACKED' IT TOGETHER," it just highlight the author's ignorance.
Edit 2: Wow, bashing them for having their picture taken with a celebrity you don't like? Saying they're a bad service and calling them slackers because they don't have a revenue model yet? Really?! How did this even get on HN?
I know what I am talking about too. I have worked on small sites upto ones with hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank. I realise they have scaling issues but let's be fair: Twitter had less of a problem.
So you are saying it's well put together? I have made plenty of examples on how it fails and on its serious lack of stability. I have heard many a person say they has issues.
If they had behaved with grace at all throughout my dealings with them, maybe I would be more sympathetic. Remember, politeness is free and there is no scalability issues with that one.
Its not about which celebrity, it's about there're being serious cries from me and many other tumblrs about the issues and all they do is roll out new features and faff about.
As much as you want to call me a hack you have to admit one of the worst things to do to a codebase that has issues is add yet more features before you stabalize what you have.
If there's anything I've learned in a career of cleaning up other people's apparent development messes, it's that making assumptions about a codebase without having seen it is one of the big mistakes a developer can make. You (nor I, nor anyone but the owners) have no idea what sort of problems their codebase is designed to surmount, what kind of hardware they have to make do with, or the codebase's evolutionary history, or really anything about their back-end. Making those kinds of assumptions shows a sort of narrow "I know what I'm talking about enough to assume" mindset that makes me, a person unfamiliar with Tumblr, wary of the article as a whole.
Oh, I agree to an extent. But I have never seen any website have so many troubles. If I coded a website as half working as that (and here people will mention that my 3 day old website had an issue of an overlapping div) I would be ashamed of myself. Yet they are egotistical and rude, as I have shown. They have no lack of resources (10 million in funding) and a ton of staff.
The community as a whole is quite unhappy. Yet they focus their time on getting famous people joining rather than trying to satisfy the people who stay.
I would call myself a Power User. I have used it more than your average user and so I do experience a great volume. But tell me this; how has Twitter never been as bad, when it has served so many more requests.
Twitter has been that bad. Probably worse, in 2008 and parts of last year. Even 2010 has seen its fair share of fail whales.
because if not, someone's trying to masquerade as you ..
if you do, please stick to using 1 id vs. using a throw away account just to comment.
If you do a little Googling you'll quickly find out that Zach is quite the accomplished developer.
http://workingwithrails.com/person/7805-zach-inglis
"Ranking: #46 out of 17943 people"
Looking from Tumblr's perspective, yes over 4 years any company is bound to make technical mistakes. Should you sum them up in a blog post and say they suck? Probably not.
I am sure the documented mistakes over the years have been resolved and fixed. It's understandable that this person is frustrated--Tumblr probably should do a better job serving it's power users who remain loyal and helped create the community it has.
Still though I was thinking of moving my blog (http://www.rakkhis.com) to Tumblr or Posterous.
Has anyone done this? How hard is it? I have moved my comments to Disqus to make this process easier. Now just my articles... Still this post makes me think maybe Tumblr is not the way to go?
This was before Posterous started aggressively pushing for moves from other platforms to themselves though, so that issue may have been fixed.
So yesterday I had to ask myself a few questions: 1) Do I still like tumblr? 2) Are they worth it?
The answers for me were Yes, and Yes…
So I created a page/service to make tracking down the uptime/downtime issues a bit easier, if you’re interested in my API then hit me up @icodeforlove
Here is the page: http://tumblruptime.icodeforlove.com/
Either way haters gonna hate
I had a couple issues with Tumblr bookmarklet, like not opening at all (even crashing my Chrome tab) or not formatting properly my post.
Bashing Tumblr for what they've obviously done is O.K., but TR shouldn't be slandered on account of dubious claims.
As for the merit of the accusations... There is a litany of models who say that they felt coerced by him. If they felt coerced, then they were coerced. End of story. Maybe you feel they shouldn't have let themselves be coerced, but that doesn't change the fact that they were.
That creative group made Tumblr a really fun place. Then Tumblr got big and went mainstream and went on the growth pattern curve of big internet message boards. Uh oh, eternal September.
Many have grown up and grown out of Tumblr, others are working full time again so the content shift is beginning. Once clean 400px wide multimedia page layouts are peppered with glittery trinkets, customer mouse pointers, and encumbering music players. Tweens have settled in with duckfaces and shameless personal drama. The Corporations have also stepped in, trying to slick up their wardrobe, wanting to blend in with the cool crowd.
It's not a complete wasteland but Tumblr has traded wrestling one monster for another. Though still an enviable position, who doesn't want to be the guy trying to come up with strategies of how to deal with a billion pageviews? Then again, who does? But running the business like the adults its original and most passionate users have become would be a start.
You can export any or all of your posts as xml using the Tumblr api (http://tumblr.com/api) and your browser. eg http://we-heart-sci-fi.tumblr.com/api/read
There are any number of scripts/gists/pasties around the web that will give a simple script to download your posts.
So, Tumblr is a site where you can press a button to put stuff in but you have to deal with the stuff you just listed to get it back out. You've made half my own point there.