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Comment by jayshua | Hacker News Reader

I find this very interesting. Could you elaborate a bit more in what features tumblr has that you require?

The main thing Tumblr offers that I haven't seen anywhere else is curated submissions. Like the sister reply said, on Tumblr, you can allow anyone to submit posts to your blog (including anonymous users and users without Tumblr accounts). You can set restrictions, such as "only text post or photo+caption submissions", and provide tags for submitters to choose from (e.g., on my blog submitters can choose the tag for the TTRPG they're using).

The key differentiator is the curation. Only those submissions which my mod team approves get posted to the blog, unlike Reddit where all submissions get posted first and then up/downvoted accordingly. I think (?) Reddit might have a way to curate, but it's not feasible at the scale of Reddit and a subreddit equivalent of the blog would quickly overwhelm the mod team and have to become uncurated. Considering the number of low-quality submissions we actively curate out, the result would be a significantly degraded experience. Which is not to say a transfer to Reddit is impossible, but it would definitely be An Effort, and one I'm not sure I'm willing to put in for what's been a fun hobby project for the last seven years.

Asks are another Tumblr feature that I haven't seen in other places. An ask is a question submitted to the blog mods, which the mods can reply to either publicly or privately, and which are visually differentiated on users' dashboards. On Reddit, a question to the mods would look exactly like any other post, and the mods' answer could easily be lost in the sea of general comments on the post.

There are also lesser features that Tumblr has that I've never seen on other platforms. Tagging is a big part of Tumblr culture and something I've had a lot of fun with on my blog. Reblogs and replies are very different forms of interaction than retweets/@'s. Fun coincidences like "dash did a thing" (where two unrelated posts show up together on a user's dashboard in a way that's amusing) don't appear to be a thing on other platforms for various reasons. The visual layout and formatting of Tumblr posts on the dashboard tends to be more readable than Reddit or Twitter.

These are all little things, but they're little things that have built up the personality of the blog over the years. I'd rather close the blog with its personality intact than watch it slowly die as yet another subreddit plagued by low-quality posts, insufficient moderation, and sameness.

(This sounds like I'm down on Reddit, which is not the case at all - I like Reddit, just not as a possible host for my blog.)

Why not use a restricted subreddit and have submitters simply email links to you?

Tumblr posts are multimedia, have tags, etc. There's no straightforward way to package all that in an email.

Also, it's just not a simple workflow to copy/paste from email. On Tumblr you just push a button and the post goes up.

I don't want to restrict the subreddit, for one. I have around 295k followers on Tumblr; I can't hand-approve all of them. Plus, restricting the sub would keep new people from finding it.

Plus what the other commenter said about formatting and poor workflow. The mods can just barely handle the current workload of reviewing ~30-40 posts per day, choosing 20 to post, and adding tags as needed. If we had to open an email, then open a link (and hope the link was functional and not malicious), then review the submission, then copy the submission, then open the "submit a post" dialogue, then paste, then format, then post... yeah, that's way too much.

There's an IFTTT workflow for sending Tumblr posts to Reddit, but unfortunately the API it uses doesn't preserve any formatting, so you end up with a giant text blob. I don't think it could handle image posts. If that worked, I'd happily start sending things to a subreddit.

Restricted subreddit means that only approved users can post, but anyone can view. Private means that only approved users can view.

Another option is to set all posts by non-approved users to be automatically flagged (hidden to non-moderators), and moderators can un-flag the posts. Which, I think, is the workflow you're looking for? All you have to do is set the spam filter to "All" in the subreddit settings.

You still run into the problem that a lot of people might not want to use reddit, and you'll just end up fragmenting the people following your blog and lose a lot of readers.

The flag workflow is the closest I've seen on any platform to Tumblr's submissions, for sure.

The concern about people not wanting to use reddit is definitely a big part of this. Reddit has a very different culture than Tumblr, and I agree that it's likely I'd fragment my readers and lose most of them. As much as I love my blog, I don't think the effort of trying to make the switch to reddit is worth the harm and disruption it would cause.

Thanks for reminding me why I loved Tumblr! I was a pretty heavy user ~2007-11.

For all we Tumblr users love to mock the blue hellsite, it really does do some neat and very unique things. I'm still holding out hope that it manages to stabilize somehow and stick around, because I've tried all the other social media sites and none of them has kept my interest.

You are wrong about Reddit.

* Reddit AutoModerator has settings option where every submission and/or comments must be first approved by moderator. AutoModerator supports relatively complex moderator rules. https://www.reddit.com/wiki/automoderator/full-documentation You can also allow only approved submitters or design rules for allowed submitters.

* Questions to moderators in Reddit should be send as messages to moderators. They show in completely different place where moderators can reply and discuss.

Automod is what I was thinking of when I said I thought Reddit has some tools to do this. The problem, like I mentioned above, is one of scale. Automod is not capable of making judgments about post quality; it can't do anything to enforce a "must be something someone said" rule, for example. Nor is it capable of flagging the many, many variants of the same low-effort submission we frequently get (not without a lot of false positives, at least). That's what my blog's curation team does, and what takes the most time. We can manage the blog's former peak submission rate of 25-35 per day, but given the nature of Reddit I expect that number would skyrocket, overwhelming the mod team.

Modmail isn't public, is it? It's only viewable to the sub's mods. If it isn't public, then it is not equivalent to asks.

>That's what my blog's curation team does

And why would you move your blog to Reddit without curation team? It seems that Reddit does technically the same as Tumblr, you just have to move your site there and ask you mod team follow.

> but given the nature of Reddit I expect that number would skyrocket, overwhelming the mod team.

That's very, very unlikely to happen. People start their own subreddits and want more people, but it's just as painful to grow the number of subscribers as everywhere else.

Like I said in the original post, a transfer to Reddit is not impossible, but it would be a significant effort, and it would definitely kill the blog's personality. Even if the curation team comes along, even if the submission numbers don't skyrocket beyond what the team is capable of handling, Reddit lacks a lot of other small features that give the blog personality. If/when Tumblr goes under, I'd prefer to allow my blog to end gracefully rather than trying to port it over to a platform that isn't quite a match.

What you want sounds within Reddit's normal use case. If it's not a site feature, it's a feature of automod: https://www.reddit.com/r/AutoModerator/

There's a lot of subreddits configured to only allow text posts, one of the subreddits I frequent is configired to delete your post if it is an image post that doesn't have a top level comment by the poster, as the subreddit rules require all image posts to have text descriptions (to guide conversation/mitigate low quality posts).

I don't Tumblr so I don't know the full use case for tags, but from what you've described it sounds like flair: https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360010513191-P...

Automod is an automatic moderator, not a curator unfortunately, which is what we really need.

Tags are in the same general family as flair, but they're distant cousins of each other. Reddit generally expects one flair per post, and for flair to be short. My blog uses a minimum of three tags per post, with around 95% of posts having four to seven tags. A couple of those could go away due to the difference in how flair and tags are used, but that would still be at least two flairs per post on most posts. It also still doesn't solve for very long tags.

Imagine if you had a popular twitter account but you were running low on content to post.

In tumblr can have other people submit content to you to post on your tumblr. You just have to approve it or reject it.

They get visibility, you get a steady stream of content and your followers get a curated feed.

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