mootPointer Tumblog

Tumblarity isn’t about you.

For those of you who are readers and not Tumblr users, feel free to skip over this one. I just thought I’d share this fairly sane interpretation of the new “Tumblarity” feature on Tumblr.

alaskamiller:

It’s never about you. Well, actually it kind of is. Measuring users is the number one priority of every major website out there. All the big companies have entire departments with multiple tiers of management just for the sake of recording and interpreting internal metrics. These are all stored in columns and rows of SQL databases scattered across muliple redundant servers in multiple network centers. Who’s the most liked person on Tumblr? Marco knows. What’s the most reblogged post? Marco knows. They all know, they’ve always known.

Now you know too. Good for you. You don’t get a cookie, rather you get a score. Be happy. If you think that score is low, post more! In fact, that’s the whole friggin’ point. Tumblr released a feature to let you know your tumblr score specifically so that you will post more, which in turn benefits them. Have you noticed that your Tumblrarity score decaying? That’s how they want it, so the active 20% funemployed top dogs can never rest on their laurels and to continue pumping out the loads of free content that the rest of the 80% peons readers can enjoy.

So the line has been drawn. If you’re bitching about this tumblarity feature then it’s likely you’re just part of the passive 80%, it’s okay, no one blames you for having a low tumblarity score. In fact, having such low scores might be indicative of your high real life score. But likewise, if you have insane amount of high tumblarity score, bitching about this tumblarity feature is just tacky because, again, this was never about you, you’re already Tumblr-famous. This isn’t a elementary school lunch table, this isn’t a high school prom, no one is picking winners of the Game. The scores are private and it changes so fast over time—almost minute by minute—that it’s not about popularity, it’s all just a ploy to get Tumblr to get you to visit this site more and for a way to report to their shareholders month to month the almighty sign: growth. For the day Tumblr, Inc., took that $750,000 something like this was already being planned. It’s almost required. Grownups with real money aren’t impressed with the number of notes on the 4chan memes that keeps getting published. But accurate tracking of how active a 1 million strong userbase is? That’s worth ten times an investment.

If after a day you look at this and still hate your life, I made greasemonkey scripts to hide the line. But you have to google it yourself.

I’d liken this whole phenomenon to the idea that if you put a target in the urinal, men are that much better at aiming. If you create a metric for people to try to improve, the result is more people posting more content. The quality of the content might improve a bit too.

In the end, yes — this is a cynical ploy — but a necessary one.