#nerd sniped

So apparently Tumblr is making changes. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

But! The computer engineer in me is still intrigued by the idea of exposing more of the reblog tree for interaction. Or even using data about the tree for sorting/ranking. So here goes.

The old behaviour exposes only aggregate note counts, no matter what part of the tree you encounter. You see OP? 1,000 reblogs listed. You see a lengthy chain of reblog replies emanating from OP? 1,000 reblogs listed.

The new behaviour dis-aggregates those numbers, doing something like this, BUT ONLY SHOWING 1st-child RBs on any given node!:

4 [1st-child RBs] / 11 [all child-RBs] <-- OP |- 0 [1st-child RBs] / 0 [all child-RBs] |- 1 [1st-child RBs] / 1 [all child-RBs] |- 0 [1st-child RBs] / 0 [all child-RBs] |- 3 [1st-child RBs] / 5 [all child-RBs] |- 0 [1st-child RBs] / 0 [all child-RBs] |- 1 [1st-child RBs] / 1 [all child-RBs] |- 0 [1st-child RBs] / 0 [all child-RBs] |- 1 [1st-child RBs] / 1 [all child-RBs] |- 0 [1st-child RBs] / 0 [all child-RBs] |- 1 [1st-child RBs] / 1 [all child-RBs] |- 0 [1st-child RBs] / 0 [all child-RBs]

SO, if a big influx of activity on a post happens deeply in the tree (or really, anywhere deeper than direct-child), like this:

4 [1st-child RBs] / 111 [all child-RBs] <-- OP |- 0 [1st-child RBs] / 0 [all child-RBs] |- 1 [1st-child RBs] / 1 [all child-RBs] |- 0 [1st-child RBs] / 0 [all child-RBs] |- 3 [1st-child RBs] / 105 [all child-RBs] |- 0 [1st-child RBs] / 0 [all child-RBs] |- 1 [1st-child RBs] / 1 [all child-RBs] |- 0 [1st-child RBs] / 0 [all child-RBs] |- 1 [1st-child RBs] / 101 [all child-RBs] |- 100 [1st-child RBs] / 100 [all child-RBs] |- 0 [1st-child RBs] / 0 [all child-RBs] |- 0 [1st-child RBs] / 0 [all child-RBs] |- 0 [1st-child RBs] / 0 [all child-RBs] |- 0 [1st-child RBs] / 0 [all child-RBs] |- 0 [1st-child RBs] / 0 [all child-RBs] |- 0 [1st-child RBs] / 0 [all child-RBs] |- 0 [1st-child RBs] / 0 [all child-RBs] … … and so on for 100 of these rows … |- 1 [1st-child RBs] / 1 [all child-RBs] |- 0 [1st-child RBs] / 0 [all child-RBs]

Then OP's badges still only show the "4" for the number of 1st-child RBs! There's no indication of the extra activity! Boo! And apparently, OP might not even get any notification at all about the activity that goes beyond their own 1st-children? Double boo! Maybe? People seem more split on when/how they want notifications than on whether or not they want to see the aggregate numbers. But that, I suppose, is a tunable thing that can be configured per-user.

In any event, I think it makes sense to have the "all child-RBs" number included in the tallies and shown in the interface. I also think only including child reblogs (and not ALL reblogs across the entire tree) helps to identify (1) where interesting conversations and contributions are happening, and (2) how interest is flowing across the userbase.

An aside on comments: apparently, comments are now segmented according to the specific node of the tree they're on? Rather than being a single comment space for the entire tree? That seems to be a bad move that's definitely frustrating people too. I've never really used the comment feature though, given how paltry its threading interface is.

My friend Skrappy asks

So, with all this talk of D/s, Top/bottom, Cuddle Top/cuddle bottom etc... I wonder if there could be an equivelent for general conversation having... I can't stand to carry a conversation and i love it when people either just go on about themselves or something they're interested in, or take it uponm themselves ask the questions that spark a conversation. I'm pretty sure there are people who prefer to do it the other way round, aren't there?

I suspect there’s something really valuable to discover here, and I’d like someone to discover it, but I probably don’t have any particularly useful insights myself. Some things which do seem relevant:

I get mildly nervous about hanging out with people one-on-one, in case I can’t think of anything to say. Even people I count as my best friends. It’s easier with them, because we’ve hung out enough that logically I’m pretty sure I’m capable of holding a conversation with them.

There are probably multiple axes here. Likes/dislikes talking, likes/dislikes listening, likes/dislikes asking questions would be vague ones. Then if a +talk/-listen/-ask is chatting to a -talk/+listen/+ask, they’ll have a good conversation even if someone on the outside thinks the +talk was rudely dominating it (and the +talk might also think that, and the -talk might worry they were boring).

But I’m not actually comfortable placing myself upon these axes. Upon reading the original, my instinctive reaction was that I was a bottom. That probably caches out as -talk/+listen/+ask. -ask seems more accurate for me. But when I feel like I’ve had a really good conversation, I think those are often ones where someone has managed to draw me out and make me talk. And the conversations where I just listen... some of those are really interesting, some are boring.

There’s probably a difference between disliking a conversation role because you just dislike it, and disliking a conversation role because you just aren’t very good at it yet/think you aren’t very good/think your partner doesn’t enjoy you doing it. I can think of things in the latter category for me, e.g. I think I would enjoy asking questions more if I thought I was good at asking the kinds of questions that help people to talk about things they want to talk about. I can’t think of a conversation role which I’m pretty sure I just inherently dislike, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one, or that other people don’t have them.

There are probably also axes related to personal-ness of conversation. There are people I’ve known for years and we’ve never shared anything personal, and there are people who get me sharing personal things the first time we meet. I don’t think that’s just about conversational style, but it probably is at least somewhat? And then there’s interesting versus mundane, which is obviously a matter of opinion. But LW type conversations are often great to bottom in, and conversations about TV are not.

So like, maybe I’m somewhat toppish about personal things, provided I have a partner who I feel comfortable with; and somewhat bottomish about interesting things; and I just don’t particularly care for mundane conversations?