Nerdsniped by a Bad Update
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.
