#twitterfication

Hey @staff, @support, @wip! The new layout sucks! It is less intuitive, less straightforward, less aesthetically pleasing, and overall a real pain. Suggestion: why not let us choose by having a toggle in settings between Classic Tumblr and New Layout?

^ This is what Tumblr is known for visually when you see screenshots in the wild. It IS Tumblr.

^ This new layout is terrible in every way.

with the Twitterfication finally hitting the last survivors, I wanted to post something like this because I'm realizing a lot of people are either new and unaware that all these tumblr extensions exist, or aren't aware of some of the most current ones and still use New Xkit.

New Xkit isn't broken or anything, but its development is pretty much dead in the water for a bunch of reasons so it's likely to break in the future with all the changes being rolled out. Fortunately there are alternatives.

I use Firefox, so I know all of these extensions work for it, but I have no idea about other browsers. If you're still using a chromium browser for some reason godspeed.

Xkit Rewritten

this is an even newer offshoot of New Xkit created by one of the developers, it includes pretty much all of New Xkit's features but lives in your addons bar, has a streamlined UI, and as far as I know is still getting updates/support.

Palettes for Tumblr

a better alternative to Old Blue, one of the few features not brought over from New Xkit. If you're like me and have an aversion to highly saturated/high contrast web design, or you just liked tumblr better in 2016, this extension is your new best friend. It's got a good number of preset options including a couple older versions of tumblr, but you can also create your own.

Dashboard Unfucker

a Tampermonkey script that reverts tumblr's layout to its pre-Twitterfied state, allowing you to bask once again in the peaceful blue void of your dash. it also has a lot of other nice features like disabling that obnoxious "don't forget to add tags so people can find your Content uwu" popup that shows up when you post now, and receives regular updates.

For everyone else, you can find me on my neocities page.

Also, good time to tell you to make a neocities page!! I will never shut up about Sadgrl's links, tutorials and resources for web building (They even have a layout builder!!!) (There are also multiple FREE layouts you can use!).

You can also see Melonking's guides to get a little brief in the web revival and how to make a website!

And I don't mean the old new UI that the people who use old.reddit like to complain about. I mean, a proper, new, twitterfied, shitty UI.

I haven't heard anyone talking about it, which might mean it's being slowrolled out, but it's possible I just missed the announcement and discourse. Or saw it and forgot. It's funny actually: I saw the logo and rebranding on a graphic design blog the day before it went live, but missed the UI redesign entirely.

Here it is:

I've boxed out the subreddits that would narrow down my location, but otherwise this is what it is. Oh, and I suppose the "recent" widget would be open by default as well. The thing about that is, if you drop into any sub, the name goes in the recent list. You drop into a weird sub you don't want people in your house knowing about? Well, you better go visit 4 other subs. There's no way to permanently keep the drawer closed or turn it off.

Below that, you can see all my subreddits and learn a great deal about my interests. It was certainly enlightening for me, having them all thrust into the light of day like that. I had a visceral reaction of disgust seeing some of the old subs I don't really follow anymore. A locus of old interests that seemed important at the time, but trite now. And of course, visiting them puts the sub name in the recents list. Right where you don't want to see it.

The feed defaults to "cards" mode, and seems to revert itself occasionally if you turn it back to "classic". Gone are the days of skimming the post headlines to find the content you want, the endless boredomscroll is here instead, just like every other site. This might be the worst part of it.

You'll also notice the recent posts feed on the right has a few subreddits I don't subscribe to in it. This used to be where you could easily access posts you had visited earlier to check the comments again. Now it exclusively has posts I have not clicked on, meaning it's likely driven by an algorithm trying to determine what I want to look at. Spoilers: I don't want to look at any of those posts, and I'm genuinely embarrassed r/SipsTea is up there. Again, there's no way to turn this off.

The feed itself seems more algorithm sorted than it used to as well. Sorting by best no longer delivers the top post from all your subs, but shuffles around posts at random, weighting subreddits you visit more more heavily. If you click forward and want to come back to a post you saw before, good luck finding it.

I... look, I know we were supposed to jump ship from Reddit. I tried, but some of the communities I'm a part of have been irreplaceable. It's been hard to let go. And yet, I feel like I'm being punished for trying to continue to be a part of them.