local trash babe

 "Pebbling" - a courtship ritual where Gentoo penguins pick up pebbles in their beaks and bring them to their prospective mates. Hospitalized children painted the pebbles for the penguins at the Edinburgh, Scotland, Zoo. Here they are picking their favorites.

He's got his, and is rushing off to present it to his mate. This is too cute.

Anyways, plan from above gets executed with "A/B" testing, sometimes. In this case I'm not sure if it was but, in my experience, even when Tumblr had more competent knowledgeable people working on it, they never did a real A/B test the way you should. They got close, but in the end things just got rolled out if they didn't disturb things "too much". They also look for signals that it's working if people post more. do they separate out "people posting about this saying this is a bad idea" vs "posts in general"? No. I was there for the "no more replies" then "replies are back!" fiasco. The justification for ditching support for a feature (any feature, not just replies) is that anything that's an extra thingamajig upon the Tumblr codebase requires you to maintain it and fix it if it breaks. Less unique features = less stuff to fix. In this case, they saw replies were barely used vs other methods of communicating, so they figured they could get rid of replies when they introduced Messaging! Because now you can just DM the person rather than leaving a reply!

obviously that backfired. Tumblr once again touched the hot stove of "small but vocal group of users use this, actually" and they had to revert it. What they did do, at least, is fix a bunch of stuff with replies before bringing them back. I can't remember off the top of my head what they fixed but it was something like making them easier to use and read.

back to "tumblr is too hard to use for new users". it is because not many people use tumblr vs other places. so its patterns are not familiar. but that's not a good enough excuse for companies that own tumblr because infinite growth is the goal. most posts = more users therefore friction between users and making new posts must be eliminated. however this conflicts with what makes tumblr unique, which is why people stick around to use it. catch 22.