On popularity contests with dubious criteria
I said it once, but I’ll say it again because I think it’s worth its own post:
Tumblarity sucks.
There you are, trying to behave like a person with an interest in keeping an interesting blog featuring posts and comments that, while not being that many (it’s sunny outside, you know) are actually written with your own hands on your own keyboard (rather than mouse-clicking in approval of what someone else posted), and you get that annoying number calling you a shithead for all your troubles. It seems the key to ‘successful’ Tumblr activity, at least according to that stupid, stupid metric, is to behave like a cross between a pushbutton crazed monkey (‘following’ and ‘liking’ and ‘reblogging’ everything that you come across) and a spammer/’search engine optimizing’ scumbag. What the hell, Tumblr?
Of course, you can just ignore it. But the stupid number which you can’t turn off is still there in the dashboard, judging you every time you log in, an unwanted reminder that you are alone. And should you click the Tumblarity link, it again calls you a shithead - you are not in the top 50000 blogs, therefore you deserve death. You lame prick. It helpfully points out mine is the 155th Portuguese ‘tumblelog’ (out of 157 - the last two are my other two blogs I don’t even use anymore), but it won’t even allow me to scroll up the list and see who’s at 150th. Apparently, that blog would be too elite for me.
Obviously, I’m not the only person who’s incensed by this ‘feature’: Warren Ellis didn’t like it either, and the people at Gawker were quick to realize what its announcement actually meant. A couple of months later, we can see they were right.
