This was originally a reblog I posted on a recent post made by an excellent and one of my favourite Tumblr users Justin Leon. However, to eliminate a tonne of ‘potential’ reblogging (I say potential as a synonym for ‘unlikely’) I thought I’d make it a seperate post of its own. Sorry for the duplication folks.
If you have any interest in Tumblr and the Directory service, I hope you find that the following post interests you:
As much as I support the move to the appearance of premium services on Tumblr (or even for turning the site into a premium service altogether) I don’t think allowing its users to pay to get their blogs featured in the directory is a good idea at all.
I think it’s great you’ve earned yourself over 40 new followers this week Justin as I personally think your blog clearly deserves them. I also have no issues with the people who choose to use this service. After all, why not? It pretty much guarantees you your voice to heard [and respected] by an increased number of fellow peers, and all for a measly and affordable fee.
My concerns with this are that with the ever-growing popularity of Tumblr and the increase in the number of blogs we follow as a user, it’s becoming harder and harder to find those blogs that are new and upcoming or are not getting their content noticed by other users. Allowing your users to pay to appear in the directory makes it all too easy to form a group of power users on this site. Power users are already a major issue with Twitter and I can already see this occurring with certain categories of blogs on Tumblr.
I personally preferred Tumblr’s original [and previously the only] solution in place to the above problem, that being the recommendation system. The only problem I see with recommendations is [I’m assuming] few people head to the directory every Tuesday to recommend another blog to the rest of the community.
My alternative solutions to this would be to:
- Enforce or move recommendations to the top or on the right-hand side of the dashboard to increase the use of this feature.
- Produce a public directory where users can submit their blogs to one or two categories. After which Tumblr lists these blogs based on an algorithm that would calculate a weekly score/rating.
Now you’re probably going to look at the second solution and think “Oh shit, Tumblarity” and think number one is a much better option and I’d probably agree, but let us reconsider a scoring system for Tumblr that catered and could work for all of the site’s users.
As we all know, there were several problems with the Tumblarity scoring system and how unbelievably broken it was. I assume most of you were around at the time of Tumblarity so I’m not going to go into detail about it here. So let’s consider a new algorithm. Similar to Tumblarity, each blog would would be based on a weekly score. Now, this weekly score would need to take into consideration the quality and popularity of the content but at the same time ensure that popular blogs, power users (fuckyeah blogs and the like) and new/unknown blogs are all able to compete with one another.
By no means is said algorithm perfect, but something similar to it I believe could work:
(number of notes [likes, replies, reblogs]) / (number of followers / (0.5 * activity))
Having only spent a couple of minutes thinking it up, it’s a pretty basic algorithm and would need much further work and tweaking but I’m going to try and explain the concept of the algorithm and what it aims to achieve. The number of notes equates to the quality of the content posted (which is what the score aims to evaluate). This is then divided by the number of followers said blog has (this means popular blogs have to earn more notes per post than a less popular one). To make things not as unbelievably strict on power users with the above rule, weekly activity is also taken into account to decrease the the amount the scoring of quality will be divided by. This also stops heavily followed yet inactive blogs that have at some point been abandoned by their authors.
As for the 0.5? I threw that in for the laugh. I guess this would have some sort of effect on the ‘fuckyeah’ blogs that make use of excessive and highly frequent posting on a daily basis but this would need to be further analysed. Constants make the final score come out a little prettier too and that’s always cool thing.
I think one other (and probably the most important) point to note with this idea is that the score, in my humblr opinion, should remain hidden from the user. This aims to counter the Tumblarity-obsessed freaks who would be blogging crap in attempts to increase their score and hopefully make their appearance in the directory.
For those of you who made it this far and understand that my ideas are not the be-all, end-all solution to providing all blogs with an opportunity to be heard, what are your thoughts on this issue? Do you even consider it to be an issue or have I just wasted 30 minutes of my life postulating such a system?
