Thread by @gwenstacying

A bunch of my friends made tumblr accounts last night and I know for a lot of people there’s a learning curve so I’m going to write down a bunch of tips about how the site works for anybody who needs it

btw everything I’m saying on the assumption that everyone who reads this has only ever used twitter and tumblr is their second social media account ever. If another social media site has any of these features I will be acting like tumblr invented them

please don’t censor any words with an asterisk like ab*se or r*pe. There are no consequences on tumblr for typing the word out in full or swearing and by not censoring it people who don’t want to see that content can have it filtered out. the algorithm will not punish you.

also yes this does also go for threatening to kill other users and big name celebrities on tumblr too. it’s okay.

Hashtags do not work as one big word. If you for example want to search for Ben 10 content or post it for others to see you would type it as #Ben 10 instead of removing the space. Nobody on there combines every word they want to be visible into one run-on sentence.

Tagging a new post is the only time it will be thrown into the search function for everyone to look at. However you tag a post when reblogging only matters with how you want to search for it later on your own blog. Think of your blog as your own personal archive.

Because of this you can also choose to just not tag anything on your blog. It’s up to you how you run it but if you want to look at that one really cool piece of fanart of your blorbo 5 months later you’ll have trouble finding it again without any tags attached to it

I have not checked this one out myself for years so this could be outdated info but if you tag a reblog with a hyphen it screws up looking for it later on your blog due to hyphens being the default way to display spaces in URLs. Just tag Spider-Man as SpiderMan or Spider Man

^ the above thing only goes for reblogs on your own blog though. You can type it as Spider-Man if it’s a first time post to put it into the search engine if you want.

And again this could be outdated info by now but it was a huge problem a few years ago.

Unlike Twitter where if you retweet a post you have to wait before you can retweet it again, on tumblr you can reblog a post as many times as you want in a row & no one can stop you. This includes something as long as the Colour of the Sky post if you want to be a bitch about it

When you delete a tweet on Twitter it will be gone along with all retweets. This is not true for tumblr: if you post something, someone reblogs it, and you delete the original that person will still have a copy of it on their blog whether you want it to be there or not.

You can always ask for them to delete it of course but if a post gets out of hand there’s really nothing you can do at that point. Just keep in mind it is always possible for a typo you were embarrassed about to still be doing rounds on the website 6 years later.

Tumblr had a very bad bot infestation a few years ago that’s still being dealt with today so once you join immediately ditch the default icon because people might start blocking you on sight if you keep it too long.

One of tumblr’s most famous features is that you can highly customize the appearance of your blog. There are dozens of blogs who have theme codes created by users for free you can copy and paste to use with tutorials. Theme Hunter is one of my favourites

theme-hunter.tumblr.com

For obvious reasons you can only do this on desktop mode. There’s lots of things you can do such as add links to your bio, make extra pages for your blog, add a search bar, etc. Search around the website on desktop to see other people’s themes for ideas.

here’s a long explanation on how to remove a default feature so your blog is more easily visible :

Tumblr offers you the feature to make your likes and following list to be invisible to the public. Just go to options and turn them off. You’ll know it worked when they have these locks next to them on mobile.

oh shit this thing has other fonts, sizes, and colors!

If you want to become familiar with a lot of very old recurring memes or the history of the website itself really fast heritageposts is dedicated to documenting the “culture” of tumblr and even helped set off a couple of shots to keep the rent down

heritageposts.tumblr.com

the newest version of XKit has just launched and it’s very worth checking out if you ever use desktop.

april.tumblr.com/post/661586202…

If you are an artist who wants to start over on tumblr Blaze is a possible option you can consider to promote yourself. It costs money and people majorly use it to make people look at shitposts or cat pictures if you want to use it that way too.

help.tumblr.com/hc/en-us/artic…

the old tumblr user base is VERY famous for being anti-corporation capitalism bullshit and bullying off every official account who isn’t Neil Gaiman but users are actually very friendly to artists who use the feature to get attention because of the drought left after the porn ban

Speaking of the porn ban that is still in effect and it was greatly exaggerated when tumblr said titties were back on the menu once Twitter started to tank. It’s up to your discretion of how far to follow the rules but it looks like artistic nudity is 100% okay now

If you want to see 100s of posts at once on someone’s blog you can go to the desktop version of their blog and add a /archive at the end of the URL. Most themes come with a button that will bring you there automatically. You can search by year, month, post type and even tag.

for etiquette just so you know it is 100% cool and normal to stalk someone’s tags on their blog for content in a fandom you share. I once had someone go through 86 pages of my Madoka Magica tag in one night liking everything which was over 8000 posts.

For new users I know it’s hard to find blogs you wanna follow or just find stuff you’re interested in for a content binge so I’m recommending moonlightsdreaming’s account. She has been posting *literally* every single day on that blog since 2011 for hundreds of fandoms.

You can click the tag dropdown on her archive to browse some of her fandoms. I consider her one of the cornerstones of the website for archiving fanart and she is bound to have reblogged one of your fandoms at least once. Her Star Wars tag is amazing.

moonlightsdreaming.tumblr.com

Asks are a remnant from long before we had DMs on tumblr. It’s basically a built-in curious cat. People can send you questions as their usernames or as anon if you allow it. If they send a message without anon you have the option to send it back to them privately or publish it.

It is considered basic tumblr etiquette that when you publish an ask with someone’s username visible that you tag said ask with their username. This is so they can find it again whenever they want by searching their own username on the website