

Why Tumblr Sucks - PStamatiou
http://zachinglis.com/2010/why-tumblr-sucks/

======
karl11
Just last week I couldn't login - I would get a "You don't have permissions to
access this page" error. I e-mailed support and a few days later they
responded saying the my account had "corrupted" and that they deleted it, and
that I would be able to make a new account with the same name. Awesome
service. Definitely going with Posterous.

~~~
zachinglis
I would love to add that to my blog post if you have a screenshot?

~~~
karl11
Sent to the email posted on your site! And I should add now that I've looked
back at the email that they did respond within 24hrs, but the response was as
I described.

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pclark
Love tumblr, love the community, love the design, but god it feels like it's
tied together with string.

About two years ago I made the simple request of allowing me to not auto tweet
content when posted with bookmarklet (it. would. just. be. a. checkbox.) but
it never happened, i think they replied and said they didn't plan it.

there's no importer for wordpress or any other content.

the way you repost stuff is atrocious. i love the concept, but it has no
concept of who originally posted it when you quote something, leading to the
worlds most horrendous spaghetti of html for you to deal with (eg:
<http://grab.by/6iqJ>)

Tumblr has got all the hard stuff right, and is seemingly failing at the easy
technical stuff :(

~~~
jmahoney
The whole reposting while keeping attribution has been tidied up a lot this
week: <http://staff.tumblr.com/post/1059624418/content-attribution>

~~~
zach-inglis
I agree that this is good news.

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joey_bananas
The no. 1 reason tumbler sucks: 1 original content site for every 1000
reposting shitheaps.

Also, people using it for posting info that would be much better presented in
some other way. I'm looking at you safariextensions.tumblr.com, your site is
pretty much worthless thanks to the decision to use tumblr.

~~~
kmfrk
That's a community problem; if you subscribe to a Tumblr blog (tumblelog,
microblog, etc.) like you would with any other blog, this wouldn't be a
problem.

It's a Tumblr problem for Tumblr users.

Many people - not necessarily you - tend to forget that Tumblr is (also) a
blogging platform when used outside of the - atrocious - Dashboard.

You wouldn't say the same about Blogger or Wordpress, for instance; at least
it doesn't look like crap in Tumblr.

Tumblr has definitely created a trend and affected the blogscape with its
laudable ease with which you can publish content online, and it certainly has
its pros and cons. Most of the cons only exist if you focus on them.

------
shortformblog
This feels contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. Not that there aren't
good points here, but it just seems like _somebody_ had to knock them down a
peg.

And you know, for all of the weaknesses with code pointed out in this post,
the reason that the site has taken off is really its design and functionality.
Fact of matter, no other hosted blogging platform offers its mix of
simplicity, customizability (you can do a CRAPLOAD of stuff with this platform
that you can't do with the free version of Wordpress.com, including ads) and
user interaction.

My guess: They'll solve the downtime issues. They'll solve the more technical
issues. They'll even solve the customer service problems. The design backbone
of the product is why. Twitter had the right design mentality and that's why
the technical problems have slowly gone away. Weaknesses in design are harder
to solve than technical problems. Unless you're Digg. Then you're screwed.

~~~
ohashi
A culture of bad service and not paying attention to code details will be
corrected later? My gut tells me that just isn't going to happen. Twitter had
issues but I never got the feeling they weren't trying or listening.

~~~
zachinglis
You got my point exactly! :)

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holman
> 70% uptime.

I really hate to be "that" dude, but... [CITATION NEEDED]

~~~
jw84
No actual numbers but it's been up and down quite often. What's more important
is that the users FEEL the downtime is annoying.

~~~
kmfrk
When isn't downtime annoying? I'll manage and live a happy life as soon as
they replace the weird 404.

I wouldn't be surprised that the general uptime isn't great, but it's not that
often that Tumblr is available an entire day.

~~~
kmfrk
"Is _un_ available an entire day."*

The irony isn't lost on me.

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acabal
A little off topic, but was anyone else bothered by the fact that his picture
is overlapping the navigation buttons on Ubuntu Firefox so that I can't click
'Home', 'TL;DR', or 'Archives'? This plus the fact that I'm looking at a web
developer's website made me think twice about what he had to say without even
having read it.

Edit: having read this, the guy sounds like a hack. While I don't use Tumblr
myself, the author makes a lot of baseless assumptions about Tumblr's systems
as if they were fact. For all he (or we) know, there might be good technical
reasons why things aren't aligned with his own blogging nirvana.

Having been on the author's side of the table (the customer who is also a
developer) along with Tumblr's side (the big company with a probably complex
back-end), I want to say that when the author makes totally unverified
assumptions about how a site's SELECT queries work, pulls percentages out of
thin air, and smacks the table and shouting "BUT THIS FEATURE SHOULD BE SO
EASY TO IMPLEMENT, ARG, LOOK HOW THEY 'HACKED' IT TOGETHER," it just highlight
the author's ignorance.

Edit 2: Wow, bashing them for having their picture taken with a celebrity you
don't like? Saying they're a bad service and calling them slackers because
they don't have a revenue model yet? Really?! How did this even get on HN?

~~~
zach-inglis
If you think less of me because my website has only been out for 3 days and
has issues, then you are being hypocritical.

I know what I am talking about too. I have worked on small sites upto ones
with hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank. I realise they have scaling
issues but let's be fair: Twitter had less of a problem.

So you are saying it's well put together? I have made plenty of examples on
how it fails and on its serious lack of stability. I have heard many a person
say they has issues.

If they had behaved with grace at all throughout my dealings with them, maybe
I would be more sympathetic. Remember, politeness is free and there is no
scalability issues with that one.

Its not about which celebrity, it's about there're being serious cries from me
and many other tumblrs about the issues and all they do is roll out new
features and faff about.

As much as you want to call me a hack you have to admit one of the worst
things to do to a codebase that has issues is add yet more features before you
stabalize what you have.

~~~
acabal
1\. You should look up the definition of hypocritical. 2\. I have never used
the service and I have said so. That doesn't mean your many of your arguments
still aren't based on foundationless assumption and ad-hominem internet rage.
If you're going to call a service out on back-end specifics and hard numbers,
you'd better be prepared to cite those, or get called out on it yourself.

If there's anything I've learned in a career of cleaning up other people's
apparent development messes, it's that making assumptions about a codebase
without having seen it is one of the big mistakes a developer can make. You
(nor I, nor anyone but the owners) have no idea what sort of problems their
codebase is designed to surmount, what kind of hardware they have to make do
with, or the codebase's evolutionary history, or really anything about their
back-end. Making those kinds of assumptions shows a sort of narrow "I know
what I'm talking about enough to assume" mindset that makes me, a person
unfamiliar with Tumblr, wary of the article as a whole.

~~~
zachinglis
You're hypocritical with your anti-flaming flaming.

Oh, I agree to an extent. But I have never seen any website have so many
troubles. If I coded a website as half working as that (and here people will
mention that my 3 day old website had an issue of an overlapping div) I would
be ashamed of myself. Yet they are egotistical and rude, as I have shown. They
have no lack of resources (10 million in funding) and a ton of staff.

The community as a whole is quite unhappy. Yet they focus their time on
getting famous people joining rather than trying to satisfy the people who
stay.

I would call myself a Power User. I have used it more than your average user
and so I do experience a great volume. But tell me this; how has Twitter never
been as bad, when it has served so many more requests.

~~~
novum
> But tell me this; how has Twitter never been as bad, when it has served so
> many more requests.

Twitter _has_ been that bad. Probably worse, in 2008 and parts of last year.
Even 2010 has seen its fair share of fail whales.

~~~
zachinglis
My experience with Twitter in 2008 was a blessing compared to what I have
dealt with using Tumblr.

------
suhail
A bit over the top.

Looking from Tumblr's perspective, yes over 4 years any company is bound to
make technical mistakes. Should you sum them up in a blog post and say they
suck? Probably not.

I am sure the documented mistakes over the years have been resolved and fixed.
It's understandable that this person is frustrated--Tumblr probably should do
a better job serving it's power users who remain loyal and helped create the
community it has.

------
Sephr
Not to mention that the dashboard takes literally minutes to load (though it
only seems to affect some users, including). They have never fixed it after
multiple people have reported this.

~~~
c1sc0
That's actually the _only_ thing that bothers me about tumblr, but not enough
to switch

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rakkhi
I use blogger because I'm a bit of a google fanboy. It is a bit old fashioned
but solid as a rock. Simple to add in whatever I want via html/java gadget.

Still though I was thinking of moving my blog (<http://www.rakkhis.com>) to
Tumblr or Posterous.

Has anyone done this? How hard is it? I have moved my comments to Disqus to
make this process easier. Now just my articles... Still this post makes me
think maybe Tumblr is not the way to go?

~~~
ebun
I moved from Blogger to Posterous some time back. The migration is pretty
simple but there was one problem: my private/unpublished posts from Blogger
became private in Posterous. I had to go through and manually set them back to
private.

This was before Posterous started aggressively pushing for moves from other
platforms to themselves though, so that issue may have been fixed.

------
icodeforlove
I have been experiencing horrible API downtime’s for the past 3 days. When a
developer is working with a brittle API that can be up one minute, and down
for hours it becomes extremely frustrating.

So yesterday I had to ask myself a few questions: 1) Do I still like tumblr?
2) Are they worth it?

The answers for me were Yes, and Yes…

So I created a page/service to make tracking down the uptime/downtime issues a
bit easier, if you’re interested in my API then hit me up @icodeforlove

Here is the page: <http://tumblruptime.icodeforlove.com/>

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thehodge
Having created a tumblr account for a mini blog of quotes from our office
(<http://hodgeoffice.tumblr.com>) it frustrates me that I have to change the
URL to tumblr.com to post anything on it, theres no dashboard button on the
subdomain even when Tumblr knows I'm logged in... unless I'm missing something

~~~
cmelbye
It's in the top right corner: <http://cl.ly/2Ivj>

~~~
thehodge
I'm an idiot, thanks :)

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jakerocheleau
It seems like the article is mostly bashing Tumblr as a professional blogging
platform, which I agree it's not. Tumblr is supposed to be a micro-blogging
platform for networking and sharing small bits of posts, photos, music,
videos, etc...

Either way haters gonna hate

~~~
zach-inglis
I did not start out hating it. The community has been an integral part of my
life the last few years, such as meeting my best friend I now live with.

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beza1e1
I'm still using it <http://compilers.tumblr.com/> because it has the best
bookmarklet i have used so far. I even use the bookmarklet to enter free text
posts without a link to the current page.

~~~
gbrindisi
Have you tried the Posterous bookmarklet? I think it's way better and super
easy to use.

I had a couple issues with Tumblr bookmarklet, like not opening at all (even
crashing my Chrome tab) or not formatting properly my post.

~~~
beza1e1
Just tried it. I like it that the tumblr bookmarklet opens in its own window.
However, Posterous improves by finding an abstract automatically.

------
kmfrk
On another note, the Terry Richardson accusations hardly seem to have been
proven nor resulted in any prosecution that I know of.

Bashing Tumblr for what they've obviously done is O.K., but TR shouldn't be
slandered on account of dubious claims.

~~~
erikpukinskis
That's absurd. The OP claims that TR was accused of coercing models into
sleeping with him. TR was without question accused... the accusations are
published everywhere.

As for the merit of the accusations... There is a litany of models who say
that they felt coerced by him. If they felt coerced, then they were coerced.
End of story. Maybe you feel they shouldn't have let themselves be coerced,
but that doesn't change the fact that they were.

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zachinglis
I also forgot this… [http://altreport.hipsterrunoff.com/2010/02/pitchfork-
steals-...](http://altreport.hipsterrunoff.com/2010/02/pitchfork-steals-url-
to-start-a-tumblr-tumblr-facing-big-brother-backlash.html)

------
ivankirigin
I've had almost no problems

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jw84
I've used Tumblr for 3 years, mostly during my funemployment year. Content on
Tumblr at the time were just pulled from Ffffound, YayHooray, Flickr, Vimeo,
4chan, 4chan-lite (Reddit). Then you have the unique content from the small
group of also funemployed or under-employed mid-20s writers, artists, and
filmmakers.

That creative group made Tumblr a really fun place. Then Tumblr got big and
went mainstream and went on the growth pattern curve of big internet message
boards. Uh oh, eternal September.

Many have grown up and grown out of Tumblr, others are working full time again
so the content shift is beginning. Once clean 400px wide multimedia page
layouts are peppered with glittery trinkets, customer mouse pointers, and
encumbering music players. Tweens have settled in with duckfaces and shameless
personal drama. The Corporations have also stepped in, trying to slick up
their wardrobe, wanting to blend in with the cool crowd.

It's not a complete wasteland but Tumblr has traded wrestling one monster for
another. Though still an enviable position, who doesn't want to be the guy
trying to come up with strategies of how to deal with a billion pageviews?
Then again, who does? But running the business like the adults its original
and most passionate users have become would be a start.

~~~
iamdave
4chan-lite == reddit??

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terra_t
isn't it just some kind of black hat spam site that's written by Markov
chains?

------
benologist
Wow .....

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mikecane
If you post from a Windows PC, your data is trapped until they deign to create
an export app (WTF!) to pull out the data. Ridiculous! I can pull my stuff out
of WordPress by doing Export XML. That they require an _app_ is just plain
screwy.

~~~
jmahoney
Your data is hardly trapped.

You can export any or all of your posts as xml using the Tumblr api
(<http://tumblr.com/api>) and your browser. eg <http://we-heart-sci-
fi.tumblr.com/api/read>

There are any number of scripts/gists/pasties around the web that will give a
simple script to download your posts.

~~~
mikecane
>>>There are any number of scripts/gists/pasties around the web that will give
a simple script to download your posts.

So, Tumblr is a site where you can press a button to put stuff in but you have
to deal with the stuff you just listed to get it back out. You've made half my
own point there.

