According to a post on the Tumblr Team blog, the company is planning a major update to its platform by adding algorithmic recommendations to users’ streams. So far it has only published posts in chronological order.

How is it going to be?

In the message, they talk quite frankly about the reasons for the upcoming changes and the shortcomings of Tumblr.

The main problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Being a 15-year-old brand is tough because the brand carries the baggage of people’s preconceived notions about Tumblr.
– writes the company.

While the microblogging service Tumblr doesn’t give exact details about the new features, it does give some pretty big clues about what’s to come. The company says one of its main goals will be to “offer great content every time the app is opened” and describes the current update feed as “outdated”. So currently working on “algorithmic sorting capabilities on all posts”.

The company pays special attention to the problem of new writers who come to the service but do not receive any feedback about their publications, because no one knows about them.

Being a new writer on Tumblr can be daunting. You are more likely to leave the site or be disappointed after sharing your creations without any engagement or feedback. The lack of feedback stems from an old decision to only show content from subscribed blogs in the main dashboard feed, continuing a cycle where popular blogs continue to gain more visibility at the expense of new authors.
– He said on Tumblr.

The company also states that creating more author-friendly features, including improvements to replies and reposts, will be key to attracting new users.

Taken together, the changes Tumblr announced are very similar to TikTok (or even Instagram): algorithmic recommendations on key user flows, creator-friendly features that encourage sharing, and simpler commenting and conversation tools.

It should be noted that recently there were also rumors of a possible redesign of the platform, which has remained almost unchanged for ten and a half years of its existence. Auto acquired Tumblr in 2019. Since then, it has been experimenting with paid subscriptions that remove all ads (there are a lot of them on the service), introduced Post + functions that users do not like very much, sell various products, and also offer to buy “absolutely”. Useless” ticks joke about the new verification on Twitter. Here they are colorful and allow you to have several at once.