Towards better commenting on the Web.
When we originally built the commenting system on the old PTE (pre-Tumblr era) Say Yeah website, we required users to create an account and sign in before they could comment. This created an unnecessary barrier to entry that reduced the likelihood that a user would comment. It just took too long.
At the same time, we wanted to ensure that we weren’t dealing with moderating spam comments all the time and the account creation process pretty much eliminated this. Additionally, the same user account for commenting allowed a user to post or like an event on the TO Events Calendar, so the barrier to commenting for calendar users wasn’t as high.
With all that in mind, and to encourage the conversation by making the process less painful for users, we took a fresh look at the relationship between commenting and user accounts on the Say Yeah site. For users who weren’t using the TO Events Calendar, it was clear they had no reason to make an account unless they wanted to comment, so we worked to combine these actions.
Tumblr community love.
For sure. We’re just getting started! One of the things we highlighted in our Tumblr pros & cons post was how we dig the liking and reblogging philosophy over straight up comments. We’ve been keeping our eye on some design and tech blogs on Tumblr so we can hopefully kick the reblogging into gear. But even if we’re slow with reblogging here, we’ll look to make up for it on our other blogs.
Guys, c’mon.
I love you, but you’ve spent more time complaining about various CMS features you wish Tumblr had, then actually doing Tumblr stuff like reblogging and contributing the community. Get on that!
