Tumblarity, revisited
So you see, Tumblarity is just a metric of your popularity this week, not how popular you are over the life of your Tumblr, or what have you. I think it’s probably a very accurate depiction of who/what is captivating Tumblr users this week. Even if they stopped letting us see the results, it is probably very useful for Tumblr & their investors.
Lastly: I believe this feature is in beta and the staff at Tumblr are pretty fucking cool.
Nathan has an excellent post explaining tumblarity, so if you’re interested in how the scoring works, check it out. I personally don’t see why people are up in arms. It’s a good at-a-glance measure of your reach for the week. if you don’t care about that, ignore it, it’s just a number, and if you think people you follow are gaming their behaviour just to get a better score, well, then stop following them.
We’ve been thinking a lot about how to work similar algorithms into our search rankings at TeachStreet. The goal is to immediately reward activity, but rapidly decay it. To allow new and trending teachers and classes a chance at the spotlight, while respecting the natural order that comes from lifetime reputation and vibrancy. To me, this is some of the most fun stuff to work on. I don’t imagine we’ll surface a “score” to our users, but there is tremendous value in tracking various short-term activities and using that data to drive all sorts of system behaviors.
Lastly: I’ll second Nathan’s statement that the Tumblr staff are damn cool. There’s a lot I don’t agree with, but they are cranking out some pretty creative and interesting ideas. And 800,000 posts yesterday? Awesome, congrats!
