random acts

Tumbularity

lonelysandwich:

As a matter of principle, I fear and thus despise the new and the different. That said, notes on tumblr’s new feature, Tumblarity.

2. The Tumbluality score in my Dashboard reminds me of my mortality. Stop that. Let me hide that rapidly decaying metric or I swear to Christ I’ll never visit my Dashboard again. Consider yourself threatened. (J/K love you, tumblr!)

I know your intent was to incentivize kids to keep on putting change in the slot to watch the number grow, but it makes me all nervous and pukey. What happens when my number shrinks ever towards zero? Do my body parts start vanishing from pictures? Seriously. Stop it.

3. Across the quad at Twitter, we play a little game called Favrd. It’s fun to play because (like tumblr), it’s fun to keep track of how many people faved something you wrote. At the end of the day, Favrd keeps tabs on who got the most faves on the Leaderboard. And a spot on the Leaderboard is a real kick in the pants. Makes you feel good. Makes you want to keep playing. And the best part? It starts all over the next day. Tabula rasa. The only number that persists is the number of people who read your content. If I had a running all-time tally of how many times I’d been faved, synthesized into an ambiguous number that punished my mellow post frequency by dropping rapidly, I’d hate Favrd and I wouldn’t play the game.

I have a Tumbularity score of zero. It kind of reminds me of Plurk karma, and I’ve completely abandoned Plurk these days.