Reblogs vs. Likes
It seems to me like the introduction of Likes would have two effects – higher user engagement (because it’s so easy to Like posts) and reduced reblogs. Reduced reblogs, I hypothesize, leads to reduced follows, which leads to reduced discovery. I’m only guessing, of course, and I wish I had access to data to verify (David? John? Marco?).
I’ll explain a bit more. Likes increase user engagement for both
content producers and consumers. Content consumers, I imagine, find it
easier to Like posts than reblog, if nothing other than it’s 1 click
and 0 page loads instead of 2 clicks and 2 page loads. Content
producers, seeing an increased responsiveness from their followers,
produce even more content than before. So in that way, Likes are great.
The flip side to increased Likes is the reduction of reblogs
because, you’d imagine, some percentage of Likes had previously been
reblogs (before Likes existed). What makes reblogging the best social
design pattern of the last several years is how, coupled with
asymmetrical follow, information propagates through social networks in
the form of both the content being reblogged and the chain of people
involved in the (re)blogging process. So reblogging introduces me to
new content producers and new content. Every new person I follow
increases the chances of me discovering valuable content worth
reblogging, which increases the quantity of quality content flowing
through the Tumblr ecosystem.
All of that is to say that reduced reblogging reduces social network
connectivity and reduces the propagation of quality content. Without
metrics, I can’t judge whether the increased user engagement offsets
the effects of reduced reblogging, but it seems to me Tumblr could very
easily get the best of both worlds by publishing Likes. In this format, Likes become a 1-click reblog
with no added commentary. These Likes would default to being publicly
viewable with the option of being marked as private. Plus, your Likes
would now be searchable and search engine indexable.
I’m curious to know what people think (plus, this is my first full-length post on Tumblr).