(Crossposted from The Itinerant Librarian)
As I mentioned last year in my end of year thoughts and reading list post, I started a blog over at NewTumbl back in June of 2029 to replace the Alchemical Annex, which I closed down from Tumblr. Alchemical Annex
for me is mainly a bit of experiment, a bit of free writing and
posting, and a bit of stuff for fun. I call it the "refugee from Tumblr"
blog since that was the motivation for trying out NewTumbl. Now that I
have used it for a year and a half give or take, and I've had time to
kick the tires and take it for a ride as they say, I am going to write
out some thoughts as an informal review. So, in no particular order,
here are my thoughts on the site.
- A strength of NewTumbl is their ratings for blogs and posts system. The ratings through F (family friendly), O (safe for work), mature (NSFW), X (explicit, really NSFW), and their extreme rating of W (they call it Wow! and not safe for anyone. As I understand this one, this is for stuff even too extreme for X rating but still legal content). You can learn more about their ratings here. Ratings in theory give you a good level of control for your blog content and for what you see on your feeds. Feed is based on tags you choose to follow and users you choose to follow. In practice, getting a formula you are comfortable enough for your blog and your feeds is not as easy as it sounds. Yes, I like the idea you can rate posts, and I like the idea people can then adjust what they see based on ratings. You rate your blog, and others see it or not based on their level of comfort. For example, I now have an X-rated blog (more on that in a moment), which means I can see any blog and its content at X level and below. People with a rating below me would not be able to see any content I rate higher than them. They can see posts I rate at lower levels but nothing higher, so they would only see the parts of the blog that fit their comfort level.
- As I mentioned, calibrating your comfort level (what you want to see) and your blog level (what you may want others to see of your content) is not easy. I reflected on this on Alchemical Annex back in July 2 and again in July 5 of 2019.
- The ratings system is mostly human based, and to a large measure it does depend on people flagging things if they are not accurate. The results can be inconsistent. For one, I found a lot of people rate lower than they should be, i.e. a post that by definition is likely X gets an M rating because the user may be trying to skirt rules or just trying to get more views (or their threshold is higher despite the definitions from NewTumbl). The result is at times, if you have a lower rating of M for example for your comfort level, X-level stuff slips in because some users are just not scrupulous enough or may not care. This is another reason that getting a good comfort level on NewTumbl is next to impossible short of filtering everything out, but if you do that, you see very little since not many people are rating at the lower levels of F and O.
- So, why did I end up rating my blog with an X rating? Mainly because I started getting some followers who had a higher level I had, and to see their material, I needed to raise the comfort and blog ratings. A big disadvantage of the higher X rating is that regular viewers may not see parts of the blog unless they are signed into NewTumbl (and they have a high enough rating). However, for posts below X rating, and I think for me that is actually most of my content there, if you have the URL link to the blog, you see that content just fine. Having an X rating for the blog was not a decision I took lightly, but I felt it put me at a disadvantage. However, it does mean I have to more actively filter my feed because to be honest I do not want to be seeing porn all the time. Hey, I like porn as much as the next healthy male, but I do have my limits. NewTumbl does give you the option to filter the feed by levels, which means I can just tell it to see stuff that is just F and O on the feed and filters the rest out. One thing NewTumbl can do is make users a bit more thoughtful about the content they post and share and have a bit more control on what they see or not.
- What kind of content do I post? I use the blog as a second place to post my cartomancy content. I do a daily Tarot card pull on Twitter, and I cross post it at Alchemical Annex. It is just another alternative, though those posts get very little views and interactions if any. I also posts or repost memes, some pin ups, other bits and pieces of art, trivia, some vintage things, quotes, i.e. stuff one may keep in a commonplace book.
- What do other people post? From what I see, you get a lot of memes. All kinds of memes from humor to politics (on both sides of the U.S. spectrum. Don't really see much politics from other places). A lot pictures of things people like. A ton, and I mean a seriously huge amount of porn. NewTumbl basically became the Mecca if you like posting and sharing porn and adult images. Nothing wrong with that. After all, they billed themselves as the adult alternative to Tumblr, as the place that will not censor you (as long as you mind the broad rules), and people have run with it. If you set your comfort level to X, or even M as I mentioned, you will see porn. There is no escaping it. If that is your thing, then this is the place for you. If it is not, I honestly think you should either stay with Tumblr or try someplace else for your microblogging.
- Features on NewTumbl. I think it is safe to say NewTumbl is a Tumblr clone. It is not the only one, but it was one of the first that has been growing. You can do pretty much anything you might do on Tumblr.
- You can post and repost content from other users. You can also like content from other users and you can mark it as a favorite. If you mark as favorite, you can then view your favorites in a single feed. This is pretty much as you would do in Tumblr .
- You can set your "home" (where you start when you log in) to your dashboard, which shows activity related to your blog (any reblogs, likes, favorites, comments, so on you that you've gotten on your blog) or the general feed (shows content based on tags and users you follow). I have mine set up to go to the dashboard when I log in.
- Types of posts you can do: text posts, photos (and pictures), video, quotes, links, and audio. However, not all of those work. In reality, you can do:
- Text posts (which include some limited editing ability; you are not getting anything like a WYSIWYG option, but you can link things in text posts).
- Photos and pictures can be uploaded and you can add text underneath. However, you cannot embed images in a text post. So for example, if you want to make a text post and put a picture in that post with a caption, you cannot do that.
- Quotes. Sort of a text post. It puts the quote in a bubble when it displays, and gives you space to put in source of a quote. You can also add comment on the quote in text. If you share quotes, say a quote or thought of the day, this may be useful. I suppose you could do the same in a text post but this makes it look nicer.
- Link. You can post a link to something like a website, a video (the link; you cannot embed videos), or anything else on the web with some comment.
- Audio. That option is just for looks. Seriously, I have tried it and nothing happens. It looks like they intended to have some way to embed audio but they have not gotten around to it.
- Video. It supposed to be to
either upload a video or embed one from a place like YouTube. The
functionality is pretty limited. Embedding from YouTube or such is not
working. Like the audio function, it seems to be there for looks. The
uploading video function does not seem consistent neither. I honestly do
not bother with it. Overall, it is a bit of a fail in usability for
NewTumbl.
- What you do see often are short animated GIFs (often porn clips) and some very short video clips, which I am guessing people upload since there is no function to link and embed.
- You can filter types of activity to see on your activity, so basically sort things by just the likes you are getting or any comments.
- You can follow people, and they can follow you. While NewTumbl claims there is an option to block people you do not want following, in reality it does NOT work. They claim to block someone they have to follow you first, which makes it a joke because more often than not on social media you want to block out anyone who bothers you, who may be offensive to you, or you just do not want to see period. Most social media ranging from Facebook to Twitter have easy blocking options to make things more comfortable for the user. There is NONE of that here. Believe me, I have tried and looked. This is a big failure on the part of NewTumbl when it comes to usability.
- You can set up a queue of posts so things can post to the blog over time. You can also set the frequency in which those posts in the queue get posted. For example, I have the blog's post with enough content to post once a day.
- However, another big fail is that there is NO way to schedule posts to specific dates like most other blog platform does. You can just add them to the queue but they post when they post. You can move posts in the queue around a bit so one thing posts before another, but even this process is somewhat difficult. Basically, it is very much a "set it and forget it" kind of thing. Lack of ability to schedule posts on a specific date is a significant limitation. Even Tumblr allowed one to schedule posts on specific dates, like content for Christmas/holiday season.
- You can make posts and save them as drafts. However, the draft queue is not that much better than the queue in terms searching and moving things around to put in certain order.
- You can hide certain blogs and tags from your feed, though this also works fairly inconsistently.
- Tagging. You can tag your content. An issue is that a lot of people do not due to laziness or carelessness, so if you want to hide certain posts, many that fit a tag will slip because some user did not bother to tag things.
- There is some limited function to personalize the appearance of your blog, things like having an image banner, adding some personal links, a short statement what your blog is about and a title, those kinds of things.
- Having said that, there are a lot of users that do not bother with any of that and just leave their blogs as untitled. On a related note, a lot of people just set up a blog but not post content of their own, nor do they reblog. They just lurk. To me that is not a big deal, but there are some users who get very anal retentive about disliking followers with no content of their own. Oh well.
- You can get post alerts. This usually means you got flagged. This allows you then to revise a post, say change a rating. Until you revise, a flagged post becomes invisible. So for example, if you rate something as M, but it is really X, and you get "caught" (i.e. flagged), you get an alert. You then either revise the post content or change the rating for the post to get back in circulation. Once you learn the feel of the land, at least for me, alerts become rare to non-existent. First few days I got some persnickety monitor that flagged every other thing (not unlike Tumblr, except Tumblr uses their algorithm). Once I learned the ropes, I've not had any issues. The flagging system has its advantages (human based) but also disadvantages (again, human based and now and then you get some fuckbagel who is either way too literal and anal or one that does not have anything better to do than flag to bother people. The latter kind is relatively rare to be honest, so there is that).
- Speaking of the ratings, they do offer you the option to become a monitor. There is a process to apply, and they review your flags to get you a proficiency rating (i.e. how well you match their ratings rubrics). If you work your way up to "community monitor" there is a small payment that those folks can earn. Some of the information on that program is here.
- I have given thought to applying and seeing if I can make it to becoming a community monitor. I am sure my librarian skills could help, but realistically speaking I do not have the time to just go around looking for things to flag or not. Having said that, I do appreciate the self policing efforts, which are more than many other sites do.
- Their search function. This is not very good to be honest, but then again, search functions for most social media are bad. Facebook's search function is notoriously bad for instance. In NewTumbl, you can type in a keyword, say cats, and you first get any blogs that may contain "cats" in title or content, then searches NewTumbl for any posts containing "cats." Notice it is not a matching search. For example, type "tit" and in addition to what you might expect (tits, i.e. female breasts), you can also get things like "unTITled," "TITanic," "TITillate," etc. There is no exact match, and it finds anything containing the set of letters you type. This makes for a pretty poor search function.
- Speaking of searching, finding anything on your own blog is also next to impossible. You can see your blog, and if you tagged things well, a site search can bring up your posts, well, for the most part. However, there is no specific way to search your blog that is easy if you want to find a specific post. So if you recall you posted a particular post, but do not recall when, search may or not help you find it. At least Tumblr allowed you to see your blog's posted queue by month so you could at least scroll and look. NewTumbl does not even offer that.
- Advertising. It is a free to use platform, so supported by advertising. The ads show up in your feed and they sort of try to look like other posts, though they are identified as ads. The main issue with the advertising is not that they advertise. It is that they have chosen to use the worst porn ads imaginable. I am talking about the kind of cheesy and ethically dubious porn ads you only see on not so good porn sites and on seedy parts of the Internet: shady personals, the "click here to meet hot women in your area," ads for dubious male enhancement, and other less than tasteful ads. I get the site has to monetize. Believe me, I am not opposed to some ads. But for crying out loud, that is the best they could do? By the way, even if you have your comfort set up to low levels you will still see the porn ads in your feed even if all you set up to see was Dr. Seuss and memes and about cats. Their choice of advertising adds a seriously seedy element to NewTumbl overall.
- They have a chat function. These are fairly basic chat rooms. Chat rooms can be labeled according to level (F, O, etc.). However, I have no idea who creates chat rooms nor who picks the topics for rooms (assuming people even stick to a topic). I certainly do not have the option to create or set up a chat room. Most chat rooms to be honest are basically sex related and fairly explicit kind of chat rooms, so if that is not your thing, chat rooms will be pretty useless to you. The chat rooms, if there are people in it, do allow you to invite someone to a private chat. However, traffic in chat rooms seems to be fairly low. I personally find the function fairly useless. This is something they probably could have done without.
- They also have a trivia competition feature, but I have not tried it out. It appears to be something that may provide some form of micro reward to users. As I said, this is the one feature I have not tried out, so I cannot comment on it.
- You do have the option to delete an account, and it does
not seem difficult. However, there does not seem to be an option to
export your blog content should you decide to leave (or if there is, I
have no found it, and I did look). Tumblr at least gave you an export
function.
So let's do the final thoughts.
If you are into adult content, and you really like your porn, then this is definitely a place for you.
If you are not into that, you can filter it out when you set up your profile and blog, but odds are content you will see will be much less. There are just not that many people who do "mixed" content or stuff other than posting adult imagery. Practically no one posts any text. Much like Tumblr, images are the main type of post, and they are the post most favored and most likely to get other users' attention.
In terms of functionalities, NewTumbl does the very basics to be a Tumblr clone. However, there are a few features I feel it should have that they do not have, and that just makes the site less effective and useful. If you want a micro blog for "shits and giggles" as they say, then this is an OK site for that. However, if you were doing OK in Tumblr, at this point in time, even if you hate Tumblr's current owners, you may be happier or more comfortable there. I do not see a reason you would want to move over to NewTumbl unless it is for the adult content. Granted that Tumblr's algorithm is a pain, but if it is not bothering you because your content is relatively safe, I see no reason for making a move. You can do what some people do and keep their Tumblr and open a blog in NewTumbl to test it out, but as I said, if you are happy over there, you may be better staying over there.
Sense of community is still lacking in NewTumbl. Granted, they are a new site and a small operation, so they do not have the time, reputation, nor resources that Tumblr or other bigger social media sites have. Having said that, community sense is still limited. On the positive, looking for sex friendly (who may or not be sex positive, that is another question) and explicit material loving people, then NewTumbl could be for you. If you have any other interests, you may be better off looking elsewhere. That could change over time if more people come over, although from what I see, I do not see the current patterns expanding anytime soon. If you have more mundane interests like books and reading, you are not going to find enough if any people with similar interests in NewTumbl.
For
the moment, I am keeping the blog and account. For the most part, I
have the filters set up to something that works for me, but it did take
some effort to get there. I am not sure if I would keep it long term
given the lack of community and the limitations on some functions, like
scheduling posts. In addition, when they were starting out, the
owners/producers of the site would update on progress and report on new
features, fixes, so on. They have gone awfully quiet, and the site does
not seem to be upgrading or updating things much; that video
non-function shows no sign of being implemented for instance. So long
term, it is possible I abandon the site and end the experiment. It would
be nice to export things, but to be honest, if not, it would not bother
me. Overall, this is my review based on my experience as a fairly
active user of the site.
