#They see me scrolling [Dash Memes]

[tachiisms]

which archetype on a pirate ship are you!!

the stowaway

you are guarded and sharp; you’ve stolen onto the ship, giving up your doomed life on land. society has hurt you too much, you do not want to return to its hypocrisies and expectations when the sea offers freedom. you keep many secrets, almost too many, and you do not immediately trust the crew of the ship, preferring to keep your head down and to observe quietly from the crow’s nest as the rest of the crew share dinner. sooner or later, though, when an enemy holds a pistol to your head or a storm nearly throws you overboard, a crewmate will fight tooth and nail to save you, and you will realise that you would unquestioningly do the same for them.

tagged by: @mutatiio tagged the dash so i had to tagging: also the dash especially anyone who likes billowy pirate sleeves

[cheekyquokka]

Just putting out there again that my tag is CheekyUser if anyones interested. We don’t have to be mutuals for you to use it.

[rome-roy]

logs onto tumblr

tumblr live: off

money-grabbing ad: in the way

me: scrolling

I am forcibly removed from where I was on the dash

[handbellanon]

Is there a particular reason the filters for both tags and post content refuse to filter specified content from @staff (and some other accounts)?

[doggytail-duck]

Just encountered my first not-safe-for-tumblr Blazed post

I’m kinda surprised it took this long ngl

[jughead-is-canonically-aroace]

hi reddit refugees. you probably know about blocking tags by now, but i havent seen a post mention this:

you should probably block #long post. that is the standard format for tagging when someone reblogs a really really really long post, so that you don't have to scroll past a million miles of scooby doo taught me that the real monsters are humans memes (real post)

on mobile, opening a blocked tag post opens it in a new side thingy so if you see a #long post and open it up and it looks interesting, you just saw a cool post, but if you open it up and it's scooby doo taught me that humans are the real monsters you can just nope back onto your dash no harm no foul

desktop doesn't do this, but on desktop you have the ability to jump to the next post. press j to jump down a post and k to jump up a post

some people don't use #long post. it's definitely less common than it used to be. but some of them do. and the less scooby doo taught me that the real monsters are actually humans color of the sky posts you have to scroll past the better

[pathos-logical]

How to Keep Doing Descriptions (from someone who does a fuckton)

Plain text: How to Keep Doing Descriptions (from someone who does a fuckton)

This is a list aimed mostly at helping people who already write IDs; for guides at learning how to do them yourself, check my accessibility and image description tags! I write this with close to two years of experience with IDs and chronic pain :)

Get used to writing some IDs by using both your phone and your computer, if you can! I find it easier to type long-form on my laptop, so I set up videos and long comics on my phone, which I then prop up against my laptop screen so I can easily reference the post without constantly scrolling or turning my head

I will never stop plugging onlineocr.net. I use it to ID everything from six-word tags to screenshots of long posts to even comic dialogue! On that last note, convertcase.net can convert text between all-caps, lowercase, sentence case, and title case, which is super helpful

Limit the number of drafts/posts-to-be-described you save. No, seriously. I never go above 10 undescribed drafts on any of my four blogs. It doesn’t have to be that low, but this has done wonders (italics: wonders) for my productivity and willingness to write IDs. If I ever get above that limit, even if it’s two or three more, I immediately either describe the lowest-effort post or purge some, and if I can't do that then I stop saving things to drafts no matter what. No exceptions! Sticking to this will make your life so much easier and less stressful

My pinned post has a link to a community doc of meme description templates!

Ask! For! Help! Please welcome to the stage the People’s Accessibility Server! It’s full of lovely people and organized into channels where you can request/volunteer descriptions and ask/answer questions

I make great use of voice-to-text and glide typing on my phone to save my hands some effort!

Something is always better than nothing!!! A short two-sentence or one-sentence ID is better than no ID at all. Take it easy :)

If you feel guilty about being unable to reblog amazing but undescribed art, try getting into the habit of replying to OP’s post to let them know you liked it! This makes me feel less pressured to ID absolutely everything I see

This is a sillier one, but I tag posts I describe as "described" and "described by me." When saving to drafts, I never preemptively tag with "described by me," since for some reason that always makes me feel extra pressure and extra stress. Consider doing something similar for yourself if that applies!

I frequently find myself looking at pieces of art which feel like they need to be considered for a bit before I can write an ID for them, and those usually get thrown into drafts, where the dread for writing a comprehensive ID just builds. Don’t do that! Instead, try just staying in the reblog field for a bit and focus on the most relevant aspects of the piece. Marinate on them for a little; don’t rush, but don’t spend more than a handful of seconds either. I find after that the art becomes way easier to describe than it initially seemed!

On that note, look for shortcuts that make IDs less taxing for you to do! For example, I only ever describe clothes in art if they're relevant to the piece; not doing that every time saves a lot of time and energy for me personally

Building off of that, consider excusing yourself from a particular kind of ID if you want to. Give yourself a free pass for 4chan posts, or fanart by an artist who does really good but really complex comics, whatever. Let it be someone else's responsibility and feel twice as proud about the work that you can now allot more energy to!

As always, make an effort to find and follow fellow describers! It’s always encouraging to get described posts on your dash, and I find that sometimes I'm happier to ID an undescribed post when the person who put it on my dash is a friend who tagged it with "no ID"

TL;DR: To make ID-writing less stressful and more low-effort, use different devices and software like onlineocr.net and voice-to-text, limit the amount of work you expect yourself to do, and reach out to artists and other describers!

[sevdrag]

hello sev i am sorry to bother you but. if you have the time. could you PLEASE elaborate on how you thought elon musk was a tumblr meme i have not been able to stop thinking about it

So. The first thing you need to know about me is that I haven't been able to follow the news for the last, like, well. About 10 years. First I was in a black-hole-of-employment, and then once 2016 hit, reading the news just made me unhealthy levels of furious. So I stopped doing it for my own sanity. This, more than anything, allowed me to live a blissful life where Actual Husband could update me every weekend on anything important, while I had a drink in my hand. I ignored as much news as I could during those years, cause it turned me into something horrible. So! That's the foundation of this story.

I also don't pay attention to, like, famous people and stuff. At all. I thought the band was called One Directional, okay? I am happy in my little corner.

The second thing to note is that while I'm quite intelligent, I also am incredibly scatter-brained. It's the ADHD.

The third is to note that I'm a heavy Tumblr user. I've curated my dash here to show me, mostly, things I like to see. It's relaxing.

So I saw all the memes about Glup Shitto and Blorbo and a million other made-up Tumblr names (whatever they were back in like 2015-ish) during my daily lunchtime scroll, right? SO when I see a post about a guy named Elon Musk, paired with something absolutely fucking ridiculous, my brain just goes: Oh. Tumblr made up another meme guy. This one's rich. That's funny.

I don't remember, but I'm possibly even reblogging stuff about Elon Musk during this time, still thinking it's a meme name. I mean, look at it. Elon Musk. Sorry, dudebro, but your name be dumb.

Elon Musk wants to build his own spaceship. Okay, Tumblr. Sure. It's like a Tony Stark that's just buttfuckingly stupid. I get the meme. Cause, like, he does crazy fucking stuff, right? Crazy stupid stuff. Gotta be a meme. Tumblr's really going for it, I think. Alright.

Anyway, Elon Musk comes up in a Discord GC one day, and my friends are talking about him like he's a real person, and I just said:

Hold on. I thought he was a meme.

Chat, of course, is silent for a drastically embarrassing amount of time, and then explodes.

And that's how I learned, in front of a bunch of friends, that Elon Musk was NOT a tumblr meme character, but a real-life idiot doing real-life crazy ass shit. It took me a humiliatingly-ass time to realize it, and I DO still get Sevdragged about it to this very day.

tl;dr due to my head-in-the-sand tendencies and my love of Tumblr, unlike the rest of you, I had a blissful period in my life where Elon Musk was completely made-up.

I wish that were still true.

[unclewaynemunson]

the funniest thing about being in the steddie fandom while not at all being attracted to either of the Joes, is how i keep seeing all those thirsty comments on my dash but they're placed underneath photos of theee most regular looking men i've ever seen. like both of them are peak Just Some Dude™ to me and i will never understand why all my moots lose their goddamned minds over pics that literally look like this 🧍‍♂️ to me. i'm just scrolling past it sipping my tea like the "good for her" meme

[scarybabe]

I'm sorry if this is insensitive question but you accidentally popped on my for you page (I dont know how, I'm here only for memes and chosen few writers) and scrolled a little through your dash. Well, i don't understand why are you gaining weight? As in actively seeking to gain it. Is it something you just enjoy? Kink? Fetish? For the first time in my entire life I saw anything like this and I'm not quite understanding. Im not hating or anything, I'm just a? Curious person?? Passing by.

Also good luck with anything you try to do here even tho I'm flabbergasted.

yeah that’s exactly it! My fiancé and I have a lot of mutual kinks, and weight gain (feedism) is one of them! I get a lot of satisfaction from being this size, and both of us are enjoying it a ton. I have only been fat for about 5 years of my life (3.5 ish this weight gain attempt) and my body is honestly fighting me to gain more 🥲 most of my life I was 130-140. My fiancé and I want to start a family in a few years so within the next 2 years I plan on lifting weights and not actively gaining and seeing what size my body wants it to be when I eat intuitively - I wanna be feeling my best for that 😊 it’s been a great experience though! A lot of my hobbies involve heavy physical activity so it’ll honestly be cool to enjoy those without worrying about losing weight - after I enjoy being 300 pounds for awhile, I’ll get rid of my scale 💗

[tau1tvec]

Tumblr’s discovery options are absolute garbage, I swear it’s just straight up excluding blogs from tags and suggestions, I need more variety on my dash

Pls if you post/reblog

Elder Scrolls ( any )

Fallout ( any )

Starfield

Animal Crossing ( any )

Stardew Valley

Black Desert Online

The Sims 3

Y2K/Nostalgia

Movie/TV gifs/stills

Writing/Memes/Resources

Literally anything funny

Cats

Like/reblog this so I can follow.

You’re also welcome to @ me if you feel like I would like to see something you posted, and possibly reblog it.

EDIT: adding The Sims 3, bc even though I check the tag daily, I refuse to believe there’s only like 30 of us and a gum wrapper actively posting this damn game. 😭

[fipindustries]

you refresh your tumblr to see if someone posted something new, you see a couple of post you havent read before, they are very funny, you scroll down trying to find the last post you remember to see if youre caught up, all new posts, you keep scrolling down, you just checked ten minutes ago, it cant be that suddenly its filled with new posts so fast.

you keep scrolling down, you start to realize that they are filled with references to world events that couldnt be real, michael jackson got a new album? south iran stopped its bombing of north iran? president clinton passed a new bill? at first you thought it was part of a new meme of making up alt history, wouldnt be weird but they have like photos and youtube videos to back it up and also this is way too sudden and fast, you dont recognize half the people in you dash, you never followed these people before, finally you come across a post from yourself, is a photo of you with someone you never saw before smiling together looking at the camera. in the caption says “me and my bro hanging out!” you have no memory of having posted that before.

before you do anything else the page refresh on its own, you are back to your normal dashboard, familiar posts.

[wygolvillage]

a new year's resolution

well, as of 2024 i’ve decided i will no longer be posting on tumblr... this shouldnt be the hugest surprise since ive been pretty critical of staff, the over-monetization of the website, the site culture, and the user experience for the past year and gradually reducing my time spent scrolling the ol’ dashboard- ive even mentioned my intent to eventually leave; well, that eventually is now! gradually ive found myself analyzing the effect that using tumblr for 7+ years has had on me, and the effects of social media in general.

ive never had to write a goodbye letter like this before. while ive joined and left several online platforms over the years, its always been a gradual fade in interest rather than a conscious decision to stop. never have i used a platform as long as ive used tumblr, over 1/3 of my life. ive grown up with tumblr, for better or worse. how do you write a goodbye for that? i guess ill have to try my best. because as important as tumblr was for me, ive recognized the way its hurt me too.

finding other avenues of online self-expression particularly has made me think a lot about this. when i edit my website i feel accomplished, happy, and content, feeling i have put something of myself out into the world, my seed to grow and garden to tend. when i scroll through tumblr i feel as if my brain is mostly idle, and when i do emotionally respond its often out of anger or annoyance, because anger = engagement and social media sites like tumblr WANT engagement. particularly because i have OCD ive found myself upset by certain aspects of tumblr discourse culture, as well- it is basically the Scrupulosity Website and much of the way i react to and interact with media has been colored by my years spent absorbing the viewpoints of said Scrupulosity Website! i even used to look up discourse topics on tumblr just to anger myself on purpose, which is a dangerous road to go down, to build up Enemies and Factions in your mind- this is how discourse culture works. the culture of tumblr teaches you to see the world in black and white, and to feel like youre always in danger of compromising your moral purity or being attacked by the morally impure. If You Don’t Reblog This You Are A Bad Person. even as someone who nowadays tries to stay away from discourse entirely, its still there in the back of my mind, because the way we interact on this website is colored by this. when im online i dont actually want to be angry all the time! in fact i like putting my effort towards more positive stuff. but additionally: tumblr made me unhappy but it also made me an addict

and yeah social media addiction sounds like a silly boomer thing to complain about but one thing i noticed when i started trying to curb my time spent on tumblr was that opening the site was damn near compulsive. we all know those “open tumblr, close tumblr, open tumblr again immediately after” memes but that did describe my behavior pretty accurately. the draw and allure of social media feeds is powerful, if i accidentally click the youtubes short tab ill find myself a half hour later scrolling through random shit i don't care about and asking well how the hell did i get here? i dont even like that stuff! tumblr is no different no matter how much the site tries to coast on the reputation of being the last social media that's a “remnant of the old web” and “has no algorithm”. i like my chronological dash but it is equally as addicting to scroll through the thousands of people ive followed over the years, as it is to scroll through the algorithmic feeds of youtube shorts, because that's just social media!

and kicking addiction is pretty damn hard. before 2023, i made two separate attempts at reducing my tumblr usage and both fell through within a week due to that addiction. for reference this current bought of thoughts about reducing my tumblr usage and making my online/irl balance more healthy, around the start of 2023 when i began working on my website and its taken me an entire year to wean myself off of the hellsite, bit by bit. theres a point where it stopped being a conscious act, and even as i was carefully whittling down how often i use tumblr with extensions like leechblock i still had that compulsion go off multiple times every day, its a really strange feeling. but now that ive found so many more ways to express myself online, i just feel more whole now... i guess what im saying is that when i post on tumblr my first instinct is to complain or wallow about something, when i post on my own handmade blog on my website i always want to talk about things that excite me or make me happy! and its been such a tangible change in the way i think and act and im certain its because of the way social media and tumblr have their own “societal expectations” and structure that is built to feed on this negativity loop.

and a lot of the biggest shifts happened when i began immersing myself in the ideals of the web revival, while creating my own website. finding things that genuinely interested me and niches i want to occupy made me so much happier. i know we make a lot of jokes about having mutuals we never talk to that mean the world to us and i do think that is indicative of something. like, when i post on a forum full of strangers i am engaging with more “face to face” (or the digital equivalent) communication than i do with years-long mutuals. how genuine are these connections, this dashboard, the enjoyment i got from that meme post ill forget in 10 minutes? (not to say that i don’t genuinely care abt my followers and mutuals. ykwim?) i can still get all the things i enjoy out of tumblr in a more curated form via rss feeds; ive been so much more proud of what i post and create and code on my website. what am i here for? i gradually realized that i am losing absolutely nothing when i “miss out” or block tumblr on my phone or what have you.

since starting working on my neocities site ive felt so much creative drive. ive created whole interactive essays and worlds and games and writings and so many things i could never host on social media. my website is a place of my very own, and ive been learning the value of focusing on what i put out into the net compared to what i take from it. its made me feel so much more fulfilled when i spend time online.

and let's not forget about staff. i have broader issues with how automattic in particular has gone about running the site. the ads only took up more and more of the dashboard, and every month it felt like there was some new paid feature doomed to never take off. all while the user experience gradually degraded. using the site without browser extensions to fix the ui and block the ads and tumblr live and all the other shit they threw all over the place makes it look like its ridden with viruses, and i think the fact that its become so normalized to feel like we have to stay in spaces that become increasingly hostile to us, even while the internet is so vast, is really strange (i mean, i also thought that way at first). but Anyway. so much time and effort was spent on features no one liked or wanted in some desperate attempt to get a little extra money, while staff members get in public fights with users who complain about getting monetization shoved down their throat. its so openly pathetic. the merch store had mostly mediocre designs and the digital tumblrmart is absolutely full of useless digital goods with free alternatives. considering this is a userbase that gladly donates to other sites donation drives for hosting costs (i.e. ao3, wikipedia, internet archive), i am shocked that staff never considered the obvious answer of a fucking donation drive once a year or so! the ceo telling people with concerns about the ads being unsafe for epilepsy to “just pay the ad free subscription” is one of the most disgusting things ive ever heard from someone officially representing such a platform. do not be fooled by the reputation tumblr has cultivated: all that it cares about is making money from you. tumblr is “in danger” because it can't turn a profit- because a profit is all they care about!

so why stay here when im happier elsewhere, apart from the addictive compulsion? that's what ive been thinking through for nearly a year, realizing that i have no reason to, and that weaning myself off of the addiction is in my best interest. i can create and blog and have fun online and connect with others and follow other peoples work all without the need for tumblr anymore! and i think id be all the healthier for it.

over the past year ive truly fallen in love with the internet again and ive loved putting myself out there, unrestrained in ways i havent felt since i was very young. but nonetheless ive learned a lot on tumblr, ive had some of the worst and best experiences of my online life, and i dont doubt that i would be a much different person if i had never been a tumblr user for as long as i was. but i had to break out of this shell eventually.

i keep going over this wondering how i can express every feeling in my head, how i can word everything just a little better, how i can make the perfect goodbye. but i think this will have to suffice.

you can still keep up with me online here:

-explore my website: i keep it consistently updated and im always adding new things and writing new posts on my blog! you can even speak to me directly on the site! if you sign my guestbook or use my chatbox ill try to respond :) if theres anything on this list you do id like it to be this one! i worked hard on it! you can even send me chat messages on my homepage! just keep in mind it may not display everything right on most mobile browsers, but it should be mostly navigable...

you can also subscribe to my rss feed. if you don't know what rss is, it allows you to use a feed reader to keep up with updates from sites all over the internet! my rss feed will notify you whenever ive made a new post on my blog or made an interesting edit on my site id like you to take a peek at :0 convenient, right?

you can also email me at wygolvillage@gmail.com to message me directly. if you prefer im also “wygolvillage” on discord

thank you and happy new years :) thanks for seeing me off as i sail to a new sunrise <3

[guzhufuren]

hello hello not expecting u to 100% tell but also w he re do u find incorrect/text posts for ur meme gifs they are always so funny and on point(+if its by pinterest what do u even look it up as??) do have a good day week and job ur v funny and cool<33

hi darling!! thank you so much 🥺 my poor heart almost gave out on these compliments! yeah, it's no trouble, i can tell you how i find them!! basically i'm a professional tumblr diver but i'm gonna explain techniques in a more detailed way

technique 1. gold miners

you see a cool fun text post on your dash that has less than 5000 notes; you go in the tags and scroll to the very beginning of reblog chains; there you will find the people who somehow always find the best freshly birthed text posts; choose the people who tagged it as some variation of "#text post", "#txt" or they tagged it as "#x-character-core/coded" or even better, they tagged it as their oc - go to their blog and look through that tag, usually you will find a treasure mine of text posts; if all the posts you immediately see are well known and you saw them all over your dash already, then go back and start diving on the next person's blog through the tags and keep doing it until you are out of tagger rebloggers; when you find good text posts you gotta screenshot them (try to think ahead - maybe there is a show coming out in the near future that will fit this text post)

visual example: i always have various non-popular text posts in my queue that i will dive in later when i have the time. like these

technique 2. oc and character tags again

you find a post that perfectly fits your blorbos but it has much more than 5000 notes so it's impossible to check all the rebloggers - that's fine, once again go in the notes for blog diving; start from the top and find specifically someone who tagged this post as their oc or their favourite character - that's your new source; go through the tag and it will certainly have text posts/tweets that fit your blorbo as well

visual example: i found this post for Pete and his poor burnt balls, one day i'm gonna go through it to see other people's blorbos who have suffered in a similar way, and i'm sure there will be lots of petecore stuff on their blogs

technique 3. porn blogs are your best friend when it comes to mature tv shows

find one, just one, good funny very sexual text post and go in the tags for to see which mature bloggers reblogged it using a tagging system; it can be them categorising it as "#text post" or similar, it can be them sorting posts by kink so pay attention to tags like "#petplay" "#collars" and etc, you will be able to find lots of funny sexy posts the deeper you search through their tags

visual example: see, this post has only 1500 notes, so when i will go in the tags of it i will find approximately 10-15 people who tagged it well enough for me to scroll through their tagged reblogs and find other good stuff

technique 4. when you are done with any of techniques explained above, choose best blogs to follow

while you dive in random tumblr users' blogs you will for sure stumble upon blogs that reblog amazing rare text posts; follow them and see what other gems they can bring to your dash in the future

other tips for people who make text post memes

- THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE! make sure the text screenshot that you placed on a picture/gif is large enough to be readable both on mobile and on web. check it on every gadget. i have really bad vision and squinting my eyes at the phone makes my head hurt, so i never look at memes that i can't read right away without zooming in. make them easily readable!!

- choose one style of screenshots of the text posts. it can be web screenshots, it can be mobile browser tumblr screenshots, if can be tumblr app screenshots. choose one and stick to it always, it will make your memes look neat. i always make screenshots of text posts on the tumblr app, then i put them all on a 750 pixel wide canvas, scale them down to 360 pixel width and copy paste them to 540 pixel wide pictures of blorbos. so we get something like this:

have fun, please write me again if anything i explained is confusing, i'm not great with words <333

[theros]

because i follow the satyrkin tag, and toggled on the setting that injects posts from your followed tags into your dash, i frequently see posts by other satyr and/or faunkin while i'm scrolling

recently though, it's been showing me the same 4-5 posts from 2014

it's not that it's annoying me, but it's kind of... sad, i guess? I was on tumblr but hadn't awakened as a satyr back then. i wouldn't discover i was a satyr for another five years, and only after a severely traumatizing situation ruined my entire previous perception of myself and my identity and forced me to rebuild and rediscover myself from the ground up.

and all of the blogs whose posts i'm seeing have been inactive since 2015. so are the majority of other satyr/faun blogs in their notes.

and i know i'm not quite like other satyrs, as i've repeatedly said before. the part of my satyr identity that is grounded in a separate fictional source rather than mythology will always set me apart from my fellows, make it so that there's always at least one thing they can't relate to me about and i cannot relate to them about.

but there used to be several active satyrs in the community back then. serious ones, discussing their experiences in the ways that the alterhuman community has recently been begging everyone to return to. more talk of actual lived experience instead of moodboards and memes and gear (not that there's anything wrong with those things; having fun with your identity is just as important as serious discussion of it and i will die on that hill).

there used to be so many of us talking about what it was like being a satyr or faun or both. now there's a much smaller community, about half of whom i can't interact with for one reason or another, and the other half of whom hardly ever talk about being a satyr/faun.

even if i wasn't a different type of satyr in the first place, it would be a really lonely experience. it is a lonely experience.

[powdermelonkeg]

I’ve seen a lot of lists for “hey, if you’re here from Twitter, here’s what you need to know,” so here's a bit of my own advice.

You’ll learn the culture 100x faster if you follow a few hundred blogs, reblog from them without tacking on anything, and just read what shows up on your dash. Guidelines are great and all, but having to remember a checklist is hard. So, some simple step-by-step instructions:

Personalize your blog Get some picture besides the default as your icon. Doesn’t matter what it is, maybe a meme or something, it just can’t be a geometric shape with a few dots. Also worth noting, you technically CAN use a selfie for your icon, but people will give you weird looks. We more or less don’t do that here (99.99% of the blogs that do this are porn bots). If you can’t decide on an icon/header, etc, then at least put “New here, haven’t figured out the site yet” or something to that effect in your bio. We block blank blogs here, because they’re usually bots.

Pick a fandom and go on a following spree This is the easiest way to fill up your dashboard. Search whatever fandom you want, find artists in that fandom, and follow them. Rinse and repeat as many times as necessary, and your dashboard will be full of things you enjoy. If you’re like me and are constantly refreshing looking for new content at 4am, you’ll need to follow 1000+ blogs. If you’re more interested in searching things than having your dash bring you content, keep it around 100 to 300.

Reblog things without commentary Tumblr is a VERY different culture to Twitter, and if you’ve been on Twitter a long while, you’ll have habits around how you interact with people. The two generally do NOT mix well. I’m sure you’ve seen by now the posts like “reblogs are good, likes are worthless” or “don’t censor things in your tags” or “don’t tag like Twitter.” Genuinely, the best way to speedrun getting used to this place is to reblog things you like without adding onto them, and learning the culture by reading the posts on your dash. Once you’re confident that you know how we do things here, go ahead and sprinkle in some tag rambles or Tumblr memes, but that adjustment time is going to be different for everybody.

Scroll through your dash No, really. If you’re bored, take a tour through the recent posts of the people you’ve followed. You’ll find good artwork, cool stories, funny moments, and everything in between, but most importantly, you’ll start building those habits we regulars on Tumblr learned awhile ago, like which memes are a genuine response (Apollo’s dodgeball and red for color theory, currently) and how people tag things here.

Curate your dash Everyone’s pretty much been screaming it from the top of their lungs, but there is no algorithm here. The dash you have is the one you make from the people you follow. This means that you’re responsible for the company you keep. If you see a post you dislike, unfollow them. If someone’s going on a fandom spree that annoys you, unfollow. Point of view you don’t agree with? Unfollow. You can block for the same reasons, and block liberally. On top of this, you can filter out terms and tags in your settings. This is a link to it on desktop; scroll down and you’ll see an entire section titled “Content you see.” On mobile, you can find it by clicking the little person icon in the bottom right, then the settings wheel in the corner of your blog. From there it’s “General settings,” then scroll down a bit to “Content you see” and click it.

And that’s the easiest way to cozy up in this place.

If you’re worried about things not to do, everyone will give you a different list, but here are a few universal faux pas:

Sending hate Sending hate in the ask box is, unfortunately, something this site is known for, but doing so here tells everyone that can see it that you’re an obsessed child. If you do it on anon, you look even worse, even if you can technically “get away with it.” A mature Tumblr user doesn’t send hate no matter what; they block the user they dislike and move on. If you get hate, block them. Yes, even if they’re on anon. It blocks their IP address from sending you anything on anon, forcing them to use their real username if they actually want anything to get through.

Negative commentary Things along the lines of “I don’t even like this show, but-” are not compliments. They’re very discouraging to artists, and using them makes you look insensitive at best. If you want to convey “I don’t watch this show, but I like this art,” you can start it with “I don’t even go here, but-” instead. And if you want to criticize—don't. Genuinely, do not. It's the easiest way to get people not to like you here; if you don't have something nice to say about an art piece or fanfic, then just don't interact with it.

Censoring sensitive words The “content you see” feature on this site does its job and it does it well! If I, a Tumblr user, dislike the mention of “cleaning supplies,” I will block it. This means any post that contains “cleaning supplies” will be filtered from my dash. What this also means is that if you write it to get around this—for example, “clean*ng suppl*es,” “clea/ning sup/plies,” “cle@n!ng $uppl!es,” and so on, it will not be filtered, and I will have cleaning supplies on my dash despite my precautions. The only time you'll see someone doing this is if they don't want a specific user or term searched: squ/id-ink-per/sonal won't show up if I search my username, ze/lda won't show up in the "zelda" tag for that audience to see, etc. People on this site do not get terminated/shadowbanned for specific words. The closest we have ever gotten to that was when Apple tried to block sensitive content and made it so things like #girl wouldn’t show up on Apple devices. Which was a bug that was then fixed. Believe it or not, our moderation team is actually human, so if you’re terminated, it’s not because of some search-and-destroy program built into the site.

Now, before I go, here are some quality-of-life things to help you more easily use Tumblr’s features.

Only the first five tags on a post are indexed If I tag something #zelda, #loz, #fave mutuals, #ask bee, #worldbuilding, #you have no idea how long i spent on this, #i’m going to bed now then only the bolded tags are going to show up in the search results. Someone searching #i’m going to bed now won’t find my post, because it’s not in those first five tags.

You can change the color scheme of the site You’ll have to do it once on desktop and once on mobile, because the two platforms have different color schemes. On desktop, click the little person icon in the top right, then “Change Palette.” On mobile, tap the person in the bottom right, then settings wheel, “General settings,” “Color palette.” We have a lot more than dark and light mode!

You can insert links without interrupting your text Find whatever link you want to insert first, then highlight the word you want to turn into that link, press the “insert link” button, and paste it in. On desktop, it looks like a little infinity symbol. On mobile, it’s a little chain link icon. It lets you do cool things like this whenever you want.

Text can be colored! On mobile, it’s really, really easy to color text—just highlight what you want and the colors will pop up automatically. On desktop, it’s trickier to do, but we have a lot more options here: In the corner of your post, there’s a little settings wheel. Click that, then change “Rich Text” to “HTML.” Your page is going to look like weird code. This is normal. I recommend coloring text as the LAST thing you do because of this. Go here, type the text you want to color, and pick your colors out, then copy the HTML code at the bottom. Then go here, paste that in the box, and replace the “;” with nothing (I’m serious, nothing; not a blank space, just leave the “with this” box empty). Copy the semicolon-less code, go to the Tumblr post, and paste it in. It’s that easy! Fun fact, you can also do this in your desktop blog description, if you want; that little box is fully HTML-configurable.

And those are my starting tips! Have fun out there!