I never used a web service that made me feel bad about myself.re-blogging for your self-esteem’s sake. :) tumblarity is teh dumbz.
Josh says: Totally agree. I had to step away from Tumblr for about a week, and now I’m a zero?! What gives Tumblarity? I loved how easy Tumblr was to get started, and how it’s a kind of casual, low maintenance blogging system… but this feature just seems to make users feel like they aren’t good enough. Poor choice. It would be great if somehow it could be used to encourage people. I think users prefer reward and a feeling of “kicking ass” as opposed to frustration and failure.
I still love you, Tumblr, but this is teh lame.
Charlie says: Absolutely. “I never used a web service that made me feel bad about myself” perfectly encapsulates the problem with Tumblarity.
Tumblarity is an ideal example of something that should be an “opt-in” / “labs” feature. In fact, any time you have a metric that assigns some value judgment on a user, either A) the default “low score” should still make their day brighter, or B) the whole thing should be opt-in … and, ideally, both of those would be present.
In fact, even if Tumblr’s backend is using hard numbers to determine each user’s Tumblarity score, there’s no reason that they couldn’t use fuzzier breakdowns when applying the numbers to users’ accounts: “Your Tumblarity is awesome | outstanding | terrific | dyn-o-mite! | wicked pissah! | rockstar | tumblriffic | like a fine wine | unreal | better than Cats! … etc. That way, there’s an element of fun, just in seeing what kooky description the Tumblaritybot has come up with for your account level. There could even be a suggestion box, where people could make suggestions for descriptors. Good suggestions could trickle up, and be applied to more users’ accounts. Bad suggestions could be cycled back at some point down the road and given to the user who suggested them, giving the user a sense of ownership over the system (even if the suggestions didn’t trickle up to be shown to any other users).
Finally, I can see the logic in applying game design theory to something like blogging. But people hate playing games with arbitrary rules and capricious points systems. (Re-reading Josh’s comment, that’s basically a rehash of what he was saying.) I know the Tumblr guys are smart cookies. I’m surprised they haven’t responded to Tumblarity criticism with a more innovative feature, or a more innovative execution of the existing feature.
