Tumblr announced that it has redesigned its popular reblogging feature and it’s supposed to be especially helpful for mobile devices.
In a blog post on its website, Tumblr said that the changes would be implemented the very next day. “Starting tomorrow, reblogs will have a new look—one that showcases all comments as equals, not buried under an impossible stack of blockquote indents. Our change to reblog captions last month laid the necessary groundwork for us to arrive here, at a place where the dashboard will be a lot easier to read and cleaner-looking.”
The site, which was acquired by Yahoo (YHOO) for $1.1 billion in 2013, also added that the new feature will take effect for older posts as well as for ones publishing going forward.
Techcrunch explained the differences that come with the update:
No longer a long list of blockquote indents, where each new user adds their own commentary to what was said before, the new reblogs will simply list each comment one after the other. This makes the comments easier to read, but also makes the Tumblr post much longer than when the older-style reblogs were in effect.
The reblog chains that emerge when a topic goes viral can be essentially unreadable when viewed on mobile. That, however, should no longer be the case due to the changes.
People took to Twitter to express their opinions:
https://twitter.com/kendrawcandraw/status/639484631792906242
.@tumblr everyone's freaking out about the tumblr redesign but i think it is so much better–mobile-optimized and all #tumblr#redesign
— Phoebe Lin 林凯欣 (@aigelicwings) September 3, 2015
the new tumblr reblog design is, EVEN BY TUMBLR REDESIGN STANDARDS, an abomination
— Chelsea Fagan (@Chelsea_Fagan) September 3, 2015