My beef with Tumblr Communities
Article published on my Dreamwidth on August 4th, 2025
←← Take me back to the writings directory!The context
Tumblr Communities are a recent-ish feature added to Tumblr (added in December 2024 as far as I can find). In terms of function, Communities are like Reddit's Subreddits. People can post to Communities and share posts into them (but not out, which will be discussed later), and people can comment on Community posts. This is well and all, but we have to keep in mind Tumblr's staff is itty bitty, so the implementation of Communities is not completely harmonious with The Rest of Tumblr that Already Exists.
(I will also note that I am not a frequent Communities user, so my view might be more biased if it wasn't already.)
The walled-garden-ness of it
My main gripe about Tumblr Communities is that they mess with what I feel is the fundamental flow of Tumblr. On Tumblr, old content can circulate endlessly thanks to the reblog function, that's how we have things like "heritage posts". On Communities though, it basically becomes like every other social media. Things that are posted to Communities sink into obscurity over time and are nigh impossible to find again because it's not like Reddit, where you can click on a user's profile and see all of their posts from other subreddits. If you try doing that with Communities, you just get brought to a user's Tumblr blog, which does not show their Community posts. This sucks, because picture this: You go onto an art-centered Community and find someone with some really cool work. You try to go to their blog to find more of their work, only to find for some reason or another, they've posted to Communities exclusively. You are unable to find more of their stuff unless you scrolled down far enough in the right Community, and you are unable to share their work outside of the Community.
On that last part, I will note two things:
Some artists do crosspost their work from Communities onto normal Tumblr. I think what some artists do is that they post onto normal Tumblr first and then reblog their work into Communities, that way they kinda have the best of both worlds. Extra engagement while also having their work permanently on their blog. My gripe is with people who exclusively post to Communities not knowing the stuff isn't like, tracked on their blog and is inaccessible later.
Some people might not want their work displayed outside of certain circles. Some Communities are more personal in nature (I've seen a few venting Communities before), so it's natural to not want posts to breach containment -- or at the very least not give tools for making breaches easier.
Half-assed functionality
While Communities are out of beta, I wouldn't go as far to say Communities are as good of a product as Reddit is, as an example. Off the top of my head (and with the help of scrolling the Communities Feedback Community), these are some functional issues with Communities that staff need to address:
There is no gameplan for what happens if a Community's founder goes offline, resulting in Communities with no moderation or no ways to accept new moderators.
Community owners are not able to remove admins, enabling scenarios where admins go mad with power and the owner is unable to do anything about it.
Community members can only be banned if they're currently in the community. This has resulted in some scenarios where trolls join a community, troll it up, and leave the community before the mods can ban them.
Currently no way to easily ban a user for offensive comments. Only works for if they make a post (or if the moderators go into the members list and ban them from there, if they can find them (see above)).
Similarly, there is no way to see a "comment log" of all the comments a user has made on a Community. I could seex users potentially exploiting this lack of logs to use obscure posts on the Community as some sort of private chat.
And similarly again, there is no way to see all of a user's posts on a particular Community. I can potentially see why this isn't a thing due to potential use for cyberstalking, but at least make this a feature for Community moderators.
There is no audit logs for when members delete their own posts and comments, which has been used to skirt moderation for offensive actions before.
There is currently no ability to post to or create Communities with a sideblog. Part of Tumblr's appeal is the sideblog feature, which allows users to sort their experience into different little blogs instead of having one "everything blog". I know that not having this has been a turn-off for some people.
There is currently no way to queue or draft posts for a Community the same way you can queue and draft normal Tumblr posts.
The bot problem, oh god the bot problem. A lot of people posting to the Communities Feedback Community have reported/suggested that owners switch their Communities to "request to join" instead of being open to join to prevent bots from getting in, but I don't think this is ideal. I will also say that the bot problem extends to all of Tumblr and not just Communities, but for Communities it is especially egregious because there, the bots will almost certainly have a guaranteed audience (as in, guaranteed to have people see their scams). It's especially worrying when there are porn bots going into Communities that attract a large audience of minors.
I don't use Tumblr to go onto [insert social media]
This is kind of an extension of the first section, but part of why I don't like Communities is because I feel like it's existence is a benign growth on the rest of Tumblr (though "benign" might be putting it lightly since resources being put into Communities could be going to the rest of Tumblr). I go onto Tumblr because to me the experience of using it is unique and I feel like the addition of Communities is just... there. Like imagine going onto YouTube and for some odd reason there's just a whole Twitter-like platform on there. Maybe it's not entirely detrimental, but you're on YouTube to look at videos, not Twitter posts. I feel much the same way about Tumblr and Tumblr Communities. I'm here to reblog shit, not engage with Tumblr's wannabe attempts at trying to be a different platform.