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Comment by ironmagma | Hacker News Reader

I always found it weird that people call Tumblrs blogs. A post on your blog there is more like a tweet; people can pile on, amplify it beyond what your intended audience could have possibly been. This can be great or disastrous. It’s yet another social network — hardly resembles a blog at all.

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It's a blog (e.g. https://archimodels.tumblr.com). The main diference is that your posts appear on followers feeds also.

I remember Tumbler lacking actual dates and timestamps for the longest time. It was also sometimes difficult to know the provenance of the things you were reading, especially after nested reblogs and comment chains.

These are two really odd design decisions for blogs and trying to read content written by experts.

Dates and timestamps have always been available.

From the blog view, it's entirely dependent on the blog's chosen theme. Some themes may omit dates/times for whatever reason; it's up to the theme author, and up to the blogs choosing that theme.

From the dashboard (as a logged-in user), you can see a post's timestamp by mousing over the top-right corner.

It's a lot more like blogs than it is like twitter, but overall it's almost closest to MySpace. I think if you wanted to write long form content on a social media platform, there isn't really a better pick.

Very early blogs often had more of a Twitter/Tumblr feel in single-sentence posts. The style of longer articles/essays with titles only developed a little bit later. Take a look at one of the earliest weblogs, kottke.org in 2000. The posts there displayed have titles, but that is a post facto artefact of the CMS and current theme, not how kottke.org looked in 2000. If you imagine those titles and metadata away it looks more like a Tumblr.

https://kottke.org/00/01/

Most blogs in the early 2000s evolved into longer articles; but some weblogs kept the style and evolved it into another direction, mixing short posts with links, images, quotes and such. A term for that new mixture was tumblelogs.

https://web.archive.org/web/20050722001616/http://redhanded....

https://kottke.org/05/10/tumblelogs

https://leahneukirchen.org/anarchaia/static/faq.html

http://leahneukirchen.org/blog/archive/2005/04/thoughts-on-v...

That was all 2004/2005ish, before Twitter and Tumblr. So yes, Tumblr has is original inspiration in the the early blogging scene and I suspect the name too. But you’re not wrong, another essential part of Tumblr is the builtin social network and the new mechanism of commenting and reblogging. If I remember correctly those came a little bit late.

>A post on your blog there is more like a tweet; people can pile on, amplify it beyond what your intended audience could have possibly been.

People could do that with blogs.

Could, but the platform doesn’t facilitate it. A difference in ease is a difference in kind.

On blogs you can have links to posts other blogs. I am pretty sure its facilitation was the biggest idea behind the web itself.

Blog is a generic term that most people is familiar with but the more accurate description for both tumblr and twitter (hell, even mastodon) is microblog - due to small, short form of the posts

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