on tumblr and blocking and spam

chagrined just posted an interesting poll about how people navigate tumblr, which reminded me that I wrote this post up like a month ago and never posted it. So!

A while ago, I wanted to un-ignore someone on tumblr that I'd added to the block (now ignore) list months and months ago. Because the block page wasn't paginated at the time, and only showed the last 100 people I'd blocked, the only way to do that was to un-block everyone until I finally made it back far enough. Since tumblr also has a bug where you can't un-block banned or deleted accounts, I knew eventually I'd hit a point where I couldn't go any further back - I'd be stuck with a page of 100 banned accounts - but I hoped I could make it back a couple months before that happened. (As it turned out, I couldn't even make it that far back, because of a separate tumblr bug which reduced the length of my block page to just 10 accounts at a time; that wasn't fixed until they finally decided to paginate. Oh, tumblr, why are you so broken.)

I wanted to re-block at least some of the accounts when I was done, so I started making a spreadsheet of which accounts I'd blocked and whether or not I wanted to continue to block them. I thought I might have to do this again in the future, if I ever needed to work backwards, and tumblr doesn't have a notes function, so since I already had that spreadsheet I started adding all the new people I blocked to it. As it turned out, this ended up being a kind of interesting spreadsheet full of Statistics About Tumblr, so I thought I would reproduce some of the numbers here! Obviously this is very idiosyncratic - it's, like, portrait of a person who is trigger-happy with the block button and sometimes regrets it later - plus it's very specific to the tags I track. But nonetheless, here are the numbers from the last 1000 accounts I blocked (some of whom I unblocked later).

( An accidental and non-scientific study of tumblr accounts )

Also, I uploaded this spreadsheet with all the usernames blocked out except those of the spammers, in case anyone is curious about the numbers. Since I started writing this post I've added, like, another 150 accounts or so. Because the ignore button is awesome.

Oh, and I am eruthrosish on tumblr, but I don't post/reblog anything using that account, I just follow people, because I'm not really interested in having conversations on tumblr. I do reblog to a secondary tumblr, thingsfortwwings, which is for things thingswithwings might like and feeds an rss account on dw; mostly marvel, mostly fanart, some comics pages or movie stills, rarely gifs or videos. I try to tag for tumblr savior; thingsfortwwings tag list here.