Tumblr says it’s reversing reblog notes change after user backlash

Tumblr is walking back a major change to how reblog notes work, less than two days after pushing it live. The company shared its statement on X, saying the reaction had been strong and that it would not pretend otherwise.

As we reported yesterday, the update immediately got most users up in arms and demanding a revert. Instead of funneling likes, reblogs, and replies back to the original post, each reblog in a chain now got its own separate set of notes. Tumblr called it a way to give contributors the recognition they deserve. Users were not buying it.

Over 100,000 complaints were submitted through Tumblr’s feedback system. The official staff response post pulled more than 28,000 comments, most of them negative.

One X user even shared a screenshot of a Tumblr post showing the before-and-after of the update. Their post had 152,372 notes in the old view. After the update, it showed 2 comments, 1,107 reblogs, and 1,673 likes. Not even two percent of the actual interaction.

For a lot of creators, the problem was not just how it looked but that they had no way of knowing how far their work had actually traveled once it left their hands.

Tumblr’s statement is brief and mostly owns the mistake.

Your feedback in comments, emails, and especially reblogs, made clear that the rollout created problems we need to address before moving forward. We also should have communicated this differently from the start, and we didn’t.

It’s worth pointing out that they are not dropping the idea entirely though. Tumblr says it still believes there is a better version of how reblogs can work, and says it wants to figure that out alongside users rather than just shipping changes cold. In the coming days, the company says it will share more details, including plans to work directly with some users before future changes go live.

Tumblr has done this before, more than once. It pulled the Replies feature in 2015 to push instant messaging, and users were furious for months. The company eventually brought it back with a revamp. Then there was the 2018 NSFW content ban, which gutted a significant part of its user base, and Tumblr quietly reversed that too in 2022.

For now, the change is being reversed, and that is what most people were asking for.

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