Day 303

Some interesting things have been going on with my Tumblr account. Well at least they're interesting to me so I'm gonna write about it. Tumblr is a microblogging site so entries tend to be bite sized sort of like Twitter, but you can also post pics, videos, audio along with text. It seems to me though that most users don't actually generate their own content. They just post stuff that other people have posted.

If you're a new user like myself, the only way for people see your posts are through tags. You tag keywords to your post and hope someone searches for that keyword and sees your stuff. When you search a tag, all the posts come up chronologically newest first, so after a few hours it's unlikely someone will see your post since it'll be far down the list. If someone does see your post, they can like it or reblog it. Reblogging will take your post and have it appear on their blog. If that person has followers, more people will see the post and they can like or reblog it and that's how things can spread. Tumblr keeps track of all of this so you can see who liked or reblogged even if it's dozens of people down the chain. Likes and reblogs are clumped together and are just called notes in general.

So I started with posting my Game of Thrones crayons, two a day at the beginning. At first, I didn't get any notes. Then one day I got about a dozen. Because the newest stuff comes up first when you search a tag, it's very important what time you post things. I looked this up and apparently the best time to post is at night and on weekends. I tried following this with not much success. The Game of Thrones crayons were getting a few to a dozen notes. I saved posting the group crayon shot for Sunday hoping that it'd get popular. It ended up with like 28 notes which was better but still not that great.

The next night, I posted the Princess Bubblegum crayon. I hit refresh to check that everything looked ok and it immediately had five notes. I kept checking and it kept getting more notes. By midnight it had around 200. Then it started to slow down after that. I checked it one last time at 3 AM when I went to bed, and it was trending up again. People check Tumblr before school or work so that might explain that. The next day I woke up and the post was exploding. I was getting hundreds of notes and hour. By the end of Tuesday, I had over 3000 notes. It slowed down the following days but I was still getting a steady amount of likes and reblogs. By Friday, I had 7000 notes but it was dying. I was getting five notes an hour and I was pretty sure it was done. But it was a wild ride while it lasted.

Then I woke up Saturday morning, and the post blew up even more than before. I got 10,000 more notes just that day. It's slowed down since then but right now I'm getting close to 30,000 total notes. So what does this all mean? This entry is getting long so I'll start another one.