Fun Size Bytes (from @Tj)

Tumblarity Explained! Or at least guessed at well?

Quoting jollilama:

Haha! TJs post is funny to me because just the other day I sent TJ - the Tumblr API fount of knowledge - an email about my idea for a Tumbularity tracker. TJ I’M SO SORRY!!

The funniest part of this is thinking I have knowledge of the Tumblr API (although the Tumblr API and Tumblarity aren’t really related).

I think it’s because I’m new and I came to Tumblr with zero instant friends — Tumbularity is not a mystery to me.  It has been very predictable. It took me a long time to get my Tumbularity up to even 30, so I was able to observe it the whole time and see what happened when I got ONE heart, and then a few days later got another.

The basic formula is simple. You get 3 points per post if you add just one character to it. You get one point for every heart that shows up in your stream. Reblogs are worth nothing on their own. New friends are worth (I think) 3 points.

That’s the best explanation I’ve seen so far.

But the kicker is that these drop off exactly one week later. If you post something and your Tumbularity instantly drops 30 points, it means that exactly one week earlier you must have posted something that got you 30 hearts in quick succession.

I’ve heard the one-week thing before too.

I only WISH I had that problem.  I have less than a dozen actively hearty followers. My Tumbularity swings by 1 point at a time. But I can see how if you came here as a popular Twitterer with a following, you were instantly seeing huge Tumbularity swings.

So to possibly save a lot of grief over what seems to be a really simple calculation, please reblog.  This ridiculousness needs to be demystified already.

Done. Thanks for the explanation!

I wonder why Tumblr, inc. doesn’t make this clear themselves.