You’ve heard of Spotify Wrapped, obviously. The end of year celebration of what you’ve been inundating your eardrums with is always fun to see, and Spotify does a good job of making it unique. Tumblr decided to get into the game, though, on Tuesday, December 7th, when they launched Tumblr Wrapped, a low-key rip-off of the popular music recap. Tumblr Wrapped didn’t even work for a few hours after its launch, leading into a lot of knowing laughter on the website which so often seems to rebel against the choices of its coders, also known as “Staff”.
Tumblr Wrapped in theory sounds like a fun idea—find out what your most popular tags were, what your most popular original posts for the year are, find out the dichotomy between reblogs and original posts—but the presentation was rather bland. Where Spotify makes good natured fun of you—it plotted out the soundtrack of the movie of your life, for instance—Tumblr Wrapped merely laid out you statistics. It feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of the website that Staff is so dedicated to; Tumblr is a cheeky place these days, so this end of year wrap-up could surely have featured more spunk.
It didn’t help that it prompted you to post your Wrapped at the end, and that process barely worked, too. If you’re a gifmaker, you had to delete the gifs from your post to even get it to post. I assume others with more text-based posts had an easier go of it, though. It was fun to see what your most popular posts for the year were, but you can easily investigate that on other, third-party Tumblr statistic sites. Tumblr Wrapped, and the time spent waiting for it, kind of felt like a waste of time.
By the way, as near as I can tell, this might be the first article written about Tumblr Wrapped, which speaks to how low impact it was. To be fair to Tumblr Staff, Tumblr’s star has surely fallen over the years, but Tumblr Post+ did get some attention, or rather, the outrage did. The question with Tumblr for the past couple of years has been “will it survive?”, and I’m not sure Tumblr Wrapped’s weakness is the best barometer.
But hey, I’m in the beta for Tumblr Post+ so full steam ahead, I suppose. Not that I’d charge anyone for the nonsense I post.
