Stowe Boyd

Tumblr Fixes Attribution

I’ve commented numerous times (and so have many, many others) that the approach taken by Tumblr to attribute content in reblogs is a mess. Well, they have fixed it, and have taken the innovative approach of creating attribution metadata for posts. This turns out to be something like what I recommended in Tumblr’s Reblogging Mess Solved, but not exactly.

Here’s what the Tumblr staff blogs says:

Fixing Content Attribution (Once and For All) | Tumblr Staff

Back when we launched two of Tumblr’s most unique features, reblogging and the Tumblr Bookmarklet, we devised automatic “via” links in post captions as a simple solution for attribution. Three years later, this solution has gotten us pretty far. But it’s easy to spot some real shortcomings:

• It’s hard. Even with the best intentions, it’s possible to mangle attribution when reblogging. Links get dropped, and credit gets buried under reblog links.

• It’s ugly. Reblog links pile up. Credit is formatted as any permutation of url, author, blog name, and page title.

• It doesn’t play well with content that doesn’t originate on Tumblr. If I share one of Jacob’s Flickr photos, the post notes attribute me as the original poster. And posters too frequently mistakenly attribute content to re-publishers (Digg, BuzzFeed, 9GAG) instead of creators.

We know we can do better. After weeks of testing, we’ve got an upgrade that fixes all of these issues:

Starting today, reblogging will no longer insert attribution into the content/caption of the post except to quote content added by the parent post.

In practice, here’s what it will look like to readers. Below I have to version of a post where I selected text from a Susan Orlean piece at the New Yorker. In the topmost, I deleted the automatically generated link in the text pointing to the New Yorker, so the new approach to attribution was used. In the bottom post, I left the text link to the post, and the automatic attribution does not show.

I tested removing the attribution in the text after the first edit, and the automatic attribution did NOT reappear, so this approach only works during the first edit, as far as I can see.

I logged in as Underpaid Genius and reblogged the Susan Orlean post above, and in the first edit I was presented with an in-text attribution, as I has always been the case, but also an attribution pointing back to the New Yorker and to Stowe Boyd that cannot be deleted. If I delete the text attribution to Stowe Boyd those attributions remain:

And here’s a random person who reblogged the porst from Underpaid Genius — two degrees away from the original post:

The only thing that seems to be missing — at least in the automatically injected version I have fooled with so far — is that the HTML for the attribution is not styled. I think Tumblr should wrap the attribution up in a ‘source’ or ‘attribution’ span so that the text can be styled. But I guess I will wait for David Sutoyo to gen up a new version of Schema (this template) with attribution built in.

If you notice the attribution on this post, at the end, you’ll see one glitch: I quoted the Tumblr blog and selected a hunk of its text near the top of this post. Tumblr automatically attributes that but didn’t insert it following the text, so the attribution is at the end of the post. Seems like it is crying out for a footnote model, doesn’t it?

We will have to see how these changes are received by the Tumblr community, but is seems a much more esthetically pleasing and reliable mechanism than what preceded it.

related articles

• Tumblr Perfects Reblogging (blogherald.com)
• Tumblr’s Improved Attribution is Good News for Publishers (readwriteweb.com)