fun fact!! it turns out that now when u make a new blog, tumblr forces you to follow 3-4 people before you can change your icon or modify your blog in any way!! this, of course, means that, yes, some of the “potential bots” many of us have been automatically blocking could have possibly been genuine new users who were only just seconds in to having an account!!! tumblr is literally screwing new users over!!!!
OK, SO!
Just to confirm for myself that this was true, I went and made a new account and took some screenshots.
After the usual inputting of email, username and birthday (which, I don’t remember if tumblr used to require you to enter your birthday? I feel like it didn’t??) it takes you to this page:
it requires you to follow five tags from a selection of categories (I didn’t count the exact number of categories, but there’s a lot. The right section of the screen scrolls down). I followed some very neutral tags:
The “Next” button doesn’t become click-able until you pick all five.
After that, it took me to this page:
it suggests 10 different users for each tag that you selected in the previous page (the right side of the page scrolls down to all five tags). As far as I could tell, there wasn’t a way to ask for more users in each tag.
Again, the “Next” button doesn’t become clickable until you follow three people.
And finally after that it took me to the dashboard:
There wasn’t any way to change my icon before this point. So long story short, seems like the og post is true y’all :/
That being said, this only applies to blogs that still have the standard tumblr-generated icons, which is pretty easy to distinguish from the pretty-lady-icon porn bots 🤷🏻
even if tumblr didn’t have this requirement, actually seeing the posts suggesting that people change their icons would most likely require some time of following a number of people to see them share those posts in the first place
blocking blank blogs with default icons was always a horrid idea. no wonder tumblr is having a hard time retaining new users and panicking over trying to find a way to help them stick around
oh no
How to Unblock
In the Apps
Tap the account icon (the little human) and select the correct blog at the top left corner. After that, tap the gear icon and look for “Blocked Tumblrs”.
You can also go straight to a specific blog to unblock it. For that, type the name of that blog in the search box, tap on the blog name, then tap the little human icon at the upper right corner, which will reveal the “Unblock" button.
On the Web
On the web, go to your blog settings, scroll to the bottom, and click on the pencil icon next to “Blocked Tumblrs.” From there, you can click the Unblock button next to any blocked user.
