Please make it possible to hide users' posts without blocking them. Like, in cases where a person hasn't done anything wrong to be blocked, but you just don't like their posts.

Answer: Hello, @deithwen!

As it turns out, we’ve received this feature request a lot over the years. Usually, it comes in as wanting the ability to “mute” other blogs on Tumblr. While we would love to build it, we’ve balked at it a bit because of its technical and product complexity. Let us explain what that means:

In terms of technical complexity, our current blocking feature is closest to how “muting” would work. Our current blocking feature may seem simple, but it’s very complex because of how big Tumblr is. Every time we fetch a list of blogs for you or anyone on Tumblr, we have to also fetch the list of who you’re blocking, and who’s blocking you, and filter out anyone with that block relationship. This mapping of who’s-blocking-who is stored in a directional way right now, so the “cost” of loading that list gets higher the more people you’re blocking and the more people who are blocking you. If you’re blocking 1,000 blogs, we have to check that list a lot. If you’re being blocked by 1,000 blogs, that’s another big list to check against.

In technical terms, this is a “many-to-many” relationship, which is almost always incredibly difficult to manage while not degrading the experience of using a platform like Tumblr. The more people who are blocking, the harder it is to store those lists in a way that’s easy to check, but we’re working on making it smoother. The vast majority of people don’t block many others, if at all, so it’s never been a huge problem. But the outliers who block thousands of others (or are blocked by thousands of others) can degrade performance for everyone over enough time.

Adding muting would throw on top of that yet another list of blogs to check, increasing the complexity of something that’s already pretty complex. It helps that muting would be one-directional and not bi-directional (as in, it doesn’t matter who’s muting you), but, as that list of muted blogs grows, your experience may degrade further. So we’d need to solve for that, which is definitely doable. It would just take time—and lots of it.

And, as a product, Tumblr is already pretty confusing to people trying to figure out what “blocking” means already, as well as our other filtering options. Up until fairly recently, blocking was almost entirely one-directional, the opposite way you’d expect: blocking made it so the blocked person couldn’t see you, not that you couldn’t see them. We’ve been updating blocking to work both ways instead, which is more common on social media these days. Similarly, the options to filter tags versus content cause a lot of confusion because they don’t work the same way as each other.

So if we wanted to add another filtering option to that mix, “muting” blogs, we’d need to be conscious of how all of those options work together—and are confusing in context with each other. We should really clean up that experience to be more streamlined and simple, not more complex. And I didn’t even mention the oddity of how different settings apply to your primary blog versus your sideblogs if you have more than one blog!

Taken together, it is a great idea for us to clean all of this up, improve our existing options here, and add “muting” for even more control and granularity. Sadly, however, it just isn’t high enough on our list of priorities to tackle anytime soon. We don’t want to simply tack on muting for the sake of doing it—we want to do a better job than that. I hope that makes sense!

Thanks for your question. It was an important one to address. If anything should change here, you will get news through the usual channels: here at WIP, or at @changes. 

Mute people on Tumblr 101

Do you wish you could use Twitter's muting function on Tumblr? Well, you can. Sort of.

Tumblr's filtering system has two variants: Filtered Tags (hides posts containing a certain tag), and Filtered Content. This second one is what can be used as a way to mute blogs.

Filtered Content will hide posts containing the word of your choice anywhere in the post. This includes urls. Imput the url of the blog you want muted as a filter, and every post they've ever appeared in will be hidden. Original posts, other people's posts they've replied to, every single post they reblog if you follow them - this will impact your dashboard and any blog viewed on the app, and your desktop dashboard. It will not impact blogs viewed on desktop.

Now for the how-to.

1. Account Settings 2. Filtering

3. Add a new filter

4. Done. Any post containing the word, and in that case url you put in will be filtered out where applicable.

Now go forth and mute to your heart's content.

Sick of whumpee talking?

Well they still have a tongue so you must not want them quiet all that bad.

How do you close this annoying line about 'blah-blah you muted users' in the search page.

I KNOW. I did it.

I'm on Quora and something I've noticed is that incest is everywhere. I got annoyed by all the incest and made a question calling them out(I suggested them to be a responder). They deleted my question. They know what they're doing, 60% of quora is incest and I'm pretty sure that's why they're not doing anything about it. They know they're in the wrong, they just don't care.

I am pretty ruthless on AO3 with the muting feature, because curate your own experience.

And currently the number one thing I mute for is authors who tag “rated M for mention of sex but no actual sex”

Oh god a post breached containment again I was like how the hell do I have 60 notifications in 1 minute 😭

Applying the latest AO3 mute feature slashed my Portamis search by about 300+ fics but that's fine. I can die happy now knowing that I will never have to type the same urls again and again and again 😌

Tumblr update idea: the ability to filter out tags/words, but only in posts from specific people.

Unpopular take, but blocking on tumblr is a lot less aggressive than blocking someone on twitter. Mainly because the mute button on twitter actually *works* better than on tumblr, so there’s less of a need to block someone on twitter (unless your mutuals keep answering posts and reblogging stuff from the person you muted). 

Whereas if you don’t want to see someone’s post on tumblr, you have to mute them like a thousand times to avoid seeing their content (the mute button doesn’t really work on tumblr). Or you can block them. 

My only issue with blocking people on tumblr (or being blocked) is that it’s not always clear if you’ve blocked someone or if you’ve been blocked. 

If you see a post from someone you’ve blocked on tumblr (like a pornbot, or a person whose content you don’t want to see for any reason), just click on the three dots in the right hand side of their post and select Block again. The block button doesn’t always work, but it works much better at removing content from your view than the mute button on tumblr. 

So, to make things clear for anyone new to tumblr: if you can’t reblog a post from someone and their blog hasn’t disappeared, you’ve been blocked. Tumblr is too foolish/bizarre to SAY you’ve been blocked (I like tumblr, but this is true), unlike other social media platforms. 

If you like someone’s tumblr post and the like heart symbol doesn’t turn red, and the number of likes doesn’t show your like, you’ve been blocked on tumblr. 

I’m saying this, because I keep seeing good people who are new to tumblr waste their time by trying for hours on end to reblog from a blog they can’t reblog from. Adding a feature saying ‘you’re blocked from this person and there’s no way you can reblog from them’ would save time on trying to reblog from them. 

Just saw the AO3 announcement on comment blocking and muting about to roll out, and let me just say from the bottom of my heart:

Thank you, AO3!

I am grateful for 99.9% of the comments I've ever received but occasionally an idiot wanders in, toeing the line of harassment (because I only allowed logged-in users to comment and trolls/harassers absolutely know there's a line not to cross to get reported) or offering unsolicited crit.

I will be blocking those previously "frozen" commentors. 😎

💙

~Hunny

P.S. rambling excitedly/ incoherently is always welcome! conjecturing wildly is always welcome! likewise for: keysmashes, emoji notes, flailing/swearing about whatever bad choices the character are making or how much emotion the story is causing you...

...basically, if you're engaged with one of my works and enjoying it/it's making you crazy/happy/worried/inspired and you're commenting to that effect, know that you are wonderful and won't have any problems with me.

P.S.S.

To all my fellow writers: manners are back on the menu!!! How's it feel knowing you may never have to see another "are you ever going to update this 😕" if you don't want to?

Self care ❤️ #blocking #muting #unfollowed #deleting #selflove #selfcare (at Catalina Foothills, Arizona) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cmx5Yl3L-xjHPydbu3znkME3bjLnGkimXYKkoE0/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

Pros of hyperfixiation:

Happy!

Art ideas

Life is good

Cons of hyperfixiation:

I am going to blow up

All my art is of the same guy

If I don't think about this 24/7 I get violent

"i have to water the shitbird wait a minute"

"prosper stupid poultry"

all my advice about using real athletes to learn drawing bodies beyond hard abs, and my particular pref being wrestlers, also applies to women btw. you can draw women who r strong and not an hourglass shape. fucking do it.

kris statlander, rhea ripley (look at her SHAPE), willow nightingale, ruby soho, these r just four off the top of my head that have obvious musculature and different body types. skye blue and julia hart have more slim cheerleader style bodies as well, i REALLY wanted to put emi sakura who is fucking STOUT (adoring) in this post but i couldn't find a good demonstrative pic, the list goes on

DRAW DIFFERENT BODIESSSSSSSS

"kill them with kindness" wrong. bat attack

🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇