For people who spend any significant time in their Tumblr dashboard, I would be willing to bet that at some point you’ve wanted to reply to a post that you have enabled replies on. That is, you ask something… someone answers… and then you have no way of replying back (outside of making a new post, which just seems wasteful).

I suspect that Tumblr doesn’t allow this for one of two reasons: They just haven’t quite nailed it down technically, or they don’t want to turn it on because it too closely resembles “comments”, the lack of which is a unique selling-point of Tumblr.

As someone who works designing and implementing web applications most days, I have a hard time believing it’s a technical hurdle (though it’s possible). My theory is that they don’t want to succumb to the idea of “comments”. And in principle I completely agree. Comments, as they exist everywhere else, would be absolutely awful. However, I think that IF a person goes to the trouble to check the “Let people answer this” box, then it implies that they are interested in some form of conversation. And as we all know, a one-way conversation is no fun at all. If I ask a question and someone answers, I want to be able to talk-back. It only makes sense.

The only semi-effective way I’ve seen to have any kind of talk-back, and a way that I’ve seen Tumblr staffers use, is to take a screen shot of the question, post it back as a new photo post, and put your answer in the caption. I think the inefficiency of this is obvious.

Perhaps there is some other reason I can’t see from this vantage point. I’d sure love to know though.

(For the record, I sincerely hope my comments don’t come off as mere complaining. I LOVE Tumblr and have had nothing but spectacularly great interactions with everyone from Tumblr whom I’ve ever interacted with.)