On October 30, 2014, Tumblr rolled out a new update featuring wider posts: 540 pixels wide, to be exact.

This change has ruined every single gifset and graphic on the site, as all of the creators on the site create their images in either 500 px, 245 px, or 160 px. The larger dimensions of 540 px, 268 px, and 177 px mean that each image is stretched out, looking blurry. This is the case both on blogs and on the Tumblr dashboard itself.

These changes were enacted with no apparent consideration of the vibrant community of creators that Tumblr has, as the post explaining the changes simply said that they changed it because “there was no reason not to.”

There are in fact many reasons not to, but the most important reason is that for seven years, gif and graphic creators have been making their posts with the old dimensions in mind. These 40 pixels ruin the entirety of their bodies of work.

Let’s say that all of the creators on the site “get over” the changes and start using the new dimensions, accepting that the work they’ve done to date is now invalidated….their new gifs will be resized back to the old dimensions and stretched back out to the new sizes, causing them to be ruined despite doing as Tumblr asks (source). One user received an email from Tumblr support outright telling them that Tumblr did not support gifs larger than 500 px wide (source).

The users of Tumblr are not just accepting this change, however. There is currently a petition with almost 50,000 signatures, and on November 3, there was a strike. The Tumblr for the strike can be found here, and the strike’s hashtag was #TumblrStrike2k14. Many posts have been made on Tumblr itself, from masterposts about the debacle to posts lamenting the loss of their body of work to letters to the staff to a ‘tumblrgate’ blog. One post bemoans the change from a design standpoint. Another post takes the opportunity to discuss the much larger problems that Tumblr has, but has neglected to fix.

The responses from Tumblr support have been simple form emails for the most part, or in some cases, like my own, no response at all. The lack of response from Tumblr has caused users to become even more enraged and hurt, with many speculating that the changes were meant to drive users from photos to video posts, or meant to drive users who don’t post videos from their site altogether.

Some users have left the site already, flocking to alternatives like Soup.io, Ello, and WordPress. Others have chosen to fix the changes on their dashboards and blogs themselves. The userstyle that fixes the new dimensions on the dashboard has over 40,000 downloads so far. These scripts might make our dashboards look better, but they do not assuage the betrayal that Tumblr users feel, nor will they help the majority of users view images the way they were meant to be seen.

Before you comment telling the many creators on Tumblr to “get over it,” remember that even if they give up on all of their gifsets and graphics, if they make gifsets in the new sizes, the images will be resized and stretched out. This will effectively kill the various #fandomedit communities on Tumblr; a look at the #gotedit, #twdedit, #hpedit, #parksedit, and other fandom edit tags will show you that they are much less active than they were a week ago, and that every single post does indeed look blurry and stretched out.

If you are a Tumblr user, or anyone who enjoys the various graphics and gifs that are created for Tumblr, please take the time to email Tumblr support and sign the petition.