Tumblr update brings new tools and features to encourage users to go longform

New features will make it more like less popular but more fancy site, Medium

General view of atmosphere at Tumblr's Year In Review 2014 at Brooklyn Night Bazaar on December 10, 2014 in New York City (Rob Kim/Getty Images for Tumblr)

Tumblr has unveiled a new cleaner and more interactive interface that it hopes will encourage its users to write more longform pieces.

While the blogging platform has a huge user base, many use it to post smaller pieces of text or media, or to re-post such updates.

Tumblr unveiled a new text editor on its blog and said that there was “much, much more” to come.

The text editor looks similar to that on Medium, the blogging platform created by one of Twitter’s co-founders.

While that site is not as popular as Tumblr, it has gained appeal as a high-brow and quality place to put up posts — enough that the White House chose to put the entirety of Obama’s State Of The Union up on Medium last week, before the speech.

The other features are expected to include a writing tool where posts look as they will on the real site. The site is also allowing users to put images, videos and other media into posts more easily — another feature that resembles the way that posts are created in Medium.

It also said that it will introduce new ways to structure work, “like subheads and horizontal lines”, and that extra “real craft s***” will be coming soon. “Whatever you want to write—simple things, flashy things, handsome things, trashy things—now you can write the hell out of it,” the site’s team wrote in a post announcing the features.

The new features will be included on the iOS and Android apps, which have been updated. On those apps, users will be able to receive push notifications for asks and other activity.

But the new additions still leave the Tumblr interface much less clean that Medium, Techcrunch notes. Much of the idea of Medium as a high-quality publishing tool has come from its stripped-down look, which uses a great deal of white space, on both its text editor and published posts.