cyle:
I went digging through youtube, old posts, and shitty websites, along with my memories, and here you go! Hopefully these are accurate.
2013 — Unoffical Tumblr event “Mishapocalypse” happened, an online flash mob event wherein which Tumblrinas change their profile pictures to a specific picture of Misha Collins of Supernatural fame.
2014 — Users were given the option to get Tumblr Pro for free, and those who accepted were given top hats on their icons. Prompty after this, @staff announced that “Everyone with a top hat is now marked for account deletion. This is the only way we could destroy this horrible website. Happy April Fools day.”
2015 — The “Executive Suite 2016 Productivity Edition” essentially changed Tumblr into office software, allowing spreadsheets for memes, calculators that gave incorrect answers, and Coppy. Who gave “helpful tips”.
2016 — Tumblr voted to select the “new lizard king”, from Rick, Debrah, Mop and Wretched Tooth. However, more famously, an edited @staff post reads “for april fools we’re deleting this entire site sayonara you weeaboo shits”.
2017 — The Tumblr Horse Game was a feature that, when clicked, took users to a game wherein you had to collect shit from a pixelated horse. If you failed to do so, the horse died.
2018 — The answer to Bitcoin, is Tumblcoin! A parody of crytocurency.
2019 — Tumblr Memories, in which Tumbeasts were set loose. Remember them? The mascot from 2011, for service interruption announcements.
2020 — There was seemingly no prank this year. This was COVID-19.
2021 — Tumblr released “non-fungible tumblcryptids”, a parody of NFTs. There was a supposedly limited amount of them.
2022 — A light switch, when activated, would open up a variety of colourful things on the desktop dashboard, including a “Summon Crab!” button, which would summon a crab when activated. Other buttons made different sounds.
2023 — A feature similar to the Discord reaction function was temporarily added, using basic emojis.
2024 — Every user was given the option to opt-in to the boop o meter, and could boop, super boop, and evil boop other users who also opted in, earning up to three badges by doing so.
very good list. some minor corrections/additions:
2016 was simply “the lizard election”, we purposefully didn’t say what position the election was for. you could also make campaign posters in the mobile apps.
2018 also included a prototype version of Tumblrmart, but the currency to spend was Tumblrcoin/Tumblcoin, and it featured Horse Game, Coppy, and some other references to past April Fools.
2019’s memories blog is still available to see what it says about you.
2020’s prank was @storybot – it existed in group chats only, and let people collaboratively write stories.
2023’s emoji reactions also unlocked various effects once certain thresholds were reached. for example, if “cheese” was reacted enough times, the post got covered in cheese.