How Tumblr turned social media polls into a game design challenge – The Verge

On February 3rd, Tumblr user Relientk used the site’s then-recently released poll feature to list several common baking ingredients. “Okay let’s bake a cake,” the poll urged. There were no further instructions, no rules. Users’ votes just implicitly set the percentage of things like butter, flour, sugar… and vanilla extract.If you’re already a Tumblr user, you know how this went. The resulting cake recipe was 44 percent vanilla — briefly turning the phrase “vanilla extract” into a sitewide meme. While the gag was short-lived and the cake (based on one real-life baking test) far from delicious, it’s become part of a much larger trend on Tumblr: turning the site’s polls into sometimes surprisingly complex — and often very funny — games.You’d probably have to take out several loans to even BUY that much vanilla extract these days. Image: Relientk / TumblrSupport for Tumblr polls rolled out in January of this year, many years after Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram had implemented (and in some cases, discontinued) their own polling features. And much of the Tumblr user base has employed them in the ways you might expect. Artists and creatives ask their followers to vote on their next project or select features
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