We wrote for Slate about Tumblr + LiveJournal + fandom.
Here’s the takeaway:
As they say in Battlestar Galactica, all of this has happened before and it will all happen again. Even if Tumblr survives, the community that remains will likely become different than what we see today. Of course, all online platforms rise and fall, and fandom will outlive them all. In 20 years, we will giggle about Tumblr (and even Facebook) in the same way we giggle about Friendster now. Fandom, however, has burned brightly since long before the internet, and no single platform will even get close to snuffing it out.
I actually feel sorry for the likely unpaid intern sitting at tumblr HQ dealing with all our bullshit and snark while those actually in charge watch the world burn from a safe distance and blame it on us damn kids not buying more products. Because ultimately this is what this about. Verizon needs to make money from Tumblr, and Verizon can’t make money cause Apple says “no adult content” and Apple has a stranglehold on the app market.
The fact that a lot of us use tumblr to host our own services and products as independent creators, often as our only source of income, is irrelevant to them. The fact that to many of us this is our community is meaningless to them. We’re acceptable collateral damage to furthering corporate greed and that’s the fucking tea on that.
Also to the hypothetical unpaid intern: leave, sweety. You can do better, and you’re worth so much more.
I thought Apple removed the app because of the CP though ?
Not that I don’t think Apple is evil or don’t have a stranglehold on the market, but
if the removal was specifically because of the pedophilia then
that was a more than fair decision. Come to think of it, if it was because of all the porn bots it was also pretty fair. Tumblr should have gotten its shit together way earlier about that and if the whole “no adult content” thing is wholly their decisions then this mess is on them for not being able to manage their own website, panicking when there’s finally some consequences and deciding that trying to ban all “adult content” instead of dealing with the actual problem is the way to go
(so yeah hypothetical intern might want to find a better, not completely incompetent place of work)
The CP is what forced them to roll out changes quicker, but otherwise this NSFW ban has been in the planning for quite some time. They were always planning to do this.
That whole “oh we rolled back the filtering system” that happened a while ago cause the algorithm was bullshit? Was them testing it to see a) how well it worked but also b) how we’d react.
But because, and this is all through the grapevine stuff and “anon sources” who were willing to talk to Vox (source), Verizon haven’t been putting any money into Tumblr since they bought it, the engineers that run the site have been jumping ship left right and center for better gigs (without being offered any reason to stay), so there’s been increasingly fewer staff to maintain or make changes, so the filter is still bullshit, still broken, and the site is only going to break further as time goes on cause no money is going into maintaining the basic infrastructure. So it doesn’t just seem like things are broken and no one is fixing it, things actually are breaking down, and there’s not enough people with the know how to fix it.
Tumblr is like the house built on sinking sand at this point. It just so also happens to be built on top of a tire fire as well, and the “discovery” of a CP circuit was just the thing that made them go “oh shit oh god oh shit” when Apple finally got sick of their shit and pulled the app. (And Apple is notorious for not allowing apps “that contain user generated content that is frequently pornographic” or for trying to muscle them out of site out of mind (source)(source)(source) so to the people in the notes going “uuuh they allow snapchat???”, yeah, for now. It also likely has different age restrictions and details in their ToS compared to the android one, where the rules about apps are a lot more lax, something which Steve Jobs himself was snarky about (source).)
Jesus Christ I’m so mad at myself for not knowing about any of this until now
Don’t be! The facts are only just now starting to emerge as people are becoming willing to speak out and talk, but also, some of these things are well hidden!!
Big companies pay big money for you to never know these things about them, they scrub their google returns clean so that most of the time all you will ever find are positive results. Most people didn’t even know that Yahoo had been acquired by Verizon until recently. Some people still don’t.
Misinformation is how chaos thrives, and chaos can often be capitalized on provided it’s a carefully curated kind. All of this?—laughable as it is to say, was planned. Poorly planned, and even more poorly executed, but premeditated all the same. As is anything that is done by a corporate company.
This is why things like Net Neutrality did and do matter. This is why telecommunication companies developing a monopoly over the Internet was a bad idea. This is why so many of us have been freaking out while others call us tin foil hatters go “ugh come on guys, it’s not a big deal” because it does matter! The small things matter! Because the small things eventually make up the whole and sometimes the whole turns out to be a big steaming pile of mass censorship in favor of profit. And that’s a Problem.
So don’t be mad at yourself. Not when it’s time to get mad at them.
don’t join mastodon. the lax nature of regulations makes it an extremely popular platform for maps and pedophiles.
there are always alternatives to tumblr but mastodon is Not a trustworthy or good one
This is based on a drastic misunderstanding of what Mastodon is. It’s not a social media site like tumblr – it’s open-source code that allows anyone to create a social media site, which can then interact with other sites using that code. To say Mastodon has “lax regulations” is really misleading, because Mastodon itself has no regulations, it only has tools for moderators to regulate their own instances
Mastodon “allows” pedophiles in the same way that email “allows” identity theft scams. No, “email” doesn’t put a stop to identity theft, but “email” is just a set of protocols for sending messages – it’d be absurd to expect it to
Most Mastodon instances (including mastodon.social, the largest and oldest) do more to keep pedophiles off their platform than tumblr ever has, by having strict rules against it, banning any instances that don’t have strict rules against it, and actively moderating to enforce those rules. At that point it’s as if the pedophiles are on a different website entirely – because they literally are on a different domain
As someone who actually uses it, I can confirm that I’ve never had or even heard of a run-in with pedophiles. Admins know the instances that allow it and quickly block and spread the word about any new ones that pop up. Again, it’s been more of an issue for me on tumblr than it’s ever been on masto
Please reblog this. People love spreading this rumor without knowing what they’re talking about, and it’s driving people away from non-corporate, community-controlled, secure open-source social media. And that’s a real big shame
Some guy just mansplained space to an actual fucking astronaut.
tfw correcting misinformation is written off as mansplaining
tfw when idiots on tumblr who know jack shit about thermo assume the dude is ‘correcting misinformation’ when actually he’s dead ass wrong. ‘Spontaneous’ is a scientific term – it means a reaction with a negative Gibb’s free energy, i.e. a reaction that will occur without an external energy input, i.e. water boiling because of low atmospheric pressure. Spontaneous is absolutely the correct term for what she’s observing, and that is ‘simple thermo’, and this is ‘correcting misinformation’.
Part One of Episode 2: Fresh From The Fight; or, Supernatural’s Relationship with Heroism & Independence is now up on Soundcloud, Spotify, and iTunes! This episode discusses heroism, anti-heroes, Western and noir genres, and death of the author, taking a deep look at American heroic archetypes and the portrayals of Sam and Dean Winchester.
now that having basically any image in your posts places you at risk of getting flagged for “sensitive content” by the new algorithms, we’re just going have to start posting our reaction images in text format