prokopetz:

I think the real problem here is that big media corporations seem to believe that social media userbases are fungible, and persist in acting on this belief no matter how many times it’s demonstrated to be wrong.

There’s a specific pattern of events that plays out over and over (and over) again, and it looks something like this:

1. Social media platform becomes popular

2. Social media platform is purchased by big media corporation in order to gain access to it large user base

3. Big media corporation realises that social media platform’s demographics are not the demographics they want to sell things to.

4. Big media corporation institutes measures to drive away “undesirable” users, apparently in the honest belief that the outgoing users will automatically be replaced by an equal number of new, more demographically desirable users

5. This does not, in fact, occur

6. Social media platform crashes and burns

You’d think that, by the sheer law of averages, at least one person who’s capable of learning from experience would become involved in this whole process at some point.

jaspurr:

you know if tumblr was a competent website, I wouldn’t mind their new “no nsfw allowed” policy. it’s a little irritating that they couch it in “we want to make sure everyone feels comfortable and welcome” when filtering existed for awhile, but ok. it’s their website.

except there’s a huge precedent of censoring queer content every time a social media website wants to censor nsfw content. youtube got in trouble for that years ago. it was a huge problem with tumblr’s safe mode.

speaking of tumblr safe mode, remember that a whole bunch of sfw posts were marked as nsfw or “sensitive” by tumblr algorithms? how about during the latest purge when a bunch of innocent blogs were deleted because of whatever algorithm they use? how about when tags like “chronic pain” were censored? how about the fact that people abuse the hell out of the report system to delete blogs that they don’t like off of tumblr, because tumblr doesn’t really verify reports and will delete any blog that gets enough of them?

I could keep going but my point is: tumblr is extremely incompetent when it comes to how it handles nsfw content. everyone who has been on here for more than a week would know this.

the announcement is so vaguely worded too. what are the “some exceptions” to their policy banning adult content and nudity? how can you talk about banning that but also talk about the importance of sex positivity, art, and self expression? is sex education allowed? can people talk about their sexuality? can survivors of sexual assault and rape talk about their experience? what if someone thinks that their discussion is too graphic and must be pornography? what if someone’s tasteful artistic nudes is someone else’s pornography?

maybe to y’all it should be “common sense”, but when I see that, all I can think about is how unless tumblr clearly defines their rules and spells them out for everyone, it’s open to abuse. hell, people already abuse the policies they have in place.

and when you combine that with a history of tumblr deleting blogs that don’t violate the tos, censoring tags that aren’t nsfw, marking innocent posts nsfw, and just… everything about tumblr’s shitty history of dealing with actual problems like porn bots, nsfw content popping up in recommended posts and the gif search, recently having nsfw ads….

if you don’t think you have to worry about this, you really should. even if you don’t post adult content at all, or you think that what you do post is one of the exceptions to tumblr’s new policy. sure this is gonna hit some blogs harder than others, but it’s gonna have an impact on everyone. well, except maybe the blogs that are actually causing harm. for some reason those blogs always seem to thrive no matter what tumblr does.

jenniferrpovey:

memecucker:

memecucker:

What I think is really interesting about the papyrus account of the workers building the tomb of Rameses III going on strike to demand better wages is really fascinating to me because if you look at the description given by the royal scribe you see that there was an attempt to satisfy the workers by bringing a large amount of food at once but that was rebuffed by the workers who declared that it wasn’t just that they were hungry at the moment but had serious charges to bring that “something bad had been done in this place of Pharoah” (is poor wages and mistreatment). They understood themselves as having long term economic interests as a -class- and organized together knowing that by doing so they could put forward their demands collectively. It so strongly flies in the face of narratives that are like “in this Time and Place people were happy to be serve because they believed in the God-King and maybe you get some intellectual outliers but certainly no common person questioned that”. If historical sources might paint that sorta picture of cultural homogeneity it is because those sources sought not to describe something true but invent a myth for the stability of a regime.

Since this is getting notes here’s a link to a translation of the papyrus scroll and here’s an article that gets further into the economic situation surrounding the strike and giving an explanation of the events. The workers didnt just refuse to construct Rameses III’s future tomb, they actually occupied the Valley of the Kings and were preventing anyone from entering to perform rituals or funerals. Basically they set up the first ever recorded picket line

Again the workers went on strike, this time taking over and blocking all access to the Valley of the Kings. The significance of this act was that no priests or family members of the deceased were able to enter with food and drink offerings for the dead and this was considered a serious offense to the memory of those who had passed on to the afterlife. When officials appeared with armed guards and threatened to remove the men by force, a striker responded that he would damage the royal tombs before they could move against him and so the two sides were stalemated.

Eventually the tomb workers were able to win the day and acquire their demands and actually set a precedent for organized labor and strikes in Egyptian society that continued for a long time

The jubilee in 1156 BCE was a great success and, as at all festivals, the participants forgot about their daily troubles with dancing and drink. The problem did not go away, however, and the workers continued their strikes and their struggle for fair payment in the following months. At last some sort of resolution seems to have been reached whereby officials were able to make payments to the workers on time but the dynamic of the relationship between temple officials and workers had changed – as had the practical application of the concept of ma’at – and these would never really revert to their former understandings again. Ma’at was the responsibility of the pharaoh to oversee and maintain, not the workers; and yet the men of Deir el-Medina had taken it upon themselves to correct what they saw as a breach in the policies which helped to maintain essential harmony and balance. The common people had been forced to assume the responsibilities of the king.

[…]

The success of the tomb-worker/artisan strikes inspired others to do the same. Just as the official records of the battle with the Sea Peoples never recorded the Egyptian losses in the land battle, neither do they record any mention of the strikes. The record of the strike comes from a papyrus scroll discovered at Deir el-Medina and most probably written by the scribe Amennakht. The precedent of workers walking away from their jobs was set by these events and, although there are no extant official reports of other similar events, workers now understood they had more power than previously thought. Strikes are mentioned in the latter part of the New Kingdom and Late Period and there is no doubt the practice began with the workers at Deir el-Medina in the time of Ramesses III.

There was also a strike at one point where construction workers refused to continue until they were given sufficient “cosmetics.”

This was thought a highly strange thing until somebody deciphered the recipe for the “cosmetics” the workers were demanding and recreated it.

It was sunscreen. Sunscreen. 

Making that the first recorded strike over occupational safety.

If you’re leaving Tumblr for good, then cancel your account on your way out.

nomadicism:

Sounds drastic. Especially for content creators who may still need Tumblr for commissions while they find an alternative.

If you can swing it, here’s why:

I suspect that the December 17th deadline is so that Verizon/Yahoo can clean house and make Tumblr appealing to investors. This is a Q4/Q1 fire sale kind of thing. It makes a certain amount of business sense to make this change. Human-lead content curation (e.g. separating the CP from the legit) is expensive and time-consuming. I doubt they have the money for it. They already sold off Flickr. As a long-time Flickr pro user, I’m not pleased by the change and increase in pro account price, but I get it.

Investors are looking for a user base. User base is a prime attraction for investment or buy-out for a social media platform or application (I speak from experience as a co-founder of Rhinobird.tv).

Every account that is cancelled will be one less account in Tumblr’s user base for their pitch. I assume that there are millions of accounts with some percentage simply being abandoned accounts that haven’t been used in years. So cancelling one’s account on the way out the door won’t really matter unless the number of cancelled accounts reaches several hundred thousand at least.

If you decide to leave and cancel, then I also recommend sending a polite message to Tumblr staff, or tweet to the account about why you are leaving.

Finally, using Twitter to voice your concerns and thoughts about this issue will increase its visibility. They ain’t gonna like that. Media outlets that cater to tech entrepreneurs, and Silicon Valley types are going to be all over this.

I never ask for reblogs, but I will this one time.

wilwheaton:

sodomymcscurvylegs:

Real talk, though, because it needs to be said: as much as we all joke that porn was the only good thing this place had left, the reality is that it being the only place where one could regularly engage with and promote sexual content being gone is really not understanding at all what makes this place special. I mean we all joke about “horny on main” and all that, but the reality is that for a lot of the LGTBQ+ community, particularly younger members still discovering themselves and members in extremely homophobic environments where most media sites were banned (but Tumblr wasn’t even considered important enough to be), this was a bastion of information and self-expression. For a lot of artists too, this was a great place to come and post NSFW work and get traction that became Patreon pages that became honest jobs.

The problem with “family friendly” social media is that more often than not, the ones hit  the most by the whole family friendly nonsense are marginalized groups that have no vehicles to express themselves. Stuff like YouTube consistently bans or flags simple content featuring something as innocuous as two men kissing as “adult” content and makes it hard for LGBTQ+ content creators to compete with their non-queer peers for a lot of those reasons.

The ultimate problem isn’t even that banning of NSFW content, it’s the general mess surrounding it and unintended consequences to these groups. For MONTHS Tumblr has had a huge problem with porn spam bots and outright child pornography, and for MONTHS the majority of the userbase has been in general consensus that both of these things needed to stop. Tumblr did NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. When Apple finally removed their app from the store, SPECIFICALLY because of the child pornography, Tumblr decided to do what any rich corporation owning a social media site with zero understanding of what makes it popular would do, and decided that the best course of action was to eat itself like an Ouroboros. Rather than admit that they have done an absolutely shit job at keeping pedophiles off this website and rather than hiring the necessary staff to carefully moderate content, they decided to loose a poorly programmed bot that literally deleted perfectly SFW blogs with thousands of followers, and rather than properly handling moderation, they decided that it was best to simply go the lazy route and block anything even remotely NSFW.

They run this site in the worst way possible, and I don’t understand how @support or @staff or their completely oblivious “CEO” plans to keep this sinking ship alive.

the reality is that for a lot of the LGTBQ+ community, particularly younger members still discovering themselves and members in extremely homophobic environments where most media sites were banned (but Tumblr wasn’t even considered important enough to be), this was a bastion of information and self-expression.