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.
We believe it is of utmost importance for users to have control of their content and how it is accessed. Tumblr’s structure encourages users to think of other people’s content that they reblog as partially their own, but we think that that mentality leads to a lot of the harassment and plain rudeness that has grown on Tumblr over the years. The fact that a post can be reblogged by others, ridiculed, and passed around endlessly after the original user has already decided they don’t want that content to exist and represent them anymore has always struck us as a massive design flaw. On Pillowfort a user’s post is always their post first and foremost, and all reblogs and comments to that post are still under the control of the original user. So yes, while it may be unfortunate to have a post you like disappear from your blog or lose a comment you left, we think it is still more important for a user to be able to delete their own content when they choose.
I can’t think of any benefits to non-destructible reblogs that is worth having a
user’s control over access to their own content taken away.
It’s worth noting that users can also delete any individual comments left on their post, because we want to encourage the notion that when you comment on someone’s post you are in THEIR space. It’s a bit of a shift from the way that Tumblr and Twitter have forced users to deal with anyone and everyone putting their own thoughts on your content, but we don’t think users should have to deal with the responses of people who may only be trying to spread harassment or otherwise exploit users’ lack of control over responses to act in bad faith, as we have all seen happen quite often.
I just want to make sure people thinking about migrating to pillowfort see this one, because this is an incredible example of a policy that was clearly not thought through by people who have ever tried to keep abusers from doing their thing.
This is a great policy, if your primary goal is to ensure that abusers cannot be challenged or disputed, ever. It is a great policy if you want to actively punish people for putting in any effort at all in conversations.
Yes, we think of things that we write in response to other people as “partially our own”, because we wrote some of the content in the post. When people put effort into responding to me, that effort is theirs. If I make a silly shitpost and someone responds with a 2,000 word essay, their post was more effort than mine.
Fuck’s sake. Look at the writing prompts blog. Think about how this plays out in Pillowfort’s world: You post writing prompts which are a sentence long, other people write multi-page responses, and you get to delete any of those responses any time you want leaving them with no record of the work or effort they put in, no way to retrieve the data, nothing.
Conclusion: If you go there, do not attempt to interact with other people. If you want to comment on something someone said, do it by starting a brand new post with no trace of direct connection to theirs, so it will probably be safe.
But really, just… Don’t. This is not sane.
“We designed a reblog system that discourages people from ever substantively using the reblog system.”
The maddening part is that I get it. That first paragraph does lay out real ways in which Tumblr is uniquely good at making sure that the dumbest thing you ever said on a social blogging platform becomes an unbanishable ghost that haunts your notifications forever. Clearly that’s not ideal.
But this doesn’t seem like a solution to me.
Why not, say, keep the content but divorce it from the original poster? Any deleted comments show up in reblogs with no attribution, or just a grey “deleted” icon, while disappearing from the OP’s blog.
That’s one thing that Twitter gets closer to right, from what I’ve seen. It even seems much better to just show that any particular post no longer exists, through the reblog chain, rather than making it possible to also delete what other users have written.
Tumblr’s new algorithm is flagging non-pornographic blogs that feature images of fully clothed fat people. As a result, great fat-positive blogs that in no way break the new Tumblr rules as stated (not that I agree with those rules) are being forced off the
platform.
Let this be a sober reminder that fat discrimination and fatphobia can present itself in all things, including
machine learning algorithms. Remember, algorithms are
only as unbiased as their developers, and are only as smart as their training set. Suppose you want to train an algorithm to detect porn, so you feed it a lot of porn images. However, you want to exclude nude art and scantily clad people, so you feed it the most popular sets of images of nude art and scantily clad people. These images are more likely to be of thin people, since fat people are often excluded by virtue of their fatness from being so-called influencers and fat people are largely excluded in art (brief chubby art periods notwithstanding).
So now, you have an algorithm that flags any bulging bit of skin it perceives as “too much” (i.e., more than would be exposed on a non-nude picture of a thin Instamodel-type) as porn. Fully clothed fat people are then flagged for their arms, cleavage, tummy in a crop top, legs in short shorts, basically any way of dressing short of draping oneself in a tent.
The
biases and blind spots of the developers of any given algorithm will be
present in how the algorithm operates. The culture promotes and celebrates thin people and does its best to hide fat people. So the algorithm will most likely misflag images of fat people, as it is most likely to have been trained on over-represented thin bodies.
@fatpeopledoingthings (which is no longer automatically linkable, I had to do it manually) was misflagged by the algorithm, despite the fact that the fat women in the images it publishes are fully clothed. Its description is, simply, “Pictures of fat girls doing things…because fat girls do things, just like everybody else!” Pictures of fat people doing things are now being treated like porn by Tumblr’s algorithm.
What can we do about Tumblr’s attempt to remove images of fat people from the site?
1. If you have a blog with mostly images of fat people and it is being
flagged for content that is in no way pornographic, please post about it
and tag your post #fatphobia. If you can’t participate in the tags
anymore, please submit a post about your experience to @thisisthinprivilege (we are also not automatically linkable!).
2. Comment on blogs and news articles about Tumblr’s new policy letting people know it is mis-flagging fully clothed pictures of fat people.
3. Use social media to talk about this. Be loud. Tumblr’s new policies meant to maximize ad-money are discriminating against a whole category of people.
4. Reblog other posts pointing out how Tumblr’s algorithm is flagging LGBT content, too.
Let’s fight this. And, if we have to go, let’s not go quietly.
Venus, bussin that pussy open since the renaissance
BUST IT WIDE OPEN GIRL
Let us appreciate that this is made of marble! I couldn’t make that out of clay.
I see tiny lil dicks all over the place but this is the first time I have ever seen a statue figure with a vagina. I need more of this in my life
i have NEVER seen a statue with an actual vagina. the most i’ve seen is your standard nude woman statue with her legs clamped shut. this is boss.
That’s the vulva, not the vagina, though. Also this is not from the renaissance.
I’m reblogging this again because art – not Renaissance art but still art.
NO WAIT I’LL REBLOG THIS AGAIN BECAUSE PEOPLE ALWAYS FORGET TO CREDIT THE ARTIST – WHO’S VERY MUCH ALIVE, AND SHE LIVES IN CALIFORNIA. This piece isn’t depicting VENUS by the way, it’s depicting a contortionist, and this is a nude study. The piece is simply called “Swan”. The artist is Jami Young. She’s proud to fly the colours of the Pride flag on her website alongside her own art. Her website is at http://www.jyoung-studio.com .
We didn’t do anything except post critically about the new filter. I haven’t noticed any flagged images (we have very few images, most of the posts are text). I’m assuming they simply lied in the explanation of the new filter when they said they weren’t going to censor text.
This is Thin Privilege has been in the bad graces of @staff for a long time. We were ghost-noted in, oh gosh, 2009 or so? Maybe 2011? I forget. So I’m assuming the staff that fucked with us then is using the new filter as an excuse to fuck with us even more.
This is troubling. Thanks for the head’s up. Followers, I’d really appreciate it if you point out anything else amiss about the TiTP experience.
-ArteToLife
It hasn’t been showing up for at least a year (on mobile at any rate), and I wondered what was up with that before. Not sure exactly how long it’s been gone, but that’s definitely not a new thing.
The Incas may not have bequeathed any written records, but they did have colourful knotted cords. Each of these devices was called a khipu (pronounced key-poo). We know these intricate cords to be an abacus-like system for recording numbers. However, there have also been teasing hints that they might encode long-lost stories, myths and songs too.
In a century of study, no one has managed to make these knots talk. But recent breakthroughs have begun to unpick this tangled mystery of the Andes, revealing the first signs of phonetic symbolism within the strands. Now two anthropologists are closing in on the Inca equivalent of the Rosetta stone. That could finally crack the code and transform our understanding of a civilisation whose history has so far been told only through the eyes of the Europeans who sought to eviscerate it.
I’ve been loosely following developments in research about khipus since reading about them in an obscure paragraph in the back of my high school history textbook and every time I read more about them, it’s more and more exciting.
The full article is fascinating. Here’s another excerpt:
Earlier this year, Hyland even managed to read a little of the khipus. When deciphering anything, one of the most important steps is to work out what information might be repeated in different places, she says. Because the Collata khipus were thought to be letters, they probably encoded senders and recipients. That is where Hyland started. She knew from the villagers that the primary cord of one of the khipus contained ribbons representing the insignia of one of two clan leaders.
She took a gamble and assumed that the ribbons referred to a person known as Alluka, pronounced “Ay-ew-ka”. She also guessed that the writer of this letter might have signed their name at the end, meaning that the last three pendant cords could well represent the syllables “ay”, “ew” and “ka”.
Assuming that was true, she looked for cords on the second khipu that had the same colour and were tied with the same knot as the ones she had tentatively identified on the first khipu. It turned out that the first two of the last three cords matched, which gave “A-ka”. The last was unknown. It was a golden-brown fibre made from the hair of a vicuna, an alpaca-like animal. Hyland realised that the term for this hue in the local Quechua language is “paru”. And trying this alongside the other syllables gave, with a little wiggle room, “Yakapar”. That, it turned out, was the name of another of the lineages involved in the revolt that these khipus recorded.
“We know from the written testimony that one of the khipus was made by a member of the Yakapar clan and sent to Collata, and we think this is it,” she says. Hyland claims that the Collata khipus show that the cords really do hold narratives.
Yet even if she is right, it is possible these later khipus were influenced by contact with Spanish writing. “My feeling is that the phoneticisation, if it’s there, is a reinvention of khipus,” says Urton. Equally, the Collata khipus might be a regional variation. Possibly even a one-off.
Hyland is the first to admit that we don’t understand the link between these khipus and those dating from before the Spanish arrived. That doesn’t make them any less interesting though. “Even if these later khipus were influenced by the alphabet, I still think it’s mind-blowing that these people developed this tactile system of writing,” she says.
She will spend the next two years doing more fieldwork in Peru, attempting to decipher the Collata khipus and looking for similar examples elsewhere.
I first learnt about khipus in the 1980s. They’re used as a written record in the kids series The Mysterious Cities Of Gold which is from the early to mid eighties.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.