The Vox article that I was interviewed for is up and running, and it contains some serious fuckign information about this whole fiasco.
Information that tumblr just straight up refused to provide to its userbase at all.
Unsurprisingly to those of us watching this website deteriorate over the last year, this full content purge and ban has been in progress for a solid 6 months. The date got moved up because of the child porn thing, but it was always coming for us.
Equally unsurprising: Tumblr’s management and ownership are absolutely destroying the actual staff working on it. The company has been hemoragghing senior staff without so much as a token attempt to keep them in place. So the drops in site quality are real, and wil probably only be getting worse.
Truly astonishing is the fact that apparently this crap was supposed to “double” the userbase by the end of next year. Boy, howdy, that’s not gonna work out well for them.
good luck with your plan to sell ads targeting a user base that doesn’t exist any more, @staff.
Then they’re def gonna let Tumblr die on the vine when it doesn’t pan out. It’ll take a few years but mark my words, this is going to work out about as well as when Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace and everybody left. Also, fuck Verizon forever.
Plz lemme know if you reblog this and it disappears. I have Suspicions.
I mean, there are already mutuals of mine reporting that they can’t see this post, only a “post was deleted"notice on my blog, and I’m the OP.
So, whatever your suspicions are, I suppose mark them as confirmed.
i’ve seen it disappear about 5 times off my dash.
I’m doubting the “post disappearing” stuff, if that is happening at all, I’d suspect bugs before malice. They don’t care enough to remove it, plus, if they wanted it gone, it would be *gone*, not gone for some people
Tag: verizon
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.
some context for yahoo’s excellent product management that not a lot of people know about:
remember yahoo instant messenger? i’m guessing basically everyone stopped using that after like the early 2000s. but until about two years ago, almost all of the world’s oil trading was conducted through yahoo instant messenger. every day hundreds of millions of barrels, billions of dollars in equity, was traded by a bunch of dudes through yahoo instant messenger. traders and brokers loved that they could be speaking with tons of people at once, and their compliance officers loved that there was a transcript of conversations and deals left behind for auditing and regulatory purposes.
but yahoo decided, perhaps reasonably on the surface, that they did not want to support this service anymore. they wanted to migrate the messaging platform onto something a bit more integrated and 21st century. except their new service was not compatible with any kind of conversation-recording capability, so traders would not be allowed to use it anymore for compliance purposes.
chaos. billion dollar companies all around the world were scrambling. how would they conduct their business? i know this sounds silly, but traders talk to hundreds of people a day, brokers are showing them markets all day long. phones are inefficient and not all are set to record. they explained to yahoo what the compliance issue was. they offered to pay – these companies can afford any kind of subscription necessary. they assured yahoo that a massive pillar of the world’s economy, as fucking insane as it sounds, is actually conducted through their service. just let us use it. (here’s a reuters article about it, and here’s a financial times article on it)
yahoo didn’t change its plans.
now everyone uses something else to trade the world’s oil.
By the by, just so we’re clear, this was a post-acquisition thing. Verizon bought Yahoo two months before they annoucned YIM’s cancellation.
Why Tumblr’s NFSW-ban is a cautionary tale for why we need Net Neutrality
Well, here are the salient points, and you’ll have to forgive the America-centric lens despite the wildly international community that’s on Tumblr.
The ~reason~ that Tumblr went into panic mode re: nudity and adult content was because Apple pulled the Tumblr app from the store due to child pornography on the website. Or at least, that’s what they’re telling you – the single largest paragraph in the Staff update re: this change was on child pornography, how abhorrent it is, what all they’re doing to combat it, etc.
But that’s honestly bullshit. That’s not why they’re /really/ doing it, though it’s certainly a flashpoint.
1. They’re rolling it out /now/ because Apple removed their app from the store. Which is on brand for apple. They have a history of removing “adult content” from their products. Here are some posts on Apple and it’s so-called “Walled Garden.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/24/apple-explicit-app-catego_n_475231.html
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/78k8yb/reddit-ios-apps-disappear-nsfw-content
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mjxg/apple-tumblr-porn-nsfw-adult-content-banned
Which is fine, if Apple wants to purge adult products from their content (ie things they own and moderate, such as a social media network), that’s their prerogative. But what Apple is ALSO doing is policing what kind of content developers and companies are allowed to have on their own websites that might be accessed by users of Apple technology, which is in exact opposition to principles of net neutrality. Apple preventing users from seeing certain content on their iphones or imac computers, or the safari browser, and preventing them from accessing certain apps/websites that don’t meet their approval, is part of a technology monopoly that controls how certain aspects of the internet are going to develop.
IE, Tumblr purging its nudity content to get back on the Apple apps store, because they want to make money.
There was a lawsuit over this in 2014, which resurfaced in 2017. Here’s the court case on Apple Inc vs. Pepper, if you wanna read more on it:
http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/apple-v-pepper/
But the big issue here is, when Apple begins to create a monopoly, net neutrality laws are part of what helps combat this. And if there are no net neutrality laws in place, it’s an awful lot harder to deal with corporations like Apple throttling ~sensitive content.~ A heading under which Apple has notoriously included stuff like LGBTQ+ content (see: https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2018/08/31/apple-censors-pride-watch-face-in-russia/), which is obvious unethical on a number of levels.
2. They had been planning on doing this for a while. You may have seen the vox interview article re: this, but I’ll post it below:
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/4/18126112/tumblr-porn-ban-verizon-ad-goals-sex-work-fandom
The NSFW ban had been underworks for 6 months already. Six months! They were planning on doing this with or without the CP issues that got them kicked off the Apple app store.
And here’s the thing. Tumblr was bought by Yahoo in 2013, with the intent of making $ through advertising, a goal which was not met. Marissa Mayer was at the helm of this project, and reportedly she was mocked and belittled for a lot of the ideas she had re: Tumblr, and insiders have reported that in general Yahoo really failed to do anything with Tumblr because they didn’t understand how it worked and really didn’t care to learn. Here, we have a case of a MAJOR communications company purchasing an internet social media platform, and basically stagnating it. Every report that we’ve had about Tumblr post Yahoo purchase is that they’ve been hemorrhaging staff – esp senior staff – because they won’t do anything with them, or they’ve actively pushed them out of leadership roles to push their company agendas onto the already existing culture of Tumblr. Basically, they’ve been strangling Tumblr as a website. We joke about @staff being terrible with coding, but from 2014-2018, pretty much all of the dysfunction we’re seeing is in tandem with the Yahoo takeover.
Here’s an article that describes some of these problems, though it’s by no means comprehensive:
https://digiday.com/marketing/tumblr-is-neglected-by-marketers/
Even with all that, Yahoo did somehow manage to mostly leave Tumblr alone, and relatively functional. Yahoo actually wrote Tumblr down for something like half the value that it was worth, counting it as a loss.
The real issue is that Verizon acquired Yahoo in June of 2017, about a year and a half ago. Like Yahoo, Verizon laid off tons of people involved with the programming and management of the website. Then in early 2018 they implemented to “Safe Search” filtering of ~sensitive content~ which was something users could opt out of it they chose. Which, most of us did. It seemed silly at the time, but in hindsight it was very obviously a test run of this current plan to implement the NSFW ban.
For the purpose of Verizon and Tumblr under Verizon, “sensitive content” was defined as “anything that might not be suitable for some members of the Tumblr community” such as “nudity, //////including/////// in an artistic, educational, or photojournalistic context.
INCLUDING.
For all that Tumblr @staff’s “A better, more positive Tumblr” said that the ban wouldn’t include, say, expression of political nudity or artistic nudity, it’s quite clear from the TOS that this is something they’re slanting against, and I really don’t think it’s purely from the ~bad algorithms~ that posts with topics dealing with sexuality, nudity, LGBTQ+, trans issues, disability issues, body positivity, and etc are being targeted. It’s not a coincidence that the NSFW ban included the language of “female presenting nipples” – as if women’s bodies are inherently sexual in nature.
And it’s sure as hell not a coincidence that Verizon was one of the telecommunications and media corporations that was actively lobbying against net neutrality along with Comcast. Verizon wants to control what kind of content you see, and wants to charge you for the kinds of content you can see. Verizon is a company that has admitted to actively throttling the content of its competitors.
And the fundamental issue here is that, with a large corporation that doesn’t care about its userbase, it’s trying to streamline a website like Tumblr into being something that it wants, instead of trying to work with the website culture that’s already in place. Where Yahoo was at a standstill, Verizon is actively dismantling parts of what make Tumblr so successful and tight-knit as a social media and blogging platform – particularly with content that might otherwise be deemed as “inappropriate” / “sensitive content” in other places like Facebook – talking about trans issues, talking about sexuality, etc. And the fact that this is actively harming sex workers and targeting quote unquote the female form suggests that they want to throttle freedom of expression. So when we talk about fandom leaving FF.N, and LiveJournal, and the kinds of fandom history that younger folks have maybe even only vaguely heard of (the infamous “What’s a lemon?” question comes immediately to mind) we’re talking about how a major mainstream corporation is looking at how to turn its userbase (which is just numbers to them!) into a profitable scheme, and it’s always going to be an upward ladder that harms the communities down below.
Those of us that are looking at the situation and going “Why don’t they do x, y, z? And make it actually functional?” are underestimating in a big way the fact that they want to spend as little money on this project as possible while still trying and double their userbase and profits. The fact that they mentioned BLM as a marketable niche suggests the fundamentally misunderstand why these movements exist in the first place, and the fact that BLM was mentioned in tandem with Game of Thrones fans and Manchester United Fans means that all they’re seeing is demographics and theoretically untapped markets. Making the website more palatable to quote unquote the mainstream is an attempt to bring in more advertisers, which is why they were more than happy to put together the NSFW ban.
The NSFW ban is also probably a response of SESTA, which caused a lot of website platforms to double down on their TOS without actually doing anything meaningful to help combat sex trafficking and child pornography:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Enabling_Sex_Traffickers_Act
With that said – they’re also probably not unhappy to have a left-leaning, pro-net neutrality website like Tumblr die, which is honestly what it’s heading toward. Tumblr spent over a decade building the communities that it has, and a lot of people use it as an alternative to “mainstream media” and as a way to get a lot of information on politics and current events, as well as on obscure topics. It’s been a way to connect social justice activists, queer people who often didn’t have anywhere else to connect with other queer people in a way that wasn’t inherently sexualized (looking at grindr, fetlife, etc), academics, and more. The amount of information dissemination on Tumblr is truly incredible, and, if you’ll excuse the tin hat for a moment, it’s the antithesis of how the media currently functions – with about just 15 billionaires controlling most of America’s media corporations.
A similar thing actually happened with Polyvore, which was owned by Oath, which was [hold your breath, wait for it] owned by Verizon.
https://www.racked.com/2018/4/6/17207450/polyvore-ssense-shutdown-mood-boards-collage
I don’t trust Verizon to do right by the userbase. They’ll do whatever they can to make it profitable and fit their company vision. And if you want a reminder of how utterly evil Verizon is, just refresh yourself on the fact that they were manipulating firefighter cell plans to make $ on them while they were actively in the process of combatting California wildfires.
And to cap it off, it’s 100% not a coincidence that some of the posts that were initially getting throttled on Tumblr were Tumblr/Staff critical posts. Not even on bit. Companies, particularly large companies with huge financial resources, actively scrub their internet presences so that only positive things come up.
AT&T EMAIL USERS ON TUMBLR: NEVERMIND
Tumblr reversed itself and announced today that AT&T email addresses used for blog logins will continue to work. Tumblr users with AT&T accounts are no longer affected by the June 30, 2017 att.net change.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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