tinylamp:

macaroni-rascal-dreams-of-gals:

Staff: We’re getting rid of all adult content on Dec. 17th to combat illegal content!

Everyone: You do realize this ban only hurts the people producing legal content, right? Like, those small pages posting illegal stuff never tag their pages appropriately, and don’t care about having to remake a new blog if theirs gets nuked because they can just make a new burner account to post that stuff again.

Staff: …

Everyone: The only adult content that will likely be spreading around would be the illegal content, since you are strong-arming the legally-abiding and responsible adult content creators who take care to tag and label their content and not post anything that’s god damn illegal.

Staff: …

Everyone: That’s also assuming that there won’t be people that just continue posting adult content, either with censor bars or cuts to bypass the adult content check, or by just posting whatever anyway and not caring.

Staff: …

Everyone: None if this even addresses the racism problems that people did have, including the adult bloggers you are now getting rid of. You can’t just get rid of text posts or images of disgusting rheotoric unless there’s a nipple in the mix, yeah?

Staff: …

Everyone: Speaking of which, this new plan of yours still requires moderation, which is seemingly the main responsibility you are actively dodging with this adult content ban measure.

Staff: …

Everyone: So now, basically nothing will have changed except for all the responsible adult content creators being gone that made up a decent number of your most active and loyal users, some of the most active critics and filters of racist content users being banned, and the only people being left posting illegal content or blatantly breaking your rules to post legal adult content to spite you.

How did you think this was going to pan out?

Staff: … but we said no adult content tho.

thatantisocialbitch:

“You can romanticize me all you wish, but the devil wrapped in silk is still the devil.”

— A Word To My Lovers

sallychanscraps:

never thought id be using deviantArt as a good example for nsfw control BUT

why not just copy deviantart’s concept of having to connect a birthday to your account, so if youre under 18 you literally cannot look at nsfw. and if youre 18+ it’ll still censor nsfw posts but you can click “show me anyway”, and if you choose you could turn that off as well.

i get that it would still need to be marked or filtered right but you could make it so there’s a big obvious checkmark at the bottom of a post like “IS THIS NSFW CONTENT?” so people actually see it, instead of hiding it in the little gear up on top of a post

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.