“here are some alternates to tumblr! like newgrounds or pixiv" yall just, straight up stopped suggesting sites even remotely similar to tumblr and are just saying random shit now. guys lets all move to the comments section of youtube
yall said we were moving to Yahoo Answers but I guess we’re bailing on that now?
“My suggestion was quite simple: Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, “George, I’m sorry but tens of millions must die.” He has to look at someone and realize what death is—what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It’s reality brought home.” – Richard Fisher, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (1981)
Never forget that part of the reason this system was never implemented was that when he presented it to his colleagues, their response was IIRC “George, that’s terrible! If he has to take an innocent life, he may never press the button.”
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.”
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.”
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
the second I saw that they made Butler black in the trailer I knew this was going to happen. Butler is an explicitly white slavic dude but they made him black bc theyre gonna whitewash ALL the fucking fairies and they need a token black character, so of course they pick the one guy who’s entire existence is about being subservient to the protag
Hey, unpopular opinion, apparently. But people don’t just “have pain for no reason” doctors say this all the time (especially to women and chronically ill people) and the truth is, Thats literally not possible. Even if your pains are psychosomatic (a word I hesitate to even use because of the way its used so often) there is a reason you are having those pains whether its mental illness, abuse, etc. If your doctor consistently tells you that “well some people just have pain for no reason” get a new doctor. That’s a doctor who is not going to give a shit what your actual symptoms or experiences are.
I just wanna add to clarify the psychosomatic thing.
That word DOES NOT MEAN you’re making it up. It doesn’t mean you’re imagining the symptom. What it means is that the symptom ISN’T DIRECTLY CAUSED BY ANY OF THE THINGS THAT WOULD NORMALLY CAUSE IT.
I fought to get a PCOS diagnosis for 2 and a half years. For the ENTIRE time I was fighting, I was dealing with 3 cysts that were not going away by themselves and eventually required surgery to remove. At one point close to the end of the battle, I suddenly went blind. I was visiting my parents and was standing on the veranda looking out over the tree we had planted in memory of my dog and suddenly I got one of the shooting pains that I was quite frankly used to at that point and my vision started to go dark. It was like the sun was setting while being completely hidden behind storm clouds but it was 2pm in the middle of Summer on a clear day. Within about 30 seconds I couldn’t see ANYTHING. I was 27 years old and I was screaming for my mother.
My mum raced me to her doctor (he was a 15 minute drive away as opposed to 45 minutes to the nearest hospital) and he quickly worked out that there was nothing wrong with my eyes and what had happened was totally unrelated to them. Then he said it was psychosomatic and I freaked out, yelling that I was NOT making this up and I definitely wasn’t imagining it. Very quickly he calmed me down and said he believed me and I had misunderstood. He explained that whatever was going on with my abdominal pains (he suggested PCOS which I hadn’t even heard of at that point) had been ignored for so long that my body was starting to do things other than the normal pain response to try to draw my attention to the problem. My sight going was my body basically jumping around in front of me going “HEY ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO ME HELLLOOOOOOO??????”
He gave me some prescription strength painkillers and my sight started to come back as soon as they started to kick in. About 45 minutes after it started I could see well enough to walk around without help and within a day and a half I was back to normal. On top of that I finally had a scan booked to figure out what the hell was causing all the pain.
Psychosomatic symptoms are NOT imagined or fabricated or happening for “no reason”. Experiencing them DOES NOT make you a liar. It makes you someone who has been battling with something serious for so long that your own body has started to get impatient with you.
I completely agree. Thank you for sharing this.
Psychosomatic symptoms are literally your body flipping random alarm switches just to get any alarm blaring because you’ve been ignoring the regular ones
cguard 