A better, more positive Tumblr

Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.

Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).  

Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.

So what is changing?

Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.

Why are we doing this?

It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.

So what’s next?

Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.

Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.

Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.

Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.

Jeff D’Onofrio CEO

Oh hey, look, it's Tumblr staff being their usual brilliant selves. Is anyone surprised? Not really. I wouldn't consider myself someone to wish harm on a platform, but a part of me does sincerely hope that Tumblr collapses or implodes after this, if only to show that being tone-deaf to your audience can have disastrous consequences on your platform.

Part 1 of my commission for the amazing Pia

Mosk and Eran from The Ice Plague

LISTEN I LOVE THESE BOYS this has been a total honor, I’m a big fan, and I never thought I’d fall for another fae after Gwyn and Ash but BOY HOWDY was I wrong

LOOK AT THEM. LOOK AT THESE BEEBS. Look at Eran and his kickass Kh’anzar and SULKY MOSK FOREVER AND THE ROPE LOOK THE ROPE ON MOSK’S WRIST I’M fdslkajfdas

shiro comm 4 tx bear ! tysm 4 ur patience w me while i work on this ! 

Keiths ranting about something but Shiro’s clocked out and the bath bomb is really cool.

Note to minors on Tumblr: The world doesn’t revolve around you.

I realize this might be a shock to hear. You grew up in or after the Think Of The Children™ and It Takes A Village™ era. It’s possible your mommies and daddies took you everywhere — bars, tattoo parlors, $100-a-plate restaurants, cocktail parties — without regard to how well you behaved. You concluded, therefore, you were welcome everywhere, and that all adults, everywhere, must cater to your presence or they’re just a bunch of big ol’ meanieheads.

Free clue: You are not, in fact, welcome everywhere. Nor is every single place, whether in meatspace or on the internet, obliged to think of you and your needs before anyone else’s.

Because adults have our needs, too. And, yes, writing stuff that gets us off or otherwise tickles our fancy is a need for some of us.

Here’s another free clue: Every single adult you encounter is, likewise, not obliged to but your needs first and foremost. Including… women. Strangers on the internet who happen to be women are not your mommies, not your aunties, not your big sisters, not your therapists. They did not sign up for the job of protecting and coddling your precious little asses. Not even the ones who have children themselves. The only ones they’re obliged to look out for are their kids.

I’m not one of those women. I never wanted children, I don’t care that much for children, and I feel absolutely no responsibility to mother them myself. If a minor whines at me for not making them my highest priority, I block them with extreme prejudice.

I can hear you gasping in shock right now. But the idea that women are obliged to nurture everyone out there is a really, really regressive idea. Oh, I can see how it gained currency on a site where the “social justice” crowd thinks that nail polish is feminist, Hades was Mr. Right and Demeter was an abusive mother, and if you’re a not-very-feminine woman you can’t be a cis woman. It’s bullshit, peddled by dipshits who don’t want to examine their underlying beliefs but who want cookies for being all moral and upright.

Now, getting back to spaces. You are not categorically unwelcome on fanart and fanfic websites. Many of them are considered perfectly safe in their entirety for your delicate little psyches. Others are a mix. If you go, for example, to AO3, and you see a fic rated G (general audiences) or T (teen)? You can read it.

If, however, you see a fic that is rated M for mature or E for explicit… or it has all those terrible tags like “Rape,” “Noncon,” “Dubcon,” or whatever else sends you into a shaking ’n’ crying fit? You have two choices:

1. Don’t click through.

2. Click through and pretend you’re an adult. Which means:

a. Don’t tell the author or the other commenters your age.

b. If you liked the story at all, feel free to give feedback about it.

c. If you didn’t like the story and it upset you, take responsibility for having clicked through, then go do some self-care.

Note that none of the above options include “Click through, get offended, whine at the author for having written something that upsets you, and maybe get a posse of your fellow antis together to hound the author off the internet.”

Those tags? Those were all the author owed their audience. Those tags give you the information you need not to click through if you don’t want to be offended, triggered, or disturbed by the fic. You do not have the right to insist that the fic not exist in a public forum.

As for “protecting young women and girls” blah de fucking blah: again, you are not going after abusers. And there’s another very regressive meme: that by policing the shit out of women’s self-expression, you can “protect” them. Nope. You protect them from abusers by targeting the abusers. And writing something “problematic” isn’t abuse. Because fiction isn’t reality and depiction isn’t endorsement.

continuing a timeless tradition of shirtless Shiro

“You think we did good?”

“We did amazing, baby.”

They really did good. They deserve a break. Throwing this quick little thing here out before season 7 rips my heart out. It’s not much, but I’ve been stressing about some zine contributions and I needed something soft™

A faerie introduces himself. Then, holding out a hand, asks, “And your name, please?”

And, like a fool, you give it to him.

I got asked for clarification on this (but can’t reblog that particular post cuz on mobile), which I’m more than happy to provide.

In this post, a faerie is asking for ‘your’ name. The way he is wording it, however, and the accompanying beckoning motion, makes it seem as though he is asking for you to physically hand your name over. Which, because of how some faeries operate, he is.

In this instance, saying your name aloud to the fae would be literally giving your name over to him, the exact consequences of which are left up to the imagination–usually, a fae even knowing your name gives it some measure of power over you, but giving something your name would likely let it completely take over your life.

In this instance, the wording you want to use is something like “I will not give you my name, but I will tell you that it’s [name].” Alternately, you can just lie to him.

Might i suggest the less direct yet still name-preserving “you may call me…”? It dodges the request while still giving an answer of a name, which does not even have to be yours, but any name you feel like telling the fae they can use to refer to you. I would recommend “Ainsel”.

The first time he asks for your name is the first time you meet him. He appears as you walk by the færie ring, that you have not entered because your grandmother has repeated so many times not to do so, and, curious of your presence, watches as you jump when you notice him.

You recognize him instantly. It is the Fæ whose influence your village is under, the one the elders have told you and your friends to be wary about, for the people who have been seen walking away with him have never come back.

You don’t know what he does to them. The villagers have never dared to confront him about it, never dare to address to him at all. He is not evil: he sometimes speaks blessings upon the cattle, talks the horses to calm after a storm, ensures a good harvest for the farmers, makes the flower bloom in spring even when the weather is still too cold. He is, simply, a Fæ, whose ways humans cannot understand.

Keep reading

h o m e .

“It’s all I ever wanted to be.”

… Kuron wanting nothing more than to be a paladin broke me in ways I didn’t even think were possible. This season was perfection. And I wanted to hug my poor clone bean :(

Boy is gonna need new clothes.