Single tumblr dev says "yeah this is great we totally unbanned porn have fun", followed by "okay actually I don't know what the update actually entails that's just what the vibes I got were lol"
Frankly as a metaphor for the management of this site it's a little on the nose.
seeing people get excited over tumblr maybe possibly allowing porn again is like watching charlie brown line up to kick that football
seriously though, it's incredible how much of my "maybe titties again?" goodwill tumblr torched in 30 seconds through obnoxious UX alone:
just to recap so far: the only reason i even know to look is that i saw a random post about new content settings, and i would never have bothered with all that scrolling if i weren't crusty and paranoid about sites that hide vital settings in the depths of Menu Hell. i mean, that'd be crazy, right? surely listing all those filters with no collapse is a signal there's nothing worthwhile underneath them.
the dashboard banner that eventually shows up, btw, says nothing about having been voluntold for additional filtering, and also just dumps you out in the general settings menu and leaves you to fend for yourself, with no indication of where this shit is hidden or what "this shit" even is. and that's downright friendly next to the link in the announcement post that's apparently been kicking people out of the app and onto web.
this is not how you get a rightfully mistrustful userbase to be optimistic about putting scarlet letters on their own posts. this is not how you convince anyone that it's just a courtesy, not a scarlet letter, or that it won't be used to punish and stigmatize you the instant the wind shifts direction.
in the most practical here-and-now terms, this is also not how you get people to USE the new content warnings on their posts! artists, especially, are hardly gonna jump to flag anything as mature if it means every single one of their followers - regardless of age, previous adult content settings, or whether they're in Apple's walled garden or not - has just been silently opted out of ever knowing it was there. (this goes double if it requires more than one sentence to explain how to reverse it. which this new setting seems almost deliberately designed to do.)
look, i want the titties back, okay? i would be delighted if this turned out to be the first step towards bringing them back. i know Tumblr is under duress from Apple that affects how they can do whatever they're doing here. but the way it's being rolled out sucks needless ass, and if they wanted my hope and trust, well, those are easier to muster up when I'm not going in grouchy about the frustrating UX of an app that's just taken hostile action against my prior explicitly-affirmed preferences.
As you know, art and artists make Tumblr what it is. We want everyone on Tumblr to be able to fully express themselves while also having control over what they encounter on their dashboards. That’s why we’re introducing Community Labels, an extension to your “Content you see” settings. Our ultimate goal is to create a more open Tumblr, and this is our first step in that direction.
As a poster and reblogger, Community Labels are your way to help your followers avoid anything they’d rather not come across on their dashboards.
As a follower, setting your content preferences is a way to adjust your feed to your own comfort levels.
How does it work?
When creating new posts (or editing old posts), you’ll see controls allowing you to label your post as unsuitable for those filtering certain content types it contains.
When content is labeled, it will either be hidden, blurred, or displayed normally, based on each user’s preferences.
In your “Content you see” settings, you can now choose to show, blur, or hide content that depicts the following topics:
Some examples of content that would require a community label:
This doesn’t change our content policies: spam, hate content, and porn bots are still not welcome in the community. It’s also still important that we abide by app store rules, which means we need to make sure that mature content is only accessible to people who are old enough and have opted in to view that type of content. More information about Community Labels is available in the Help Center.
This is an opportunity to work towards a richer, more nuanced Tumblr experience while making sure everyone who enjoys using Tumblr can do so safely. That future we mentioned above? We’re already moving towards it.
You realize you have ZERO user trust on this, right? You realize last time you let people voluntarily flag their content as mature it got turned into a convenient hit list of blogs and posts to lock up in Porn Jail or delete outright?
You realize silently auto-enabling a bunch of new content filters that radically fuck with the status quo and eliminate stuff most users will never even realize is missing from their dash is a sneaky, manipulative dick move that shits all over the goodwill you’ve accrued over the past couple years and flushes the desecrated remains of your userbase’s trust down the toilet? There might have been ways to do this that didn’t suck hairy donkey balls, but a fresh betrayal sure isn’t one of them.
Edit: If this IS a first step towards relaxing the porn ban, especially for art, that would be great… but I’ll believe it when I see actual policy changes. In the meantime it just looks like you’re asking us to voluntarily denounce ourselves and opting us all into new censorship. Maybe if you handn’t auto-enabled the maximally restrictive version and then made me find the new hidden menu, scroll through my entire list of existing tag filters, and click through like five different INDIVIDUAL setting menus just to put my dash back the way it was, I’d be able to muster up a little more good faith about this… but no, you had to make it as obnoxious as possible.
As you know, art and artists make Tumblr what it is. We want everyone on Tumblr to be able to fully express themselves while also having control over what they encounter on their dashboards. That’s why we’re introducing Community Labels, an extension to your “Content you see” settings. Our ultimate goal is to create a more open Tumblr, and this is our first step in that direction.
As a poster and reblogger, Community Labels are your way to help your followers avoid anything they’d rather not come across on their dashboards.
As a follower, setting your content preferences is a way to adjust your feed to your own comfort levels.
How does it work?
When creating new posts (or editing old posts), you’ll see controls allowing you to label your post as unsuitable for those filtering certain content types it contains.
When content is labeled, it will either be hidden, blurred, or displayed normally, based on each user’s preferences.
In your “Content you see” settings, you can now choose to show, blur, or hide content that depicts the following topics:
Some examples of content that would require a community label:
This doesn’t change our content policies: spam, hate content, and porn bots are still not welcome in the community. It’s also still important that we abide by app store rules, which means we need to make sure that mature content is only accessible to people who are old enough and have opted in to view that type of content. More information about Community Labels is available in the Help Center.
This is an opportunity to work towards a richer, more nuanced Tumblr experience while making sure everyone who enjoys using Tumblr can do so safely. That future we mentioned above? We’re already moving towards it.
the difference is that AO3 has never and will never use warning tags as a hit list the way Tumblr did with voluntary adult content flagging in 2018. it also doesn’t silently exclude warned content unless you tell it to, doesn’t make it unsearchable or put it behind a login wall, and doesn’t noticeably degrade the user experience when you’re actively trying to view it. voluntary warnings only work if the site can be trusted not to punish people for using them.
the way people on here talk about the porn ban makes me completely fucking insane honestly.
hey are you staffkilledthevideostar? for a while I thought you were, then I was convinced you definitely weren't, and now it's been long enough that I just don't have any clue and might as well ask
Yep! That's mostly where I put my "fuck the porn ban" memes. The user photo is from one of the blogs (@face--off, which had gory fx makup) that I deleted before the purge.
I spent ten years building up a following on Tumblr. I had 30k+ followers, great engagement, it helped my career thrive like nothing else. I could quit my day job and live off the fan base I’d accrued.
Then, their policies changed. Half my work was no longer allowed. People left the site in droves. I left too, for awhile. I came back to a ghost town. I still have 25k followers, but I don’t think more than 10% are active anymore. I’m followed by ghosts. Same with DeviantArt, although I was never quite as big there, and I’ve been gone so much longer.
This disallowed half of my work was never allowed on Facebook in the first place, or Instagram, but their algorithms are such that my stuff rarely makes it to anyone’s feeds, and if I post a link to where people could actually pay me for my content, it’s hidden unless I pay for it. Patreon swept my work away to a dark corner where no one could see it unless I personally guided them there. Twitch is so strict you can’t even show bare feet. The death of Google Reader means nobody follows RSS feeds anymore, so I can’t direct people to my own site.
So there’s Twitter I guess, where I can post whatever I want, but again, algorithms. But more than that, I don’t have the energy to build up a following once again on a site I don’t own that can delete my career on a whim. The thought of spending time jumping around through hoops for attention just to have it taken away again has stripped any motivation I had to try.
The internet has been gentrified. All the small cute houses and mom & pop shops have been shut down and replaced by big corporations that control everything. I’ve been making webcomics for twenty years, and at the start, the internet was a beautiful wild place. Everyone had a home page. It was like having a house and people came to visit you and you would visit other people in their houses. Now, we don’t visit each other in personal spaces anymore. It’s like we have to visit each other in the aisles of a megamart. Everything is clean and sanitized and the weirdos who made the internet what it was are no longer welcome. No space for freaks anymore.
People still ask me for advice on how to break into comics, and I don’t have any wisdom because I don’t recognize the internet anymore. I don’t feel comfortable working within its boundaries which seems to be getting smaller and smaller and smaller. None of the tools I used when I started exist anymore. They’ve been replaced by things I don’t know how to use. I don’t think I could break into comics today. 2002 had so few barriers compared to now. You might have started on Keenspace, but you could reach a point where you could break away to your own site and people would go to it. Now, you start on Webtoon or Patreon and I guess you just stay there? It feels so much like owning a hardware store for years and then having to go work as a cashier at the Home Depot that put you out of business. I’m looking at my career trajectory and it all points to being a Wal-Mart greeter with uncontrolled arthritis.
I don’t want to make “content,” I want to make comics, I want to make art, and I want to do it in a space that is mine. I’m not sure there’s a place for that anymore.
So there’s been a bunch of replies to this to the effect of “Boo hoo you can’t draw porn anymore, cry me a river.” They’re so perfectly proving the points I wanna make that I couldn’t possibly try to invent a strawman argument more perfect than the real people in the replies.
Here’s the thing: censorship always starts with a group of people whose ideas make others uncomfortable in some way. Sluts are an easy target. It’s the kind of censorship you can easily sell to middle America. It’s sinful, dangerous, harmful. You get to frame it as “for the children’s sake!!!” (as if our government cares about protecting children when it lets the police murder them on the reg). Even people who don’t see sexual content as bad per se still don’t see it as worthy of defending. It’s frivolous, rude, unnecessary, silly.
So the censorship laws pass. Two things happen. First, we discover that these laws are targeting people with a very broad brush. The laws never tend to define pornography, as Supreme Court Justice Stewart’s famous “I know it when I see it” statement shows. It’s up to others’ discretion, with many people getting swept up in it who tried to follow the rules, or who even undeniably did follow the rules, but with little to no appeals process, the accusation, even if mistaken, might as well be a guilty verdict.
Secondly, we have just moved the goalposts from “the government must not censor freedom of speech or expression” to “the government can sometimes censor freedom of speech or expression.” Now the precedent of censorship has been introduced and accepted. Now it’s easier to censor other things. Things that you may hold dear.
Because again, these sites aren’t just banning sexual content because they want to. They’re not just doing it because of advertiser pressure or app store pressure or financial company pressure (although we must also assign some of the blame there). This stuff started really ramping up after the government passed FOSTA/SESTA, barely over 3 years ago. These laws, under the guise of stopping sex trafficking, harmed sex workers in countless ways while driving actual sex trafficking deeper underground where it’s harder to find now. There have been so many studies about how FOSTA/SESTA had the opposite impact on helping trafficking victims, but again, this was never about protecting people. This was about introducing censorship in a palatable way.
“But there’s still porn on the internet. Just go there.” Ah, yes. There is still porn on the internet. As someone making adult content, who knows more sex workers than most people, these giant corporate megasites are a very similar experience to working for Wal-Mart or Amazon. They take a huge cut of your earnings, upwards of half. Onlyfans “only” taking 20% is pretty low, but again, in the wild west early days of the internet, you could have your own site and keep 100%. And yeah, there’s free porn everywhere. Fuck you for not paying the sex workers who get you off. Pay sex workers and tip them well!
It also means porn becomes more homogenized. It’s marginalized people who have the hardest time competing within/against big porn companies, and marginalized people deserve to see their sexuality portrayed the way cis, het, white, able bodied, fit people get to see theirs. Tumblr was host to a lot of queer, trans, poc, disabled, and fat people making erotic content featuring people like themselves. It was host to a large audience of people grateful to see people like themselves. It is so much harder to find that now. Nobody cares about protecting marginalized people, and nobody cares about defending porn. That combination means the sexualities of marginalized people gets even more stigmatized, secretive, fetishized, demonized. TERFs are usually SWERFs, and both have a lot more in common with the far right than they do with feminism or progressive justice.
You’ve been duped good and hard if you get up here in 2021 on Al Gore’s internet defending censorship when it’s a steamroller two inches away from your own heels. You’re can’t wait until your life gets fucked up by it to say something. The sluts have long been the canaries in the coal mine.
If you enjoyed my words and want to support my adult work, I am on a shadowbanned Patreon at patreon.com/RosalarianXXX and a pretty decent OnlyFans at Onlyfans.com/RosalarianXXX. I post 3 different adult comic series on Patreon, and I post both comics and surreal nudes on OF.
Anyway, @staff you wanna explain why I can't post pics of my own tits while you're showing mobile ads that use Dr. Oz and two realistically veiny dildos to hawk boner grower pills?
La letra con amor, entra. (via)
if this post gets deleted on the 17th I’m going with it
I’m pleased to announce that after nearly a year since the great tumblr porn ban of ‘18 Those Books Are Pussys has survived the great purge
Don’t laugh at this because “Oh those silly monster f*ckers.” This is a giant freaking RED FLAG just like with Only Fans.
I’ve only seen comments saying shit like “horny rights” and “uhg why are ppl so puritanical” but you need to recognize this ISNT about sex. It’s about advertising and money. I guarantee there are ads on Fandom that are a million times raunchier tha the wikis they’re taking down.
hey tumblr go eat shit you gormless little sex hating bitch
A big part of the reason I am terrified by anti-adult-content censorship is that for a lot of people, queer people are inherently adult just by existing. Erasing adult content then erases queer people significantly. We're seeing it not just on the internet, but libraries, too. It's overwhelmingly queer stuff getting flagged. They're trying to erase us completely.
when do you think the near-total unmoderation of tumblr will like, diffuse out to the internet at large. people are *constantly* getting tempbanned on twitter. extremist political groups could have a lot of fun here. theyre allowed to talk about killing the president!
Something I think is interesting:
Tumblr (mostly) only shows you things you have elected to see. The norm on sites like Twitter and TikTok (not sure about Facebook) is now increasingly toward algorithmic sorting and displaying of content, which synergizes well with advertising. The less direct control people have over what they’re able to see, the more they have to confront highly objectionable content, and the more they demand moderation to cut down on [the visibility of] that content. So at the extreme, where TikTok for instance is overwhelmingly algorithmic in its default usage mode, is extremely aggressive moderation that feels downright arbitrary, to the point where people feel like they have to censor even mentions of the existence of sex, suicide, homosexuality, self-harm, and any other mildly controversial topic.
(Note that here “controversial” doesn’t mean controversial in the normal sense of, like, actually politically contested; it means anything TikTok feels might be used to create negative publicity for its platform--TikTok has no incentive to allow even neutral to useful/positive discourse around sexuality or self-harm or the like, so their algorithmic moderation just seeks out and suppresses all mention of those topics.)
My hypothesis is that Tumblr catches less flak for its lack of moderation because--not only is it smaller--you have to put more effort into finding really objectionable content. While it’s not strictly segregated by content type like an old-style internet forum, it’s de facto pretty segregated, and it’s pretty easy to moderate your own Tumblr feed, in a way it’s not to moderate your own Twitter or TikTok feed.
The primary complaints that I have - and have seen - about moderation on tumblr come down to 1) It's not that hard to find the actual nazis what the fuck why did you decided to target tits instead of nazis oh advertising right and 2) Could you maybe not advertise books that promote white supremacy or eating disorders or extremely sexualized games to me kthnx
So basically "hey why did you take the tits away, I liked those and if I didn't want to see them I could block" and "literally the only thing I can't control about my feed is what you advertise to me; I hate all of your ads and want them gone but at least make sure they aren't triggering EDs what the fuck"
“Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content.”
This? In particular? Pisses me off. I hate it.
I hate the implication that all porn is interchangeable and devoid of cultural value, so it’s no big deal when a decade’s worth of creative endeavor produced by a vibrant subculture is destroyed, because, whatever, it’s just dirty pictures.
I hate the disingenuous inability to see a distinction between a website that is about porn only, and a website that allows people to blog about all of their interests and aspects of their lives including sex and porn because those are normal parts of the human experience.
It’s the most tone-deaf bullshit.
This post was made after the porn ban of Dec 2018. I’m reblogging because OP is still right.
I'll point out that these weren't your policies when I created the account.
Anyway, time to create a safe-for-tumblr fetish account.
Make it sizzle, princess.
this one cuts me to the core
