Recently, Tumblr was removed from the Apple app store due to an incident involving child pornography. This incident is incredibly unfortunate, but it doesn’t stand alone. Tumblr was also removed from the app store due to the large influx of porn bots and pornographic spam, users claiming to be proud to be pedophiles, blatant Nazism, racists who are not deleted for sending hate and harassing users, and more. I myself reported someone for harassing me, but because I had blocked the person and couldn’t access the messages where they harassed me, they were still able to send me anonymous asks. Your support staff, with back doors to the website (presumably), claimed they could not access the messages, and I was left SOL. Many features on this website do nothing to actually protect your users from harassment, racism, homophobia, transphobia, Nazis, pedophiles, predators, porn bots, and more.
You claim in your statement to us that you “have been working on these problems for a long time”. This is blatantly untrue. Please do not lie to us and patronize us. We’ve been here. We’ve seen you do nothing over, and over, and over again.
We complained to you for months and months about the rampant porn bots, and you did nothing except add a report button on mobile which only reported sensitive content or spam at best. You could have addressed this problem with an effective algorithm, but you did not. We complained to you about being harassed and sent hate speech for being LGBT+, and you did nothing. We complained to you about blogs being randomly deleted, and sometimes you’ve restored them, other times you have not. We complained to you that there were people proudly claiming to be “Minor Attracted Persons”, or pedophiles, and you did nothing. We complained to you about people proudly claiming to be white supremacists, and you did nothing. All of these things are “against the community guidelines”, and yet over and over, you have not found effective ways to handle these problems or suppress the feeling of welcome that these users claim to get here. You have had a long time to work on these problems, but you haven’t addressed them. To say you have is untrue.
Multiple other social networking websites, such as WordPress, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and others have effectively dealt with rampant pornography, racism, pedophilia, and other problems without causing massive issues for their users who are not misusing the platform. They are continuing to find new, effective ways to deal with these issues without causing problems for their userbase as a whole. There is no reason that you are unable to do this effectively other than that you wanted to do it quickly. You have once again chosen your stock holders over your users. And we have had enough.
You have already started to ban “Adult” content with a new algorithm. Here are screenshots of just a fraction of the posts you have flagged as containing adult content:
Your new system of simply tackling everything at once is not working. At all. And each of these screenshots is proof of your utter incompetence. None of these posts contain pornographic acts, “female nipples”, or any community violation of any kind.
We, the users, have been asking you for months to deal with these problems – particularly, the porn bots and bots that spam. In order to block a bot from a side blog, I have to do it manually, even though they are in my side blog’s feed. This is a huge issue for mobile – only users. They keep cropping up in droves, taking over our posts and tricking google into making it look like a legitimate blog linked to a pornographic website. We have complained to you for months and months now, and your solution to simply “ban all adult content” is ineffective. I agree that children should not be able to access pornography – but this is not how you tackle a porn bot problem. Your system is utterly useless, allows for racists, pedophiles, porn bots, and Nazis to remain untouched. It also harms sex workers and real people who may use this website for some forms of adult content responsibly. Moreover, as seen above, it harms plenty of users who have in no way violated your terms of service.
If you keep this up, you threaten your website and company as a whole. Many of us are backing up our blogs and planning places to go to.
You already have a content filter for “sensitive” content (content inappropriate for younger viewers). You could have improved this, instead of attacking your entire user base. It seems to be a very lazy “solution”, if you could call it one at all, and one that harms your entire userbase.
If you are going to keep this filter in place and make Tumblr, a website that has never been known for being family friendly and has never claimed to be, you are going to lose millions of your users. We are already planning our exodus. It isn’t hard to follow. Censor us, and we will go somewhere else. That is not a threat. It is a promise.
They flagged this post immediately and I’ve submitted it for review… this is… quite a week.
If you believe these words, reblog it, please. I want this to be right in their face because I couldn’t email them directly.
Exactly how I feel. I’m willing to give tumblr a chance, again, even though I shouldn’t. But they have a short amount of time to change my mind about where this site it headed
i know i’ve been on an extended tumblr holiday for a while, but seeing as everyone is jumping ship just thought i’d let you know that i mainly live on twitter these days – if you want to follow me there then feel free (i still log on here every now and again though to have a nosey around)
i also still have my website, you can contact me there for commissions or whatever should you get the urge
That’s how I found out. I’m not sure how else you’d do it. Sorry I’m not much help!
Tumblr said they’d email people a list of the flagged posts? I think? But I’m not sure how much time you’ll have between getting that message/alert and December 17th.
They do seem to be pretty quick about unflagging posts once you send in to be reviewed
So, a few of us are wrapping up a service to auto-migrate Tumblr accounts to a new stable platform. Built with scalable cloud infrastructure to carry us forward with our “explicit” content.
Hey y’all— I know the folks behind this! They’re professional developers and dedicated to making a safe hosting space for blogs that tumblr wants to purge.
This team is on twitter— ask your burning questions here:
I may have found some help to archive my blog (thank goodness). I just posted about it below.
If you need help with your blog or know of blogs that are in danger please reach out to them so we don’t lose it!
One post that I had under review has been unflagged, at least we know the process works. And takes about 2 days…ish.
I just got my pillowfort key so I’ll be on today!
This blog will be diverging a bit until this whole tumblr thing is over, I’ll have Sherlock posts sprinkled in among posts to help archive and find fandom after December 17th
It’s hard not to miss the news, and I know that there are few followers of mine that will leave due to these changes, both out of protest, and out of the possibility of being striken out from this site or just because they fear to be.
I’ve always tried to make sure that my blog was safe for everyone. So I made sure of I knew what I reblogged or talked about, keeping it on the level with the comics or TV series. Never really did go into the movies though.
But there is a way for non-tumblr users to keep up with those posting on tumblr, without having to rely on the blogger to make a twitter or facebook just to post there that there is a new post. One of the basic features of blogging is still there on Tumblr.
RSS. It’s an old technology that’s still up and running because it is pretty cheap to set up and requires next to no maintenance.
Every tumblr blog has it. To find it, simply go to “whatever-blog-name.tumblr.com/rss”. There, you might end up being a bit overwhelmed by what looks like a bunch of code. But that code is simple, and there are a lot of RSS services that translates it to a living feed that alerts you when there is a new post that has been made. And
I use it pretty often. There are a lot of webcomics that have a supporting RSS feed, several blog sites that I don’t bother visiting unless the feed pops up for me, I used it even when I was job hunting, both recruiters and job ad places had RSS feeds. I even figured out how to get instagram into it!
There are a lot of solutions that can be used, chrome has the addon Slick RSS that is standalone, I use feedly.com in conjunction with their addon for Firefox. There is probably an app that connects to whatever RSS sites that are available for free, but I’ve not found the need to keep track on my mobile just yet. I have to admit that I can’t really figure out how to do a proper tutorial, nor is this really the blog for that sort of stuff.
So for those that are thinking about leaving tumblr because of the new changes, there is at least an option to keep track of those that have chosen to stay.
Spread this message. If you’ve had content flagged you need to check if Tumblr has muted your blog. Your posts will still show up on the dash of followers but your most recent posts will be from hours ago (up to 48 hours prior) on your actual blog URL. Make a test post and post it to your blog. Go to your blog url in an incognito window and see if the post you just made can be seen. If it can you’re good. If not Tumblr has muted your blog.
Check your blogs lads. Just in case.
I honestly don’t know if this is a bug or what. I hope it’s a bug. But at least by checking you will know there is an issue.
Wtf tumblr! Fix this
Pillowfort—->goingtomymindpalace
Will have to figure out the site still but I’m on!
Sherlock Fandom Archive 