imaginarycircus:

Pillowfort has potential and I like it but it’s very small, but having been through this before with other sites–I think there’s a fine line between venting and histrionics when a major policy change is announced. tumblr’s post is vague because they can’t possibly explain how something like this will develop. As we’ve seen on and offline it’s often hard to define explicit content and know whether it’s art or acceptable or not–partly because everyone has different personal standards.

I don’t like lots of restrictions on what content is “acceptable,” because I prefer to decide that for myself. But I do wish the pr0nbots would go. And sure–I find pedophilia gross and I don’t want exploitative content to exist, but that’s very black and white. And we’ve seen what happens when “crusaders” fight against fandom by claiming we’re all pedophiles for writing fanfic. (Strikethrough 2007) But in that case neither LJ nor Warriors for Innocence understood that you could write Harry Potter fanfic or create fanart in which the characters were over 18 and not 11 years old. The WFI people basically said, “Those stories are about little kids and evil people are writing porn about them.” They also didn’t understand that a lot of content in which under 18 characters engaged in sex was written by people who were also underage. YMMV, but I think it’s silly to tell 15 year olds they can’t explore sexuality through fiction.

But I also don’t understand why people think it’s super easy to find the “bad” posts/users and leave the ones that are “okay.” If you put 10 people in a conversation they won’t agree on what material falls into those categories. Here’s something I just remembered when going through old posts during Strikethrough. There was a dude on LJ who had some pedophiliic inclinations. He was married and his wife knew. He said he was not interested in harming children, having any contact with children, or distributing any images or materials, but he did talk about his feelings and thoughts. I think being able to talk about something like that could be beneficial. It gave him some outlet, but didn’t harm any children. He didn’t seek out children or minors to speak to. Did I want to read his stuff? Hell no. But I think it’s usually healthier to talk about problems rather than shoving them under a rug and trying to pretend they don’t exist. A dude who openly admits he has some issues and that there are lines he doesn’t cross–probably makes him safer than other people. You may disagree with me and say that there is no acceptable outlet for that stuff. So how does a site decide? Whose rubric are they using? What if it’s not real–but is fictional and people don’t even realize that fact?

tumblr says their approach won’t be perfect and they’ll have to learn as they go. I’m willing to wait and see what happens. I expect them to screw it up, but it’s what they do after they’ve made bad calls that will be important. If they refuse to revisit bans or learn–that’ll be real bad. If they do come up with a workable system–it might be okay. I don’t like censorship for the most part, but won’t miss creepy bots flashing random explicit gifs at me when I try to block them. I don’t understand why anyone thinks think that hundreds of thousands of posts a day will be easy to find and delete like it’s a simple search and replace. If you wanted to remove all instances of the word blue and ban associated accounts–sure. That might be easy. But differentiating between fanfiction, art, literature, RP, discussions of sex, quotes from scholarly works, critque of films and TV shows–and pr0n bots and accounts that share materials that are illegal–is not going to be easy. Even if it were all done by humans–it would be difficult. Because there are users who want absolutely no restrictions on what content you can post. They think individuals should be responsible for what materials they see or consume and scroll at their own risk. There are also people who want incredibly curated content according to their personal likes and dislikes to magically appear on their dash. I assume most of us fall between those extremes, but I honestly don’t know for sure.

I’ve seen a lot of weird generalizations about who users think are using the site and none of it appears to be based on actual data.

I’ve seen people proclaim

• That most tumblr users are only here for sexually explicit material. People are often here for community and a wide variety of content. Just because the small segment of the site you see is a particular kind–doesn’t mean that most of the site is like that. Just like if you are standing in a room full of 1,000 people and the ten people around you are wearing yellow and you can’t really see much beyond them–it doesn’t mean everyone in the room is wearing yellow.
• That most users are over 18. The last time I looked at the demographic data–it said that more (both not most) users were over 18, but the most active users were younger.

So don’t fool yourself that this is an easy problem to solve because it’s not even an easy problem to define.

I watched people (I was one of them) wring our hands and say we were done with LJ and it was dead to us. We were going to JournalFen or Dreamwidth or other sites. We opened accounts on other platforms. We cross-posted, but we didn’t leave LJ for years. Because our communities stayed on LJ, most of us stayed even though we were unhappy. I had a tumblr account, but didn’t use it much until I fell into an active fandom that was largely on this site. About a year or two later I started to see more and more old friends from LJ whom I’d lost touch with.  So even if there are other sites to go to–people generally don’t go unless a site has active communities to replace the old ones. It won’t have those communities unless people go and use the site.

Tumblr offered a platform that was different from LJ in many ways and I think that drew a ton of new users. Over 75k people registered on tumblr within 2 weeks of it going live. It didn’t seek to replicate the old format under new management. So it might be that we’re waiting for the next thing and not just a place that’s less problematic and also less functional. But I have no idea. Meanwhile pillowfort has potential but it’s small and not super active. The layout is not pretty. IDK how long you’ve been here, but a lot of the function and layout we take for granted here on tumblr wasn’t always here. The site was clunky when I got here and that wasn’t even that early on, but it was almost 9 years ago. There were problems playing videos. You couldn’t add photos unless they were hosted elsewhere (iirc.) There were numerous other glitches. That changed over time. Some of it changed because this site was popular and the company was able to hire enough developers to work on those issues. Technology also changed and allowed them to do things like store data more cheaply.