[Image Description: Tag reading “you can go fuck yourself”]
The Special Edition AO3 Tag of the Day is: Tumblr @ its userbase
And, consequently, the userbase @ Tumblr
Female-presenting-nipple owners, male-presenting-nipple owners, and people with nipples of all other descriptions, this right here is the mood of the day.
it wouldn’t be our beloved tumblr staff if their reactionary anti-sex worker decisions didn’t also ruin basic website functionality such as “being able to post pictures at all”
Staff: We’re getting rid of all adult content on Dec. 17th to combat illegal content!
Everyone: You do realize this ban only hurts the people producing legal content, right? Like, those small pages posting illegal stuff never tag their pages appropriately, and don’t care about having to remake a new blog if theirs gets nuked because they can just make a new burner account to post that stuff again.
Staff: …
Everyone: The only adult content that will likely be spreading around would be the illegal content, since you are strong-arming the legally-abiding and responsible adult content creators who take care to tag and label their content and not post anything that’s god damn illegal.
Staff: …
Everyone: That’s also assuming that there won’t be people that just continue posting adult content, either with censor bars or cuts to bypass the adult content check, or by just posting whatever anyway and not caring.
Staff: …
Everyone: None if this even addresses the racism problems that people did have, including the adult bloggers you are now getting rid of. You can’t just get rid of text posts or images of disgusting rheotoric unless there’s a nipple in the mix, yeah?
Staff: …
Everyone: Speaking of which, this new plan of yours still requires moderation, which is seemingly the main responsibility you are actively dodging with this adult content ban measure.
Staff: …
Everyone: So now, basically nothing will have changed except for all the responsible adult content creators being gone that made up a decent number of your most active and loyal users, some of the most active critics and filters of racist content users being banned, and the only people being left posting illegal content or blatantly breaking your rules to post legal adult content to spite you.
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
Ex-fucking-cuse me staff? How are you making a place where, in your words, “wide open and creative self-expression” when you fucking pull shit like this? Like… you fucking realize that this is honestly one of the shittiest things you can do to the website right? Already, in the past 2-3 weeks, you fucked over a ton of blogs, SFW AND NSFW, just because you let a problem get too big to solve manually. Yes. I think this move is shittier than the purge that happened because at least then Tumblr gave some people their blog back.
I hope that any sensible person will realize the ramifications of this move. If they can easily just fucking nuke NSFW as a whole, then what else could they deem inappropriate for the site? It could be NSFW today, talking about politics tomorrow and sexualities the next day. You guys do realize that a lot of people use this site for porn and a place to openly talk about sexual things that they wouldn’t talk about with others, and now all that will be gone.
Not only is this going to destroy you PR-wise, but also financially. Let me make this clear. I don’t use this site mainly for nsfw, but it is a big part. A lot of the sfw blogs I follow just don’t post often and the nsfw blogs post asks, sfw art, and memes. I mention this because 3 of my irl friends use this site for the sole purpose of viewing NSFW art. I know for a fact that they aren’t alone in this.
Not only are you hurting yourself financially, but you’re also hurting users themselves financially since a lot of NSFW artists use this site as a way to take commissions. For some this is their only way of pay. SFW blogs also have stuff like donation posts, where they ask for donations to help with medical bills or to get out of an abusive relationship. If you’re going for NSFW artists today, then who’s to say that when someone needs help, this website will still be around to get their plea across?
Also, I find it funny that you say that you want to be as welcoming as possible to your community when NSFW artists are a huge part of your community. Like do you assume that NSFW artists AND their fans are a small part of your userbase or are you trying to put up a family friendly image? Because shit like this isn’t the right way to do it.
I want to touch on something called “inspiration’ for a moment. NSFW artists aren’t like “I make no contributions to society except porn”. Surprisingly, NSFW artists can inspire people to make their own art, maybe original and working their way up to fanart or vice versa. It doesn’t even need to be NSFW art, but can be SFW art as well. Taking away these sources of inspiration can and will harm any content that comes on this site as the next possible Toriyama or One or Araki could very well never find the inspiration to draw because of this move.
I say that as a community, we let staff know, on any social media they have, that we won’t stand for this. I suggest something along the lines of #NSFU or #NSFC, standing for Not Safe For Users and Not Safe For Content respectively.
