thursday needs a meme, here’s my attempt to contribute. it’s thursday and i’m here to help. thanks
it’s thursday today but it’s cold outside, so here’s an update on my attempt at a thursday meme. it’s thursday and it’s cold but i’m still here to help. thanks
it’s 2015 now and thursday still needs a meme, here’s another attempt to contribute. it’s thursday and it’s a new year and as always i’m here to help. thanks
spring has sprung but thursday still needs a meme, so here’s another attempt to contribute. it’s springtime this thursday, and even as the seasons change i’m here to help. thanks
it’s a summer thursday and thursday still needs a meme, so here’s one more attempt to contribute. it’s thursday and this summer i’m here to help. thanks
Her dedication must not go unrecognized
i can’t believe i found this again on a thursday lady your mission has been accomplished
Rule: you can only reblog this on Thursday.
Ooo its thursday
I have posted this every Thursday for 2 months. Has anyone even noticed?
in therapy my therapist and i were talking about my own feelings of self worth in relationships. and she asked me to say qualities about myself that someone else would be attracted to, on a romantic and platonic level. so i named some things like compassionate, empathetic, etc. and she said “you named things that you can give someone. ways you can serve, rather than ways that you are” and y’all..my mind was blown that’s gonna stick with me forever like she then proceed to tell me actual innate qualities about myself that she liked and thought anyone else would like as well and i hadn’t even considered those because like she said i was focused on things i could do outwardly to attract and maintain connections rather than who i was as a person..goddamn!!! thats tea!!!
With this in mind, this also makes me think of the ways people describe us. When people say the reasons that they love/like you or describe you as a person, are they only naming ways that you serve them? Are they equating your worth with how much you do for them?
ex. “You’re such a good listener. You’re so generous, you’re so compassionate. You’re always there for me. You always hold me down. You’re reliable”
vs.
“You’re so funny! You’re very vibrant. You’re creative, passionate, and intelligent. You’re optimistic. You’re so talented at ____” , etc. I think that’s very telling.
This FUCKED relationships up too because once this hit me, I realized people can just be in love with the way you make them feel instead of who you actually are. ALWAYS pay attention to the last little “vs” bit there because it IS super telling
It’s not that I want you to delete my blog, but you’re not going to and I’m frustrated because that puts me in a position where I have to decide if keeping the audience and the community I have here is worth allowing myself to participate in what you’re doing.
I know you’re not going to delete my blog because I don’t have pornographic pictures on here except for maybe a handful of reblogs. I’m a writer, and this blog is full of my stories, and many of those stories are pornographic. But erotic literature isn’t considered adult content under your new rules, and is still allowed. And that’s frustrating to me.
You’ve always been a bad website for writers, Tumblr. And that is one of a very small number of things that honestly isn’t your fault. Any writer on this site can tell you that visual art gets far more attention than writing. Fanart gets more than fanfiction, original art gets more than original fiction. Every writer on this site has seen a post by a visual artist at least once saying that they only got a hundred likes on something they drew, and I have to write forty chapters minimum if I want a hundred likes.
I’m not complaining about that. It’s the nature of the website, the nature of the community here, and we as writers all know that when we sign up. That isn’t the problem. People on Tumblr are more oriented towards visual art, and we have Ao3 at the end of the day. It isn’t anyone’s fault that this is a bad platform for writers, and I’m not here to complain about it.
But it is, and the reason why I’m explaining that is because it’s the context for what’s happening right now. You’ve banned erotic visual art but not erotic literature. And that’s because you know that about your user base, you know that visual art is what they’re here for, not written art.
And in so doing, Tumblr, you’ve created a strange hierarchy of art, one that goes in two directions, neither of them good.
On the one hand, the fact that you’ve banned erotic visual art but not erotic literature makes it very clear that pornography is pictures. I should say here that I know your primary concern in banning pornography was focused on images and videos of real people having sex, and that’s a whole other issue that I’ll tackle another day. But your stipulation against depicting sex acts explicitly includes illustrations. Pornography is pictures, including drawn pictures. The implication here is that only visual art can convey eroticism, that people will only be sexually interested in pictures, not words.
Trust me when I say that people like written pornography just fine, Tumblr.
Sending this message creates an idea that visual art is more powerful than written art, that pictures speak louder than words, that pictures are more dangerous than words. It gives visual art a place of primacy by centering it as the only thing that people can have an emotional or sexual response to. There’s no point in writing in that mentality, because visual art can do it better, because visual art is better.
But on the other hand, banning erotic visual art but not erotic literature also makes plain that you place higher value on one art form other the other. Artistic nudity is still permitted under the new adult content rules (or it would be if your bot would stop flagging medieval paintings of Jesus as sensitive), and so is erotic literature. One is forced to draw a comparison between the two, to assume that what you’re really banning is that which you consider non-artistic nudity and erotic material.
Basically, you’ve shown your hand in banning what you’re banning. You’re sorting artistic expression into what which is acceptable and that which is…I don’t want to be too inflammatory, but I’m going to go ahead and say degenerate anyway. You’ve hierarchized art in this way to say that literature is real art and illustration isn’t. In this second schema, real artists write and drawing is a waste of time.
And I’ve spent three days trying to figure out how the hell you can hold both of those positions at the same time, Tumblr. It’s easy to just write it off as you behaving irrationally (you are) or as your policy being incoherent (it is), but I don’t really think that’s what’s going on. It seems on the surface like you’re using one corner of your digital mouth to say that pictures are more dangerous than words and then the other corner to say that words are real art and pictures aren’t, and of course those positions aren’t consummate with one another.
But then I realized that the hierarchy that you’ve set up isn’t actually about defining real art by medium or genre. It’s about defining real art by its social power. Real art is art that holds up your status quo, that doesn’t threaten you, doesn’t potentially damage your advertising revenue. Real art is aesthetic, it’s pleasant, it’s neutral. It doesn’t speak to a baser human trait like sexuality, it involves the mind, the intellect, not just the eyes.
My readers are very smart, but you don’t need to be a great intellect to read my work, Tumblr.
I admit I’m still working on these ideas, and I think there’s a lot more to it than what I’ve said so far, but I think I’m onto something with this, Tumblr. I think you’re trying, like so many dictatorial figures before you, to depoliticize art, to make it value-neutral so that it can’t hurt you. To remove that which speaks to humans in ways that you don’t like and keep only that which doesn’t make people think in the wrong direction.
And the fact that you think pictures do that and words don’t tells me that you’re not just a bad website for writers, Tumblr. You’re a bad website for visual artists too.
Because the fact that you think it’s even possible to depoliticize art tells me that you don’t know anything about art.
I’m not the only one, and frankly there are a lot of people who are worse off than me over all this, and who have a lot more right to be angry. If you implement this policy in the way you say you will, I’m not going to be affected by it, something I’ll go into more in the future, but which I think makes it all the more important to tell you how angry I am and why.
This isn’t about adult content (whatever that is), and that nebulous category isn’t what I’m angry about. What I’m angry about, Tumblr, is censorship.
Because that’s what this is. No matter that you couch it in terms of community and expression, this is about putting a big black bar over content that you don’t want to see—because if you don’t want to see it, nobody should be allowed to see it. It’s about the fact that you want everyone’s morality to conform to a corporate morality that allows for the greatest possible advertising revenue for you, and are willing to use the power you have to make sure that happens at the cost of people’s ability to express opinions or ideas.
And, in an exercise in lexical gerrymandering that would put Shakespeare to shame, you’re putting it all in the language of freedom and safety and broadening horizons. Speaking as a writer, I have to say I’m impressed at your ability to say one thing in order to mean its complete opposite.
If you meant what you were saying it would be one thing. There are lots of places on the internet that people can post adult content, though those seem to be shrinking by the day, and so really losing Tumblr as a platform for that ought not to be a problem—all you’re losing is some content that you’ve decided you don’t want to host anymore. And at the end of the day, isn’t it your right as the ones maintaining the platform to decide what can and cannot be hosted on it? So we’ll keep the white supremacists and get rid of the female-presenting nipples, fair enough, that’s your decision to make.
Except, Tumblr, that censorship has never been about removing content. It’s always been about removing people. When has a censorship movement ever actually been about the material it was censoring? It’s never been about getting rid of propaganda, of subversive material, of porn. It’s always been about getting rid of communists, of queer people, of sex workers. The purpose of censorship isn’t to protect the public from content that might but uncomfortable or dangerous to them, it’s to protect an imagined body politic from having to interact with people you’d rather they didn’t. It’s to protect you from having your authority threatened by people who don’t conform to your ideal and don’t fit into your goals.
You claim your website is about community, Tumblr. Censorship is designed to separate people, not bring them together. Don’t get me wrong, othering people has always been a great community builder. It creates small, insular communities who are defensive and afraid of outsiders. If that’s what you’re trying to create, then keep up the good work.
As a content creator, censorship makes me angry, Tumblr. As consumer of content, it makes me angry. As a human being, censorship makes me angry. And it obviously doesn’t bother you, and I don’t know what to do about that.
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.
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