i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes
it wasn’t, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!
although it’s true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided it’s properly warned for, there’s a long history there - of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.
you’re referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole ‘nother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJ’s act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.
this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ain’t into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if it’s fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t think written content about this stuff was banned?) then it’s not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.
but that’s what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.
eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group who’d sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted they’d made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.
THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.
AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space - often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.net’s HTML restrictions were so great that users couldn’t use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didn’t allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.
LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.
IDK, maybe it’s just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just - it’s a lot more complicated than you might expect, and there’s a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.
I don’t read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics. They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross. But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying “yeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!” or even “yeah, I wouldn’t do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!” Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it. So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you don’t get to write or read that? No.
In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it on–sometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes not–is not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.
Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality. And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.
Let’s take a closer look at that “Ao3 supports pedophilia!” shall we?
1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse. It was not meant to titillate or arouse. It was meant to horrify. It was seldom explicit.
2) There’s a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.
3) I’ve been in fandom for a decade and a half. When people start getting upset at “omg pedophilia, think of the children!” the fics they are usually objecting to aren’t actually pedophilia. Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex. And people don’t like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they don’t like.
Let’s look closer at Strikethrough, shall we? I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too. But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:
1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.
2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.
3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Harry fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).
Basically, this very conservative “family values” group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used “but think of the children, it’s pedophilia!” to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didn’t like. And one time taking down the worst of it wasn’t good enough for them. No, this was step one on a moral crusade. If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands. This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted. It starts with anything that can get labelled “pedophilia” or “incest” because that’s low-hanging fruit. But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality. Then anything with teen sexuality. Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con. Then whatever is next on their list. It doesn’t stop until they’ve won the point and nothing but suitably “family-friendly” fics that match their purity test are allowed.
Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service. You can’t break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of “fair use” and a team of lawyers on call). You can’t use AO3 for commercial advertising. And you can’t post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positions–you know, the stuff that actually hurts kids. Other than that? It’s fair game. You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge. There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.
We’ve been down that road. It doesn’t lead anywhere good.
Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.
During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These “Warriors” (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didn’t like.
If you’re carrying out harassment of people right now because they’re posting works with sexual elements you don’t agree with? (And it’s always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strange….) If you’re doing that, you’re also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you don’t like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.
reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various “purges” that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.
AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.
This is so, so important: there’s that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like “paeodophilia”.
^^^rebageling again for excellent commentary
Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Government’s attempts to pass censorship laws on the internet. As MOST of those domains had their serves in America, they were beholden to those censorship laws. A great deal of fanfiction.net was removed because they happened to lose a goddamn courtcase. I’ve been on the site since 2002. They may not have ‘officially’ allowed NC-17 rated content (what it used to be listed as in the filters), it never did a damn thing to remove it. Ever. They had it listed as a rating option during ‘New Story’ uploading after all. It was i nthe search filters. After they lost the courtcase however, they legally had to start doing things about the mature content reports they got. The admins and mods were not actively looking for fic to remove, they were just responding to reports they had already received.
tl;dr - I know tumblr is all about black and white “you’re either all right or all wrong” thinking, but it’s important to understand what actually happened before going “ew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to post” because that is 110% not what happened.
This is why so, so many of the comparatively older fannish folks on tumblr like me are so vehemently against stuff like the anti movement and “all ships are valid UNLESS”. It smacks of censorship and content policing - and we’ve been there. We got our shit deleted and our accounts banned because someone else thought what we were reading or writing or talking about needed to just… not exist. No warning. Literally overnight. We just woke up and stuff was gone.
And yeah, the group was legit called Warriors for Innocence (or maybe of). I knew several people that were members of survivor/support groups that lost their groups - and their main support network - when Strikethrough happened (ten years ago holy shit).
You antis need to listen when us older fans tell you that the censorship you’re advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; it’s an extremely scary thing!
I can guarantee that you would be very, very upset if another event like LJ Strikethrough were to happen today because *you* are just as vulnerable as the rest of us! If you support the rights of marginalized groups of people, if you’re a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that aren’t defined by biological sex, if you care about representation, if you support women, if you have any kind of kink, if you care about fandom in any capacity beyond its eradication, YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THE SORT OF CENSORSHIP YOU’RE ADVOCATING!!
People were terrified during Strikethrough. I was there. Communities were being shut down, individual users were being shut down. People were losing access to their own fics, their feedback, their comments – a LOT went on in comments on LJ. Think more coherent reblogs, much more personal, very widespread. Comments were also very important, and in terms of networking/communicating, were absolutely critical.
LJ was, for many people, central.
It was a fundamental part of the infrastructure of fandom at the time.
Having it attacked, having parts of your fandom’s territory just deleted like that, was very very scary. People didn’t know who was next. Every day, the list of stricken journals grew. And not all of them came back, not all of them recovered their content. Some people even voluntarily deleted their content as a form of protest. It was a bad time.
Youdo not have to interact with fic that grosses you out or makes you uncomfortable. Tagging is a thing. And even outside of tags, you are responsible for curating your own fandom experience. It is not right to expect it to be curated for you. And it is not right to lash out when someone refuses to do so and expects you to walk away from things that do not concern you.
I was gonna say “things that don’t harm anyone” but I realize you can argue that. If you get triggered, that’s upsetting. That could be considered harm. And I have sympathy for that. I do.
I have run across fic that triggered me. I have pretty specific triggers, and people don’t always think to warn for them because they aren’t that big a deal for a lot of people. Or it’s sort of bundled into kink and is presumed, that if you’re okay with certain kinds of kink, you’re okay with this. So I’ve been blindsided by it before. And it sucks for a couple of days while I get over it.
That was not the fault of the authors! You could argue that tagging should have been used, and maybe it should, but ultimately that’s not an ironclad obligation. It’s a tool people provide out of courtesy.
That was not the fault of the site! The site is there to give authors a way to make fiction available, not to judge each work and interrogate its validity and make sure everything is tagged so that nobody has to see anything bad, ever.
That was not even my fault! It was my responsibilityto try to curate my experience, and I tried, but it wasn’t my fault because I didn’t deliberately set out to trigger myself.
When I get triggered, unless it is by a deliberate act, it is actually the fault of the people who hurt me in the first place! And I refuse to let them off the hook and blame perfectly innocent people who just wanna write their fanfiction! I may hate that fanfiction, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether or not people should be allowed to post whatever they want.
Also, some people cope by writing about fucked-up shit. My best friend in the whole wide world has shared her fic with me, and HOO BOY it is messed up. She wrote it during a time in her life when she was in and just coming out of a horrifically abusive relationship. I mean, it was exactly the kind of relationship all of us here on Tumblr love to hate. She was married to a shitty, abusive man who preyed on someone younger than he was and used his influence over her to treat her in a way that would be right at home in that Lundy Bancroft book Why Does He Do That? He was a real rapist, a verified grade-A bad fuckin’ guy. (She was lucky to escape. I have immense respect for her.) And she wrote some fucked up fic to deal with it, and she shared it, and people were invested in it. And because this was early 2000′s, she had to host it on a foreign server and cover her tracks, because at that time no-place was safe to post it.
“Yeah, but if she’s writing it for therapy, she doesn’t have to post it where other people might have to see it!” I hear you say.
But like … what the hell??? “Shut up, don’t talk about it, it’s bad to talk about these things, because these things are bad!” is something used against folks with trauma.
“This isn’t good for me, I can’t talk about this, I can’t be your audience for this,” that’s fine, those are boundaries that people with trauma use to defend themselves. You should learn to say those things! It will help you!
But expecting other people to never create and share art about trauma is just so thunderouslyoppressive I lack the ability to fully articulate it.
Andnobodyshould have to disclose their history of trauma to prove their motives are pure or virtuous enough for their speech to be protected. I’ve only really been able to openly say “I was assaulted, it was traumatic, I am a little fucked up from it” for the past couple of years, tops. I couldn’t talk about it before that. Couldn’t! And it was over 20 years ago!
I also believe, very firmly, that you don’t need a history of abuse to find writing really messed-up shit satisfying, or to find reading it cathartic. I believe 100% in the freedom of creative expression, and the freedom to read whatever fucked up shit you want to read.
All y’all fandom youngsters can spit nails all you want over gross rape fic, incest fic, whatever.
Fine, I don’t like it either!
But that fucked up shit? That fucked up shit helped carve out the spaces we have today. You don’t have to like it, but campaigning to get it deleted, harassing content creators, calling people rapists and pedophiles who have never done and would never ever do such a thing, that is not the way to improve the world, it doesn’t keep actual kids or teens or assault/rape victims safe. It wouldn’t have made me feel safe when I was 16 and did’t want what was going on. It doesn’t make me feel safe now. I can say with the perspective of someone 24 years away from that event, it doesn’t make the world safer for people like I was. It actually makes it worse.
Learn to steer clear of the messed-up stuff you don’t like. It’s a skill, you get better with practice. Have someone else vet stuff for you if you need help doing it now.
Everything that is sketchy and gross is not criminal, and writing about a thing is not morally the same as doing it. Pleasestop acting like writing about an adult and a teenager having really questionable, gross sex is as bad as theactual registered sex offender they caught hanging around an actualelementary school two neighborhoods over from mine, just trying to talk to the kids. The former is, at most, in poor taste, and potentially triggering to abuse victims. The second makes me want to vomit because even though he was just talking, that guy was gearing up to try something and create another abuse victim. A g a i n.
The first can be avoided because it is imaginaryand you, an adult, have power over your back button so that you don’t have to witness harm to imaginary people. The second, those very real kids had to rely on real adults and real law enforcement to keep them safe from very real assault. (It worked! The neighborhood rallied! He was arrested for violating parole!)
Pretty sure Sleazebag McDongface didn’t read some gross NC-17 Draco/Lucius fic before deciding to harm an actual human being. Pretty sure not having read it didn’t keep him from doing it. ‘Cause he fuckin’ did it. And he would have done worse. But actual people stopped him.
Iget wanting to protect victims when so many of us are victims ourselves, but man, going after fiction is not the way to do it.
An author is not a perpetrator. Stop trying to make those things synonymous in the minds of other fans, and in the minds of other recovering victims.
I’m a crone who also lived through strikethrough, and all y'all young fans need to read this and understand it if you don’t want history to repeat itself someday.
Here’s the thing, also: it doesn’t stop with fic about objectionable stuff.
If you have a website with TOS that includes any kind of “objectionable content” rules, there will be parties who will use those rules to try to silence other people whom they want silenced.
Let’s look at the alt-right and MRA movements today, or GamerGate a few years ago. What is one of their primary weapons? They report black or feminist or really any leftist YouTube channels (or Twitter accounts, or whatever) whose message they don’t like and claim those channels are are violating TOS by posting hate speech or incitations to violence or whatever bullshit they can come up with, in an attempt to silence those channels.
When Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequence came under fire for starting a crowdfunding endeavor to fund the production of her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series of videos, male gamers tried to get her KickStarter and various social media accounts shut down by reporting her for for hate speech and promoting terrorism.
Luckily, that became a big enough story that the dudes failed and their efforts backfired. But a lot of times, these tactics work.
How do I know this? Because it happened to me. Not over major shit like the examples above, but over something completely petty.
Back in the mid-to-late 90s, before LiveJournal really became the place for fandom, before FF.net was really a thing, you had to create your own personal website on whatever free webhost you could find (GeoCities was popular, but there were others) if you wanted to host your fic somewhere.
And back then, TV studios and book authors were still sending their lawyers after people who wrote fanfic, issuing cease and desist letters to not only the authors, but also to their webhosts.
At the time, I was writing perfectly het Mulder/Scully fanfic. No rape, no pedophilia, no slash. Maybe a little BDSM. But largely it was unobjectionable.
Then the 8th season of X-Files started, David Duchovny decided he only wanted to be involved part-time, and the show decided to bring in another male character. The fandom lost their shit–as fandoms do–over the idea of “replacing” Mulder blah blah blah.
One of the most popular fanfic mailing lists–one that had previously had no restrictions on what characters or pairings could be posted–decided that if you wrote fanfic involving this character, you were no longer welcome. Well, this was the mailing list with all the readers. Sure, authors could go to other mailing lists, but they wouldn’t have exposure to the sort of readership this other list boasted.
I spoke out, saying that this change was unfair to fic authors and that the moderator of this list was behaving in a pretty vile way. The moderator and her friends took aim at me and began a campaign of harassment, and a few days later, suddenly my website with my XF fanfic was TOSed because someone had reported it. So was the next site I tried to create to host my fic, and the one after that.
Thanks to the way AO3s TOS are constructed, that sort of shit doesn’t happen now. I can speak up if I need to, and while I may receive harassment on my various social media accounts, there’s no chance they can have my fic taken down just because they have an agenda and don’t like me for reasons not relating to my fic.
So yeah, AO3′s rules protect fic a lot of us might find objectionable. But they also protect fic that is in no way objectionable from being targeted by unrelated harassment campaigns. And since any of us could find ourselves in the sights of those sort of campaigns at any time, we need to thank our lucky stars for that.
I like this last addition.
When I helped write the ToS for AO3, I wasn’t primarily thinking about strikethrough. I was primarily thinking of FFN, where so many people post things that are technically against the ToS but that the community tolerates. Any time someone gets pissed off, they can go on a grudge-reporting spree and target their enemy’s work. Often, that means guys targeting slash or Twilight fic because it’s “for girls” and thus sucks. Sometimes, it’s one ship vs. another. I was also thinking of Miss Scribe and all of that other Harry Potter fandom drama. (And if you think fans are above destroying an entire archive just to strike at one enemy, think again!)
We can’t force people to like each other. We can’t force people to be nice to each other. But we could take away fandom bullies’ favorite tools.
So we did.
Watching young (ostensibly liberal) bloggers and fans take up the deeply conservative rhetoric and moral crusading of the right wing and evangelical groups from the 90s has been both fascinating from an anthropological perspective, and fucking horrifying for someone who lived through this time period and the death of LJ.
This thread keeps getting better.
It galls me to think that those of us who went through all this shit might have to go through it again because people who were still in primary school at the time don’t see anything wrong with harassing us over
Like, I hate to pull this argument, but we are your fandom elders, we did what we did to preserve fandom for y'all, so y'all would have space to safely explore the sane things we did and still do. And in doing so we rightly realized that if we wanted to protect the comfortable, cuddly parts, we also needed to protect the dark parts.
You can hate non-con fic all you want, and I will always advocate for adequate tagging/warning (especially with franchises that are aimed at younger audiences, e.g. MLP:FIM and SU) so that you don’t have to see it because I sympathize, but I will never support people who want to make sure that it isn’t even there to be seen. I’ve been through that once. It didn’t help anyone. It didn’t fix anything.
Please, learn to curate your own online experience. You are responsible for not clicking, or clicking away. Don’t try to force others to do it for you. That’s not cool. You aren’t protecting children. You are asking fandom to treat everyone like a child. There is a massive difference.
Also… maybe parents should do their job in monitoring kids’ content? When my parents found out I was looking at age inappropriate things when I was a minor, like they intervened.
Strikethrough 07 was such a well-conducted operation that communities dedicated to survivors of sexual abuse and fans of Lolita fashion were suspended, but the journal of the baby rapist, ohbutyouwillpet, stayed up. And it’s still up to this day, though it hasn’t been updated it over a decade as its owner is still in prison.
Whooo, I guess it’s my turn to take a shot at this.
I’m a nold. I’m in my 40s. When I came out as queer, in the early 90s, it was in the middle of what were called the “feminist sex wars”. If you want a really good book to read about that period, which has a LOT of resonance with Strikethrought and with the current Tumblr discourse, I cannot recommend this highly enough:
Apreview is available on Google Books, or it should be readily available secondhand, or in academic libraries (though it’s not a very heavy academic read). I recommend Booko for finding cheap secondhand copies. Support independent bookstores!
I haven’t read “Defending Pornography” for a while – I actually last re-read it about a decade ago because of the impact that Warriors for Innocence were having on Dreamwidth’s payment providers at the time, subsequent to Strikethrough itself – but here’s a quick summary, as I remember it.
1. In the late 80s and early 90s there was a vocal group of radical feminists who believed that pornography inherently harms women, not just in its production but also in its consumption (i.e. watching/reading pornography caused people to develop attitudes that were harmful to women). All explicit content was considered to be harmful, from eg. girlie magazines to hardcore XXX videos to a book like “The Joy of Gay Sex”, no matter who made it, its purpose, its intended audience, or its context. (Yup, even m/m content was considered to be degrading to women for reasons that didn’t make a lot of sense tbh.)
2. These anti-pornography feminists teamed up with the religious right and managed to get anti-porn laws passed. In particular, a law was passed in Canada preventing the importation of “obscene” material. Canada, of course, imports a lot of material from the US. Stuff started getting seized at the border.
3. Guess what was seized first? “The Joy of Gay Sex” and the like. Guess what businesses started finding alltheir shipments seized or delayed – sexually explicit or not – to the point where they were being put out of business? Gay bookstores. Guess what wasn’t seized at all? Mainstream porn made for straight men.
Around this time, Little Sisters bookstore in Vancouver (a gay bookstore) found that huge amounts of merchandise was being seized at the border, regardless of the actual content. They were being discriminatorily targeted on the basis of their sexuality. The queerness of the material they were importing was seen as inherently obscene.
Remember that this is before there was much information available online for LGBTQ+ people, so if you were a young person maybe just coming out and trying to understand things, or wanting to learn about safe sex (and yes it was at the height of the AIDS crisis, too) you’d go to a bookstore like this. Which now had empty shelves. I remember endless fundraising and activism in the LGBTQ+ community to try and keep Little Sisters open. In the end they spent half a million dollars on court cases. Read more about their struggles.
(You know what businesses weren’t impacted and didn’t have to basically ask their friends and community for help to stay open or spend a decade in the courts to defend their right to run their businesses? The powerful companies making porn by and for straight men.)
The book goes into a large number of analogous situations. Time and time again, anti-pornography laws intended to protect women are disproportionately used against women themselves, against LGBTQ+ people, and against basically any marginalised or minority group, rather than against the mainstream male-oriented porn that would seem to be its primary target.
Here’s the key point: Strossen is a legal scholar who’s looked at a lot of attempts at censorship, and you know what she found happened every time? When you try to censor pornography, even in the interests of protecting vulnerable people, that censorship will be applied first, and hardest, against the people who are most vulnerable.They won’t come for actual abusers, they’ll come for the abused, and prevent them from accessing resources, education, talking to each other, creating art to express themselves, or organising against those who are actually causing harm.
Read the book. The stories it tells are from the early 90s but they perfectly mirror what happened a decade ago with Strikethrough and what’s happening now with all this Tumblr discourse.
This is old, old business, we’ve seen it more than once before, and it never goes the way the antis think it will. Censorship is a tool that gives power to abusers and lets them inflict more harm on those who are abused, vulnerable and discriminated against. Don’t fall for it.
History they should have known: The Comstock laws in New York were this one dude (Comstock) who managed to get a mail regulation re-written to categorize anything related to contraceptives as pornography, which was already illegal to mail.
(Which is one reason for the pornographic playing cards etc, because the 19th century was almost as big on mail-order goods as the 21st, because getting to shops in person was hard for a huge subsection of Americans.)
Comstock built a non-profit with the support of the YMCA and oh shoot, some millionaire whose brand is still going strong, to enforce this law because the postal system didn’t have the personnel. They were granted the right to do so.
He and his posse of honorary mail inspectors with police powers (I kid you not) spent years engaging in endless skullduggery to prosecute people for selling contraceptives by mail. Which was how everyonegot them in the 19th century, you couldn’t walk into a shop for a pack of condoms but mail-order packages were nicely anonymous. They dragged Margaret Sanger into court repeatedly. There was a huge cottage industry of contraceptives in NYC at the time, most of the manufacturers being female, Jewish, immigrants, or some combination of the above.
There was one woman whose name escapes me they kept trying to prosecute for selling contraceptive devices and the juries kept nullifying it because the average New Yorker in the 1890s were like ‘yeah no condoms are not a crime,’ but not everybody had her stage presence and resources.
You know who they never even tried to touch? The big rubber companies were were getting into mass production of condoms. Their big funder owned the company that produced Vaseline, and was claiming in ads at the time that it worked as a spermicide.
Only the poor and vulnerable felt the impact of the Honorary Postal Inspectors of righteousness.
It’s been touched on a little before but really it’s hard to explain just how confusing and scary the crackdowns were. I was only a reader on FanFiction when the crackdown came but it felt like I was standing in a coal mine full of canaries. Canaries that were either silent or /screaming/.
Every where you looked, authors where posting warnings about how x stories were getting deleted. All of the warnings feeling rushing, panicked, most of them including notes about how they didn’t know how long they had before their warnings were taken down or they were deleted. It felt a bit like all the stars going out, everything just dying around you. Like a stampede of people had fled from some oncoming unnamed horror leaving silence in their wake. Finding AO3 later on was like finding a safe haven in a world gone mad.
Also FanFiction doesn’t really encourage socialisation aside from authors notes to readers on their chapters or homepage. Meanwhile all the warnings of the crackdown were really rushed and vague. So, as a not very sociable reader, I really didn’t have a clue what was going on at the time of the crack down and the confusion and uncertainty was almost the scariest part of the whole thing. (Not knowing if the authors should come back and if fanfics were gone for good was scarier.) It’s only years later, reading fanfic history posts that I’ve started to piece together what happened.
Also an interesting point was that during the crack down all I ever heard about was /gay/ stories being deleted. Perhaps this was just because I was reading gay stories but I didn’t even realise it was mature stories in general that was supposedly the aim of the crack down until much later.
Hot damn, this post just keeps going!
I very much second the rec about the feminist sex wars. Understand those, and you’ll understand why those of us over about 30 are so opposed to tumblr’s purity crusade.
If you haven’t been TOSsed you really don’t get it, imo.
If you haven’t spent your time wondering if the thing that will get your content deleted is the dark stuff or the nipples, you really don’t get it, imo.
Hell, way way back in the day, I had moderator types private message me going “I really like your writing, but you need to be less obvious about it, or I will have no choice but to tos you.”
A long reblog, but a worthy read. So much history and experience recounted here. If we don’t remember our past, remember why AO3 and many fandom spaces work the way they do now, we will be condemned to repeat it.
Please do not let us return to the dark ages of fear, censorship, and oppression in fandom.
Just to add my voice to the historical context here, but I was one of the main people blogging about the LJ strike through back in the day while it was all happening. I weirdly ended up being a centralized hub (hell, my LJ is even cited as a source on Fanlore, if you can believe it).
If you want a pretty good idea about the chaos and panic and how quickly it spun out of control, you can start with my post here, and then follow all of the links.
By the way, to this day, I was the only one in fandom who managed to get any kind of response out of the “Warriors for Justice,” a right-wing, Christian supremacist group who basically called anyone they didn’t like “pedos.” Their real main targets were LGBTQA. Pedophilia was really just a handy excuse.
Read and learn, young ‘uns. Not everything that squicks you out, not everything that makes you uncomfortable, is inherently bad. It’s your right to be squicked, it’s your right to be uncomfortable. But it’s also your responsibility to curate your own experience. Targeting people because you don’t like their fannish output puts you on the same side as the “Warriors for Justice.” You wind up hurting a lot of innocent people who never did anything to anyone outside of a fictional space.
And if that doesn’t convince you, do one thing for me. Look at the person to your virtual right. Look to the person on your virtual left. Then look in the mirror. Then realize this one simple fact: sooner or later when you get that perfectly sterile and safe online experience you crave, someone, somewhere, is going to decide that it’s not sterile or safe enough. And that means that one of you, either the person on your right or the person on your left or even the person looking at you from the mirror is going to find themselves out in the cold.
It happens every single time. Every. Time.
Now I’m not saying that Tumblr wasn’t allowing some fucked up shit, but there were ways to handle it properly. THIS IS NOT HANDLING IT PROPERLY.
It’s the beginning of the end, my Chili Babies. I’ve been in this movie before (hell, I had a significant supporting role in the previous movie). Tumblr will tick-tock along for awhile,but I guarantee people are feverishly looking for the next fandom thing beacuse Tumblr has now proven to be unsafe.
At least fanfic writers have AO3 at least. Right now it’s the fanartists who are pretty much screwed until the next new thing comes along.
@staff The decision to remove @toreno-wertyand@murfeelee come across my feed this morning. I am tagging you @staff in the hope that you’ll reconsider the removal of the account in question and reinstate both @toreno-wertyand@murfeelee in full. These blogs have been irreplaceable to the community and I am confident that I am able to speak for all of us in saying that this has been an error in judgement. A successful platform isn’t made by chasing away the people who come to it in good intentions, whether that be comfort, entertainment, support, or friendship, all of which this particular community has in one way or another. We have had several blogs removed during the past few years in error, and it has caused innumerable people to leave due to work being lost. I am asking in a professional and respectful manner that this error be fixed as soon as it can be managed by @staff.
To add to this I have seen several friends of mine get hit by this nonsensical attack and violation of personal privacy, personal freedom and rights. What you @staff need to realize is that this is people’s personal data and deleting/removing it without warning or giving them the chance to remove offending posts IS a violation. Please rectify your system and allow people to keep their pages before removing them entirely without warning.
@staff I was just reminded that @studiok2sims was also deleted recently (luckily they got restored soon after). There is a serious user vulnerability issue occurring recently with certain reblogged outbound links. Please do something to help us @staff, not punish us.
Myself and a number of other simblrs recently got hit with the ‘random unnotified purge’. I see a number of people posting comments and reblogs saying it’s due to ‘links to dodgy cc sites’. Firstly - how do you know? I personally was never given any contact to tell me what the reason was. Were you? What did it say exactly? Secondly - how are you knowing what post/link is the offending one so you can amend it or delete if necessary?
I remember when this whole nanny-algorithm was put in place, there was a link in the side bar that indicated you had flagged posts, but no longer. And I also remember you could check via your history, which I did. I see no posts marked as being an offender. So, I implore you - pray do tell how you all are knowing what the issue is and finding this offending posts/links? I rarely reblog and the only links I post are to credit CC I’ve used.
Holy crap, I forgot you got deleted too–by the time I heard, you already had your blog back. XD
I haven’t been told anything by Tumblr yet, but I know for sure it was because of the dodgy link/site which shall not be named, cuz I was trying to delete the posts/links on my sideblogs when the whole account shut down in front of my face. The problem site had made a very popular set of decorative doilies & air conditioners, so that’s how I was able to find the rebloogs on my sideblogs.
The posts are NOT Flagged, so they don’t throw up any warnings whatsoever–you just get deleted instantly the split second the link is clicked–you can’t even type in the URL, cuz it’ll automatically hyperlink and cause a ban. It’s the worst system ever, and @staff needs to do something about it STAT.
Rather than me having a good time on my main Sims 3 simblr account (murfeelee.tumblr.com which recently fell victim to Tumblr’s insta-ban spree)–posting my regular Weekend! Replies!, queuing up gameplay posts & TS3 CC–instead I’m hunkered down in the trenches tryna decide WHAT DO DO NEXT.
Unfortunately, these ideas weren’t able to get off the ground, as it’s EFFING HARD to run a website–costly, complex, and thankless to boot. We’ve all seen the constant pressure put on SimFileShare to carry the entire simming community all these years, as a Sims-specific FREE filesharing host for our terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, zetabytes, and yottabytes of CC.
One of the main deterrents to simblrs not leaving Tumblr as we rightly should’ve, is the plain simple fact of the matter that every alternative lacked some feature or another that Tumblr excels at. Be it site features (reblogs, tags, mentions, themes, media hosting, site import/export); integral user innovations (New X-Kit); the free and easy access (versus paywalls on Pillowfort & co.), we have all been trapped in this abusive relationship with Tumblr, for want of a better place to go.
Unless a better website is made, either by us or someone else, we’re stuck here. So what can be done about it?
Tumblr’s Auto-Bans, and the Reblogged Link Fiasco
The main allure is Tumblr’s large community presence & participation itself. The Dec17 Tumblrpocalypse lost Tumblr 1/3 of its entire user base in one fell swoop.There are tens of thousands of Simblrs across The Sims’ games. But crazy enough, these arbitrary auto-bans are ruining the one thing that kept us here–what’s the point of sticking around if you or someone you follow can get INSTANTLY kicked off the site under these spurious flaggings!? Especially if Tumblr does EFF ALL to make sure it doesn’t happen again?!
SoI have zero confidence that merely getting our accounts back will fix things–the OLD links/posts are still out there; having been reblogged dozens if not hundreds of times. Innocent simblrs are being shut down left and right lately–one site gets restored, and two more get banned the next day. This is LITERALLY what happened to me, Desiree-uk, and Toreno-Werty, within HOURS of each other.
Even if Tumblr bothers to contact you, and deigns to grace you with an actual explantion, rather than leaving you in the effing dark, lately it’s tended to be because of reblogged links
Reblogs, by their very nature, are PERVASIVE, so what do we do when years -old reblogged content is buried deep in our blogs–partcularly those links that are not immediately apparent to even be from flagged sites????
@staff it’s 2021 yall.. there has to be a better way to filter content. Deleting entire accounts is extreme af! And on top of that. The Sims community is a big reason for Tumblrs survival. Let’s be real, not many use this damn site anymore ♀️ idc idc!
Is the Simblrpocalypse inevitable? What can we do to protect/backup or content?
Last week I opened my own Wix account. However, I’ve always had trouble with Wix–it’s so HEAVY and SLOW, and bogs down my PC evey time I use it–let alone try to build my own. So it’s been VERY slow going for me to get my Wix page in a state where I can publish it, but I AM working on one, so I can at least have a place other than Tumblr to post my CC releases.
And as for Wordpress backups, the last time I imported my Tumblr blog it glitched and made duplicates of every post, thus going over my storage space so that Wordpress won’t let me make new poists on that account. I made another Wordpress account, but AFAIK there’s no function on Wordpress’ Tumblr Import feature to pick and choose which posts we want to import – it just imports the whole blog, which is unnecessary in my case, since I already have another Wordpress import for 2013-2018 – I just want everything from 2019-2021 Imported. (And if I don’t get my account back I can’t Import it anyway, which makes Wordpress moot).
So, other than Wix and/or Wordpress, what else is out there for us?
Wix might be our best bet for cataloguing CC, for those of us who make it. But what about community engagement? Places like Sims 3 Updates and My Sims 3 Blog migrated to TS4-only years ago, so Tumblr became the main hub for promoting new releases through reblogs. This was particularly effective after the rise of CC Finds Blogs like the late great Lana–another blog that got banned during the Dec17 Tumblrpocalypse, and never recovered. And several major CC Finds Blogs have been hit at least once by Tumblr’s ban since then, too.
A few weeks.months ago, when @mspoodle1,@darkccfinds, and @katsujiiccfinds got banned, I started considering backing up my stuff, but it was only once @desiree-uk confirmed last week that it was still happening that I knew I needed to do something, and made my Wix account. As a fellow CC finds reblogger with 5 sideblogs dedicated to reblogging Sims content (including fancifults3cc.tumblr.com, scifits3ccblog.tumblr.com and ninthcirclets3cc.tumblr.com), I naturally expected to get hit next, and I was right.But if we’re all too scared to reblog content anymore, the Simblr community dies, as it’s through reblogs and tags/mentions that we let our followers know about the CC being made, and support simmers in the community.
There seems to be no simple solution. Yes, we all want our blogs back, and we want this whole reblog/link issue to be fixed, with Tumblr’s @staff finally providing a reasonable way to get rid of the bad links/posts themselves, NOT our whole account. Kicking people off the platform will only lead its users to continue losing faith in Tumblr’s longterm ability to maintain this website–let alone its ability to show any sign of care or consideration for the accounts investing so much time and energy into keeping the platform relevant.
Hi guys. It’s me, Toreno Werty. Today, for some unknown reason, my blog with all its content was blocked (Fortunately, I still have links to all things for the Sims and in the near future I will try to restore the downloads. But I also lost all my subscribers who came to me for several years … I will be very grateful if you can help spread this post so that my friends can find me. Thanks in advance. I love you each and every one and I am very sorry that this happened (
ANOTHER ONE. A FRIKKIN NOTHER ONE!? Simblrs just aren’t safe @staff, WTF!?
Yes, everyone! I have my account back! ’desiree-uk’ has been restored It has been the longest 4 days EVER! So after multiple emails sent by me and only one automated reply from Tumblr staff, I was starting to lose hope, but thanks to a lot of supportive messages I didn’t want to give up, I really wanted my account back. I got a message from @treason-and-plot suggesting I go on Twitter and post on the Tumblr Support page. I didn’t have an account but I thought it couldn’t hurt to open a temporary one. I didn’t get a response but someone read my post and DM’d me suggesting I email them (Tumblr staff) again and follow this page, throwing in as much legal jargon in the email as possible and wait and see what happens. Within an hour I got an email saying my account has been restored! The reason they gave for terminating my account was pretty much the same as why @katsujiiccfinds account was terminated too:
I couldn’t believe it! I made a post referring to some curtains on that site with a link 2 YEARS AGO! Yet nothing happened all that time until someone clicked on the link on Saturday and that’s what got my account terminated! So apparently your blog can be terminated if someone clicks on a triggering link after 2 years of making the post?? Okay then.
I find this all a bit whimsical to be honest. It doesn’t make sense why that site is so triggering to them. But to cut off people’s account without any warning because of it, is a blatant disregard to the people who use their platform. The lack of communication pissed me off most of all. To have to quote their own Community Guidelines back to them to get a response is a massive fail on their part. I could go on but you all know how Tumblr is. It was actually cathartic to put it all in an email so they could see themselves as we see them.
Anyway, the offending post has been deleted, I’ve added the name of the site in my filters, I won’t refer to it or link it again! I’ve been told.
Please everyone, check your posts and add a filter to that site so this won’t happen to you. If It has happened, keep on at them. They seem to rely on people not bothering to question them. If your account isn’t important enough to you to get it back, why would it be important to them?
Now I’m gonna clean up my tags and make a full offline backup of my posts - just in case!
Thank you for all your lovely messages and encouraging me to not give up.
Murfeelee here–I just got my accounts deleted today for the same reason, so hopefully I’ll be back up and running, too. Who knows. U_U
Hi, Simblr community. Murf here, from murfeelee.tumblr,com
As I effing expected, Tumblr terminated my account today too, over the exact same nonsense that recently hit @katsujiiccfindshereand@desiree-ukhere.
I contacted @staff at Tumblr Support about it today, and even tried to make a backup account to tell y’all about it earlier today, but Tumblr banned that account too, so now I’m trying to get BOTH accounts back, FML.
This frikkin SUCKS, Tumblr–WHY are y’all making it so dang hard to make people want to even BOTHER with this site anymore? PLEASE do something about these nasty instant-terminations–at least the Flagging system warns us in advance, and just hides posts that aren’t allowed anymore, so do the same thing for posts with hyperlinks to outside websites you don’t want us linking to and clicking!!!
How is it acceptable that are you are insta-banning simmers for reblogging content y’all LET US reblog in the first place? It’s THE SIMS, Tumblr–we’re not reblogging anything graphic or hateful or anything; we’re just trying to play with virtual Barbie dolls. (What on earth did that site (starting with a D) which shall not be named evendo? O_O It was YEARS OLD reblogs of LACE DOILIES, DECORATIVE AIR CONDITIONERS, and GLASS FURNITURE, for crissakes! HIDE THE CHILDREN!)
I actually tried to delete the compromised posts on my CC Finds sideblogs, but lo and behold, the stupid posts wouldn’t even delete, and kept popping back up!
(Fun fact: I couldn’t even get my account termination letters at the Contact Support page to go through – I had to keep resubmitting them before the buttons would stop getting stuck in an endless loop–like REALLY? I can’t even do what you all tell us to do@staff.It’s not even watching what we reblog (the whole frikkin point of Tumblr, jfc) – it’s watching what we’ve ALREADY reblogged and are trying to get rid of, that can set Tumblr’s trigger-happy algorithm off.
So yeah, that’s my frikkin life right now, y’all. (－‸ლ)
Just in case they ban this account too, y'all can still see my archived CC posts at the Wayback Machine: (it might load super slow at first, at least for me it did?)
This website would be so funny in the death note universe I think some of you guys would be really pro Kira
Imagining discourse where some people are reminding you not to put your name and face on your blog to stay safe and then other people call you toxic and abusive for that bc it means you’re hiding something if you don’t want Kira to be able to kill you
just saw people on tiktok being like “if you have your likes hidden on here i assume you’re a freak and a bad person :/” i am so tired of social media stop stop stop stop
Maybe you don’t need to know exactly which chicken recipes I’m liking.
“If you haven’t done anything wrong then you have nothing to hide.” Honey do you think I lock the bathroom door because shitting is against the law?
Important! “If you haven’t done anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide” is a Joseph Goebbels quote.
That’s literally from the Nazi minister of propaganda.
Nazis will find something wrong if they can. They’re not looking for a crime; they’re looking for anything to indict someone.
Don’t let someone do it and don’t let anyone take your privacy away.
That’s literally
from the Nazi minister
of propaganda.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
people on this website be like “it’s actually school’s fault that i don’t know how to read because i wanted to write my essay on the divergent trilogy and that BITCH mrs. clarkson made us study 1984 instead. anyway here’s a 10 tweet thread of easily disproven misinformation about a 3 year old news story and btw, who is toni morrison?”
i KNOW most of y’all are lying about being in the gifted program as children because none of you could pass the basic reading comprehension assessment they give third graders today
this post is mean and I never read divergent or whatever the fuck but 1984 sucks and is rape apologism so if somebody wanted to write about divergent or whatever good for them
this reply is like literally exactly what op is talking about lol. like firstly ops point isn’t “1984 is good”, ops point is that analysing complex stories teaches you how to form opinions and think for yourself. and like secondly in 1984 you’re supposed to think damn it’s fucked up that he’s thinking that way about her, i wonder if this ties in with the central theme of “a society like this will fuck you in the head”? (this is the thinking for yourself part). like do you think orwell just put that in for fun? do you think that just because winston is the protagonist you’re supposed to agree with everything he does?
You know I feel like this post just gave me an epiphany for what is wrong with how Tumblr Fandom/Internet Fandom responds to media-or not *wrong* but makes it very hard to respond to anything but a morally correct, and heroic protagonist.
When an English teacher, or reader, taught or picked up 1984, it wasn’t with the intention they were going to love the protagonist. They picked it up with the intention of reading a whole story and trying to grasp the theme or catharsis from the story. If the protagonist was a *shitty* person it played into the the themes or the story, because it wasn’t about morally judging the book or *liking* or feeling attachment to the protagonist. Sometimes and often times, books were just about gaining another perspective.
No one read Lolita expecting to endear, or like, or be inspired by Humbert. You are supposed to be upset by his behavior, you don’t read Lolita with the intention of being inspired. You read it to learn more about what the fuck is going on inside someone’s head when they behave like that. How children get sucked into abusive situations. Or read “The Great Gatsby” not because they want to fall in love with Gatsby or Nick, but to better understand and analyze the experience of the 1920s or destitution of the American Dream.
A lot of internet and fandom culture has changed that though. When we say something like “I love the Great Gatsby” it comes with the idea or association that means you must *love* or relate to one of the characters. And maybe you do, but the first assumption is not longer about the quality of the work or themes, or cathartic impact-it’s about character admiration. And with that character admiration, in tumblr stan culture, or kin culture, or exalting characters with fanart/romance/so on you don’t just ‘admire’ or find that character ‘compelling’ it now translates to ‘you LOVE that character’ or you ‘DIRECTLY relate to that character.’
You can’t say “I love how Humbert is written, it’s so fascinating and dark”, without it directly translating you somehow relate to a child abuser or condone his actions. Taking in media has become an act of worship and connection. We no longer watch meant to just see the story as a whole, we watch expecting to connect to a character and if we offer them our “worship” as it’s become, as opposed to just attention or interest study as it traditionally was, it means we are condoning the character or saying we directly empathize with all their actions.
I think that’s why there is often now so much fuss over *toxic* characters or not. Or whether that classical novel is showing good or bad things anymore. We’re treating the characters as people we should love or want to draw or write about. Sometimes a story is just about getting the the theme or catharsis or learning another perspective. We don’t NEED to like the character. Or we don’t HAVE to like a character to be impressed by how they’re written or intrigued by their behavior.
I think if internet culture could learn to view stories as small insights into other lives or single takes of one perspective instead of purposeful moral inspirations we’d be a lot less worried about how toxic or not toxic they are.
Seriously!
And this is where “unhealthy relationships” in fiction come in too. Well-written, complex stories of bad relationships aren’t supposed to be good and healthy examples. If it’s held up that way (Twilight), then the issue is the writing and the writer. Unhealthy relationships in, say, Anna Karenina are obviously unhealthy but they are, to misquote James Joyce “portals to discovery.” You can know that a fictional relationships is seriously bad and still find it interesting. Psychology! Complexity!
Also I want to add that some characters (Humbert Humbert is a good one) are written so that if and when you find yourself sympathizing or saying “Yeah, I know that feeling” you’re supposed to stop and consider that. Not in terms of “I am a sick individual and deserve to die.” but more like “is it possible to have compassion for terrible people?” and “what is it in our culture or my upbringing that makes me think like I do?”
I’ve heard way too many people say “I will never read Lolita because of what it encourages” and I just…you’re missing the point? Completely? Like, you’re so missing the point that it’s almost meta? You’re not supposed to like Humbert??? You’re supposed to either be like “wow, gross, dude” or “oh fuck, wait, why do I have even 1 thing in common with this guy?” Nabokov is not going to be straightforward with you!
It’s like the jokes about being mad at your teacher for asking why the sky is blue in a certain book. Maybe there really is a reason. Did you think of that? For a bunch of people who’ll write thesis-length defenses of your favorite ships and trace down one instance in one minute of one episode of the 15 season show to prove that you’re right, it concerns me that you’re not as willing to look at a lot of other things with any depth. To say nothing of multi-chapter fanfic.
If you surround yourself with only good and pure and wholesome media approved by the purity-culture police, then you just don’t get to do a lot of introspection and I think that’s kind of a shame. I feel like it really limits your view of the world.
I dunno. There’s a weird kind of anti-intellectualism disguised as protection and good intent sometimes. Or it feels like the kind of prudishness that labels some books “dirty” and the people who read them equally disgusting, but just relies on social ostracism to enforce the labels. You know, “Think of the children!!”
Anyway, I’m going to go read some dirty, dirty literature now. Like 1984.
As the staff post about ad-free tumblr continues to get thousands of notes telling staff to fuck off in the tags, I wanna remind you that this website’s days are numbered. Tumblr is still unprofitable and by some modern-day miracle none of its acquiring companies pulled the plug on this money pit. But it will happen if it continues its trajectory.
Whether you like it or not, Tumblr needs to make money off you somehow in order to stay up. It either serves ads or asks for money to use it. This has been a paradigm on the web longer than many of you have been alive. It’s Tumblr’s job to make money right now because it’s well past its grace period of being a black hole for cash. This has actually always been Tumblr’s job, since it is a corporation, but that’s capitalism for ya.
If you want Tumblr to be here for free and you want to continue to use it, you do yourself a disservice by opposing any changes Tumblr makes in order to pay for its costs. When this site finally goes belly-up then you’re gonna be Tumblr-less until whatever startup takes its place and the cycle repeats itself.
If you think it should just ask for donations Wikipedia-style, remember that if and when that happens, there will be users repeating the same tired bullshit about giving Tumblr any money.
