So, a few of us are wrapping up a service to auto-migrate Tumblr accounts to a new stable platform. Built with scalable cloud infrastructure to carry us forward with our “explicit” content.
Hey y’all— I know the folks behind this! They’re professional developers and dedicated to making a safe hosting space for blogs that tumblr wants to purge.
As someone not involved in the development of pillowfort but am a web developer, I think you should lower your expectations, but not for the reason you think.
Pillowfort is a baby. A newborn. A smol bab. If you were here during the early days of Tumblr, think of that.
Pillowfort simply cannot be the immediate solution to your woes. It needs to be nurtured and cared for to become a mature and happy adult.
If you want Pillowfort to work, they’ll need feedback, advice, bug reports, etc. This is a chance to make Pillowfort the Ao3 of Fanfiction.net. It’s not gonna happen overnight, you need to give it time and love and it’ll get there.
If you don’t want to pay money to get into the beta, that’s ok. It will be open to the public soon enough and you won’t have to pay a dime. Their financial model moving forward sounds good (a subscription fee for super extra features), but even an Ao3 model would work swell for them probably.
We’re living in an interesting time on the internet. Governments across the world are cracking down on content and yet community run websites are starting to thrive more and more.
Tumblr once upon a time was what Pillowfort is today, but this time, let’s make sure Pillowfort can stay independent from mega corporations.
Be good to the bab, so one day the bab can be good to you.
raise your babs well and you won’t get put in a old folks home that smells like pee.
What is almost certainly happening with Tumblr’s image classifier is that they’ve deployed the bot entirely untrained, and are relying on user complaints to train it what NSFW content on tumblr looks like.
Making people participate in their own censorship in this way and punishing them with the threat of being silenced even if in compliance with the rules should they not participate, is, IMHO, abuse of their userbase.
Source: I’ve worked for three different top-five social networks, and at all of them this type of work would have been done by making the userbase do it as much as possible.
Please signal boost. I don’t care if you reblog or repost, just get the word out so that people know what they’re doing as they interect with this thing.
My twitter is @soren_tycho (nsfw, sfw account coming soon) and my github username is sorentycho.
Just chiming in as a machine learning expert, this is almost certainly the case (and knowing tumblr, they weren’t even smart enough to throw in pre-trained weights)
I don’t remember agreeing to beta test
A well known AI blogger I follow also supports this theory.
I actually feel sorry for the likely unpaid intern sitting at tumblr HQ dealing with all our bullshit and snark while those actually in charge watch the world burn from a safe distance and blame it on us damn kids not buying more products. Because ultimately this is what this about. Verizon needs to make money from Tumblr, and Verizon can’t make money cause Apple says “no adult content” and Apple has a stranglehold on the app market.
The fact that a lot of us use tumblr to host our own services and products as independent creators, often as our only source of income, is irrelevant to them. The fact that to many of us this is our community is meaningless to them. We’re acceptable collateral damage to furthering corporate greed and that’s the fucking tea on that.
Also to the hypothetical unpaid intern: leave, sweety. You can do better, and you’re worth so much more.
I thought Apple removed the app because of the CP though ?
Not that I don’t think Apple is evil or don’t have a stranglehold on the market, but if the removal was specifically because of the pedophilia then that was a more than fair decision. Come to think of it, if it was because of all the porn bots it was also pretty fair. Tumblr should have gotten its shit together way earlier about that and if the whole “no adult content” thing is wholly their decisions then this mess is on them for not being able to manage their own website, panicking when there’s finally some consequences and deciding that trying to ban all “adult content” instead of dealing with the actual problem is the way to go
(so yeah hypothetical intern might want to find a better, not completely incompetent place of work)
The CP is what forced them to roll out changes quicker, but otherwise this NSFW ban has been in the planning for quite some time. They were always planning to do this.
That whole “oh we rolled back the filtering system” that happened a while ago cause the algorithm was bullshit? Was them testing it to see a) how well it worked but also b) how we’d react.
But because, and this is all through the grapevine stuff and “anon sources” who were willing to talk to Vox (source), Verizon haven’t been putting any money into Tumblr since they bought it, the engineers that run the site have been jumping ship left right and center for better gigs (without being offered any reason to stay), so there’s been increasingly fewer staff to maintain or make changes, so the filter is still bullshit, still broken, and the site is only going to break further as time goes on cause no money is going into maintaining the basic infrastructure. So it doesn’t just seem like things are broken and no one is fixing it, things actually are breaking down, and there’s not enough people with the know how to fix it.
Tumblr is like the house built on sinking sand at this point. It just so also happens to be built on top of a tire fire as well, and the “discovery” of a CP circuit was just the thing that made them go “oh shit oh god oh shit” when Apple finally got sick of their shit and pulled the app. (And Apple is notorious for not allowing apps “that contain user generated content that is frequently pornographic” or for trying to muscle them out of site out of mind (source)(source)(source) so to the people in the notes going “uuuh they allow snapchat???”, yeah, for now. It also likely has different age restrictions and details in their ToS compared to the android one, where the rules about apps are a lot more lax, something which Steve Jobs himself was snarky about (source).)
Jesus Christ I’m so mad at myself for not knowing about any of this until now
Don’t be! The facts are only just now starting to emerge as people are becoming willing to speak out and talk, but also, some of these things are well hidden!!
Big companies pay big money for you to never know these things about them, they scrub their google returns clean so that most of the time all you will ever find are positive results. Most people didn’t even know that Yahoo had been acquired by Verizon until recently. Some people still don’t.
Misinformation is how chaos thrives, and chaos can often be capitalized on provided it’s a carefully curated kind. All of this?—laughable as it is to say, was planned. Poorly planned, and even more poorly executed, but premeditated all the same. As is anything that is done by a corporate company.
This is why things like Net Neutrality did and do matter. This is why telecommunication companies developing a monopoly over the Internet was a bad idea. This is why so many of us have been freaking out while others call us tin foil hatters go “ugh come on guys, it’s not a big deal” because it does matter! The small things matter! Because the small things eventually make up the whole and sometimes the whole turns out to be a big steaming pile of mass censorship in favor of profit. And that’s a Problem.
So don’t be mad at yourself. Not when it’s time to get mad at them.
Hi everyone! just wanna say a huuuge huge thank you to all the people finding this blog and following me again! Thank you for your support, thank you for letting people know I’m here, thank you for being some of the best fans n and supporters I can have right now!! (I’m going to continue to work on making @buppygirl functional again ❤️)
:c it feels like I’m just really not going to be able to get my following back. since I’m not even showing up in search results, I almost just want to take a break for a bit.
Soo yea, @buppygirl didn’t survive the tumblr thanos-ing or it at least seems like I’ve been suspended :c
but hiii I’m here on my backup for now! Im really sad to lose that blog and it’s new content and especially sad to lose all of you! Please rb or let people know I’m here!! ❤️ and of course I’d appreciate all the follows I can get rn!
once a year, i crawl from a cave to post art for a few days, collect the notes, and return to hibernation. but this year, it seems that tumblr is no longer a good platform to do this. all of the community and artists that i visit this site for are either leaving or becoming more active elsewhere.
id really like to become a more active artist - honing my own style and branching out to more specific communities are my two major goals. that includes creation of potentially ns//fw stuff, which apparently wont be possible on tumblr anymore.
i’m going to try to focus any future efforts in this on my twitter. if pillowfort.io and mastodon become viable alternatives for artists, ill likely go there as well and try to cultivate a larger audience across multiple platforms.
Still undecided about deleting my blog, I guess I’m gonna stick out for the next months to see who all this bullshit evolves
Thank you for your attention, if you are still interested in my posts I’m gonna be on Twitter @ tm__61, but I still don’t know when I’m gonna start posting there
Thank you again
Love yourself, respect each other, don’t make war make porn
Peace
M.
Just a friendly memo in case someone is still using this site.
@staff It is incredible how in 2018 you decided to close every porn blog on your platform.
Not only you signed your “death” sentence, since the vast majority of your blogs is about porn and and a lot of non-related porn blogs likes this site because of them
Not only you basically fired every AMAZING artist there is on this platform that draws porn(or even tits), you have also reduced his/her opportunity to get new jobs and now they have to move to other platforms losing THOUSANDS of followers, which are their monthly income btw
Not only you made yourself responsible of a very fascist move, but I guess that’s okay for you since you don’t ban their blogs
You showed yourselves as people who can’t do their job, because you decided it was best to hide the problem instead of resolving it; but that wasn’t enough too.
And I’m sorry for every people that gonna lose their jobs,because this crazy action you did is gonna result in less traffic in your app and in your website, hence less work, hence firings.
I repeat for everyone:
IT’S 2018 PEOPLE!!
I never expected to end this way
I bid you farewell (except for the people who made this decision)
