Please re-blog if you’re OK with silly fan art of your characters.

An Open Letter to Tumblr about the Adult Content Ban and How it is Hurting Your Users:

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. 

Sincerely, 

The users of your website. 

@staff @support

They flagged this post immediately and I’ve submitted it for review… this is… quite a week.

If you believe these words, reblog it, please. I want this to be right in their face because I couldn’t email them directly. 

Dear people planning to move to pillowfort:

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.

i am incredibly tired of my editing application crashing so take this as it is lol

Today in a nutshell

Brb sobbing with laughter

Heading to Pillowfort, and I’m Offering Keys

Hi, you may or may not know me. I go by Tyramir, and I’m an author. Mostly I write fanfic, but I have also published a book at some point. (Yes, that was a subtle plug – don’t feel obligated to click the links, they’re there to justify to myself why I’m doing this so I can say this wasn’t 100% altruistic because I’m a crusty old troll)

So, recently, Tumblr has made something of an announcement regarding what kind of content they will and will not host in the future. And you know what, that’s okay. It’s their site. They can do what they want. Just like I’m free to say, “Hey, @staff, go fuck yourselves with some sandpaper, you masochistic fucks.”

Ah, that felt good. You know what else feels good? Moving to Pillowfort. I’m in no way associated with them, beyond that I am now a user. I just bought a key. More than one, actually. I bought a whackload of them. I am not rich. See: author. Very poor profession if you’re not ultra-successful. However, what I am is angry, and disappointed with the direction this site is taking. 

This site is home for the marginalised, for the outcasts, for the misfits. It’s also the home for a lot of fellow artists, like myself. Ones that might not have a little extra cash in their wallets. So, as a Christmas gift (and as a way of sharing that link up above advertising my book, see self, you’re not totally altruistic), I’m making this offer.

Reblog and like this post. You don’t have to follow me. You don’t have to buy my book. You don’t have to tell anyone it exists. You don’t even have to click that link. Just like and reblog. Anyone who likes it will get one entry for drawing for a key. Anyone who reblogs it will get one. Anyone who does both will get two. And on December 17th, the Day of Ignominy, I will draw ten names, and I will gift ten keys. I’ll even wear a Willy Wonka hat while I do. You won’t be able to see it, but the spirit will be there.

If you want to get the word out, but don’t want to get an entry (say you already have a Pillowfort account), just reblog and tag the post with “no entry,” or some variation thereof. I’ll exclude you from the draw, but thank you (in my mind, I’m not gonna actually thank people, but that requires effort, yo) for helping others learn about this opportunity.

TL;DR: Bald author wants to use very little cash he has to give people Pillowfort accounts. Just like and reblog for entries. Also, I hope you are feasted upon by a swarm of angry weasels, @staff.

Boosting. This is fantastic, @tyramir.

Boost. No entry for me.

@joudama

we’re going to have to call smut ‘lemons’ again, aren’t we? 

LEMONS!? WHEN THE FUCK WAS THIS?!

oh you sweet summer child 

Tumblr right now

XD

from now on, this blog will ONLY post kid friendly, male-presenting nipples

This shit is HILARIOUS and it only keeps getting better!  I’m starting to reconsider just deleting this account just to watch it all go down in flames lmao

if I see anyone posting anything that isnt catholic stained glass photos after the 17th I’m reporting you to the staff on sight

Is Protestant stained glass ok too?

FUCK NO.

omfg XD

This is too sexy. BANNED.

We at Piczel.tv are sad to see Tumblr’s stance against NSFW artists, and would like to offer up our services as an alternative to Tumblr’s arbitrary shadowbans, deletions, and general stupidity.

We’re happy to host adult artists who are looking for a new place to call home, and are planning a few key upgrades and features. 

Effectively immediately though, our gallery upload size restriction has been removed, to be likely raised to 10MB in the near future for non-premium users. As always, we support image sets, and don’t compress anything. Firstly, for those that have been using tumblr as a portfolio, you’ll need a way to download all of your art, if you don’t have backups somewhere else. We are planning a tool for Piczel.tv that will import zip files full of images, including titles and descriptions if we are able. Second, we’re planning the following upgrades to piczel in the coming weeks: 1. Bulk upload/import to your piczel.tv gallery 2. Gallery UI cleanup and improvements 3. Gallery performance improvements 4. Gallery comments with in line image and custom emote support 5. Site-wide PMs (in the vein of tumblr asks, but better) 6. Archive button for your piczel account Don’t forget to follow us on twitter, we may be deleted on the 17th with everyone else. Until then, we’ll make posts here to keep everyone in the loop Please consider reblogging this to help artists in need.

OwO what’s this

Im liking the sound of this a lot!

Might check this out

Here we go. Knew other sites would be jumping all over this shit. There’s still hope. 

Everyone reblog this as much as possible over the next two weeks for good luck

OMFG lmao

Not for Tumblr, but those looking to replace it

So Tumblr is not learning from the past and so is repeating LiveJournal’s mistakes, and will go down in flames because of it.

But it’s not too late for other sites to learn from part mistakes - not LiveJournal’s, but Dreamwidth’s.

See, even before LiveJournal’s strikethrough- and boldgate, folks had been talking about the need for something better. Something more geared to fans. That talk picked up after LJ got bought by the Russians. So folks started planning an alternative. They had all these plans for what they wanted, a BETTER LiveJournal. A safe place for fans and marginalized folks, who very often we one and the same. So they stated making Dreamwidth. They were gonna do it RIGHT. It was gonna take time, bit they’d do it RIGHT.

Then LiveJournal imploded.

Dreamwidth wasn’t ready. They were still trying to get everything Just So.

But folks needed a place to go NOW.

So they did. They went to insanejournal and deadjournal and all the LiveJournal clones while waiting for Dreamwidth. The userbase fractured. Then Dreamwidth announced it was ready.

But by then, there was Tumblr. A brand new site fans could use. So they went there. Found new communities. Got used to the time way of doing things. Fandom coalesced there. The LJ clones…faded.

Including Dreamwidth.

So for sites like Pillowfort, which I’m seeing bandied around like Dreamwidth was back in the day? Y'all need to get it together and fast. It doesn’t have to be perfect; it has to be THERE. Y'all don’t have much time before your window closes and marginalized fandom - and with it ALL female-based fandom - has found a new place.

Do not throw away your shot.

Suck it Tumblr! ;D

I’ll be migrating content over to Twitter later this evening. Follow me @KazuTeppelin 

Hope to see you there!