Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/19/burning-the-library-2.html
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Dammit! Where else can I enjoy Buddies Doing Social Media?
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Yeah, I don’t have any idea how people downloading 46TB of data over a short time period could have tripped any sort of DOS protection at Tumblr…
It’s kind of a bummer that 46TB is probably only a tiny fraction of the data Tumblr purged.
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It wouldn’t be Oath/Verizon if it didn’t go out of its way to add an extra layer of crappiness.
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This all thing is really seen as an active form of aggression by NSFW content creators and I think the trauma will last for a long time and be a cautionary tale on how stuff doesn’t belong to you when you use a platform like Tumblr. Or Facebook. Or Instagram. Or twitter.
The annoying thing as an artist (occasionally presenting females presenting nipples) is that I NEED those places to have a public. Because people have leave places like blogspot or wordpress we have no real choice but follow them in those social traps. It’s frustrating.
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And I can say, as an European, this kind of censorship on sex and nudity looks really like the US.
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I can well believe that Tumblr decided to block the archivers as part of a DDoS mitigation strategy, or simply because their activities were affecting performance. It wouldn’t even have to be a conscious decision: it might simply be that automated DDoS mitigation measures kicked in as soon as some limit was crossed.
But it seems that, at every step, Tumblr has decided to do this in the most clueless and heavy-handed way possible. I’ve noticed that when people make one bad decision, they often reflexively double down on it, and just keep making stupider and stupider moves in support of the original bad idea (Brexit, anyone?) and that seems to be what’s going on here.
If Tumblr had child porn on their servers, then they need to clean house. That much is clear. But their response, to nuke anything that could conceivably be erotica of any kind, seems hugely excessive, and their tool for realizing that goal – untested filters – is just going to compound the problem. Everything they’ve done just seems to be designed to make the PR issue worse, and guarantee a mass exodus from the platform – and not simply of nipple aficionados, but also of long-term users who’ve suddenly realized that Tumblr can’t be trusted with their data (I know at least one person who’s yanked her entire archive; I’ll do the same as soon as I can find the time).
They must be aware of the archive activity going on. They must be aware that while they don’t want all the content they’ve flagged as ‘inappropriate’, other people – not just its creators – do. But apparently no one there has the wit to say “Listen, this stuff can’t stay, but we’ll work with you to move it somewhere else.” If they were smart, they could split the product and create SafeTumblr and NSFWTumblr: SafeTumblr is squeaky-clean, so that they can get their iOS app back on the App Store; NSFWTumblr still gets swept for kiddie-porn and copyright violations, but it’s a little edgier, and Tumblr don’t even try to sanitize it to meet Apple’s tastes.
Or they could just make NSFWTumblr a temporary thing: “We’ve moved all your raunchy content over here, and it’s going away in 2 months, but in the meantime we’ve raised the bandwidth caps; help yourself while it’s here, because this is your last chance.”
Obviously, this may involve some non-trivial engineering work and costs for the company. But my bet is that alienating a giant chunk of their userbase and becoming a poster child for “Don’t trust the cloud” is going to cost them far more in the long run.
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What a bloody dumpsterfire of a shitshow that whole mess is.
I really hope now that those cunts go down in flames, even thou ist a bloody shameabout the site, it used to be pretty good.
Does anybody know a valid alternative for tumblr? I mean I still have deviantart, furaffinity and newgrounds, but…
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Though question. Twitter have a social component that lack in DA, FA and NG but is really bad for archive and image compression. They are still really lax with NSFW but for how long ?
Pillowfort is quite neat but is still on beta and not have a lot of users yet.
My opinion on the subject is to have at least an account in a gallery oriented site and one social media like twitter to promote and interact with artists and viewers. And a website of your own if you can !
Though we don’t know for sure why Tumblr is banning archivists…
Well duh. Because female-presenting nipples are naughty. Who would archive such a thing? It’s like a one-way ticket to H - E - Double toothpicks!
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Of course this all could have been prevented if Tumblr hadn’t decided to implement the filters in the second dumbest way possible.
In a sane world they would have made the announcement and turned on the filters in such a way that the author gets a tag only visible to them on their photos (with a list helpfully compiled in their profile) that allows people to report misclassification before the blocks go live. Then they give their filter team 2 or 3 months to work on it before switching the filters over to block mode.
Instead it seems like someone somewhere in the company decided on an arbitrary end of the year deadline, and the staff decided to get it done before holiday vacations start. The worst part is that people who have had non-infringing pictures blocked are about to discover that nobody is going to be in the office for the next two weeks.
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Here’s the thing, though: they did have the filters in before the announcement, they just didn’t tell anyone. The first clue that I had was a few months ago when someone reblogged a SFW post of mine and it showed up in the dashboard as flagged. I appealed, it got passed, no biggie. But then another one turned up, and another and another. In no case did I receive notification that these had been flagged, and the only way to find flagged posts was to manually scroll through the eight years of my tumblr posts in the “posted” section of the dashboard.
I don’t know if this last few months was meant to be a training period for the filters, but if it was tumblr seemed to have gone about it in the most cackhanded way possible.
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One wonders how the US might be different in any way if images of nipples had always been allowed on TV and elsewhere, but images of guns had always been a ‘no go’ area. It’s weird the way violence of any/all sorts is taken as normal viewing but the slightest hint of sex is not.
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They had that, though. When they put in the voluntary flag for marking your blog NSFW, and then the NSFW flag for individual posts, that’s exactly what they had.
Why they couldn’t make that work, I don’t know, but I guess it has something to do with money; specifically, not having enough money for the moderators to work the system, but strangely having enough money now to pay moderators now it’s a screaming emergency for some reason.
Even now, it turns out they’ve got that, kinda. I’m still getting posts in my dashboard from blogs with pixelated avatars (meaning their blog isn’t directly visible anymore) showing female-presenting nipples and even-less-SFW things, seemingly unflagged. And you can still use services like tumbview.com to view those blogs, thanks to the API.
This whole thing is just getting messier. Is this just stupidity on some senior manager’s part, or is it down to internal politics at Verizon?
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I’ve been wondering if this isn’t some kind of passive-aggressive manager somewhere. “You assholes want me to do what? Fuck you, I’ll do exactly what you want.”
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Oh, and in typical Cory Doctorow fashion, he doesn’t seem to know how to proofread:
“…the volunteer Archive Team leapt into action, working furiously to preserve years of material before Tumblr tore a huge whole in the internet’s historical record.”
A huge “whole”?
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Yeah, very much this. Their filters are almost certainly designed to stop sudden new request streams that appear suddenly from a given set of IP addresses (or blocks of IPs).
More notice would likely have helped, however.
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FWIW, Tumblr/Oath/Verizon didn’t delete the material. They just hid everything behind each users’ dashboard. It’s all still there and viewable by the owner. It’s possible to view other nsfw blogs through your dashboard, but it’s dependent on how they’ve set-up the visibility and, I guess, Tumblr’s fickleness.
Anyway, this is to say that, if anyone seriously wants to archive nsfw Tumblrs, the content is still there.
look all these companies are private companies that can do whatever the heck they want within the law
facebook, instagram, etc. - there was an option before all of them and there is an option now that is easier than ever
make your own damn blog
seriously, just a couple dollars a month to even have your own VPS, you can literally install and do whatever the heck you want and make it look/work however you want
you don’t even have to have ads on your content if you don’t want, imagine that, no tracking too if you don’t want it
and you might learn some stuff in the process that might help you down the road with job skills, etc.
Of course everyone should do that… hell, most artist already have a website/blog, but how people will find it ? Social media are needed to grow an audience. I think people want a decentralised social platform and something like Mastodon could be a solution as far as I understand it.
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