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.
Look i dont wanna sound like a Fandom Mom or whatever but what do you think women over 25 or so are supposed to do? Do u really think theyre supposed to drop all their interests and just talk about taxes and marriage or whatever? It seems like 25+ year old fanboys do not receive this kind of “ooh cringe” reaction either. There are guys in their 40s with comic book collections and shit and people might think theyre a nerd at worst, not a freak who shouldnt be trusted
Thank you.Because, here’s the thing, I literally tried that. And this sounds really dramatic but it kind of ruined my life for a long time.
Once I got out of grad-school and started working, at exactly age 25, I figured it was time to get serious because I was “too old for this stuff” and frankly I was afraid of being judged.
I sold all my comics, I stopped reading fanfiction, I stopped playing video games. All of it. It’s not that I never, ever watched anything “geeky” or spent a weekend binge-reading a kink-meme, but when I did, it was rare and I’d feel guilty about it like it was time wasted. I’d keep it all to myself, you know? And without any kind of inspiration, I eventually stopped drawing. After all, I didn’t need it for my “serious job,” so why bother? Unfortunately, my former skill is so atrophied now it’s nearly lost, but worse than that, it’s stressful now instead of the thing I loved to do for most of my life.
What was I doing instead? Well, I’d work my miserable, toxic job, come home and worry about how far behind everyone else I was, and how weird I was compared to all my colleagues. I’d go out with people and do the things they liked doing, but I only pretended to. But I’m not great at that and pretending to be someone else ate me alive. Unsurprisingly, by 31, my anxiety and depression was not in a great place, and I fuckin’ snapped. Not just because of this stuff, of course, but it honestly contributed. I quit my job and left town.
Suddenly I was completely alone, no job, no friends, and no reason to pretend to be someone else. So, I started doing all the things I’d given up. I read all the fanfiction I wanted, I bought a Playstation and an SNES and played them for hours. I bought back every comic book I loved, watched every Marvel movie I missed, and caught up on my favorite characters. I started traveling around just going to cons for the first time (NYCC, GeekGirlCon, DragonCon, etc). In fact, at @geekgirlcon and DragonCon especially, I saw groups of women who were 60+, just fucking enjoying things, and it made me feel so much better about my future. I’m not even joking, I literally cry every time I think about it, because I never realized how scared I was about aging in a world that thinks I’m already a decade too old for the things I love. Suddenly, that wasn’t so scary.
And then I just stopped pretending that I wasn’t into this stuff. I mean all of it, even the stuff no one understand, even the stuff people openly make fun of, even smutty fanfiction.
And look, I’m not saying this cured my depression, or that everything is perfect. For one, I picked a city that’s awful for geeks and I’m trying to figure out where to move and how. For another, I lost six years of making like-minded friends, and it’s hard to find them now because we’re all so worried about being judged and online – the space that was always a refuge for me as a loner weirdo growing up – is now apparently a Children of the Corn. But I’m happier here, actually fucking liking things, than being the unobjectionable robot woman I’m apparently supposed to be.
I don’t expect anyone to actually be interested in this, or have gotten this far, but because I’m having feelings about turning 36 on Monday, I just want to tell anyone who is about to turn 25 that you should just tell people to go fuck themselves. It’s your life. You’re going to offend people no matter what you do, at least choose the direction that makes you happiest, because those people certainly aren’t going to pay for your fucking therapist bills, are they?🦖
This is gonna sound weird to you guys, but when I first started writing fanfic and sending stories to fanzines to be published back in 1991, in my first fandom all of the fans and writers and editors and readers I met were shocked that I was 17 because they were all in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. I was the outlier. I was an aberration.
Wanna know when young people started discovering fandom en masse? In the mid 1990s, when AOL got their internet gateway.
All the folks who ran fannish mailing lists and conventions and published ‘zines and posted fanfic online were over 18, because email and IRC and Usenet and FTP sites and listservs were primarily used by adults because they were almost exclusively college students, government employees, and academics. And the users of gated communities like BBS, GEnie, Compuserv, and AOL all skewed older. Only Prodigy was actually aimed at kids, because prior to the mid-to-late 1990s, children weren’t getting online until they went to university.
And what kids found was the fandom that adults had built online, after being a part of it offline for decades.
Even when FFN was launched, the people who initially posted there were the same people who had been posting fanfic to the internet for a decade: THE GROWN-UPS.
So the idea that we’re meant to put away childish things is hilarious, cos for most of our lives, fandom was not a part of our childhoods. It was a part of our everyday adult lives.
I love this. It’s a montage of foxes hunting for small prey under the snow. They pinpoint the location of their prey by listening intently, and then dive face-first through feet of snow to snap them up.
insane clown posse man was at midwest fur fest in a fucking juggalo fursuit oh my god
Hey so listen,
I don’t like making fun of furries to begin with, especially since they’re not all as bad as a lot of people make them out to be. But definitely, don’t lean on the horn with Violent J.
If you don’t know, Violent J is the leader of Insane Clown Posse. His daughter is a furry. Despite his notoriety, J isn’t rich at all. So you can imagine when his daughter ordered a fur suit and essentially got scammed (which, by the way, as someone who makes stuffed animals from time to time and alters clothes here and there– faux fur is pretty expensive if it’s the good kind. An entire suit out of the shit is a whole ass arm) they were pissed.
So gawk if you want, but just know, Violent J is a supportive dad and I gotta give my props to him. I know I wish my guardian or mom would’ve gotten at least a bit interested when I went to my first anime con. It’s good to see he’s standing behind her like this.
also his suit’s name is Kung Fu Joe and that’s fuckin great
fr anyone who reblogged this being mean will die tonight
you though this was gonna be a christmas post? guess again bitch! happy hanukkah! may your latkes be delicious and you have a blessed holiday season! אני אוהב את כולכם כל כך !!!
Diary's Blog 