Yahoo is a notorious repeat offender. Yahoo is the reason the “if you’re not paying money for a service, then you’re not a customer, you’re the product.” saying exists.
Here is some fully general advice: If you’re the user of a free-to-use website, and you learn that it’s being bought by a large company, then this is always, and forever, bad news. If it’s not an acquihire, then it’s something worse. You’re not a customer, you’re the product.
If we’re lucky, this will be a Livejournal-style buyout, where the site just gradually disintegrates over the course of several years. If we’re unlucky, then it’ll be a Posterous-style buyout, and Tumblr will be shut down when Yahoo goes bankrupt in six months. It is vanishingly unlikely that being owned by Yahoo will benefit Tumblr users at all.
Predictions:
More ads. Karp has a weirdly principled dislike of ads, for a guy running a free social network. Marissa Mayer is unencumbered by morals, here. If you spend a billion dollars on something, you’re gonna want a return on income.
NSFW content is probably going to be banned, or heavily restricted. (As in, “verify your age by giving us a credit card number”) Ad networks hate and fear porn, and Yahoo is going to run more ads. No other Yahoo property allows NSFW content, for precisely this reason.
They might try to restrict fan content, due to copyright/CP concerns, as Livejournal did; they might not.
Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria!
I called it, five years in advance.
The prophecy was right there and we all ignored it.
Anyway the last point I have to make here is that even if tumblr breaks under the algorithm (almost certain if they don’t back out of using it) and/or everybody leaves… I don’t have anywhere else to go or post things
people like to joke about it being bad, but I legitimately really like Tumblr. it actually feels like a blogging platform in a world where facebook and twitter are active political weapons that manipulate us elections. i don’t feel like i’m baring myself to content i don’t want to see here, or having to engage with a popularity-focused culture. the content isn’t sorted to influence you or trick you. it’s a bunch of people being themselves on their own terms. it’s oldnet.
yes, i do use other websites, but i’m not interested in posting personal things to any of them. this was a place i had control over and i’ll stay with it until i can’t. and when that happens there’ll be nothing left.
controversial but in my many years as a minor on tumblr i’ve never seen a single sex worker. they always block minors, mark their blogs as nsfw, and don’t spam the popular sfw tags. even if you, as a minor, actually look for them, as long as you listed your age truthfully in the registration, you won’t be able to find them.
what i, instead, saw as a minor was:
porn bots (which could be stopped by: captcha, double confirmation for accounts, not allowing url shorteners, not allowing rebloggers to delete captions, i would even be ok with hyperlinks not being allowed in reblogs)
fetishes and kinksters (which could be stopped by: adding more tags to the nsfw filter, including fetishes/kinks that appear as sfw)
people who forget tag their shit (which could be stopped by: an auto-tagging system for sensitive tags that would work similarly to the current block for apparently nsfw posts, but can give the op the option to delete incorrect tags)
pro-ana, pro-mia, romanticization of self-harm (which could be stopped by: banning the whole tag, as it just happened)
nazi, terfs (just kick them out for hate speech like twitter does)
pro-map thankfully only appeared once i was already past 18 but of course you could just ban the whole community + tag as it just happened.
prevent usernames with words that hate and pedophilic groups use to flag from being chosen at blog creation.
while i know that tumblr is a 13+ website, nsfw content was hidden from minors last year. most cp was deleted + outlawed (both irl and drawn) for good not even last month. and while those are recent changes they did make tumblr, overall, 13+ appropriate.
i do not care much for porn, i just feel like they are solving the problem the wrong way and punishing a group of people who did nothing to harm minors. there were smarter solutions to this problem that were ignored in the favor of a very sloppy solution that doesn’t even cover stuff like sfw kink blogs, porn bots who don’t post pictures (most of them), people who just won’t tag their nsfw, hate groups and other non-sex related communities who are extremely dangerous for minors.
This website was literally so fucking stupid. You used to be able to just fucking edit somebody’s post. Like just change it entirely. Nothing was stopping you. What the fuck. Imagine logging into your youtub account and some bozo changed your funny comment to say you love being a dummy. That’s what used to happen here. Every single day.
PTA archive 