Unfuck this place or die

Let’s forget for a moment that most of us don’t agree with your policies. Let’s forget that they are not well thought out and are reactionary. Let’s imagine no one ever corrected New Coke and just kept on pretending it was a great idea. That’s Tumblr. Let’s instead concentrate on the problems with your implementation, the double standards, and the complete train wreck that Tumblr has become. I know Tumblr is losing money, so if anybody ever deigns reads these suggestions, know that while they may have been hastily typed,  they are designed to make the place more hospitable for everyone. Well, everyone except Nazis. 

1 – The Scarlet Letter

The blurred-out icon and archive policy is ridiculous. 

There’s simply no reason for it other than to punish the people that had posted adult content in the past. The pictures you have deemed adult, are already invisible to everyone. That means that the inability to search the archive or the simple courtesy of having people‘s blogs allowed to have icons is a weird form of sexual McCarthyism designed to punish the people, most of him through no fault of their own, used to post adult content. For years it was legal and not against Tumblr policy. Now blogs like mine that have been around for a decade are supposed to go through 60,000 posts, appealing each picture and then, when the thumbs down appears from the emperor, deleting them. But, it’s all for nothing since they were invisible anyway. It seems there’s no reason to hide the blogs themselves in the particular way that you are doing it, other than to show everybody what happens when you get a scarlet letter. The very process where one must comply or be forever marked (or Tumbr’s case, marked and marked again) is without reason. Tumblr could simply hide the posts, inform you and ask that you don’t post new ones. Instead, we’re banished. 

2 – Crush, Kill, Destroy. 

Your bot sucks, Tumblr doesn’t have “real live persons” that review things 99% of the time, even though they tell us that is true. For the most part you have a bot that is crawling and auto-flagging things. It flags the same picture twice, but then a third time sometimes not. At time a picture is not flagged until it’s in the queue, or flagged one place and not another. Flagged as a reblog but not as an original post or flagged on someone else’s blog but not on yours. 

The same picture I win on appeal can be flagged on a different area and the same picture that someone else blogs that is fine for them can be censored on my blog. Does this sound like a good solution? This is just a huge and ridiculous mistake. If you can’t hire enough people, you’re going to have to go more slowly because there’s absolutely no way anybody is going to put up with this for a very long and it doesn’t even matter if it’s a blog of Renaissance paintings because, let’s face it, those get flagged as well. No amount of telling us to be patient with the process has changed a single thing, in fact it’s become worse. 

To make matters worse, we are told we can appeal everything, but if the bot flags a picture twice then that means there’s no appeal anymore and it doesn’t matter if it’s a puppy sniffing a flower because it’s gone. A personal note to the tumblr staff usually is just left unanswered. 

And what does this algorithm recognize? No one really knows. I’ve got pictures flagged from the Museum of modern Art, from Vogue magazine, from things that were published 50 years ago for the mainstream public in places like Life magazine that are now too adult for Tumblr. Do you know how absurd that is? Is anyone paying attention to that? 

Tumblr in fact says: Adult Content. Don’t upload images, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples — this includes content that is so photorealistic that it could be mistaken for featuring real-life humans (nice try, though). Certain types of artistic, educational, newsworthy, or political content featuring nudity are fine. 

So just what kind of artistic nudity is fine?  Does anyone know? We know Horst P Horst, Edward Weston, Saul Leiter, Francesca Woodman, Masao Yamamoto and Arthur Penn are not fine. They’ve all been deleted from my blog.  Even LIFE magazine has been censored here, so I’m curious how many museums a person needs to be in to be considered art. What’s educational? I had several sexual instruction magazine scans censored.  What about the nearly hundred pictures lost on appeal with no nipples showing but some breast? By printed standards here these should be okay, but the real answer is that the bots can’t tell, so tough luck. 

Let’s add to that the fact that some blogs get special dispensation. I’m sure this is something that you will deny, but I saw one blog in particular with at least 25 pictures that I have had censored because I am somehow a “porn” blog and they were all fine on that blog because it is somehow deemed “art” blog. Sorry but that’s ridiculous, I’ve got 14 flagged Edward Weston pictures which all came from famous museums that children can enter any time, I’m not allowed to post them because you’re robot doesn’t like it. If you don’t have a policy of equality, your policy is worthless. 

Let’s not forget the grace period is nil. Flag a pic and your blog goes dark. Appeal that pic and win, nothing changes. In fact, usually you have appeal again, unflag ANOTHER picture and hope someone gets around to it,

3 – Why so many dicks, Tumblr? 

While I argue with you all day long, appealing thousands of posts where you can’t actually see a nipple but you can see part of the side of the breast, I can literally look at blowjob pictures all day long on Tumblr because they aren’t censored. Yeah, that see-though dress Helmut Newton photographed in 1978 is an outrage but hardcore porn blogs are alive and well. 

No one knows why but it seems your mysterious and arcane methods are so inefficient and broken that there’s as much squirting cum here as ever. I won’t even go into the soon- to -become- a- trope about Nazis on Tumblr but you certainly don’t censor anything but lower anatomy, and most of the time not even that. Any kind of objectionable hard-core pornography that was on Tumblr six months ago is still on Tumblr, you failed completely and in the process you’ve driven away artists and attracted more porn bots. Congratulations. I guess we knew when the Yahoo (practically a virus itself) age was upon is, it was bad news. 

You don’t even have a flagging system anymore because if you don’t actually subscribe to Fuckyeahnazicocksucking or similar blog that you want to report, there’s literally no way to report it. Most of these blogs or blurred out so you can’t make a permalink to a specific post. Those of us that tried to report child pornography and Nazis for years before Tumblr imploded now find it even harder than it used to be. It’s so complicated and abstruse to do simple tasks on tumblr, but you sure got us that new headache-inducing blue. Thanks, pals. 

4 – Sorry, wrong number

You guys don’t answer emails. Yes, occasionally I have talked to a nice, beleaguered staff member, but there are obviously not enough to go around. I’ve reported the issues I am talking about for months and nothing.

If you’re losing money you can’t hire more people and you’re creating a huge problem because your algorithms don’t work. Now, I know that you probably don’t care. I know that you probably just want to ignore people as a way of weeding them out and get rid of all the old people and try to find new people because you think this is going to become the new Facebook or Twitter. However, you may have figured out that it’s not. Eventually People like me they were hanging on until you got your act together are going to leave as well. It’s gotten to the point where you’ve broken the system and we can’t complain about it or talk to anyone about it.

It’s particularly irritating to get a form letter every time I write something that’s very specific. For instance there was a Nazi blog I was trying to report that I was blocked from. I sent a report saying that I was blocked from reporting so I had to do it this way and I get form letters back telling me how to report it in the way that you’ve already made impossible. Everything you send back is a form letter assuming that no one knows what they’re talking about here. I assume for a while you tried to communicate with us and just gave up, but since you irrevocably fucked your platform ,you should have people standing by to explain the nuances, you know, if there are any. 

5 – Fix it 

I could go on on in great detail about specific things, but the truth is you have a limited amount of time to fix this before you have to sell it to someone else, which is frankly fine with most of us. Your flagging system, your draconian policies about flagging blogs, your appeals process and your customer support are all worthless. I have, in good faith, spent months and months appealing tens of thousands of pictures just so my blog would remain intact and it’s all for nothing. It’s all a useless endeavor, it goes nowhere, and is nothing and is endless. 

This was a catastrophe, and you’ve done nothing to fix it. Tumblr used to be kind of a beautiful community and you completely fucked it up. It’s turning into some kind of 4-Chan spam site with a few art blogs sprinkled In, but even most of thus are spamming auto-posted links to other groups or money schemes. To think that all of this happened because Google apps deleted Tumblr and you couldn’t figure a way to get rid of child pornography is just pathetic. The platforms like Twitter which you wish to emulate, allow a lot more explicit stuff than you do including dreaded see-through dresses. And yes, we know we’re not important and that you don’t really care, but looking at how much money Tumblr has lost it seems like you would want to do something. In attacking the wrong problem, you’ve made everything unlivable around here and I’m not putting any more effort into it unless you do. 

Unfuck this place or die.


Het blijft wonderbaarlijk, geld verdienen met het menselijk lichaam, van slaven- en kinderarbeid tot reclame en porno, is legitiem. Legitieme prostitutie… Op het zichzelf tonen in alle naaktheid heerst een taboe. Is dat beschaving?