There is a particular take on the destruction of Tumblr that I keep waiting for someone to write, but no one has yet. Which means I apparently need to do it myself.
The take is, essentially, that not only should adults have access to adult content – in itself, valid and true – but also it is important to cultivate SOME social spaces where the overtly/explicitly sexual overlap with the non-sexual. (Not all spaces; I still think it should be illegal to have sex on the sidewalk. But SOME spaces that enable the sexual and the non-sexual to exist side-by-side)
Part of what I think leads to the dehumanization of sex (and subsequently allows the stigma and shame to cling so heavily to it) is the complete bifurcation of life into SEX and EVERYTHING ELSE and never the twain shall meet. When we – at every turn – put all aspects of human life into one sphere, and sex into another, we dehumanize it. We remove the full subjectivity of people from it, which is a problem.
I think we need to actively cultivate spaces LIKE before-time!Tumblr where we can be people, and talk about what happened at work today, and the funny thing our dog did, and how our parents make us crazy during the holidays, and how dare they do X thing on Supernatural, and here’s a great version of that distracted boyfriend meme, and ALSO be able to talk about being horny on main, as the saying goes, and find the right porn clip to fap to. Or post nude selfies. Or hunt down that sweet, sweet NSFW Symbrock fanart.
Having spaces where the explicitly sexual and the non-sexual overlap is important to humanizing sex and, subsequently, de-stigmatizing it (which, it should go without saying, is particularly salient for marginalized people who often suffer way more heavily from sexual stigma)
This. As someone who is half French half British I’ve forever struggled with the frankly pretty Puritan British attitude towards sex and our bodies and the open French attitude. I know which is healthy and which isn’t from personal experience. People not discussing sex, nudity etc in a safe environment leads to so many issues around lack of education, understanding and future deep emotional and physical issues for young adults trying to figure life out. It can last our entire lives if not addressed.
My friends and I got naked in front of each other as teens to change like it’s no big deal and yeah on occasion we looked and compared bodies, it’s thanks to this that I know that my nipples which I hated for being so huge are actually not that weird. My friends all have completely different body shapes and it made me comfortable in mine knowing it was ok to not look like a model/porn star and be different because we all were.
I’ve learned so much from tumblr just from discussion and I share this with others, it’s embarrassing how little people know about their own bodies due to a lack of a forum to discuss it. This is such a good place for it and I’m so sad it is so niche already let alone if that now collapses.
Due to lack of discussion of sex and just human bodies someone close to me didn’t address the pain he had every time he had an erection until he confided in me as an open friend and it turned out he needed a medical circumcision. He went 10 YEARS with this pain (and not having sex) because he had no one to talk to about it and nowhere to look it up. Fucking ridiculous.
So yes, even for non trans / queer folk it’s so important to have an open forum somewhere regarding these things let alone how hugely important it is for these communities.
While at the same time I’m also angered that sex and nudity is villainised while nazism and it’s ilk is fiiiiiiine.
This . Is . Wrong .
“also it is important to cultivate SOME social spaces where the overtly/explicitly sexual overlap with the non-sexual.”
This.
One of my favorite things about rl kink communities? That we also went to munches (get togethers at restaurants) and just hung out, and sure we’d probably casually mention/joke about being huge perverts at some point because it was safe to do so among people we knew wouldn’t be offended, but the nice thing was just being able to be around people and talk about anything.
God, yeah. I remember being wigged out at first when I got on tumblr and it was just this free-wheeling place where someone would complain about their bad day and their next post would be a reblog of pornographic fan art with graphic comments in the tags.
You can follow people who make nsfw content (photos, fic, art) and get to know them as people. You can follow people that aren’t content creators and get to know their tastes in kinky shit. You can have friends you met because you liked the same kind of porn and find out all the other stuff you have in common and become real friends.
I don’t talk about my sex life on fucking facebook (other than in very locked groups, lol). Hell, I’m not sure I’ll do it on twitter unless I start a separate one for that (which….tbh I might; I liked having a sideblog here for me to post nudes and sexual tmi).
I’m really gonna miss the way that stuff was all mixed together here.
What is almost certainly happening with Tumblr’s image classifier is that they’ve deployed the bot entirely untrained, and are relying on user complaints to train it what NSFW content on tumblr looks like.
Making people participate in their own censorship in this way and punishing them with the threat of being silenced even if in compliance with the rules should they not participate, is, IMHO, abuse of their userbase.
Source: I’ve worked for three different top-five social networks, and at all of them this type of work would have been done by making the userbase do it as much as possible.
Please signal boost. I don’t care if you reblog or repost, just get the word out so that people know what they’re doing as they interect with this thing.
My twitter is @soren_tycho (nsfw, sfw account coming soon) and my github username is sorentycho.
Just chiming in as a machine learning expert, this is almost certainly the case (and knowing tumblr, they weren’t even smart enough to throw in pre-trained weights)
Again, I’m not in tech but this sounds about right.
I’ve become very attached to the people ON tumblr but I am getting VERY TIRED of the people who RUN tumblr. I always heard people bitching about staff but I thought, well, it runs well enough. But this is…very shitty.
i’m just gonna post all the ways i’ve found so far to get RSS Links They Don’t Want You To Know About from social media sites, because people keep Leaving Tumblr Forever in favor of sites that i’m not going to use
(if you don’t have an rss reader yet just make a feedly account, it takes about one whole minute, if you decide to use a different reader later you can export your whole list, it’s fine)
i’m gonna use strikethrough to indicate the text you need to replace and also include examples of feeds that seem to work
A General Rule
on almost any website look for the icon that looks like this
that’s the button that means ‘the rss feed is here’
Tumblr
just add /rss to the end of literally any blog’s url, including tags
i.e. unpretty.tumblr.com/rss or unpretty.tumblr.com/tagged/original/rss
now you can Leave Tumblr Forever and still follow blogs until such a time as tumblr implodes in earnest
Dreamwidth
use username.dreamwidth.org/data/rss
i.e. gallusrostromegalus.dreamwidth.org/data/rss
WordPress
if it’s hosted on WordPress.com, just add /feed to the end of the url
if it’s self-hosted (i think around 20% of people who have their own website use wordpress to host it, i know i do bc it’s easy as sin) also just add /feed to the end the url
i.e. en.blog.wordpress.com/feed or kittyunpretty.com/feed
ArtStation
use username.artstation.com/rss
i.e. beccahallstedt.artstation.com/rss
Mastodon
just add .rss to the end of someone’s profile url
i.e. cybre.space/@kittyunpretty.rss
deviantART
use backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=gallery%3Ausername
i.e. backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=gallery%3Aarvalis
YouTube
this one’sa goddamn pain in the dick because you need to find the channel id first
in general youtube channels have a nonsense url like youtube.com/channel/abunchofbullshit
you have to take that last bit and plug it into youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=abunchofbullshit
i.e. youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCbpMy0Fg74eXXkvxJrtEn3w
Tapas
this is mostly handy for webcomics that were hosting on tumblr and crossposting, i think? i don’t know how tapas works for creators tbqh. anyway they’ve actually got a button at the top when you go to the comic page.
the one between ‘add to library’ and the paper airplane will give you the rss feed
LINE Webtoons
ditto wrt tumblr-hosted webcomics, and also having a button
the button to the left of the one that says +subscribe will get you the rss feed
Twitter & Instagram
these are the only two sites i’m including that don’t have native rss support, just because so goddamn many people have literally no other web presence at all for some reason
twitter used to have rss feeds but killed them, and i don’t think instagram ever had them. you have to use workarounds for these, and a lot of them end up getting killed, like TwitRSS.me. fetchrss seems to work okay but it costs money. if you pay for inoreader they’ve got built-in support for following twitter accounts but that’s not a practical solution for most people.
right now i use rsshub.app/platform/user/username
i.e. rsshub.app/twitter/user/dasharez0ne
… but the instagram one doesn’t actually seem to work, like, most of the time. i don’t know if i’ve found one that works ever. if you’re jumping ship there please consider doing the world the enormous goddamn favor of just making a free wordpress.com account and cross-posting all your instas with ifttt or something, rather than being totally at the mercy of mark zuckerberg
Sounds drastic. Especially for content creators who may still need Tumblr for commissions while they find an alternative.
If you can swing it, here’s why:
I suspect that the December 17th deadline is so that Verizon/Yahoo can clean house and make Tumblr appealing to investors. This is a Q4/Q1 fire sale kind of thing. It makes a certain amount of business sense to make this change. Human-lead content curation (e.g. separating the CP from the legit) is expensive and time-consuming. I doubt they have the money for it. They already sold off Flickr. As a long-time Flickr pro user, I’m not pleased by the change and increase in pro account price, but I get it.
Investors are looking for a user base. User base is a prime attraction for investment or buy-out for a social media platform or application (I speak from experience as a co-founder of Rhinobird.tv).
Every account that is cancelled will be one less account in Tumblr’s user base for their pitch. I assume that there are millions of accounts with some percentage simply being abandoned accounts that haven’t been used in years. So cancelling one’s account on the way out the door won’t really matter unless the number of cancelled accounts reaches several hundred thousand at least.
If you decide to leave and cancel, then I also recommend sending a polite message to Tumblr staff, or tweet to the account about why you are leaving.
Finally, using Twitter to voice your concerns and thoughts about this issue will increase its visibility. They ain’t gonna like that. Media outlets that cater to tech entrepreneurs, and Silicon Valley types are going to be all over this.
I never ask for reblogs, but I will this one time.
Hearseeno 