Friday 7 December 2018

Lighting the flames at Tumblr

It's like standing a distance away with a friend hearing the crackles slowly intensifying as a bonfire  roars into action  consuming its content and others fearful moving back and even away lest the sparks come anywhere near them.
This week Tumblr primed their bonfire, pouring kerosene under all 18+ marked NFSW blogs they had accepted since 2007 in the fall out from losing having apps in Apples iOS store and Google Play late last month.
Okay, personally except for the odd post one on one account I could live with that if it wasn't for the start on Monday of removing the old safe search and sensitive content filters replacing that with a computer based algorithm that looks at pictures and the odd tag  and decides if you are hosting sensitive/nsfw/adult  content .
Anyone with past memories of sites can recall the issues other sites had with such approaches such as on Yahoo360 and issues from time to time on Facebook but at least it is used as a moderation tool.
Here it can decide by itself to deactivate your blog and worst still is being applied retrospectively to all your posts so if like me you an account that has near enough 8,400 posts on in about 5 and half years, you are them expected to trawl though each one on your dash to find any that have been flagged.
That is an unfair expectation to place on people as there is no indicator of flagged posts you can click on to show you just those posts. It could take a person several weeks to find them.
When you do, you see often the most innocuous of posts flagged up things like a reblog of childrens toy ads from a 1989 christmas catalogue - material safe for kids to browse at home in the company of parents - being treated as if it's porn.
There appears to be forming lengthy lines already for such flagged posts being reviewed one hopes by actual humans and the more false positives it finds, the longer this will take for each and everyone to be looked at.
Trouble is the deadline for no nsfw as deemed by this system is December 17 so if we accept any blog that was flagged as nsfw is gone by default then if posts are not reviewed and accepted as mistakes then you may find your blog mysteriously gone.
Potentially you may not get the chance to be reviewed if there are too many cases for the very limited staff doing this to work through.
One top of all of this a barrage of tags have been classed as nsfw such as "lesbian" and "trans" like they're porn related rather than the means of people who are trying to find each other through searching through tags.
This is already leading already to an exodus from the site because apart from those who do post intentionally but lawful nsfw content, many of us are finding this whole business so time consuming and emotionally stressful we are close to meltdowns, fearing losing friends and for those of us in age regression communities, support when our blogs are deactivated.
Like I saw, I fear they've lit the bonfire that will in time burn the site down so it's a ghostly relic like My Space or gone for good like GeoCities and Yahoo360 are.

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