The concern is in this snippet from the new policy: “We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.”

1. So, Tumblr is censoring people who have done nothing wrong in the CURRENT terms of service, using Tumblr as designed. That’s horrific. 

2. But also they’re saying if some other random people also get punished with a scarlet letter, Tumblr is ok with that because of an algorithm that says you MIGHT be doing something wrong.

We all see the dystopian insanity that is, right? 

I’ve already had one of my posts marked as sensitive. It was a landscape. Oops. 

But there, there’s the danger. What if someone was truly offended by it eventually, if just because the machine said it was offensive, if it depicts a landscape of a terrible battlefield that people need to see, to understand the things happening in their world? We cannot say if this censorship will happen, but we can say without any doubt that censorship has begun.

Somewhere, in the wake of the Apple app store ban, there are people exerting their power over even Tumblr, people who feel they need a heck of a lot of control over us. It is ours to lose.

It was a good run. Tumblr had escaped the bizarre neo-victorianism of false decorum within the pale pseudo propriety of online behavior that had already long taken hold of the usual suspects, FB, IG, Twitter, etc. In days, Tumblr will be behind the same conservative wall.

aperture24:

so is #tumblr still a thing ? any recent news? what you are all planning to do? i have 12000 original photos here.. what are the options?

That moment of realization that tumblr is the mypace of the 20-teens. 2019 will be the year of the export tools. It’s OK, it’ll still be around, ranking on Alexa list, and showing yahoo investors an inflated multi hundred million plus revenue.

What does that mean for us, the original content creators of tumblr? Not a whole lot except the loss of guaranteed high quality influencer audience. It’d probably be OK to continue to store work here, but the api limitations here, and on 500, Flickr and increasingly elsewhere certainly means getting lots of eyeballs on high quality 2d digital work is becoming more difficult.

The question becomes, much as it did with Flickr and even the likes of Second Life, is it that tumblr provides an audience to creators and therefore original content creators should be limited, or is it that tumblr provides content to audiences? As with all media-sharing-platforms that face this inevitable digital question in the quest for monetization, they get it wrong, the light dims, the flower wilts, the door narrows.

That nothing has yet risen as tumblr’s own star sets is the more interesting concern - What is happening across social media in its refusal to acknowledge original content creators as the oil source for their success is a sign of its quest to squeeze out yet another sliver of profit margin. The loss of audience in this strangling of content is a show of the audience’s intelligence in its mistrust of the digital platform providers’ such as Facebook and Yahoo’s ability to lure, lie and leave. What will the 2020s bring? Hopefully, and a bit tongue in cheek, 20-20 hindsight and a clarity of what it means to share work, to be critiqued publicly, to be liked, to be accepted, and to be acknowledged.

How to know where to put your work so it’s relevant in 6 months and five years? Ask a preteen. They’ll ask you “why?” as they go back to their discord and twitch conversation. And that says everything.

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