nerdwiththehat

[nerdwiththehat]

Thurston's Orange Peel Theory

[nerdwiththehat]

A message from a few of the trans staff at Tumblr & Automattic:

We want trans people, and LGBTQ+ people broadly, to feel welcome on Tumblr, in part because we as trans people at Tumblr and Automattic want it to be a space where we ourselves feel included. We want to feel like this is a platform that supports us and fights for our safety. Tumblr is made brighter and more vibrant by your presence, and the LGBTQ+ folks who help run it are fighting all the time for this, for you, internally. 

A few days ago, Matt Mullenweg (the CEO of Automattic, Tumblr’s parent company) responded to a user’s ask about an account suspension in a way that negatively affected Tumblr’s LGBTQ+ community. We believe that Matt's response to this ask and his continued commentary has been unwarranted and harmful. Tumblr staff do not comment on moderation decisions as a matter of policy for a variety of reasons—including the privacy of those involved, and the practicalities of moderating thousands of reports a day. The downside of this policy is that it is very easy for rumors and incorrect information about actions taken by our Trust & Safety team to spread unchecked. Given this, we want to clarify a few different pieces of this situation:

The reality of predstrogen's suspension was not accurately conveyed, and made it seem like we were reaching for opportunities to ban trans feminine people on the platform. This is not the case. The example comment shared in the post linked above does not meet our definition of a realistic threat of violence, and was not the deciding factor in the account suspension.

Matt thereafter failed to recognize the harm to the community as a result of this suspension. Matt does not speak on behalf of the LGBTQ+ people who help run Tumblr or Automattic, and we were not consulted in the construction of a response to these events.

Last year, the "mature" and "sexual themes" community labels were erroneously applied to some users' posts. An outside team of contractors tasked with applying community labels to posts were responsible for this larger trend of mislabeling trans-related content. When our Trust & Safety team discovered this issue (thanks largely to reports from the community), we removed the contracted team’s ability to apply community labels and added more oversight to ensure it does not happen again. In the Staff post about this, LGBTQ+ staff pushed to be more transparent but were overruled by leadership. The termination of a contractor mentioned in the original ask response was for an unrelated incident which was incorrectly attributed to this case. We regret that the mislabeling ever happened, and the negative impact it has had on the trans community on Tumblr. 

Transition timelines are not against our community guidelines, and weren’t a factor considered by the moderation team when discussing suspensions and subsequent appeals. We do not take action against content that is related to transitioning or trans bodies unless it includes violations of the Community Guidelines.

When it comes to the experience of trans folks on Tumblr encountering transphobic content, and interacting with bigoted users, we understand and share your frustrations. Tumblr’s policies, and Automattic’s policies, are written to ensure freedom of speech and expression. We prohibit harassment as defined in our Community Guidelines, but we know that this policy falls short of protecting users from the wider scope of harmful speech often used against LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people.

Going forward, Tumblr is taking the following actions:

Prioritizing anti-harassment features that will empower users to more effectively protect themselves from harassment.

Building more internal tooling for us as Staff to proactively identify and mitigate instances of harassment.

Reviewing which of the tags frequently used by the trans community are blocked, and working to make them available next week.

We’re sorry for how this all transpired, and we’re actively fighting to make our voices heard more and prevent something like this from happening again in the future. We know firsthand that having to deal with situations like this as a Tumblr user is difficult, particularly as a member of an already frequently targeted and harassed community. We know it will take time to regain your trust, and we’re going to put in the work to rebuild it.

We appreciate the space we have been given to express our concerns and dissent, and we are thankful that Matt’s (and Automattic’s) strong commitment to freedom of expression has facilitated it.

We will continue to fight to make Tumblr safe for us all.

— This statement was authored by multiple trans employees of Tumblr and Automattic.

[nerdwiththehat]

when something cool happens but you cant say anything to anyone so youre just

[nerdwiththehat]

Daddy never would have done this to us

[nerdwiththehat]

First meta post back, fifty notes in just a few hours: how's everybody holding up today?

Anyway if you need a reminder it's super chill and easy to back up your blog and transfer it elsewhere 👌

[nerdwiththehat]

@david wouldn't do this to us (said with only the barest hint of irony)

I want to be very real for a moment (completely unheard of on this site but bear with me) - the fact that there was a transphobic contract moderator who was selling their moderation actions and none of us were told about this until a year later in an unrelated post about this week's CEO drama is absolutely chilling, and speaks volumes about the rot central to this platform that Automattic have refused to deal with appropriately.

The fact that there was no disclosure about something like this, nay, that this wasn't a major news story, is wild.

[nerdwiththehat]

I want to be very real for a moment (completely unheard of on this site but bear with me) - the fact that there was a transphobic contract moderator who was selling their moderation actions and none of us were told about this until a year later in an unrelated post about this week's CEO drama is absolutely chilling, and speaks volumes about the rot central to this platform that Automattic have refused to deal with appropriately.

The fact that there was no disclosure about something like this, nay, that this wasn't a major news story, is wild.

[nerdwiththehat]

Having to reblog from other folks because of the reblog blocks and deletions that have occurred: things are not looking great!

Mr. CEO turned off reblogs for this but I still want this post on my blog and I think more people should see it. Behold:

I think @pointless-achievements really said it all. I can't imagine how he'll come down unscathed from this fiasco.

[nerdwiththehat]

Tron Legacy (2010)

[nerdwiththehat]

Peoples' desire to burn the Gävle goat isn't about them hating it. It's a "my son loved your drawing so much that he ate it" sort of a deal.

[nerdwiththehat]

Ty to @echo for the mention of the WP.com side of things - hosted WordPress supports activitypub for posts already (...and I believe technically supported OG Gnusocial prior?)

Happy to hear that it remains an overall Automattic priority ❤️

You've mentioned in the past that adding some IndieWeb friendly functionality like ActivityPub to Tumblr was in the cards, and it seems to be humming along nicely for WP.org and WP.com. Are interop improvements like this still on the roadmap?

Yes! Every future for Tumblr that I'm involved in will include it being more open, supporting more standards, APIs, and open source. That's my life's work.

[nerdwiththehat]

There's obviously a lot of talk about Tumblr being shut down, which does not appear to be happening, but do you think the re-organization will be enough to keep Tumblr running indefinitely? Or is this maybe the start of an eventual shut down of Tumblr?

What's super clear is our previous approach wasn't working. It didn't turn around the business to make enough money to support the investment of infrastructure and staff needed to run Tumblr, and a lot of users were unhappy with some of the changes we tried. There have been a few staff changes within the team, but basically what we're saying is starting January 1, 2024 we'll try a different structure with smaller, more focused teams working on the core parts of Tumblr that people say they want improved. We'll sunset or rollback some things we tried that didn't work.

I'm advocating for this change because I think it has a good chance at success. I don't do anything hoping to fail. There are lots of examples of products with hundreds of millions more MAUs and smaller teams than Tumblr currently has, and there are amazing examples like OpenAI and Telegram running circles around much bigger players with small teams. That's what we hope to replicate.

The good news is as well, since people leaving Tumblr aren't being laid off, they're just switching to other teams within Automattic, if something doesn't work or breaks we can always pull them back in to work on it.

[nerdwiththehat]

I guess I'm also still optimistic about the future of Tumblr using activitypub in the wake of the "skeleton crew" announcement, but without a crew actually working on it (short of the WP team being the ones bringing it to fruition), I'm a bit nervous as to if we'll ever see it before the site crashes and burns.

You've mentioned in the past that adding some IndieWeb friendly functionality like ActivityPub to Tumblr was in the cards, and it seems to be humming along nicely for WP.org and WP.com. Are interop improvements like this still on the roadmap?

Yes! Every future for Tumblr that I'm involved in will include it being more open, supporting more standards, APIs, and open source. That's my life's work.

[nerdwiththehat]

abandonware should be public domain. force companies to actively support and provide products if they don't wanna lose the rights to them

[nerdwiththehat]

No doesn't exist digitally anymore. It's been replaced by Not Now or Maybe Later or Snooze Tumblr Live for the next 7 days or Sign In To Continue or We'll show you less like this (lie) or Schedule your restart otherwise we force it in 10 minutes. And I hate it all with the heat of the sun.

[nerdwiththehat]

Dive

[nerdwiththehat]

so like what are all these new spam blogs even... doing? Like back a few months ago when notifications were broken I'd get the following notifications (however briefly) and see the blogs would have a few hundred posts liked, and they'd have a spam porn site link in their bio. Now they're just... empty blogs with weird profile pictures, but they're not really doing anything besides following me?

like what purpose does this serve for them now I'm at a loss. Are they just former porn bots neutered by some new setting that removed blog bio URLs, or are they a new generation of bots that are just Doing Nothing™?

**touches ground** something happened here