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Chau

He estado en plataformas virtuales desde antes del dos mil.

En todos estos años, he visto el auge y la caída de muchos sitios, con distintas funciones, y puedo reconocer los signos. Entré en Livejournal poco antes de su caída. Estuve en Deviantart, presencié casi todas las purgas de Fanfiction, presencié el cierre de Megaupload, el ataque a Yaoi Gallery... y el caos que ahora es Tumblr.

En todos esos lugares salí mejor de lo que entré. En algunos conocí gente, amigas incluso de mi mismo país, y aún estoy en un par, en uno soy muy activa. He visto artistas geniales. He crecido y evolucionado en cada uno de ellos.

(Antes no veía a las mujeres trans como mujeres. En Tumblr encontré información y comprendí que sí, lo eran. Si yo pude dejar de ser TERF, tú también puedes)

Tenemos el chiste recurrente de “¿Tumblr se rompió, o es una característica nueva?”. Pero ahora está roto más allá de toda reparación. El corte de cuajo a todo lo LGBT+ es el punto sin retorno. El eliminar todo lo NSFW es una excusa: siguen los nazis, pero lo queer, los  temas de salud como el dolor crónico y todo lo que no sea agradable para el varón cishet (oh, Deviantart...) se borra.

Así que chau, gente. Han sido unos años muy buenos, pero no estaré más por aquí. En los días siguientes me iré despidiendo de las personas a quienes tuve el honor y placer de conocer, al menos vía este sitio, y luego borraré todas mis cuentas. No le daré ni un segundo de mi tiempo a un sitio que empezó su oleada evangelizadora, puritana, misógina, lgbt+fóbica y censuradora de material no apto para un mundo blanco, cishet y religioso.

Espero nos volvamos a encontrar en una mejor plataforma.

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the porn filter only detects HUMAN skin tones you know what that means

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Reblog to show your support for NSFW Artists, who deserve better than having their art censored/removed because of a badly thoughtout idea

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I have to laugh

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Bethesda: No one can make a buggier mess than us!

Tumblr staff: Hold my beer.

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I think the real problem here is that big media corporations seem to believe that social media userbases are fungible, and persist in acting on this belief no matter how many times it’s demonstrated to be wrong.

There’s a specific pattern of events that plays out over and over (and over) again, and it looks something like this:

1. Social media platform becomes popular

2. Social media platform is purchased by big media corporation in order to gain access to it large user base

3. Big media corporation realises that social media platform’s demographics are not the demographics they want to sell things to.

4. Big media corporation institutes measures to drive away “undesirable” users, apparently in the honest belief that the outgoing users will automatically be replaced by an equal number of new, more demographically desirable users

5. This does not, in fact, occur

6. Social media platform crashes and burns

You’d think that, by the sheer law of averages, at least one person who’s capable of learning from experience would become involved in this whole process at some point.

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"Same-sex romantic content will be far more likely to be remove" meaning the art of Steven Universe of the gems and content in general will it be removed and content from the new She-ra, which both shows does have lbgt and queer themes in them?

this won’t be official policy or anything but it will probably be the aggregate effect, yes.

why does this happen, you ask?

because the site rules are enforced by humans, and humans … are not very good at being 100% fair or unbiased. (at least, not when we’re acting in large numbers. any one person could be good at it, but the likelihood that most of a group is good at fairness drops as the group gets bigger.)

thus, Even when we’re trying to be unbiased:

material that’s potentially in violation of the tumblr TOS featuring subjects that are not ‘default’ (NOT straight, cis, perisex, white, able-bodied, healthy, etc) have a greater chance of being noticed and reported. it’s more ‘visible’ because of a combined effect of ‘this might be a violation’ and the brain’s increased awareness when something is ‘out of the ordinary’. if straight-cis-white is ‘ordinary’: things that aren’t straight-cis-white grab our attention, and are that much more likely to be scrutinized for violations of the TOS. (see: fandom’s tendency to go after media that isn’t mediocre whitebread content for failing to be ‘good enough’.)

this is severely compounded by:

 a lack of internal awareness of privilege/bias/etc amongst those who hold the majority opinion. (it’s the majority opinion because the majority holds that opinion.) if the majority is biased against something, that thing is more likely to get reported as a problem by people who don’t even acknowledge that they’re biased against it.

not to mention:

people who will participate in deliberately biased & malicious reporting. there’s plenty of people who are openly racist, openly homophobes, openly transphobes, etc. you think they won’t take special time to go after TOS violations from content that they openly loathe? because they do - and they will continue to do so.

why this happens in America/on American platforms in particular:

at the admin level: in America, the higher up the management ladder you go, the more likely the people making the decisions are straight white cis guys who do not have a strong awareness of their own privilege and/or bias against people who don’t share their privilege.  These are the people who will be responsible for writing & enforcing the rules for nsfw content at Oath and/or Tumblr. they are likely to be unconsciously biased towards content that they personally like and against content they personally don’t like, so in aggregate, their decisions will be more likely to favor straight white cis guy tastes & enjoyments.

at the cultural level: America is obsessive about keeping sexual content from ‘the children’ than violent content, because our cultural values are very much rooted in puritanial Christian morality. We also still have a lot of racism, homophobia, queerphobia, transphobia, sexism, etc. baked directly into our culture. so if something can be concievably argued as a threat to preserving the innocence/sexual ignorance of a puritanical, white Christian kid, then it has much higher potential to be flagged as n sfw. (of course, this means LGBTQ+ content (romantic or otherwise) and non-white content is more likely to be tagged as in violation of the TOS.)

tl;dr: even if every single person moderating tumblr was acting with the best intentions, trying to be 100% fair and reporting/acting without bias, the drift will be towards creating a sexually chaste, LGBTQ+-unfriendly, white-centric, and cis-bodied/perisex only space as everything else gets reported more often as a problem and purged off the site.

that’s why censorship enforces baked-in privilege in brief, folx.

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Real talk, though, because it needs to be said: as much as we all joke that porn was the only good thing this place had left, the reality is that it being the only place where one could regularly engage with and promote sexual content being gone is really not understanding at all what makes this place special. I mean we all joke about “horny on main” and all that, but the reality is that for a lot of the LGTBQ+ community, particularly younger members still discovering themselves and members in extremely homophobic environments where most media sites were banned (but Tumblr wasn’t even considered important enough to be), this was a bastion of information and self-expression. For a lot of artists too, this was a great place to come and post NSFW work and get traction that became Patreon pages that became honest jobs. The problem with “family friendly” social media is that more often than not, the ones hit  the most by the whole family friendly nonsense are marginalized groups that have no vehicles to express themselves. Stuff like YouTube consistently bans or flags simple content featuring something as innocuous as two men kissing as “adult” content and makes it hard for LGBTQ+ content creators to compete with their non-queer peers for a lot of those reasons. The ultimate problem isn’t even that banning of NSFW content, it’s the general mess surrounding it and unintended consequences to these groups. For MONTHS Tumblr has had a huge problem with porn spam bots and outright child pornography, and for MONTHS the majority of the userbase has been in general consensus that both of these things needed to stop. Tumblr did NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. When Apple finally removed their app from the store, SPECIFICALLY because of the child pornography, Tumblr decided to do what any rich corporation owning a social media site with zero understanding of what makes it popular would do, and decided that the best course of action was to eat itself like an Ouroboros. Rather than admit that they have done an absolutely shit job at keeping pedophiles off this website and rather than hiring the necessary staff to carefully moderate content, they decided to loose a poorly programmed bot that literally deleted perfectly SFW blogs with thousands of followers, and rather than properly handling moderation, they decided that it was best to simply go the lazy route and block anything even remotely NSFW. They run this site in the worst way possible, and I don’t understand how @support or @staff or their completely oblivious “CEO” plans to keep this sinking ship alive.

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The worst part is, we all KNOW the porn bots will remain untouched

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Y van...

Siempre, siempre, cuando se habla de “limpiar” sitios, se apunta, en teoría, al sexo y a la violencia. Pero no, se va a toda la sexualidad no cishet. Pasó en muchos sitios antes y parece que Tumblr decidió dejarse caer por completo en la incompetencia. Bravo.

Give you three to one that Tumblr’s “we’re banning adult content but will allow discussion of relationships and sexuality” policy is going to end up being strangely selective about what kinds of relationships and sexuality are exempted.

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Best part: you have the responsabilities, but not the power or rights.

This was one of the first factors making me want to be childfree.

Eldest sisters r the most oppressed

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Not surprised.

did this philosophy quiz thing and got this

whats it mean

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Fanfic Writers: Director’s Cut

Reblog this if you want readers to come into your ask box and ask for the “director’s commentary” on a particular story, section of a story, or set of lines. 

Or, send in a ⭐star⭐  to have the author select a section they’ve been dying to talk about!

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Me: Alright, here’s how the scene will go

My characters: No

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