#i have no idea if i need to censor that word to avoid bots and people id rather not interact with so i won't take chances

[arceus-ex-machina]

I regret going into the main RWBY tag nearly every time, why do I keep doing it?

[actualaster]

Thank you for explaining!

I got it now! I am also worried it might spread through the plataform and honestly? Some words are so random that we won't be able to talk at all??

I am not complaining about the way around it, but the 1337 system is a little tough for me to read. Again, I am not complaining, if that is the way then we shall do it !

What a mess... wish we could boycott them in some way. This is not right, the responsibility for making internet safe is the parents, not worldwide.

Parents should look at what their kids are doing and teach them what to do/see and what not to do / see. It's just stupid to ban things and quite lazy if you ask me. If you don't educate nothing will be learnt. I do understand some stuff like the bots are bad, but banning everything? Making it safe? Stupid

Thanks again, for explaining sorry for the text now ^^'

I hope it doesn't spread, but we won't know until it either does or doesn't and that not knowing is the problem haha.

Also, yeah, it's fine! 1337 can be hard to read, especially when people get very heavy or very creative in replacement--plus I imagine it doesn't play nice with things like a screen reader, and I imagine there's other accessibility issues. Same issues you run into censoring by replacing letters with "*" marks or sticking "/" in the middle of a word.

And if we just use alt wording some of it makes sense like "lengthy post" or "elongated post" over "l0ng p0st", but if you start getting into references such as "HM01" for "cu7" that'll be confusing to anybody who doesn't get a reference. Fun for jokes but not gonna be fun if that becomes a go-to for censor dodging...

Sadly the alternative is just... Not tagging at all, or risking a potential shadowban and since we know so little about the fallout so far, many people aren't willing to risk that just yet.

I don't disagree with the idea of making things safer, but I also don't agree with the way it happens, either. Filtering is a way of making things safer, and I love it. But banning anything that might even imply adul7 context is not okay--especially as we see a lot of stuff get hit that shouldn't be hidden away.

Basically there are ways to improve safety that don't come with demonizing adul7 content and banning it entirely.

But also these measures don't improve safety at all--they just make it actively harder to stay safe by deincentivising people making content easy to filter out.

I do agree parents need to teach their kids better safety, though. Especially if things keep going like this. Back in Ye Olden Days there was a lot of bad stuff online, but even as kids we were quickly aware that we needed to take care to avoid it and how to handle it if we still stumbled across something. That especially if we went to places that weren't maintained as kid areas we ran the risk of encountering stuff that was upsetting. That people online could be dangerous. A lot of that isn't being taught now for some reason, so you get kids assuming all of the internet is a kid-safe area and reacting terribly when they discover that most of it isn't, and crackdowns trying to surface clean don't help because we just head back to the days when people just posted that stuff totally untagged for anybody to encounter.

And that's extra frustrating because back then we didn't HAVE all these filtering options so warning people about content was clunkier. Having the ability to easily tag was a godsend, it's nothing but an improvement--so seeing it getting trampled to try and appear safer is really worrying.

[perfcell]

Do you have any tips or pieces of advice for someone who's looking to start up an rp blog for a character? I have plenty of experience roleplaying, but none of it is with tumblr.

//OH sure sure !! 

lets get the technical stuff out first, make the account for your new blog in advance, before you prepare anything else because tumblr has this anti-bots security system in place which doesnt allow new blog’s posts to show up in the tags (and tags such as #indie rp, #anime rp, #insert show here rp are pretty important in getting ur blog out there). you’ll also have to follow some people, get followed back by at least one, reblog+like some posts before your stuff starts showing up in the tags

of course u can disregard the whole promotion thing and just follow people and wait for them to follow you back, but if u want new people to find you without you actively looking for them, its good to drop something in the rp tag. but again, you dont have to do any of this.

ALSO IM PUTTING THE REST UNDER READ MORE BC IT GOT LENGTHY:

so heres stuff you can prepare (or not, its totally up to you !!)

icons - a relict of dreamwidth era , not necessary but i find that they add some zest to the interactions so personally, im a fan. usually 100px x 100px u can make them fancy or not, your choice. just get some basic facial expressions (but again, you dont NEED them)

themes - some rpers pay a lot of attention to blog themes, i used to be like that but tbh rn i dont think anything beats a nice basic theme w/ a readable font. hit up theme hunter and snag a theme u like !!! OR DON’T, thats totally up to you !!! 

also you can set your blog to dash only in the blog’s settings which means u dont have to bother w/ a theme !! its a popular thing in rpc nowadays !!!

oh and just a hint – id avoid using somebody’s art for icons or elements of theme… i mean sure u can credit them but hardly anybody looks at credits so idk id just avoid it altogether cuz the artists dont like that and theyre absolutely right. i used to use peoples art for icons and i had some artists reach out to me and ask that i dont do that and tbh now i cringe at my past-self for not seeing that its soo disrespectful of the artists

what to put on blog: 

about page - its a page where rpers put some basic information about the character they write as. it can be super important if youre writing as an OC (not many people will follow an OC if they dont know anything about them tbh) !!! if youre writing a canon character u can just resort to filling out a basic dossier (like listing their name, age, whatever… YOU CAN USE THIS and fill out what u like). or you know, do whatever. on cell, i just wrote a piece of Something and linked his wikipedia page lol. do what you feel like, its just a thing in rp community. 

rules page - slightly more important. this is where you set boundaries and introduce yourself ooc. after introductions ur expected to tell people what’s NOT ok by you, for example, you say that godmodding is not ok (godmodding is when people write in their own responses what ur character is doing), maybe shipping is not ok by you, maybe u dont want to write smut ever etc. you put all of that there and any additional info you feel the need to add (for example, asking people to tag certain triggers etc). try to browse other peoples rules pages to get the feel 

verses page - some blogs have a lot of specific verses like idk, an AU in which ur character is evil etc. this is a page where u can put them and add descriptions, UP TO YOU. i find that its less important than about or rules page, focus on those 2 first, especially the rules page bc its what people usually check out first before writing with u!! add verses later !!!

how to start an rp blog: 

OK so lets say you’re prepared and ready to write. i usually post a promo to announce my Arrival to the rp market. take a look at what’s in the indie rp tag for example, just to give you an idea what ppl post there. it used to be REQUIRED to post like… a graphic advertising ur blog but tbh these days u can just drop a text post (preferably with ur icon so that people know which character u write) and you say smth like ‘HELLO, a new (character here) RP blog here!!! like/reblog if youre interested in writing with me!!’ (ofc write whats natural to you, just introduce ur blog in whatever way u feel like it– OR DONT, YOU DONT HAVE TO DO THIS)

BEFORE POSTING A PROMO MAKE SURE YOUR POSTS SHOW UP IN TAGS FIRST. YOU MIGHT HAVE TO FOLLOW SOME PEOPLE FIRST (refer to this) – where to find those rp blogs?? refer to tags below.

what to tag your promo with: remember that only 5 first tags will show up in the search results. so pick some good tags, i think the most important tag is #(show/movie/books name) rp. heres my promo, u can check the tags i used there and come up with your own accordingly. and also browse these tags to find people to follow, like idk, lets say u wanna rp sb from naruto, then u hit up #naruto rp and just scroll and follow ! also avoid using swear words or nsfw words in ur promo bc tumblr will censor it lol

but remember YOU DONT HAVE TO POST A PROMO, THIS IS ENTIRELY UP TO YOU !!!!!

how to start WRITING on an rp blog:

ok so youve gathered some followers, now what. i usually just post a starter call! this is a post that people who want to write with you will like and you in turn will start a thread with them (doesnt have to be IMMEDIATELY, take ur time). you can also reblog rp memes which are like writing prompts people send to you (but i dont recommend starting ur rp blog w/ a memes barrage, people usually want to get to know your blog a little bit more before they send you a prompt). 

you can also wait for other people to post starter calls and then you like them (but check their rules first !!! for example, most people have a rule about being mutuals only, which means they will write you something only if youre following each other back), which also works. 

AND THATS HOW IT GOES !!! you are now writing on an rp blog. remember to take it easy and do what feels natural !!! browse some other rp blogs to get Inspired (but dont just lift things, stealing is a big no-no in the community). do what you feel comfortable with, if you dont want to make icons then dont! you’ll always find somebody who’ll write with you without icons (we just rly like them lol). be patient with others and yourself, read peoples rules, be nice, dont reblog an rp meme without sending a prompt to the person youre reblogging from (thats called reblog karma, if you dont wanna send a prompt then rb from the source), put yourself out there and UHH have fun !

[godzillamendoza]

YouTube Is Failing. I don’t know if I can keep this up forever.

I think its time I gave some of my take on this whole thing going on lately. If you’re unaware, YouTube is striking content for very silly reasons, some of which it refuses to explain. Videos get demonetized for no reason now because YouTube’s AI is biased to pick on certain channels, and the whole thing is trying to push a more family friendly, ant-controversy feeling. A lot of people are talking about the way the system works now, how creators are effected, and how there’s not much hope of fixing it. I decided that I wanted to talk about how its affecting me on an emotional level, having this anvil on a string above my head with “not suitable for all advertisers” written on it. 

As per usual, here’s a stream of consciousness rant about where I feel like all this is going for myself personally. Some of this I wrote down while texting a friend on the subject and then realizing that these points were probably important to share on a broader scale. 

I love making videos on this platform, but I feel like we're running on borrowed time. ​Its only a matter of time before this is not long financially viable and I have to drop all hopes of using it as a career. I've wanted to make it as a YouTuber since I started watching the site in 2008 and made my own channel in 2010. Now it feels like right when I'm making progress and have an audience, I'm only weeks out from getting shanked by the system and left to bleed in a gutter while my loving followers stand in a circle and panic while they fail to close the wound. Then I’ll be left to start over in some other entertainment field that's far less accessible than YouTube once was. All my life I’ve wanted to be a public persona and an entertainer. Ever since I was a kid. I felt it most when I became isolated and alone in middle school. But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

A lot of people begged me to start the Patreon as a last ditch effort to keep a steady flow of revenue before the bot inevitably notices all the times I committed to dark comedy and swear words in my videos.  Now, the thing is, Patreon and stream donations are entirely dependent on the kind of audience loyalty I have.  ​If I can't continue to grow as a channel, that audience stagnates.  ​If I can't keep providing videos for that audience, they will stop caring, regardless of how loyal they are right now.  They can't keep donating to someone who isn't posting videos anymore. Its a waste of their money and I don’t think they should do that. ​The paradox is that if I can't keep producing in a way that narrowly slips past the censors and bots, I will implode, but the more content I produce, the closer I get to being unable to make more content.  I need a steady stream of content going or else I'll be forgotten. I can't keep a steady stream if YouTube is kneecapping creators in favor of whoever gets them the most cash. If the money doesn’t keep flowing, I’ll have to get a normal job and then have even less time to make videos, meaning that I’ll just get closer and closer to having to quit entirely because its going back to being a profitless hobby that’s distracting me from being responsible and working for a living. 

I’ve heard others tell me that I can get by if I just go PG with the whole thing. That’s more difficult than it may seem.  ​I'd be unable to put out a lot of gameplay videos because games are almost always violent and Kyle and I almost always cuss because that’s how my friend and I communicate. That’s our normal banter. Censoring that to fit the guideline and talking to each other with restrictions becomes disingenuous and its more clear that I’m trying to do the video to appease YouTube than to have fun. However,  ​I can avoid cussing in reviews. In fact, in the Marvel nemesis review I said "shit" once and zero f-words.  That wasn't even intentional honestly, I just didn't have a reason to swear that much. I think in my scripted material, I can exercise self control and avoid more adult oriented language and material, but that sort of limits the tone and humor people have come to expect from me and like about my channel. 

My goal from day one was to be a comic channel that can have fun and isn’t quite as rigid or sterile as the others. Other comic channels do two things. They look at the material as something to be taken too seriously and avoid having any kind of humor towards it, often functioning as a sort of fanboy echo chamber to perpetuate safe and sterile opinions on this material without having a sense of identity or memorability. The other thing they do is become this sort of manufactured and dishonest figure, by really jumping on the train to make easy money and ride the sudden popularity of the medium that sprang up in the past decade. They report on and commentate on comics, but they often feign interest in it or turn their nose up at it with a subtlety that says to me, “I secretly think this is ridiculous and people who like this are more so, but they give me money so whatever lol Spider-Man radiation semen in Spider-Man Reign, remember that?????? I’ve never even read that story but I bring it up constantly for the lulz” I honestly fucking despise both. I felt like most comic channels (with exceptions of course) gave this medium a bad name by taking it too seriously or not seriously enough. I thought the thing that made me unique was by staying in the middle and making jokes where appropriate, but also expressing my genuine love and fascination at others. And it was working. People were noticing and I was picking up steam. Now in the past few weeks, I feel like I’ve been unable to increase my audience. I can’t seem to gain subscribers in the pace I used to, and even my comic book related videos are under-performing. I don’t think this is the fault of my current audience, I think they’re more excited than ever. I think its that the system is becoming increasingly hostile towards creators and making it harder to get noticed and build upon an established audience unless it was ALREADY massive. Channels with 2 million+ subs get promoted more and more, while channels with only a few thousand are either getting dismantled by the robot or just struggling to ice-skate uphill and get more views. Some mothafuckas’ always trying to ice skate uphill.  So in addition to being worried about being unable to keep making things the way I do without losing financial stability, I’m also worried that I won’t be able to keep growing with the safe and sterile content I’d have to make to keep being financially stable, and the way I’m making things currently is also being actively ignored by YouTube because I don’t spam 15 videos a day to stay relevant in the eyes of the promotion bot. Its a 3 pronged problem. You can almost turn it into some kind of complex equation. But the end result is that I’m getting stuffed from 3 different angles and its looking more grim as I go. In all honesty, I don’t see my channel surviving past the end of 2018. I can already imagine myself making a teary eyed video explaining that I can’t do this anymore because I can’t afford to pay my bills.

Honestly, this is very stressful for me. The thing I love doing most, the thing that I felt like gave my life meaning for the past 3 years... its being taken away little by little. I used to get made fun of for the things I liked. People actively avoided me in school for the comic books and video games because those weren't cool things to them. Now people respect me for liking those things and think I'm cool for knowing so much about both. I took my weakness and made it a strength.  I have this legion of amazing people that treat me like I'm important now and I feel like once I can't provide entertainment for them anymore, they'll forget about me. And then I'll just have to work at the grocery store and never express my ideas and opinions. I'll just get set back to being a face in the crowd that barely anyone talks to. I don’t know what to do anymore. Best I can hope for is to just keep making things for my small but respectable audience. I’ll keep making them laugh and making them think and then when I can’t do it anymore, we’ll part ways and I’ll find a new way to entertain. And I’ll just pray to whatever’s out there that those fans will remember the times I made them laugh or made them think, and they’ll smile and ask “whatever happened to GodzillaMendoza?” And hopefully they’ll find me in whatever new corner of the world I’m in trying to make a living being creative, and they’ll support that new dumb endeavor. I really feel like I have something to give to the world as a creator. Its just hard to do that sometimes, but generations before mine had it harder. Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter and pre-scumbag-George Lucas all had their own uphill battles becoming household names. They had to fight to put their ideas out there in a vacuum. The sad reality is, for a short time in society, it became super easy to be a big name creative type, no matter what you looked like, what you were into, and where you were from. For a time, anyone could have made it to the big-time. I’m trying my best, and maybe through some sheer accident I can be one of those people. But as it is now, it looks like I may have hopped on just a few years too late. It won’t be easy anymore. It’ll go back to being this infinite struggle to be heard or noticed. Both as a person, and as a creative voice. I dread that feeling, but I suppose deep down, I’m ready for it. 

Being me was never meant to be easy. With every personal struggle, every abusive father, every financial hurdle, every cheating girlfriend and broken heart, every lie I’ve been told by someone I trusted, every cruel school bully, every time I had to fall back on a handful of pills to make it through the day without collapsing... with all of that plus run-on sentences-- I’ve gotten used to fighting to simply exist. Maybe this is just part of that. I can’t exist without art. Videogames, comics, movies, books, every other kind. It all makes me who I am, and its all I feel like I can give to the world. I’ll keep trying to give that until there’s nothing left of me. I never wanted to be rich and famous. I just wanted to live comfortably and stress-free doing the things that make me happy. Being an adult for a year and being responsible for myself taught me there’s no such thing as living comfortably or stress-free. Its always a battle with the world and yourself. So fuck it, I guess I’ll just keep going anyway. Live through the despair with blind hope and just pretend that I’m not freaking out constantly. This is going to get a lot worse and might not ever get better, but I can’t give up. I’m not particularly handsome. I can’t be some innovative inventor that will fix society’s problems. I don’t have the influence to reshape society and make the world more peaceful with a silver tongue. 

All I can do is try to make living on Earth a little more fun for other people with this warped imagination of mine. Without sharing my creativity, I really have nothing left. I won’t live through that.

[cryptid-anarchist]

thinking about the whole censor thing tumblr is doing, its kind of hard for me to care because it doesnt effect me. at the same time, this is bothersome because porn bots and all that still show up for me. they did not improve the website at all, all they did was put a barrier in front of minors so they cannot see half the content. and im sure at least half of that content is appropriate or even important for people of any terms of use age (note- you are supposed to be 13 to use tumblr, any younger and they have a right to delete your accounts) to see. 

age 13 and up and the point where kids need to be introduced to ideas of the world and one of their windows is tumblr. questioning sexuality? tumblr is probably the BEST social media website for orientation questions that is not focused on relationships or hookups. there is a lot of toxicity here too, but if you’re responsible enough to understand that websites don’t cater to you then you can avoid following the bullshit. UNFORTUNATELY, with how whiny and quick to aggressively defend some people are (note- its commonly thought that these people are all minors, even if not all minors are defensive. but plenty of adults are like this as well) tumblr staff probably decided that its younger users are not responsible enough. 

this is also a good location to find world news. way better than facebook, because there you have to be following a certain set of people to see anything and the comments are not usually in the post itself. on here many PSA blogs will scour for sources and often times debate or additional sources to confirm/debunk articles are within the post thanks to how the reblog captions work. i’ll be honest, im too lazy to research EVERY scrap of news i find interesting. so the collection of supporting and criticizing articles in a single post (as can only be done on tumblr) is an important resource for most people who wont do their own resource. im sure plenty of these posts will fall under the nsfw filter because of violence (like the target bathroom situation where someone did drugs and blew up the bathroom, but people were reporting a bomb and terrorism), sexual terminology (basic orientation words that are not sexual to say but have been stigmatized, such as gay, lesbian, etc), and whatever other generic tags the filter is against. most 13-17 year olds are not looking up world news every single day the way they may be on tumblr and come across articles of interest.

lastly, this is just plain lazy of the @staff. they put a wall up that covers content that might be important for young people to see just because it might have a word that a computer will think (as programmed by the staff) is related to content that minors should not be seeing. by doing this all you did was cut off their resources, while porn bots are still active. just because the rest of us are 18+ does not mean we want to see what we do. just because i am 21 does not mean i want to see uncensored gifs of women chocking on penises because i wanted to make sure my new follower was not a bot (surprise- it was a bot). i see that you put in your own policing system but it is flawed in every way. take down this wall and add a blacklist function. users have been clamoring for a blacklist function. all you have to do is create a way for users to make a list of tags that will take blogs and posts off of their dash and search. you cant say thats impossible since you know how to omit blogs and posts from dashboards and searches.