#though granted they are mainly text sites without native image video or audio hosting

[subdee]

Way WAY too much “Elon is a smart guy, he’s in over his head on this, he’s making mistakes but his heart’s in the right place” on this article when it’s pretty clear the dismantling of Trust and Safety isn’t (only) coming from a libertarian free speech idea but specifically is targeted at getting the right-wing trolls back on the platform while blocking the antifascist opposition point of view in deliberate and politically-motivated way.   

Or running the “twitter files” which even in the very cherry-picked and biased way they are being released, through only sympathetic right-wing journalists publishing only what they consider the worst parts, still show what they call “smart people having nuanced conversations about content moderation” in this interview, mixed with intemperate off-the-record remarks about flyover states  etc that the people releasing these files know is gonna rile up the right-wing base who won’t know or care about the rest of it.   And this at the exact same time that Talking Points Memo is releasing their own actual scandal, Mark Meadow’s texts to Republican congresspeople trying to overturn the 2020 election. 

...I got really far away from what I originally wanted to say, lol.   Anyway, way too much benefit of the doubt to Elon, but Matt Mullenweg is a smart guy and he’s not gonna come out and take a political side on stuff like that, especially in an interview there’s a good chance Elon could read.   You’re more likely to reach someone like that pretending their intentions are good whether or not you really believe it, than if you take an adversarial stance that shuts down the dialog.

But overall I just think this was a really really good interview, Matt is a lot more open than I was expecting about all kinds of details about running tumblr?   He talks about the younger (under 25) userbase as a particular challenge, talking about stuff like mental health concerns, “silliness”, widespread bullying & harassment & hate speech, and promotion of harmful content (pro-ana being chosen as, I think, a “noncontroversial” example of harmful content) as specific challenges of moderation, in that all of this content is legal, but it is harmful and should be mitigated, if only by not promoting it on the algorithm and kind of silo-ing it off to only the followers of those accounts, intervening in tag searches with links to mental health resources, etc. 

Also the bit about how tumblr/automattic has quietly replaced 85% of the tumblr team since purchase, how they are looking to further reduce the tumblr staff (by transferring them to other profitable divisions within automattic), and how they’re looking to hire a bunch of ex-twitter employees (and so is every other tech company) was all really illuminating and not something I was expecting to see in an interview with a company CEO???  Like there’s a lot of inside baseball stuff in this interview even if you can still see the diplomacy.   Really really good interview.   I’m so glad to be on tumblr (and mastodon) these days.