Yahoo is a notorious repeat offender. Yahoo is the reason the “if you’re not paying money for a service, then you’re not a customer, you’re the product.” saying exists.
Here is some fully general advice: If you’re the user of a free-to-use website, and you learn that it’s being bought by a large company, then this is always, and forever, bad news. If it’s not an acquihire, then it’s something worse. You’re not a customer, you’re the product.
If we’re lucky, this will be a Livejournal-style buyout, where the site just gradually disintegrates over the course of several years. If we’re unlucky, then it’ll be a Posterous-style buyout, and Tumblr will be shut down when Yahoo goes bankrupt in six months. It is vanishingly unlikely that being owned by Yahoo will benefit Tumblr users at all.
Predictions:
More ads. Karp has a weirdly principled dislike of ads, for a guy running a free social network. Marissa Mayer is unencumbered by morals, here. If you spend a billion dollars on something, you’re gonna want a return on income.
NSFW content is probably going to be banned, or heavily restricted. (As in, “verify your age by giving us a credit card number”) Ad networks hate and fear porn, and Yahoo is going to run more ads. No other Yahoo property allows NSFW content, for precisely this reason.
They might try to restrict fan content, due to copyright/CP concerns, as Livejournal did; they might not.
Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria!
I called it, five years in advance.
The prophecy was right there and we all ignored it.
Especially if you’re a blog that produces original content. I just scrolled my entire blog history looking for stuff that had been flagged, and the stupidest stuff had been flagged. Like landscape screenshots that had a lot of pink and peach color to them, like sand dunes. Go to tumblr.com/blog/yourblogname to scroll your blog, because blogname.tumblr.com does not allow you to see the option to request a review for flagged content.
Actually I’m encountering a glitch when I look at blogname.tumblr.com where it shows me ONLY the content that has been flagged, but without the option to request a review, so if your blog looks weird to you, you might be having the same glitch, and it might be helpful for some people in identifying what has been flagged. Also double check and make sure that your blog hasn’t been flagged as explicit by going into settings, visibility.
Remember, tumblr isn’t deleting anyone for posting nsfw content, they are just turning that content to private, and potentially making your blog private. You can contest this. Even if you do get deleted, you can contest it and they will restore you. They’re only trying to delete bots.
I read the new rules thoroughly, and my understanding is that no photographs of real humans showing boobs or genitals are allowed, but that drawn or painted pictures and artwork that contain genitals and boobs are allowed so long as they are not so photorealistic that they might be mistaken for a photo. Additionally, no pictures, whether photos or artwork, of sexual acts are allowed, but written works featuring descriptions of sexual acts are fine.
To summarize the new rules:
No photos of boobs or genitals.
No photos or artwork with sex.
Artwork/not-photos with boobs or genitals is fine (as long as it’s not photorealistic and doesn’t depict sex.)
Written descriptions of sex are fine.
I didn’t have anything flagged that didn’t have a photo in it.
As far as I can tell, it looks like they’re using a neural network (an AI) to flag content. This works by feeding the neural network a ton of pictures of porn and then turning it loose on the website and telling it to flag anything that looks similar to the porn they gave it. I’ve read about neural networks like this before, and they’re buggy as hell. They are most infamous for flagging pictures of sand dunes as porn, but they will also flag things that have a lot of pink/peach color to them and that have a lot of curves. They also tend to be programmed to be racist due to the overwhelming quantity of porn depicting white people that they’re given, so they often fail to recognize porn depicting people of color.
If you’re just a fandom blog and not a porn blog or a nsfw artist, I encourage you to stick it out. Tumblr is still the best place for fandom, and I would be very sad to see all of my fandom friends leave. I’m not going anywhere.
2009 – GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites
2010 – FFN forums deleted
2011 – Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence
2012 – major FFN crackdown on porn
2014 – Quizilla shuts down
2015 – Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank
Didn’t quizilla have purges before finally shutting down? And I know basically every vidding home hot destroyed, repeatedly taking out the entire history of vidding online.
… they deleted Fandom Wank???
Well, not specifically. Journalfen failed completely and has never come back. FW was on Journalfen, so while you can see some entries on the Wayback machine, I think (?), the long comment threads aren’t archived.
2007 – Youtube starts using its “content ID” system to identify (and block) works that include copyrighted material in their database.
2009 – Greatestjournal shuts down, taking down fandom’s biggest collection of blog-style RPGs
2012 – Megaupload shut down by FBI; some (many?) fanvid archives lost
I thought there was also some kind of purge at Deviantart, but I don’t recall the details.
I’d like to remind folks that there was literally wank last month about why do we need the OTW.
Well, this would be why: we sincerely believed in the internet values of a decade or two ago, which involved owning our own servers if we wanted to see our projects remain stable, in the long term, online.
Worth mentioning: Yahoo purchased GeoCities, and was behind the decision to shut all those sites down.
Yahoo’s incompetence destroyed Delicious.
Yahoo owns Tumblr.
1356: 50% of monks.
People just… completely forget. I was there for all of the bans on fanfiction.net. You don’t know panic until you go to log in one morning and find out a bunch of your works have been deleted, gone forever, because some asshole arbitrarily decided that they wanted to ban something.
AO3 IS IMPORTANT. IT MATTERS.
2016 -y!gallery an archive of m/m art and stories, original and fanfiction was completely destroyed and all works were lost
Y!gallery itself was originally built in response to Sheezy art banning adult themes in 2005
Deviant Art in my experience says it doesn’t allow porn but will allow erotic art of women to reach the front page, straight male gaze gets a pass. Art focused on men is more likely to get deleted.
A lot of things destroyed by anti-porn rules are really anti-porn not made by and for straight men. It’s women’s and queer folks work that is demonized.
^^^^^ i actually tested this when i was on DA. I drew a bunch of s*xually e*plicit vag*nas and d*cks and the d*cks were removed within 24 hours. the vag*nas were never reported.
these bans are attacks on women and queer/LGBTQ people. the straight male gaze is apparently the only legitimate n sfw view
2010 ish (?) – deviantART purges adult fanfiction (I only very vaguely remember this one, because I’ve never been a dA user and it happened during my fannish hiatus, but there is some incomplete info on Fanlore. If you remember more about what happened, please help edit that page!)
Fandom purges are almost never just about one thing. Fannish content both relies on fair use exemption and is frequently sexually explicit, so it gets attacked on both copyright/legal grounds (thank you, OTW Legal Team, for protecting us!) and TOS/hoster rules about porn/specific fictional content (thank you, AO3, for being an open archive!). On top of that, there is a nontrivial history of fannish content being lumped in with content that criticizes authoritarian governments, and targeted by sweeps by those governments and their censorship agencies when they purchase or put pressure on the commercial entities that own the servers (thank you, OTW, for being a nonprofit and owning and defending our servers!).
If you care about fannish content, you have to fight for fanfic on all three fronts. And if we hop off of HTTP and onto one of the decentralized protocols like dat et cetera, like people are starting to talk about in response to Article 13 and the Tumblr purges, we will inevitably be targeted along with a) people pirating media, b) porn distributors, and c) anti-government protestors, because those groups are also going use those protocols, too. I’m not saying, don’t think about migrating. I’m saying: there is a systemic problem within fandom, regarding the fact that we routinely get hit on three fronts: legal rights to the material we transform, sexual content, and governmental disapproval. Protecting fandom means fighting for fandom on all three fronts and putting thought and effort into how to make an archive robust against all three prongs of the attack.
This is what’s made AO3/the OTW so special: we have lawyers protecting our right to make what we make, we have a TOS that protects our right to make things that are sexually explicit, and because the OTW is a nonprofit, it’s more robust to the pressure that can be brought to bear upon commercial entities by both corporate and governmental powers (though, I note, especially when it comes to governments, it’s not immune, and we have to keep actively protecting it, and we have to protect other fans). If you are in fandom but you think that copyright upload filters are fine, because, well, you don’t want to put fanvids on YouTube, you are part of the problem. Your community is under attack. The powers that be have always come for us by attacking us in pieces, and we have always only ever successfully fought back by banding together.
Never forget this. There are certain kinds of content people don’t want you to make, and everyone expects that to be “graphic rape” or some thing that is at least arguably Not Great
but more often than not it ends up just “gay.”
Censors. Are. Lazy.
No matter what you don’t like or what you’d rather not see, never forget that censors are lazy.
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