I am interested in where the community for sharing nude or adult photos, GIFs and writings is going to end up - now that nude content is not welcome on Tumblr after December 17th, 2018.
My friend is a software developer who made the excellent Gridllr.com tool which I’ve been using myself recently to view and reblog from my huge selection of about 7000 personal likes.
Gridllr.com also lets you download the images from your likes - hopefully that feature will be extended in the next days, as I can see a lot of people wanting to use it!
I am discussing with my friend how hard it would be quickly to create a complete Tumblr Alternative site where nudity and adult content will always be allowed.
If you are a community member interested in this possibility, please Follow me and also comment / Like / Reblog this post. I’ll blog an update in the next few days saying where we have got to. If you don’t Follow me, you probably won’t see the update!
i don’t see how gridllr.com lets you download your likes?
A former staff engineer, who recently left Tumblr and asked to remain
anonymous for professional reasons, tells Vox that the NSFW ban was “in
the works for about six months as an official project,” adding that it
was given additional resources and named “Project X” in September,
shortly before it was announced to the rest of the company at an
all-hands meeting. “[The NSFW ban] was going to happen anyway,” the
former engineer told me. “Verizon pushed it out the door after the child
pornography thing and made the deadline sooner,” but the real problem
was always that Verizon couldn’t sell ads next to porn.
Porn on Tumblr is something Verizon needs to wipe out if it’s going to
make any money off what it thinks is actually valuable about the
platform — enormous fandom and social justice communities that, just
before the Verizon acquisition, Khalaf was insisting the staff figure
out how to better monetize.
On that note-
Two former Tumblr employees said they were alarmed when Khalaf chose
Black Lives Matter as an example of a community that the company should
focus on converting into Yahoo media consumers. One told The Verge,
“Simon explicitly said that Black Lives Matter was an opportunity to
[make] a ton of money.”
A former staff engineer, who recently left Tumblr and asked to remain
anonymous for professional reasons, tells Vox that the NSFW ban was “in
the works for about six months as an official project,” adding that it
was given additional resources and named “Project X” in September,
shortly before it was announced to the rest of the company at an
all-hands meeting. “[The NSFW ban] was going to happen anyway,” the
former engineer told me. “Verizon pushed it out the door after the child
pornography thing and made the deadline sooner,” but the real problem
was always that Verizon couldn’t sell ads next to porn.
Porn on Tumblr is something Verizon needs to wipe out if it’s going to
make any money off what it thinks is actually valuable about the
platform — enormous fandom and social justice communities that, just
before the Verizon acquisition, Khalaf was insisting the staff figure
out how to better monetize.
On that note-
Two former Tumblr employees said they were alarmed when Khalaf chose
Black Lives Matter as an example of a community that the company should
focus on converting into Yahoo media consumers. One told The Verge,
“Simon explicitly said that Black Lives Matter was an opportunity to
[make] a ton of money.”
We are aware of the devastating impact of Tumblr’s new “Community guidelines” for a large part of the Tumblr community.
We are now rapidly looking at what steps we can take to:
* help the community retain access to current blog content and Likes
* create an alternative home for safe, equal and non-judgmental posting of all legal content, built on free speech principles.
For now, we recommend that users download to their own PC any content which they want to be sure of preserving. For PC and Mac users, Gridllr.com can be used to help download photos and GIFs you have liked (but not video or audio, sorry). For photos and GIFs, the download button automatically gives you the largest image size available.
Pro Tip: For fastest downloading on a Windows PC, right-click the download button and select “Save Link As…” (Firefox / Chrome), and save immediately to disk. This download button gives you the largest size available from Tumblr - it is not limited to the current size seen on the screen.
This weekend (8-9 December) we will update with more information about what Gridllr plans to do to help the community after 17 December.
Banned content includes photos, videos, and GIFs of human
genitalia, female-presenting nipples, and any media involving sex acts,
including illustrations. The exceptions include nude classical statues
and political protests that feature nudity. The new guidelines exclude
text, so erotica remains permitted. Illustrations and art that feature
nudity are still okay — so long as sex acts aren’t depicted — and so are
breast-feeding and after birth photos.
“Users have a chance to appeal flagged content”
The policy change takes effect on December 17th. From then on, any
explicit posts will be flagged and deleted by algorithms. For now,
Tumblr is emailing users who have posted adult content flagged by
algorithms and notifying that their content will soon be hidden from
view. Posts with porn content will be set to private, which will prevent
them from being reblogged or shared elsewhere in the Tumblr community.
Even the cold dead embrace of a Yahoo! acquision could not end
Tumblr, such was the power of fandom gathered there. But Yahoo never
knew what it owned in Tumblr and was indifferent to its continued
existence. The management of new Yahoo owner Verizon, however, has a
pulse. It knows what Tumblr is and it hates it. It will hack it down
until a perfectly clean advertising- and appstore-friendly traffic
center remains.
That phrase Tumblr uses, “female-presenting nipples”, is darkly comic
given the context of its ultra-woke audience. They didn’t give even the
slightest thought to what people other than lawyers and appstore
gatekeepers might think of it. In that sense, it seems to have a knowing
reactionary air about it. It’s a “go fuck yourself” so perfectly aimed
at Tumblr users it’s almost impossible to believe it isn’t intentional.
