Godzilla killed my dad

spookyghostkat:

smallmiight:

staff:

Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.

Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).  

Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.

So what is changing?

Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.

Why are we doing this?

It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.

So what’s next?

Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.

Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.

Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.

Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.

Jeff D’Onofrio
CEO

“The pedophiles and porn bots were rampant so we’re taking away ALL adult content, yall did this to yourself” what the actual fuck staff?

Hey, if you can make “automated tools” that can detect adult content, then clearly you can make one that gets rid of porn bots. This app is 17+, and while I don’t care to engage in adult content, this is still stupid. We have BEGGED you to get rid of them, and you ignored us for years. The only reason why you started to attempt it is because you were making less money from the app getting deleted. That was your fault. So not only are you punishing us for all the pedophiles, porn bots, and nazis here that we wanted to be deleted in the first place, you’re also punishing us for your negligence to do so. You have ignored us for so long, that the amount of people like this have piled up. It’s like refusing to do your laundry until you run out of clothes, and instead of washing them, you say “fuck it” and burn them all and buy new ones. I mean yeah, there are plenty of websites that have this kind of content, but why do you think so many people came HERE to post their stuff? Because unlike now, Tumblr was once a functioning website. Crazy, right? I can’t believe it either.

There are better ways to get rid of these bots besides erasing everything. Heck, put up captchas if you have to! I’m sure that having to do a captcha or two when you log in is a small price to pay for adult content to stay on tumblr.

But because it’s you, there might be a silver lining to this. Your reporting system clearly has almost never worked throughout all these years. What makes you think it’s going to work now? And even if it does, go back to the first sentence of this reply. You are clearly capable, you’re just too lazy to it and too greedy to even try to satisfy your users by only getting rid of the bots and pedophiles. But hey, maybe once hundreds of people delete their blogs and migrate to these adult content websites, to the point where you’re losing even more money than you are now, maybe then you’ll change your tune. I mean sure, you’ll do it out of greed instead of kindness, but still.

Remember when 8tracks only allowed free users to listen to only one hour of music per week, but then they changed it so everyone would come back? Maybe you should take a leaf out of their book. They learned that taking away something that’s been there since the beginning is a bad idea, and now it’s your turn to suffer! Good luck, you’ll need it.