Jules of Nature
ojovivo
JBB: An Artblog!
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
almost home
One Nice Bug Per Day
Cosmic Funnies
if i look back, i am lost
i don't do bad sauce passes
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Cosimo Galluzzi
JVL
Claire Keane
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Love Begins
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tannertan36
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Kaledo Art
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@jbk2k1
A proper money laundering scheme should be a business which is in no way profitable, run by the brother or cousin of a mass murderer who’s really passionate about making a specific kind of food or something but has no idea how prices or advertising work, frequented by folks who you should absolutely never make eye contact with!
Shut up, Twitter.
Imagine if the garbage celebs who made that “Imagine” song cover had put half as much effort into their singing as these pro stunt artists put into their own quarantine content: a fight scene performed by over a dozen stunt artists, remotely.
i laughed so hard when the guy swung the kid lmfao
I’m still straight up DYING over that ngl
The only logical crossover parody with this meme
you can tell a lot about the values of the culture you’re in when it comes to making hard decisions, and what decisions are considered “extreme, but necessary” versus what decisions are considered “unthinkable.”
right now, the culture I’m inside of says that over 400,000 people within our borders dying from covid-19 is “extreme, but necessary” but that taxing billionaires and using the money to give everyone guaranteed shelter, food, clean water, and supplies, and to pay everyone to stay home until there are no cases left is considered “unthinkable.”
Approaching one million deaths now.
how dare you make me see this with my own eyes
MILF: TERMINATED
BONG: TERMINATED
GIRL: TERMINATED
alright let's talk about Apple and Tumblr's current predicament. If you don't know already, I used to work at Tumblr as an iOS engineer. Though I keep in touch with current staff at Tumblr (what little that are left that I know) I do not have picture of what's going on internally. The banned word list is absolutely perplexing and I can only theorize why tags like 'long post' are banned from appearing on iOS. What I can do is give you a peek into how the Apple App Store review process works, so you have an idea of the hell that Tumblr staff is dealing with right now.
Let me be clear about this from the get-go: I think Apple's censorship policies are wrong and they have no grounds to be policing adult content within apps on the app store. Apple's power to set content policy over apps is absolutely fueled first and foremost by internal policy that goes back to Steve Jobs. After that, they're beholden to payment processors wanting to distance themselves from porn. Finally, there's lawmakers and policy that influence them as well. I think these are the 3 things that shape their policy decisions, in order.
What happens when you submit an App to the App Store?
You compile an app and submit it to the app store, and it proceeds through an automated and manual process to review your app to ensure it meets Apple's standards. Apple's standards are 1) non-malicious, functioning programs, and 2) programs that adhere to the App Store's review guidelines that cannot be asserted in the same way a program can. These guidelines are judged by a human being assigned to your app during the review process. The review process used to be long, sometimes it would take weeks, but in recent years they've got it down to about 24 hours.
Now, there's a laundry list of things in those guidelines, but we're going to focus on adult content because that's the most relevant. If a reviewer runs your app and finds porn, your app is rejected and you're told to correct the problem.
What's Tumblr dealing with now?
In the case of Tumblr, this would be a reviewer going to search, typing in something like 'tits' and finding porn. Sometimes they would search something more innocuous like 'socks' (yeah, i know) and find porn. Sometimes they would search something completely innocent and find porn anyways. Tumblr would get rejected.
This happened regularly. I'd say once every 5 updates (every time Tumblr updates the iOS app, they have to re-submit the app for review). A reviewer would find porn, and respond by sending us the steps they followed to find it and a screenshot of the content. Tumblr staff would remove the porn, resubmit, the reviewer would find nothing, then approve the app. Once in a while Tumblr would get a really persistent reviewer. It would take a handful of porn scrubs and re-submissions before they'd finally green-light an update.
Sometimes, however, Tumblr would get a reviewer who flags tumblr for porn, and when Tumblr opened the rejection notice, the screenshot would be something completely not porn. I'm talking stuff like a woman in a bikini. Not even posing in a porny way. Something you'd see in like, a laser hair removal ad. In these cases, Tumblr would appeal the rejection, saying the content doesn't violate our policies (and to the best of our knowledge, Apple's) so we won't remove it.
In this case, the appeal gets bumped up to a developer support contact that would manage the appeal. Usually when it got there, the contact would look at the report and say "oh, yeah, that's not porn" and tell us to re-submit the app again. It then would usually be approved.
This process, I believe, is where the problem lies. Of course, the bigger picture is Apple's adult content policies, but the relationship between reviewer, developer support, and policymakers is completely fucking discordant. Since the review process is human, some reviewers interpret the guidelines more strict that others. Since the review process chooses a random reviewer, the review experience is random every time.
The developer support contact is not in direct contact with the reviewer and does not communicate with them in any way, other than the report they receive from the review (that Tumblr has too). The dev support contact also cannot tell Tumblr whether they'll pass review if they were to propose hypothetical changes to Tumblr.
Here's the kicker: your developer support contact will also, like the reviewer, not be consistent from case to case. They stick with you until your appeal is complete, but when you have to open a new case for a subsequent rejection, it's someone new. And every one of them had different answers to the same questions about policies regarding adult content.
I really don't think the people enforcing Apple's app store guidelines have a clear answer on what's porn and what's not, and they're left to decide on a case-by case basis. Apple is fucking massive, and it's a waterfall organization where orders come from the top down. If Tumblr gets rejected because a reviewer decided a woman in a bikini is pornographic, no one in Apple gives a shit. I bet no more than a handful of people in Apple right now are even aware of the situation with Tumblr, and just one person (the dev support contact) is deciding what Tumblr must do to resolve it and stay on the App store.
The 2018 porn ban
I was present for the 2018 app store fiasco and boy, it was mind boggling. The removal was legit since Apple had received a user-submitted report of CSAM, and by policy they immediately yank an app that contains such content. That was 100% understandable, and if I were in Apple's shoes, I too would remove an app that has CSAM in it. But what followed was a gauntlet of rigorous reviews over adult content in general. The app was rejected repeatedly until the infamous adult content ban was fully enacted.
While Tumblr was actively working on the ban, they were asking Apple for any sort of guidance on what would meet approval, because as you know it's impossible to scrub a UGC site of adult content. The answers we got were either vague or unhelpful. Tumblr had to just keep re-submitting over and over with a half-baked porn finding algorithm until it finally looked clean enough for Apple.
During this time, we'd be searching Twitter, Instagram, etc, for the same search terms that we were being rejected for, and finding lots and lots of porn. When the rep was asked if other apps went through the same rigamarole that Tumblr was going through, and why they had porn on their apps, the answers we got were "we can't discuss other apps" (of course) and "that shouldn't happen".
Now, I do not want to get conspiratorial about this because I genuinely don't think Apple has it out for Tumblr. What I do think is it's a combination of the discordant enforcement of policy, caused by the complete separation of policymaker, support, and reviewer. It's also less of a problem for other apps like Twitter, Instagram, etc because they have many, many more staff to deal with the problem. They have more staff to build and maintain porn-removing algorithms, and more staff to put out fires caused by App Store rejections.
A little part of me also wants to be cynical and say that since Instagram and Twitter are so big, they can get away with more than Tumblr can. Combine that with Tumblr's history of blatantly allowing porn up until the end of 2018. I can't prove it, of course, but if Tumblr has a reputation at Apple, it can't be a good one.
Apple's reputation amongst developers
As I mentioned I'm an iOS engineer. I talk to other iOS engineers all the time, not only at my current job but also in other places like Slack instances for iOS development. The iOS engineers at Tumblr did not like Apple's bullshit one bit, which is unsurprising. However, my experience thus far is the vast, vast majority of iOS engineers at other places feel the same way. Apple's review process is seen as an asinine hurdle you must clear. Their policies are not viewed in good light amongst iOS devs, though you'll have a mixed bag of sympathy over being rejected for some of them like the adult content one. It really depends if you've worked on any UGC apps on the app store. If you have, you get it.
Outside of adult content, though, the two other big ones that rub iOS devs the wrong way are the 30% cut Apple gets when devs get paid, and the completely arbitrary policy that Apps submitted to the app store must have a "clear purpose". I haven't talked to a single iOS dev who's been on the side of Apple in the Epic v Apple case over the 30% cut, and most of them are hoping for Apple to loosen up their control over the App Store (either voluntarily or by court order). The "clear purpose" policy means that reviewers can reject the app if they think it's useless, which is incredibly discouraging for new developers who are just trying to get out there with something simple. It also squelches creativity and reduces the field for more single-purpose apps.
Aside from App Store review guidelines, iOS developers also have to deal with ever-shifting technical guidelines that can be unclear, with deadlines that change or are vague as well. A good example of this was a recent change that required all Apps that were available on iPad to support split-screen multitasking. Not only did I get conflicting answers on what that means from Apple themselves and devs who were in contact with other Apple reps. No one knew if their iPad app would be yanked from the store, or if there was a way to opt out. This requirement forced many companies to scramble to update their iPad experience to meet this deadline, only for the requirement to be relaxed, and the deadline to be pushed back. Fun times, great use of dev hours.
The Apple fanboy you can picture when I say "Apple fanboy" is very unlikely to be an iOS developer. They probably just love Apple products and think that the company can do no wrong. The more Apple does to piss off their developers, the worse it's going to get for anyone who just wants to use an iPhone.
Anywho, that's Apple for you. Why am I still an iOS developer? I dunno, I got bills to pay. I think I know what Tumblr is working on to appease them. Don't expect this banned word list to last too long. The timing is awful, of course, since everyone on Apple is on vacation, and Tumblr is too. Have fun with the chaos for now. As always, don't take it out on staff. They're doing what they can.
My asks are open if you have any questions. I'll try to answer them.
op i want to thank you for being extremely open about a process that is completely opaque to i imagine the vast majority if not 99%, of all people using any of these products. this process is a nightmare lol. holy cow
Have you ever wondered how someone meets Santa? Well, you need to follow a very specific ritual to summon him.
Do you have any idea how long I’ve had this queued? Any idea? A year. A fucking year. I don’t even use my queue ever. Ever. This is the only thing I’ve EVER queued. I’ve had this queued for a year so I don’t forget it.
everything about this video is perfect. the voice acting, the cookies, the milk, the cave, the chickens singing the imperial march for some reason, the way the sound of the fires starting lines up with the haunting song of the chickens, the way santa teleports right in front of the player at the last second. it’s all so surreal
sleeping under a blanket in just your underwear when it’s cold and your blanket is warm enough to make up for it is the best fucking thing
until the demon living under your bed rips it off and has full access to your body
and the demon is probably hot so she can do what she wants what’s your point
a lot more likes than reblogs on this post bc this webbed site is full of cowards that know im right
I was cleaning out my computer and I found a bunch of screenshots of text posts from 2013-2014. The golden age of tumblr.
I take no credit for these posts.
God they don’t make em like this anymore
this is literally all tumblr is
none of yall know what propaganda actually is, do you?
this is legitimately the absolute funniest thing anyone has ever added to one of my posts, thank you for your service
@elodieunderglass if you haven't seen this yet...
I see so many prankers go way too far, ending up harming people, but this one, this is an innocent good prank 😌
It's a Potato
The Great NFT Robbery
MINECRAFT ANIME: Piglin Girls!
Video Version:
Happy 10th birthday to Moonstuck! I had to scale back the scope of this due to time constraints, but hopefully it brings back some happy nostalgia anyway. :D
- Contains major spoilers for Moonstuck’s story. Also, it won’t make any sense if you haven’t already read Moonstuck. You probably shouldn’t read this first!! - If reposting (to image indexes or otherwise), please consider spacing out posts instead of posting all the images at once. There’s a bunch of them and nobody likes getting spammed.
Download cutscene? ▶ Y…
(naivgation will not work in tumblr app, use a browser if possible)
me giving yousa the absolute best ass i can
i keep forgetting that your oc is yousa and definitely read this as jar jar trying his best to fuck
Happy 6 months to this post
