Simblrpocalypse (Weekend Replies)
Rather than me having a good time on my main Sims 3 simblr account (murfeelee.tumblr.com which recently fell victim to Tumblr’s insta-ban spree)--posting my regular Weekend! Replies!, queuing up gameplay posts & TS3 CC--instead I’m hunkered down in the trenches tryna decide WHAT DO DO NEXT.
soupiesoupsimblr reblogged your post “Murfeelee Account Deletion”
What the heck… What are we gonna do.. Do we leave.. Or stay and fight?
doka-chan reblogged your post “Murfeelee Account Deletion”
#Really #Like REALLY ??!!!!!! #Seriously #@staff #This is nonsense and it has to end #We love Tumblr #Don't give us excuses to hate it #Please
sugar-sugarsims replied to your post “Murfeelee Account Deletion”
This is what they want us to pay for? Gradient boxes and random auto deletes? I think not. I just hope my cc blog doesn’t get hit. 😔
dreamsongsims reblogged your post “Murfeelee Account Deletion”
I feel like the entire sims community needs an emergency location where we can all meet up post Tumpolcalypse. I hate the thought of our little community being purged and culled with no way to get back to each other. Ridiculous!
Even if/when Tumblr restores my account, and the accounts of fellow simmers who are being sniped (I just heard that Toreno-Werty got banned yesterday, too @three-stars-ranch WTF--not to mention everyone else who told me about their bans), that’s not going to solve the underlying problem with this hellsite.
It’s been increasingly obvious that Tumblr and @staff’s reliance on its fundamentally flawed and BROKEN algorithm have alienated and downright driven away whole swathes of its user base. The infamous Dec17 Tumblrpocalypse first started purging the site of all kinds of content, to pander to Apple’s apps (which whaddaya know is neck-deep in an antitrust lawsuit vs Epic Games for bad business practices).
Sinking Ship: Tumblr/Simblr Alternatives?
Ever since December 17th, Tumblr users have seen the mass flagging, shadowbanning, Sensitive Content soft-bans, and instant termination of posts and accounts at large, which have led to several exoduses off of the platform for different, safer microblogging alternatives.
The Sims’ community of videogamers for TS1, TS2, TS3 and TS4 also fell victim to Tumblr’s nonsense, and numerous posts circulated ideas about the simblr community needing to move elsewhere, or better yet: creating out own Sims blogging website, some even making kickstarters to try creating one.
Unfortunately, these ideas weren’t able to get off the ground, as it’s EFFING HARD to run a website--costly, complex, and thankless to boot. We’ve all seen the constant pressure put on SimFileShare to carry the entire simming community all these years, as a Sims-specific FREE filesharing host for our terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, zetabytes, and yottabytes of CC.
One of the main deterrents to simblrs not leaving Tumblr as we rightly should’ve, is the plain simple fact of the matter that every alternative lacked some feature or another that Tumblr excels at. Be it site features (reblogs, tags, mentions, themes, media hosting, site import/export); integral user innovations (New X-Kit); the free and easy access (versus paywalls on Pillowfort & co.), we have all been trapped in this abusive relationship with Tumblr, for want of a better place to go.
Unless a better website is made, either by us or someone else, we’re stuck here. So what can be done about it?
Tumblr’s Auto-Bans, and the Reblogged Link Fiasco
The main allure is Tumblr’s large community presence & participation itself. The Dec17 Tumblrpocalypse lost Tumblr 1/3 of its entire user base in one fell swoop. There are tens of thousands of Simblrs across The Sims’ games. But crazy enough, these arbitrary auto-bans are ruining the one thing that kept us here--what’s the point of sticking around if you or someone you follow can get INSTANTLY kicked off the site under these spurious flaggings!? Especially if Tumblr does EFF ALL to make sure it doesn’t happen again?!
ny-sims reblogged your post “Murfeelee Account Deletion”
@staff soooo are you keeping this same energy for the racism, homophobia, or sexually graphic content too??? How many accounts will be deleted without notice before y’all fix the problem??? 🙄🙄🙄🙄
So I have zero confidence that merely getting our accounts back will fix things--the OLD links/posts are still out there; having been reblogged dozens if not hundreds of times. Innocent simblrs are being shut down left and right lately--one site gets restored, and two more get banned the next day. This is LITERALLY what happened to me, Desiree-uk, and Toreno-Werty, within HOURS of each other.
https://three-stars-ranch.tumblr.com/post/658800265616588800/hi-guys-its-me-toreno-werty-today-for-some
Even if Tumblr bothers to contact you, and deigns to grace you with an actual explantion, rather than leaving you in the effing dark, lately it’s tended to be because of reblogged links
xldkx replied to your post “Murfeelee Account Deletion”
they'll hit you if you reblog anything with adfly on it. be careful. also they do not like outbound links bc your stuff gets shadowbanned in the tag.
Exactly. And one outbound link in particular:
https://desiree-uk.tumblr.com/post/658600853646770176/my-account-has-been-restored
Reblogs, by their very nature, are PERVASIVE, so what do we do when years -old reblogged content is buried deep in our blogs--partcularly those links that are not immediately apparent to even be from flagged sites????
ny-sims replied to your post “Murfeelee Account Deletion”
@staff it’s 2021 yall.. there has to be a better way to filter content. Deleting entire accounts is extreme af! And on top of that. The Sims community is a big reason for Tumblrs survival. Let’s be real, not many use this damn site anymore 🤷🏽♀️ idc idc!
ktarsims reblogged your post “Murfeelee Account Deletion”
This is absurd. If an old reblog contains bad content, can’t you just delete the original post and all reblogs? Or are your moderation tools so poor that you can’t? Banning whole accounts for old reblogs which are glitchy and can’t even be deleted is ridiculous. #tumblr fails
catbrokensims3 reblogged your post “Murfeelee Account Deletion”
This is just so disheartening. I don’t understand why @staff can’t delete the posts rather than the whole blog? Then give the blog owner some warning when posts are deleted so they can do something and/or know that reblogs that used to be okay no longer are? We’re losing potentially valuable content to our community here. This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater big time and it’s sad. #sims #what is going on #why
Tumblr’s claimed to be making the site better and more positive and other BULLSHITE before, but ever since the Dec17 Tumblrpocalypse things have just gone from bad to worse. If Tumblr’s blatant handwaving of the Post+ backlash is anything to go by, @staff just said EFF ALL Y’ALL, and DOUBLED DOWN on their nonsense, regardless of the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS who spoke out against them going forward with paid subscriptions and filled out the survey Tumblr clearly IGNORED.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/22/tumblr-community-lash-out-post-plus-subscription/
It’s been 3 years since we faced this kind of continued barrage from @staff, and one paying to the signs seriously has to wonder if Ragnarok is finally upon us, after 3 years of Fimbulwinter.
Is the Simblrpocalypse inevitable? What can we do to protect/backup or content?
Last week I opened my own Wix account. However, I’ve always had trouble with Wix--it’s so HEAVY and SLOW, and bogs down my PC evey time I use it--let alone try to build my own. So it’s been VERY slow going for me to get my Wix page in a state where I can publish it, but I AM working on one, so I can at least have a place other than Tumblr to post my CC releases.
And as for Wordpress backups, the last time I imported my Tumblr blog it glitched and made duplicates of every post, thus going over my storage space so that Wordpress won’t let me make new poists on that account. I made another Wordpress account, but AFAIK there’s no function on Wordpress’ Tumblr Import feature to pick and choose which posts we want to import -- it just imports the whole blog, which is unnecessary in my case, since I already have another Wordpress import for 2013-2018 -- I just want everything from 2019-2021 Imported. (And if I don't get my account back I can’t Import it anyway, which makes Wordpress moot).
So, other than Wix and/or Wordpress, what else is out there for us?
Wix might be our best bet for cataloguing CC, for those of us who make it. But what about community engagement? Places like Sims 3 Updates and My Sims 3 Blog migrated to TS4-only years ago, so Tumblr became the main hub for promoting new releases through reblogs. This was particularly effective after the rise of CC Finds Blogs like the late great Lana--another blog that got banned during the Dec17 Tumblrpocalypse, and never recovered. And several major CC Finds Blogs have been hit at least once by Tumblr’s ban since then, too.
A few weeks.months ago, when @mspoodle1, @darkccfinds, and @katsujiiccfinds got banned, I started considering backing up my stuff, but it was only once @desiree-uk confirmed last week that it was still happening that I knew I needed to do something, and made my Wix account. As a fellow CC finds reblogger with 5 sideblogs dedicated to reblogging Sims content (including fancifults3cc.tumblr.com, scifits3ccblog.tumblr.com and ninthcirclets3cc.tumblr.com), I naturally expected to get hit next, and I was right. But if we’re all too scared to reblog content anymore, the Simblr community dies, as it’s through reblogs and tags/mentions that we let our followers know about the CC being made, and support simmers in the community.
There seems to be no simple solution. Yes, we all want our blogs back, and we want this whole reblog/link issue to be fixed, with Tumblr’s @staff finally providing a reasonable way to get rid of the bad links/posts themselves, NOT our whole account. Kicking people off the platform will only lead its users to continue losing faith in Tumblr’s longterm ability to maintain this website--let alone its ability to show any sign of care or consideration for the accounts investing so much time and energy into keeping the platform relevant.
@doka-chan said it best: #We love Tumblr #Don't give us excuses to hate it.
