Found this great album while working on the Tumblr Blaze queue today. The artwork is awesome too. Coming across art like this is one of the best things about the job.
There are certain parts of the internet where Star Trek and adult content overlap harmoniously in expected ways, but Tumblr was recently a p
La Sirena just so happens to also be the name of one of DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc’s clients—La Sirena 69, an adult content creator notably not involved in the Star Trek fandom.
In one recent copyright claim, the monitoring service targeted over 90 Tumblr posts that matched a keyword search of “la sirena.” But instead of alerting our team to La Sirena 69’s allegedly infringed content, the company reported a wide array of @mappinglasirena's original posts—like a short essay about a new La Sirena booklet, an article analysis of the starship’s design, and even the blog owner’s thoughts on the fourth trailer for Picard season two.
None of these reported links from mappinglasirena.tumblr.com contained infringing content from La Sirena 69—instead, they focus on La Sirena, the starship. As you probably expect, we rejected this complaint.
A peek behind the curtain at [tumblr] keeping you safe from DMCA trolls.
I've always wanted to go to Burning Man. The logistics seem impossible coming from Scotland - and that's even if I was only preparing for the heat and dust!
tumblr proposal: involuntary lottery. every month 100 blogs are randomly charged 10$ and 1 blog gets 900$. tumblr staff are awarded the remaining hundo but we get to watch via tumblr live as they fight to the death for it.
what's the point you're making here? an unfinished feature looks unfinished? personally I think this is a great idea - I'd love to have a way to engage with fandom without having to follow people who I might not otherwise like following.
the point is "there is a new feature coming from tumblr labs and it is called communities. currently, it is planned to look like this."
i actually posted a bit about this on my own and the conclusion i came to is that any potential excitement for it on my end is unrelated to how it currently looks and mostly based on how moderation for this new platform may go, as poorly ran communities may cause the feature to fail. hope that helps
this is indeed another unreleased / unfinished prototype feature we're working on in @labs. like the other "mini" one that leaked, it's not meant to be seen yet, it may never make it further than a prototype, so please don't judge it based on what's being data-mined. we have a lot of ideas like this we're exploring.
if an idea like this makes the cut, then you'll hear about it on the @labs blog officially.
Hey, Google Domains customers: We’re paying for you to transfer domains to WordPress.com —that includes an extra year of registration. This offer is for the first million domains, so act fast! Start your transfer now: https://bit.ly/3O9JZFS
Can I ask why the terf and Nazi tags are able to stay unblocked?
I'm getting variations on this theme a lot right now. Understandably, folks are pointing out this inconsistency we definitely have with the block list. We hear you. The block list isn’t good enough.
We’ve inherited it and we’re working on it but we need to make sure that it’s done carefully. We've picked up individual tags over the past couple of days to explore unblocking (which takes hours - longer than you'd imagine), and we want to re-examine the entire block list in a systematic manner. It is thousands of terms, added to ad hoc over like a decade. It's a real mess!
Glorification of violence and hate speech isn’t permitted. If you find that content please report it. We have a backlog to get through, but we will look at it and action as soon as we can; that said, we generally answer reports in order, but prioritize certain issues that demand more urgent attention.
Blocking tags means that people can’t talk about certain issues - including speaking out against nazis for example - so we would rather remove offending content from the platform than censor folks by accident with a blunt instrument. The nazi tag right now includes a ton of anti-nazi content and debunking of myths, etc, which is the sort of content we support. Again, this is the inconsistency that is so maddening to folks! We should definitely be allowing trans terms.
If you come across specific tags that are particularly problematic and blocked, please let me know so we can investigate.
Unfortunately the @staffcon2023 Tumblr Live hosted by the CEO Matt (@photomatt) and COO Zandy (@zingring) was not recorded by staff, so I wanted to make my notes of the Live accessible to anyone unable to make it (which was most of Tumblr; there were only around 800 people watching the stream). They answered questions from the chat for an hour about Tumblr's current plans and decisions.
Tumblr’s Financial Situation
Tumblr is currently burning more money than it makes and needs to make 30 million a year to break even.
Only 25,000 users currently pay for Ad-Free Browsing.
Despite appearances, they are not experiencing significant growth. As such, they are trying to attract new users while still retaining existing users. Additionally, they will continue to try to find new ways to monetize the site without selling user data or drastically increasing the number of ads users see.
Tumblr Live
Snoozing Tumblr Live. Tumblr Live is a way that Tumblr is attempting to make money right now, so basically no, they aren’t going to let us permanently toggle Tumblr Live off. Matt jokingly(?) asked how much we would be willing to pay to permanently switch it off and the idea of including a permanent off toggle within Ad-Free Browsing was raised.
Data Collection. Tumblr intentionally collects the minimum amount of information for Tumblr Live to operate: birthdate (as you need to be above a certain age to use the service) and location (as it’s restricted to the US). Currently, all streams are ephemeral and not saved by Tumblr. Tumblr Live is not actually banned in Europe, they just haven’t expanded there yet, but they are planning on expanding outside the US. I will note that Tumblr Live uses The Meet Group’s Livebox, whose privacy policy you can access on their site (which is honestly the standard data collection: more than I would like but not egregious).
Tweaks. Tumblr Live does not have high usage, so they will continue tweaking it until it becomes popular or they decide on something else. They plan to expand Tumblr Live’s screensharing capabilities to mobile (currently you can only screenshare by setting up a virtual camera on desktop) and may work on allowing streams to be recorded in the future.
Payment. Streamers can currently get paid through Tumblr Live. Tumblr takes a small percentage cut of all payments to streamers (this is completely normal for hosting services).
Moderation
Over-Removal of Content. They acknowledged that their moderation team may make mistakes and remove content that is permitted under Tumblr guidelines. We should escalate anything that we believe to be mistakenly removed. They are working on improving their response time, but they have a backlog of materials that they are working through. In regard to removal of LGBTQ content, they claimed it shouldn’t be happening (…) and promised to check into the disproportionate flagging of trans users.
Moderation Automation. They did not answer whether moderation is still automated or if it is entirely human moderated. Considering their settlement agreement over the discrimination allegations in 2022 required them to hire someone to review their moderation algorithms for anti-LGBTQ bias, I would assume that they are still using algorithms to flag content with humans reviewing appeals.
As a note, the entirety of the Tumblr staff is only about 200 employees, so I can only imagine how small their moderation team is. For reference, Twitter’s moderation staff alone (before Musk fired everyone) was 1,500 people.
Future Plans
Emphasis on Transparency. They plan to be more transparent about their decisions and priorities in the future, similar to the post they released earlier (they also said they will be more careful about their messaging to avoid similar misunderstandings to the chronological timeline debacle). They are considering hosting another Tumblr Live in the future and will hopefully record that one for users to be able to view afterwards.
Changes in General. They are trying to make the site better and to be the most user-controllable social network out there while still making money. A big part of that is experimenting with features and changes, then looking at how users actually interact with those features and deciding how to move forward from there. Any change that they make should not be considered 100% set in stone.
Chronological Timelines. They are not removing the chronological timeline nor do they plan on ever removing it.
Reblog Chains. The condensed reblog chains are not necessarily a permanent feature. They changed it to make things more consistent across platforms, so that it functions how users would generally expect it to work.
Custom Themes and Domains. Custom themes are here to stay, allowing you to do things like autoplay music on your blog. They also may expand custom domain’s functionality, further incentivizing users to pay for their own custom domain.
Sideblogs. They intend to improve sideblogs to make them more like “first class citizens.” What that actually means, I’m not sure.
Tumblr Stories. This is currently a feature on Wordpress, so they could expand it to Tumblr as well.
Multiple Dashboards. They are interested in supporting this feature, but it would be a pretty big task to take on.
Feedback
For bugs, the best method to get them resolved is send a ticket to support.
For general feedback, you can ping Work in Progress @wip or Humans @humans. You can also ping or message Matt @photomatt or Zandy @zingring. They mentioned that messages that are very hateful will not be read.
Overall, I appreciated the Tumblr Live and the opportunity to ask them directly about specific issues. It’s not super common for these social media platforms to open themselves up to be yelled at by their userbase for an hour. I definitely don’t agree with all the decisions that Tumblr is making and remain frustrated with their moderation issues specifically, but also recognize that they are making some efforts to listen to a userbase that despises any form of change. Also to be completely honest, after witnessing the meltdown of Twitter and the debacle at Reddit, I am more willing to view these efforts in good faith than I may have otherwise. Of course, we’ll see how everything actually plays out, but I genuinely hope that Tumblr is able to improve and survive.
This is what (almost) all of the Tumblr @staff team looks like in a room. 192 people here at the meetup! In my introduction I ended up doing an impromptu presentation on typography and how that brought me to open source. I originally learned about this stuff through our Automattic colleague @apartness, in this article on A List Apart The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters).
if anyone wants to see when they signed up for tumblr, visit the above post. it displays your registration timestamp when you view the post itself, but when you reblog it, it’ll copy that timestamp.
that blog is a little bit of chaotic tumblr magic i built for april fools a long time ago.
origamiaround
ellievsbear
kaledo-art
prguitarman
dededos
izzy806
turnnoffyourmind
vaporwave
