Maybe just figured out why that Tumblr-publishes-your-flagged-drafts-when-you-submit-them-for-review thing happened:
As you know, if you have read my endless whining about Tumblr’s public API, Tumblr’s public API is bad. This means that Tumblr has no easy, built-in way of hooking its database into any software other than the tumblr.com interface (the thing you’re reading this post on). Tools for backup/archiving/export, bulk editing, linguistic or image analysis, content moderation... Tumblr can’t use that stuff very easily.
(This is part of why Tumblr ads are so poorly-targeted - a useless public API has its upsides. Facebook and Amazon have very robust public APIs.)
What this means is that, if Tumblr has to bring in a contractor to fix a problem, or if Tumblr has to let in law enforcement to track a pedophile, or WHATEVER, they have to either,
1) give the other party full access to the database (very dangerous, frequently opens them up to lawsuits or prosecution if they get caught at it), or
2) you have to sit down and build some tools especially for them.
The App Store ban required an immediate response from staff. Being Tumblr, my guess would be that they started by panicking and giving full read/write access to someone incompetent, who deleted a bunch of stuff indiscriminately. Then, realizing that they had initiated a self-destruct sequence, they panicked a little more, dropped that strategy, and went for option two as quickly and sloppily as possible.
Given staff’s historical disdain for the API, they almost certainly didn’t try to fix it: they probably just hurriedly built a moderation frontend onto the site itself: like, the tiny human mod staff was (and maybe still is!) logging onto the mod dashboard at ‘tumblr.com/dashboard/with_nipple_problems‘, it probably looked exactly like the regular dashboard but in a more evil shade of blue, etc.*
Actually no. I’m making them sound more competent than they probably are. Le’ts say they didn’t even change the shade of blue; they didn’t change anything. Let’s say that, initially, the entire moderation interface is copy-pasted from, say, the Drafts page.
So: normally, Tumblr posts have one of four 'states’: published, draft, queue, and private. But there’s no way of viewing these states on individual posts on the dashboard, drafts page, or queue page, right? There doesn’t need to be, for normal use - that’s written up at the top of the page. If a post’s in your queue, its state is ‘queue,’ if it’s on the drafts page, its state is ‘draft’. No need for labels like that.
But if you clone the drafts page into a moderation interface and just let a bunch of exhausted Indian mods loose on that shit... how are the mods going to know that some of these posts were drafts, or private? No one bothered to edit the fucking template to display that information. They may not even have access to a ‘Save draft’ button - after all, the mods aren’t not supposed to be able to edit the posts, and that specific option only shows up in the actual editor pop-up. For all we know the interface devs only gave them the ‘Post’ button.
...and even this may be giving Tumblr staff too much credit - it’s entirely possible that they just deleted the initial post state and replaced it with ‘flagged,’ making it impossible for anyone - even those with full database access - to determine to which posts were drafts/queued/private and which were published without looking at a backup copy of the database. (Which - did they even have one? They might not have!)
* (I can’t fully explain how stupid and inefficient this whole concept is in under five pages, but it’s bad. If I’m right about this shit, I suspect that at least some of that $1 billion devaluation came from the sheer cost of paying all these mods they had to rush-hire to go over the same content, over and fucking over, because they waited too fucking long to try to build a working API.)
I’ve reblogged a LOT of fanart on this blog, most of it f/f. Officially, it’s all safe for work... but we know how these purges can go.
Let’s say I backup my blog, and then the worst happens and some or all queer content gets deleted. Thousands of posts from hundreds of different artists.
Reblogging somebody’s work on another site is generally, and rightly, frowned upon. But that’s predicated on the idea that the artist can display their work on stable platforms as they choose. If the platform becomes unstable...
Basically, the question is, what’s the morality of reposting fanart elsewhere for archival purposes? A lot of this stuff is from inactive blogs, now, and if those blogs were to be shut down by tumblr, there’d be no way to contact them, and it would be a huge task, besides.
So, what’s the bigger problem? Reposting art without explicit permission, or the loss of years of fandom history? (Perhaps setting up an archive with the stated proviso that any creator can request to have their work removed from it, no questions asked?)
I would sincerely like to hear everybody’s thoughts.
Hey, y’all! So, I won’t be leaving Tumblr after Dec 17, but I realize some of you may.
I’m sorry that you’ll be leaving, and I’m sad that I don’t know exactly who’s going. But, I just want EVERYONE to know- even if I haven’t talked to you, even if you’ve liked my posts/reblogged then, even if you’ve said a simple ‘hi’ to me- thank you. You truly, truly have made my life better, and it would NOT be the same without you. Thank you for making the Korrasami fandom, and my experience within it, so fun. :)
I love you all ❤️
My social media’s:
Instagram: @thevividminimalist
Snapchat: @Icon551
And, find me on Facebook! I guess y’all can ask em for my full name on Tumblr messenger 😂😂
Also, I’m on both the Avatar Rewatch and Korra Fitness Discord! :)
Avatar Rewatch: https://discord.gg/Ch3yGKk
Korra Fitness: https://discord.gg/yDRy8tp
Thank you, all. For those who are still left after Tumbldown- we’re still here. We won’t leave. We’ll still make a beautiful community, and a beautiful life here. :)
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Either staff is on a general reactivating-last-fall’s-suspended-accounts spree... or they’re specifically reactivating the ones I personally use as the “suspended/deleted by staff” examples in my API test suite, to spite me. Very rude. I need to find some new murder victims to experiment on.
