God that second article says that a mother of two was sentenced to prison for crossing the border with the intention of seaking asylum you know, something that isn’t fucking illegal????
the reason I like tumblr is because it’s so easy not to be found here. I don’t have to worry about people from real life being able to find me bc I can hide my blog from search engine results. I can be openly gay here and have a little space to myself to explore my interests and stuff. Social media has always made me really anxious as I’m a naturally reserved person. I’m reluctant to use such widely used sites like Instagram and twitter because I don’t want my family or friends I’m not too close to find me on there ! And also why the fuck do twitter and Instagram make your following and likes public
exactly like these sites DEMAND access to your contacts and phone number and even when you say no they still recommend you to other people based on your phone number and real life proximity to other users. That’s so fucking creepy. I do so miss the old days of the internet where everything wasn’t so connected to your day to day life.
men reviewing a male filmmaker’s movie: if you can’t understand the poeticism of this movie’s slow pacing, then maybe you are not ready to understand cinema!
men reviewing a female filmmaker’s movie: not a lot happened. 0/10 wack
Men reviewing men: “A deeply moving, personal journey.”
Men reviewing women: “Too personal.”
Listen up y’all. I’m a young, lesbian woman midway through a masters of fine art in Screenwriting as I prepare for a career in film and television. And this is the fucking truth.
About a month ago I met with a (young straight white male) professor about a script I was working on. The protagonist is an LGBT female struggling with a depression severe enough to have ended her last relationship. She is medicated for her depression and the medication itself plays a role in the script. This isn’t the plot of the film, just an aspect of the protagonist’s character.
The entire duration of the meeting with this professor was marked by his extreme disinterest in my script. Which, fine- you can’t please everyone, and honestly there were some major problems with the script that I’ll have to tackle during the rewrite. But the real highlight of the meeting was when, after being asked what he felt the biggest issue with my protagonist was, my professor responded: “Well nobody’s that sad. It’s just unrealistic.”
Three other scripts in my class feature protagonists struggling severely with depression. Two of those three are written by men. When I checked in with them afterwards, I was told by the other female writer that she’d received a similar comment from our professor. Both male writers, however, had been praised for their “sensitive and thoroughly human characters.”
Of the faculty in my program, only two professors (of close to 20) are female. The majority of the program is taught, run and managed by white, straight, cis males.
My point is this;; it’s not just Hollywood. As far down the career step totem pole in Screenwriting as formal education, men genuinely don’t believe that women are allowed to be emotive, expressive beings. If you say too little, you’re a bitch- if you say too much, you’re melodramatic and pathetic to boot.
Men don’t want women, men want female bodies on camera, and that is the single biggest crock of horse shit in this entire garbage industry.
Men don’t want women, men want female bodies on camera, and that is the
single biggest crock of horse shit in this entire garbage industry.
As someone not involved in the development of pillowfort but am a web developer, I think you should lower your expectations, but not for the reason you think.
Pillowfort is a baby. A newborn. A smol bab. If you were here during the early days of Tumblr, think of that.
Pillowfort simply cannot be the immediate solution to your woes. It needs to be nurtured and cared for to become a mature and happy adult.
If you want Pillowfort to work, they’ll need feedback, advice, bug reports, etc. This is a chance to make Pillowfort the Ao3 of Fanfiction.net. It’s not gonna happen overnight, you need to give it time and love and it’ll get there.
If you don’t want to pay money to get into the beta, that’s ok. It will be open to the public soon enough and you won’t have to pay a dime. Their financial model moving forward sounds good (a subscription fee for super extra features), but even an Ao3 model would work swell for them probably.
We’re living in an interesting time on the internet. Governments across the world are cracking down on content and yet community run websites are starting to thrive more and more.
Tumblr once upon a time was what Pillowfort is today, but this time, let’s make sure Pillowfort can stay independent from mega corporations.
yes this
most of the criticism i’ve seen of pf so far ultimately come back to this
is it an alright platform with a good community? yes. does it have a lot of potential? yes. does it have a lot of problems still being worked out? yes. are the staff open and responsive? absolutely. do i recommend it? yes, if you’re willing to live in a house while it’s being built.
but it’s not a ready-made replacement for tumblr. set your expectations accordingly.
YES THIS
One of the great things about PF is that the staff is listening to the userbase. They want to know what we want and need. We got features like mutuals-only post locking and readmores months before they were originally slated to roll out, just because so many people not only wanted them but said that those were at the top of their wish lists. Yes, that’s right, they actually listened to user feedback – solicited it, even, with surveys! – and then changed their plans based on that feedback. More than once.
There are a lot of cool features that are planned but not yet implemented. There are a lot of bugs. But one of the things that’s been most fun about watching this site grow (I’ve been on there since February) is the moment every few weeks when BAM! we get a major feature we’ve been waiting for, or a major bug magically disappears.
If you don’t want to deal with bugs and lack of features, that’s fine, totally understandable, but don’t shit on the site just yet. None of us knows for sure what it’s going to look like a year from now. Once it’s out of beta and had a chance to work through the inevitable growing pains that will come after that, if you still think it’s going about things all wrong, by all means, warn people away from it.
But right now, if you’re not sure about some of it but are at all curious to see how it turns out, come join us and let Staff know about your concerns. Strike up conversations about the features you think are most important. You have the chance to influence the shape of this site in a way that is rare, and that Tumblr has never given a shit about.
Just don’t go into this kitchen expecting a cake. Because what you’re going to get is a bunch of ingredients and a lady working on mixing them while the oven’s not even done preheating yet. You can either get mad that there’s no cake yet, and go around telling everyone what a shitty baker she is, or you can let her know what flavor frosting you want.
In response to the NSFW ban being enacted by Tumblr Staff, on December 17th 2018 I propose that we all log off of our Tumblr accounts for 24 hours.
The lack of respect and communication between staff and users is stark. Users have been begging staff to delete the porn bot outbreak, which has plagued the website for well over a year. The porn bots oftentimes send people asks and messages, trying to get them to go to a website full of viruses. They also spam advertisements on others posts.
Users have also begged that Tumblr ban neo-nazis, child porn, and pedophiles, all which run rampant on the site. The site/app got so bad that it was taken off the app store.
However, instead of answering the users, Tumblr has instead taken the liberty to ban all NSFW content, regardless of age. But users have already run into issues of their SFW content being marked as sensitive and being flagged as NSFW, not allowing them to share their work.
Not only does this discriminate again content creators, but it also discriminates against sex workers. Disgustingly, the ban will be enacted on December 17 which is also International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.
This ban is disgusting, and while I (and plenty of others) welcome porn bots and child porn being banned, the Tumblr filtration system is broken. It tags artistic work’s nipples as NSFW (when it is art), it tags SFW art as NSFW (when it is not), and does not stop the porn bots, neo-nazis and dozens of other issues.
This ban is discriminatory. This ban is ineffective. This ban is unacceptable.
To protest, log off of your Tumblr account for the entirety of December 17th. Log off at 12 am EST or 9PM PST and stay off for 24 hours. Don’t post. Don’t log on. Don’t even visit the website. Don’t give them that sweet ad revenue.
Tumblr’s stock has already taken a hard hit. Let’s make it tank. Maybe then they will listen to the users.
Recently, Tumblr was removed from the Apple app store due to an incident involving child pornography. This incident is incredibly unfortunate, but it doesn’t stand alone. Tumblr was also removed from the app store due to the large influx of porn bots and pornographic spam, users claiming to be proud to be pedophiles, blatant Nazism, racists who are not deleted for sending hate and harassing users, and more. I myself reported someone for harassing me, but because I had blocked the person and couldn’t access the messages where they harassed me, they were still able to send me anonymous asks. Your support staff, with back doors to the website (presumably), claimed they could not access the messages, and I was left SOL. Many features on this website do nothing to actually protect your users from harassment, racism, homophobia, transphobia, Nazis, pedophiles, predators, porn bots, and more.
You claim in your statement to us that you “have been working on these problems for a long time”. This is blatantly untrue. Please do not lie to us and patronize us. We’ve been here. We’ve seen you do nothing over, and over, and over again.
We complained to you for months and months about the rampant porn bots, and you did nothing except add a report button on mobile which only reported sensitive content or spam at best. You could have addressed this problem with an effective algorithm, but you did not. We complained to you about being harassed and sent hate speech for being LGBT+, and you did nothing. We complained to you about blogs being randomly deleted, and sometimes you’ve restored them, other times you have not. We complained to you that there were people proudly claiming to be “Minor Attracted Persons”, or pedophiles, and you did nothing. We complained to you about people proudly claiming to be white supremacists, and you did nothing. All of these things are “against the community guidelines”, and yet over and over, you have not found effective ways to handle these problems or suppress the feeling of welcome that these users claim to get here. You have had a long time to work on these problems, but you haven’t addressed them. To say you have is untrue.
Multiple other social networking websites, such as WordPress, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and others have effectively dealt with rampant pornography, racism, pedophilia, and other problems without causing massive issues for their users who are not misusing the platform. They are continuing to find new, effective ways to deal with these issues without causing problems for their userbase as a whole. There is no reason that you are unable to do this effectively other than that you wanted to do it quickly. You have once again chosen your stock holders over your users. And we have had enough.
You have already started to ban “Adult” content with a new algorithm. Here are screenshots of just a fraction of the posts you have flagged as containing adult content:
Your new system of simply tackling everything at once is not working. At all. And each of these screenshots is proof of your utter incompetence. None of these posts contain pornographic acts, “female nipples”, or any community violation of any kind.
We, the users, have been asking you for months to deal with these problems – particularly, the porn bots and bots that spam. In order to block a bot from a side blog, I have to do it manually, even though they are in my side blog’s feed. This is a huge issue for mobile – only users. They keep cropping up in droves, taking over our posts and tricking google into making it look like a legitimate blog linked to a pornographic website. We have complained to you for months and months now, and your solution to simply “ban all adult content” is ineffective. I agree that children should not be able to access pornography – but this is not how you tackle a porn bot problem. Your system is utterly useless, allows for racists, pedophiles, porn bots, and Nazis to remain untouched. It also harms sex workers and real people who may use this website for some forms of adult content responsibly. Moreover, as seen above, it harms plenty of users who have in no way violated your terms of service.
If you keep this up, you threaten your website and company as a whole. Many of us are backing up our blogs and planning places to go to.
You already have a content filter for “sensitive” content (content inappropriate for younger viewers). You could have improved this, instead of attacking your entire user base. It seems to be a very lazy “solution”, if you could call it one at all, and one that harms your entire userbase.
If you are going to keep this filter in place and make Tumblr, a website that has never been known for being family friendly and has never claimed to be, you are going to lose millions of your users. We are already planning our exodus. It isn’t hard to follow. Censor us, and we will go somewhere else. That is not a threat. It is a promise.
Welcome to Chaos 