Vapidity For Sale

Feb
19th

Thu

So not only are you a knee jerk censoring nepotist…

…but your a gutless coward too? That’s got to be a tough draw. Way to cave. How about including some meaningful thought and commentary on what truly motivated your decision in the first place and what factors—personal, professional, and philosophical—lead you to back down—don’t just brush it off as some unfortunate mistake…something happened here—let’s take a look.

staff:

I’ve read several hundred responses from users who are upset about the recent changes to our Content Policy.

First, let me again apologize for taking action before publicly explaining these policy changes. Some internal confusion lead to five accounts being suspended prematurely.

To clarify, this policy specifically targeted “reblogging-blogs”, where the sole purpose is to repeatedly reblog posts from a specific user or group. We view this as an abuse of our reblog feature, which places accountably on the identity of the poster.

While there are still relatively few blogs of this genre on Tumblr, they’ve become an increasing detriment to our service as they’ve started to proliferate.

Our moderators make no determinations about your posts, except for spam and illegal content, and we have zero interest in censoring your voice. But we now realize this is the first time our Content Policy forbids content that is potentially meaningful.

After giving this serious consideration, we think it would be more appropriate for us to give you the control to police this content, rather than our moderators. So we’ve hurried to finish a new block feature that will let you filter content from your post notes and Dashboard.

In light of all this, we’ve decided to restore the accounts affected, and remove the language in question from our Content Policy. It was a miscommunication that lead to these accounts being removed prematurely, but it was my decision to leave them off. In retrospect, this was the wrong decision, and I hope we can work to regain your trust and continue building Tumblr into something great.

- David

This is really upsetting I’ve decided that only one of my purposes ought to be the specific negative targeting of members or groups in the tumblr community. The other purposes being my own general enlightenment and amusement regarding the world around me. Does that fit within the terms of service? Alternatively, I was considering making it my sole purpose to generically criticize tumblr communities and members (warning, I expect some lumping here—surely not all of you are created equally). I trust that either approach should pass the bar unless they retro-actively remind themselves that they need to tweak the censorship meme.

david:

I’m really sorry for how poorly I handled this.
The harassing behavior we’re specifically looking to protect against is accounts who’s “sole or primary purpose” involves negatively targeting “specific members or groups within the Tumblr community”

Feb
18th

Wed

This is really upsetting...really, I mean , yes, very, umm yes really, very very isn’t self-delusion grand?

That said, the timing was a mistake. We accidently rushed into enforcing this policy which was, in fact, on hold as we’ve been evaluating a new blocking feature as a programmatic alternative.

We have absolutely no interest in censoring users, though we will continue to police spam and illegal content. We’ll spend this week closely evaluating our policy changes and looking for a programmatic solution.

This policy decision had nothing to do with any personal relationships.

….

Kausfiles

suddenly

This is really upsetting | David's Log

savior to the twit, and censor to the critic

I was just minding my own business today when I stumbled upon tumblr, and specifically its brand spanking new terms of use, which were clearly crafted to camouflage a rather heavy handed form of censorship—censorship in the name of friendship no less—and worst of all, friendship to an apparent complete waste of space from what I can gather via my online investigation.

How sad I thought, and as I picked through the self-justifying (righteous surely ed) text of the site’s owner, I wondered how on earth they were managing to convince themselves they were in fact doing the right thing.

It occurred to me, that one way to check the veracity of tumblr’s claims that their recent actions did not constitute censorship, would be to write a blog that clearly falls within the bounds of the new terms of use, while still maintaining the central theme of those that had been censored—namely that narcissistic, vapid, self-promoting leaches deserve to be criticized—widely, openly, and often—preferably with the same level of tenacity and vigor with which they promote themselves.

I’ve just joined, but look forward to seeing how the system works—and yes using the reblogger function—but only for good, I promise.