Dear Tumblr: Not Like This
#open supports and celebrates everyone’s right to explore and express themselves in their own way. We always appreciated the unique role tumblr played in providing a safe and open space for self-discovery and self-expression. Whether known to management or not, tumblr was home to countless communities of people finding a way to share themselves—their passions, their fantasies, their dreams, and their identities—forming a more robust and supportive community for everyone.
That community ends on December 17th.
By altering their Terms of Service to deem “adult” content no longer welcome, the most devoted and passionate spaces of tumblr will be gutted. All “adult” blogs, from erotic literary outlets to queer identity outlets and everything in between, will be forced to censor themselves or leave. While tumblr won’t delete your adult blog – allegedly – they will push it back into the closet, making it accessible only to you. No sharing allowed. No community. No social in this social media.
tumblr can change their business model if they want, and by changing their Terms of Service they believe that is all they’re doing. But their methods are egregious, abrupt, and devastating to a significant portion of the content creators and passionate members of this vibrant and diverse community.
tumblr isn’t giving people the necessary time to come up with plan B. Where are we going to go? How are we going to get years worth of archives there? To make matters worse, tumblr’s engine for exporting blogs seems to be choking on the volume of material people are trying to pack up.
One cheer for tumblr for providing a tool to let people gather their archives and export them. But only one.
Here’s what we think tumblr should do right now:
First
Extend the date for shutting down public access to “adult” content out until at least January 1st. Take a deep breath, guys. It’s okay. “Female presenting nipples” haven’t caused any major issues in the world for the last decade or so, and they aren’t going to cause any problems by the end of the month.
Second
They should publicly report, on a daily basis, how many blogs have already been exported, but even more important, how many have requested export but are in the queue for processing. Let the community know how the exodus is going.
Third
They should leave our blogs up and public until our exodus is complete. Shutting us down even as we’re trying to use their clunky export engine is needlessly disrespectful, dismissive, and insulting. It’s the latest form of shaming, brought to you by the fact that, as Larry Lessig says, code is law. It’s power doing what power does when it gets into a panic. tumblr, of all places, should be better than that.
Reblog if you’d like tumblr to take our advice.
piercednipples
