The girl nipples have eyelashes

[lizbee]

In case you missed it, there are Tumblr shenanigans ahoy.

An extremely rough timeline, assembled from my own fuzzy memory without recourse to sources:

• Tumblr's app got dropped from the app store because the site carries actual child porn. This has been an issue for the site for a while, but only became an actual problem they were motivated to solve when it affected new sign ups and therefor revenue. Because Tumblr is THE WORST.
• Various accounts have been deleted and tags wiped since, largely based on reports? Because Tumblr is THE WORST, a lot of these were just regular fan sites and innocuous tags that attracted reports, because a noisy minority of fans can't tell the difference between "a pairing I don't like" and "child abuse material". Allegedly the "chronic pain" tag was wiped, too, but I can still see it -- I think caching might be an issue there.
• I woke up yesterday to discover that Tumblr has announced that, come 17 December, all adult material (including "female presenting nipples") will be banned from the site. At this point they say written material is safe, but the actual terms are fuzzy.
• The entire internet loses its mind over "female presenting nipples", because that's hilarious. 
• But also Tumblr's new Offensive Content Detecting AI is out automatically flagging posts as sensitive, with a notable bias against even the most chaste of queer content, eg, my friends' engagement picture, a screencap of Dax and Kira and a declaration that DS9 is lesbian culture, Alexander Siddig's face, etc. 

So even if you don't post or consume adult content on Tumblr, as a platform for fandom, art or social interaction, come 17 December, it's going to be a lot quieter and less fun to use. 

I'm honestly kind of bummed. I whinge a lot about Tumblr, and I think that it's a terrible platform for interaction, but it's great for sharing. Especially fan art -- I'm not a great artist, or even a very good one, but I felt comfortable throwing my silly sketches out into the ether.

And it was a wonderful place for just going, "Hey, I like this." You didn't have to create fanworks, or even write up a post to express your fondness for something, you could just reblog a gifset. It was easy to be a casual fan. Dreamwidth doesn't have that capability, which is why I think it's perceived as a more challenging platform. 

Eh. Platforms come and platforms go, and Tumblr won't disappear overnight. But it's a shame. 

(Pillowfort is being touted as the alternative, but ... well, it's back from its security audit hiatus, but the servers are robust in the most Journalfen sense of the word.)

Comments

[jesuswasbatman]

I realised eventually that your post title was about how cartoon characters are marked as female, but for a while I was thinking about Shelley's alleged drug hallucination of a woman with eyes instead of nipples.

[lizbee]

That's exactly the sort of sick thinking that Tumblr's trying to stamp out!

(I have seen some EXCELLENT sketches of nipples wearing false moustaches in the last 24 hours.)