staff:

Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.

Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).  

Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.

So what is changing?

Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.

Why are we doing this?

It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.

So what’s next?

Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.

Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.

Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.

Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.

Jeff D’Onofrio
CEO

For all who wish to see the epitome of failure to protect their own creators, look no further than Tumblr. They’re about to screw over the biggest source of income and creatives that they have, and they’re doing so under the pretext of helping make tumblr “better”.

What a failure of a company.

kaisermakes:

Storytime!

Halloween a few years back my mates and I were dressed up for Halloween and my cat furry roommate (good guy, furries are entertaining folks) was wearing his partial suit out with us. We were in Boston proper and all of us were on a budget at the time, so the only option for a late night drink and dinner open to us was a place called Dick’s Last Resort. 

If you’ve never been, the big draw at Dick’s is that they’re dicks to you.  The staff are sarcastic, they throw your menus and straws and shit at you, and they make you hats that say mean stuff. 

I don’t get it either. So anyways, we’ve got - I’ll call him Frank - the cat with us, and Frank’s 100% ready to go fuck with Dicks, so we head on in.

The waitress starts doing her bit, but the cat in the room has thrown off her game and she doesn’t really know how to handle Frank in Full Cat mode. 

He points out the drink he wants without speaking, with a paw, on the menu and she asks for an ID and starts saying ‘I swear to god your ID better have a big fuckkin’ cat on it or-“

She threw his licence back at us and walked away speechless. Didn’t talk to us the rest of the evening.

Anyways, I dug up this old photo today and thought it deserved to be preserved for posterity.  So here you go, the day Frank broke Dicks.

This is the bast thing ever. Period.

caramelbunnies:

I know pirates gonna pirate, but seeing artists talk about torrenting night in the woods is crazy offensive. Like, you expect others to support your art when you’re ripping off individual artists? NITW is made by literally three people (Scott, Bethany, Alec) and their publisher is a mom and pop shop run from somewhere in Michigan like come on. In Scott’s own words:

outcastspice:

razairazerci:

religiousragings:

There is a famous story told in Chassidic literature that addresses this very question. The Master teaches the student that God created everything in the world to be appreciated, since everything is here to teach us a lesson. 

One clever student asks “What lesson can we learn from atheists? Why did God create them?”

The Master responds “God created atheists to teach us the most important lesson of them all — the lesson of true compassion. You see, when an atheist performs and act of charity, visits someone who is sick, helps someone in need, and cares for the world, he is not doing so because of some religious teaching. He does not believe that god commanded him to perform this act. In fact, he does not believe in God at all, so his acts are based on an inner sense of morality. And look at the kindness he can bestow upon others simply because he feels it to be right.”

“This means,” the Master continued “that when someone reaches out to you for help, you should never say ‘I pray that God will help you.’ Instead for the moment, you should become an atheist, imagine that there is no God who can help, and say ‘I will help you.’”

ETA source: Tales of Hasidim Vol. 2 by Mar

I started reading this and was worried it would be something attacking atheists, or bashing religion, but this makes me really, really happy.

Wow!!

walkintotheclublikeanairplane:

otherkin is when you get to special snowflake that you must denounce your original snowflake-ness and then evolve into an even more special snowflake 1 special snowflake to rule them all however dumb and fucked up that kingship shall be