Yeah, the social media situation in general is pretty dreadful.:( I think what's happened on Tumblr is reflective of the larger social media environment. Facebook and Twitter have also been pretty draconian in their censorship. The FOSTA and SESTA stuff, Apple's 'walled garden' extending beyond their walls, and social media being beholden to admakers are all, I think, big parts of this mess.
That was a legitimately bad call by Pillowfort, and I can understand people not wanting to use the site due to the choice to ban someone for a Terms Of Service change that hadn't even been added to the TOS yet. I just don't think Tumblr or any of the other large social media sites have better policies or even better enforcement of their policies. Pillowfort, as flawed as it is, is the closest there is to a Tumblr the way Tumblr used to be, that doesn't ban displaying portions of basic human anatomy, that doesn't autoban content with a half-baked AI in such comically incompetent ways that such posts are frequently reblogged as jokes, and that doesn't abruptly ban tags like 'my art' or 'me' for entirely inexplicable reasons.
Maybe Pillowfort will get worse, will eventually go down the same path Tumblr has. Or maybe it'll disappear. Who knows? My continued use of the platform is entirely dependent on what choices they make. But I don't have the option to return to a Tumblr before the ads, or before the porn ban. Since most the people who objected to Pillowfort returned to Tumblr or went off to Twitter or Facebook rather than taking up somewhere with better policies like Dreamwidth, the only conclusion I can draw is that the larger populations and larger resources of those sites are the actual draw. Because I don't think their content policies are better.
I didn't delete my Tumblr account or stop interacting with people on it for exactly those two reasons. It's just, I value the people who are still on the platform and what they have to say, but I don't value the corporate executives who are slowly trying to strangle out anything subversive from the site. I mourn the loss of what Tumblr used to be, but what it is now is no longer usable to me.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2021-12-28 06:58 am (UTC)That was a legitimately bad call by Pillowfort, and I can understand people not wanting to use the site due to the choice to ban someone for a Terms Of Service change that hadn't even been added to the TOS yet. I just don't think Tumblr or any of the other large social media sites have better policies or even better enforcement of their policies. Pillowfort, as flawed as it is, is the closest there is to a Tumblr the way Tumblr used to be, that doesn't ban displaying portions of basic human anatomy, that doesn't autoban content with a half-baked AI in such comically incompetent ways that such posts are frequently reblogged as jokes, and that doesn't abruptly ban tags like 'my art' or 'me' for entirely inexplicable reasons.
Maybe Pillowfort will get worse, will eventually go down the same path Tumblr has. Or maybe it'll disappear. Who knows? My continued use of the platform is entirely dependent on what choices they make. But I don't have the option to return to a Tumblr before the ads, or before the porn ban. Since most the people who objected to Pillowfort returned to Tumblr or went off to Twitter or Facebook rather than taking up somewhere with better policies like Dreamwidth, the only conclusion I can draw is that the larger populations and larger resources of those sites are the actual draw. Because I don't think their content policies are better.
I didn't delete my Tumblr account or stop interacting with people on it for exactly those two reasons. It's just, I value the people who are still on the platform and what they have to say, but I don't value the corporate executives who are slowly trying to strangle out anything subversive from the site. I mourn the loss of what Tumblr used to be, but what it is now is no longer usable to me.