5 ms·
This article utterly misrepresents Tumblr as some kind of paradise. It's definitely not. It's as good and bad as Twitter or Facebook or whatever else. I used
by b5 8y ago
This article utterly misrepresents Tumblr as some kind of paradise. It's definitely not. It's as good and bad as Twitter or Facebook or whatever else. I used Tumblr for years, from probably 2008 until 2017.
The real problem as I see it is there's a large, vocal, vicious echo-chamber effect at play. A lot of its userbase are quite radical and aggressive in their beliefs, and the reblogging system makes it easy to use the platform for bully. It's not entirely optional to interact with radicalised elements on Tumblr. The tagging system lets them find you, and then they can brigade you if you fall foul of whatever pet cause they have.
This happened to me when I'd posted a photo of my dog. She's my pride and joy, and it was a harmless and cute photo of her jumping to catch a ball in the air. My mistake was using the caption "Good girl!" and tag #goodgirl. (I also tagged #dog, #fetch, #springerspaniel, #spaniel.)
I was flooded with follows from people, mostly men but also some young-ish girls, in the "daddy dom" community (their main tag seems to be #ddlg, but #goodgirl was enough for them to find me). That was a pretty disturbing subculture with definitely uncomfortable elements of abuse built right into the foundation of it.
I was also reblogged and targeted by a group of people who had decided that by "gendering" my female dog, I was a bigot. They mercilessly harrassed me. They flooded my inbox with abusive message: "dirty cis scum, kill yourself", things like that. They reblogged my photo saying some pretty vile things about me and my poor dog. In their reblogs they utterly misrepresented what I'd said, reposted it endlessly, called me transphobic, a bigot, threatened to dox me.
In the end I abandoned my entire blog there and deleted it. As far as I know, there's no way to get my dog's photo removed from Tumblr or get the hateful reblogs taken down. I reported them all for abuse and harassment, but Tumblr did nothing. Tumblr's staff don't care. They would never respond on Twitter or by email or to my reports through the form on the site. Just radio silence.
This is purely anecdotal of course. I know someone else who also accidentally drew the ire of Tumblr and ended up having to delete their blog and leave the platform to escape a sustained campaign of harassment and threats from a similar group of people. Again, Tumblr-the-company did nothing to stop it.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoIndeed. I wondered whether the author was talking about a different Tumblr to the one I was familiar with. Even from the early days it seems to have been a community for militant transsexuals, furries, SJWs, and people with niche sexual fetishes.
- pjc50 8y ago> I was also reblogged and targeted by a group of people who had decided that by "gendering" my female dog, I was a bigot. Ah, you've run into an anti-trans false flag operation. Obviously they need to be banned for posting death threats, but they will be a hydra since their main organisation is not organic and is outside the platform.
- blueflow 8y agoI was on tumblr until around 2016 and i can confirm the observations - harassment for totally misrepresented things, just to demonstrate virtue. From the few persons i met IRL it doesn't seem like an false flag.
- jrs95 8y agoI think you seriously underestimate the level of mental illness present on tumblr.
- tinbucket 8y agoWhat basis do you have for concluding it was an anti-trans false-flag operation in this poster's case? Nothing in their post would lead me to naturally reach that conclusion. Downplaying or instantly dismissing this kind of anecdata as the result of a "false flag" is naive at best and dangerous at worst. Speaking from my own experience, I've seen a lot of stuff on Tumblr that leads me to think there's a very active, very angry, very threatening trans lobby on the platform. I've seen repeated threats of violence and worse from trans-identified individuals directed at feminists who want maintain female-only safe-spaces. These posts are rarely taken down and the community will often rally against the "TERFs" being threatened ("Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists"). I know one woman who'd posted about keeping changing rooms for females separated on a sex basis. Her employer and college were contacted repeatedly by a pair of people who said she was spreading hate-speech online. Their goal seems to have been to have her fired. These same people had been making threats of violence against her, culminating in a rape threat. At this point the police became involved and I'm not sure how it's since been resolved. Obviously this is a tiny minority of people but it's a tiny minority that often aren't actively censured or disowned by the larger community, and whose extreme views are reinforced by a sympathetic echo-chamber of like-minded people. Some may be "false-flags", but I don't think they're in the majority by any means.
- makomk 8y agoVery much this. Tumblr has features which seem designed to actively encourage harassment. The quote-tweet feature which that post about Mastodon the other day complained about? As this points out, Tumblr's had its own version of that since the very start, and unlike on Twitter deleting your post does nothing about the quoted copy. It also allows anonymous asks by default, which are widely abused to harass and threaten. It also has an utterly toxic culture built around all this which the press seem to downplay for political reasons, just like they downplayed the Russian influence op which reached pretty much all of Tumblr whilst writing endless articles about Facebook and Twitter.