>Inscription#0009: "I can't concentrate + the fall of Tumblr"
Man, I procrastinated with the making of all these recent posts for a looong fucking time. It wasn't planned or voluntary either, starting with things is just incredibly hard for me. I have a lot of ideas for things I want to do and I know I need to do mandatory schoolwork, but if it doesn't interest me or seems cumbersome, I cannot for dear life start working on it on time. I am extremely easily distracted and sitting at the computer offers a hundred thousand ways of getting easily distracted, but this is also where I'm supposed to be doing my schoolwork. It's a vicious circle. I blame my depression and ADD for not being able to do stuff before deadlines, and I also try to fight them the best I can. It's hard. The internet and video games offer numerous many places to escape to, to the point that I do different types of absolutely useless procrastinatory (that's not a word) stuff during different nights; this way I cannot blame myself for doing the same useless things night after night after night and I get to hear some teeny tiny comforting words whispering in the back of my head saying "you did something different today, it's not your fault there's so much useless things to see/watch/do".
Whenever I'm on vacation, my sleeping schedule gets obliterated the very first night I know I don't have to wake up from early. I stay up 'til 6-7 in the morning doing dumb stuff which usually are not productive, at least not usefully so. Sure, I might find a new interesting mod for The Sims 4 I'll probably someday use or I might finally watch that one movie I've wanted to see for years. But as said, they don't serve me in any other way than to grant a momentary feeling of satisfaction. After I'm done with whatever the thing is that time, I feel bad for not doing anything actually useful. There's a banging in my brain reminding me that I have lots of more important things to do. I could've done schoolwork, I could've continued with the world building I'm doing for my book project, I could've worked on a commission. Like, if I'm gonna fuck up my sleeping schedule, at least do something productive in exchange. At some point, the internet WILL be the bane of my existence.
To form a short, pretentious analysis, I'm just another sleep-deprived money conveyor for the masses of website owners. They don't care what kind of people use their services, as long as they're getting money from ads and views. I do have two ad-blocking addons on my browser and they're pretty good at hiding a lot of ads, even from various video players. Do the websites still make money from just visiting..? Not an expert in these things. But most are pretty adamant in keeping their visitors on their sites for as long as possible. As said, "no matter what kind of people they are, just please keep using our site or we go bankrupt".
But is it their responsibility to ensure their users are doing well in life? Is it their job to make sure that their users do not suffer from health issues that might have something to do with using their site? A recent incident with the popular blogging site Tumblr made me think about it for a bit. As a longtime user of the site myself, I've seen a lot of policy changes and interface changes that have mostly not been agreeable with the userbase, but a single recent happening turned the site almost upside down. Tumblr is a blogging website and has millions of different types of blogs, ranging from someone's personal diary to a collection of aesthetic inspiration to a source of study material to fandom wars to an art portfolio to sharing political views to porn. With the latter's case, porn ranged from regular stuff to weird fetishes and downright illegal material, like animal and child porn. Other unsavory people, like neo-nazis and people advocating hate speech towards quite much any group of people (popular ones being e.g. LGBT+, white cis men, women, anything really) were also running rampant and Tumblr's staff is known to be notoriously disregarding of all this. However, this all changed earlier this month when they announced that "adult material" and hate speech would no longer be tolerated on the site ad will be removed.
It started with Tumblr's phone app getting taken down from Apple's App Store due to Apple's staff finding child porn on someone's blog. Tumblr's staff were shaken and startled because this would mean a considerable drop in their finances due to people with iPhones no longer being able to download the app. Trying to keep their public image clean, they finally decided to take action against problematic and illegal stuff their had been harboring, but only so that their app would reappear on Apple's site and money would once again flow in regularly. Only NOW that their fiasco of administrative skills had made it to the news were they interested in doing something about it. And how did they go about it? They made an algorithm bot, programmed it to flag anything and everything that even distinctively resembled a nude human body or a sexual act and set it free on the site to do just that. It certainly tried its best.
The final takedown of "adult material" posts took place on December 17th, and my blog's tag for NSFW stuff looks very sad now.
By eliminating ""porn"" from their website, Tumblr's staff tried to assure that it was to try and keep illegal things happening again and to make the site more child-friendly, and apparently they are also preparing for the new SESTA/FOSTA laws that are supposed to come into effect in January. But by doing this, they have effectively weeded down a huge chunk from their userbase, who have migrated to other websites such as Twitter and Pillowfort. The remaining users also had a protest on December 17th in the form of not logging into the site to demonstrate how shitty the staff's decision was. And I do agree with them. NSFW material has always been part of Tumblr and some people used the site as their main source for fandom porn (young people are horny, don't blame us). A big part of the site's material has been stripped off and to be quite honest, it is such a weird feeling I get every time I visit the site now. We live in the times of big changes and this was one of them. Huh.
As of now, Tumblr also hasn't been taking definitive action against neo-nazis and other horrible people on the site. Remains to be seen if they ever will. To the staff, those people are more acceptable than boobs. Something to chew on.
I started this post talking about my tendency to get easily distracted on the very machine I'm supposed to work on and it derailed into coming undone about one of my (not so) favourite websites. I really can't concentrate, can I.
Whenever I'm on vacation, my sleeping schedule gets obliterated the very first night I know I don't have to wake up from early. I stay up 'til 6-7 in the morning doing dumb stuff which usually are not productive, at least not usefully so. Sure, I might find a new interesting mod for The Sims 4 I'll probably someday use or I might finally watch that one movie I've wanted to see for years. But as said, they don't serve me in any other way than to grant a momentary feeling of satisfaction. After I'm done with whatever the thing is that time, I feel bad for not doing anything actually useful. There's a banging in my brain reminding me that I have lots of more important things to do. I could've done schoolwork, I could've continued with the world building I'm doing for my book project, I could've worked on a commission. Like, if I'm gonna fuck up my sleeping schedule, at least do something productive in exchange. At some point, the internet WILL be the bane of my existence.
To form a short, pretentious analysis, I'm just another sleep-deprived money conveyor for the masses of website owners. They don't care what kind of people use their services, as long as they're getting money from ads and views. I do have two ad-blocking addons on my browser and they're pretty good at hiding a lot of ads, even from various video players. Do the websites still make money from just visiting..? Not an expert in these things. But most are pretty adamant in keeping their visitors on their sites for as long as possible. As said, "no matter what kind of people they are, just please keep using our site or we go bankrupt".
But is it their responsibility to ensure their users are doing well in life? Is it their job to make sure that their users do not suffer from health issues that might have something to do with using their site? A recent incident with the popular blogging site Tumblr made me think about it for a bit. As a longtime user of the site myself, I've seen a lot of policy changes and interface changes that have mostly not been agreeable with the userbase, but a single recent happening turned the site almost upside down. Tumblr is a blogging website and has millions of different types of blogs, ranging from someone's personal diary to a collection of aesthetic inspiration to a source of study material to fandom wars to an art portfolio to sharing political views to porn. With the latter's case, porn ranged from regular stuff to weird fetishes and downright illegal material, like animal and child porn. Other unsavory people, like neo-nazis and people advocating hate speech towards quite much any group of people (popular ones being e.g. LGBT+, white cis men, women, anything really) were also running rampant and Tumblr's staff is known to be notoriously disregarding of all this. However, this all changed earlier this month when they announced that "adult material" and hate speech would no longer be tolerated on the site ad will be removed.
It started with Tumblr's phone app getting taken down from Apple's App Store due to Apple's staff finding child porn on someone's blog. Tumblr's staff were shaken and startled because this would mean a considerable drop in their finances due to people with iPhones no longer being able to download the app. Trying to keep their public image clean, they finally decided to take action against problematic and illegal stuff their had been harboring, but only so that their app would reappear on Apple's site and money would once again flow in regularly. Only NOW that their fiasco of administrative skills had made it to the news were they interested in doing something about it. And how did they go about it? They made an algorithm bot, programmed it to flag anything and everything that even distinctively resembled a nude human body or a sexual act and set it free on the site to do just that. It certainly tried its best.
The final takedown of "adult material" posts took place on December 17th, and my blog's tag for NSFW stuff looks very sad now.
By eliminating ""porn"" from their website, Tumblr's staff tried to assure that it was to try and keep illegal things happening again and to make the site more child-friendly, and apparently they are also preparing for the new SESTA/FOSTA laws that are supposed to come into effect in January. But by doing this, they have effectively weeded down a huge chunk from their userbase, who have migrated to other websites such as Twitter and Pillowfort. The remaining users also had a protest on December 17th in the form of not logging into the site to demonstrate how shitty the staff's decision was. And I do agree with them. NSFW material has always been part of Tumblr and some people used the site as their main source for fandom porn (young people are horny, don't blame us). A big part of the site's material has been stripped off and to be quite honest, it is such a weird feeling I get every time I visit the site now. We live in the times of big changes and this was one of them. Huh.
As of now, Tumblr also hasn't been taking definitive action against neo-nazis and other horrible people on the site. Remains to be seen if they ever will. To the staff, those people are more acceptable than boobs. Something to chew on.
I started this post talking about my tendency to get easily distracted on the very machine I'm supposed to work on and it derailed into coming undone about one of my (not so) favourite websites. I really can't concentrate, can I.
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