Yarp!

A better, more positive Tumblr

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

#baddecisions #byetumblr

Theory: Nobody who writes a physics textbook gives any fucks

odinoco:

yourownpetard:

cheattoe:

a-bore-of-a-whore:

lady-of-greenwood:

sindri42:

solwardenclyffe:

sindri42:

sidereanuncia:

ontologicalidiot:

an-actual-stone:

glumshoe:

colonelmagpie:

colonelmagpie:

colonelmagpie:

colonelmagpie:

Evidence:

Update: Legolas’ pupils are about 3.5 cm wide each. Now drawing kawaii Legolas on physics assignment.

And they told you science was no fun.

Science!

I’m going to do it. I’m going to hand it in.

Legolas’s pupil size isn’t the problem here, though. 5 leagues is 17.262 miles. The curvature of the Earth means that for a person of average height, the visual horizon is less than three miles away. Even if your vision is telescopic and the atmosphere is perfectly clear, you can’t see around the planet. If they were standing on a hill, it would have to be at LEAST 198 feet above sea level in order to see the horizon at 17.2 miles away, with nothing tall in between. Which, knowing Rohan, isn’t impossible.

But consider: Elven satellite eyeballs.

you mean like

@sidereanuncia it’s back, the post that I can only imagine haunts your nightmares 

I shall never find peace.

Also, for what it’s worth, there’s absolutely no reason to believe that the curvature of Middle Earth is the same as that of Earth.

There’s no evidence that Middle Earth curves.

Yeah there is.  The Silmarillion states that the world was curved after the fall of Numenor (I believe), preventing access to Valinor.  But Elves (among others) can travel the straight path across it.

So middle earth is round, but not for Elves because magic.

So wait, the reason he can see that far is because Elves just have the ability to ignore the curve of the earth? That’s awesome. It also means that no matter how good your optics got, you would always want elf eyes manning the spyglass because they can see arbitrarily far while everybody else is limited by this ‘horizon’ bullshit.

Oh thank God, my poor elf prince has seen too much in this post

Elves are flat-earthers

This post went from amusing to horrifying, to be brought back down to amusing, sprinkled in with some cannon explanation, and then you leave me here in fucking outrage

This post really was a rollercoaster.

for elves it was a straight line

(via gingerinvermont)

Make better choices.

So there I sit wanting to write words. But there are no words to write. They have left me and there is nothing left. Just a meaningless jumble. A bit like life. Meaningless. But is it? Or is that the point? We seek meaning because we refuse to believe there isn’t one. And where has that lead us? Religion? Our first attempt at explaining the world. Through which we have brought both light and darkness to others of our own kind, not to mention the other creatures on this planet. We are a mess. We like to think that we’re above all that lower animal bullshit but we’ve built our world right on top of one of its prime motivators. Fear. We fear what we cannot control. And so we’ve built systems to determine who has control and who owns what. And then we built systems to manage those systems and determine the value of those participating in the system. And we like to think we’ve generated this great massive machine that cannot be stopped. But that’s just more bullshit. It’s just words. Another meaningless jumble. Something we created to make sense of it all. To create meaning. How petty. If we’re going to create systems of meaning shouldn’t we start with something that benefits more than just other humans? I mean there is a whole planet of creatures that we have not killed yet still sharing this rock with us. More things we seek to control with our systems. But it shouldn’t be that way. No creature has survived the destruction of its habitat. Why should we be any different? We like to think we are different. But we do not act it. We say we are different from those other animals because we have reason and imagination and consciousness. Reason? We collectively act more on emotion and impulse than reason otherwise we’d have stopped fighting among ourselves long ago. Imagination? Most of it is spent on creating ways to make money and exists within the fear based systems we’ve created for ourselves. Consciousness? We barely comprehend it. We are still coming to terms on what it means to be human. Hell most of the world is still fighting just to determine if they get to live or if other humans will come and kill them for whatever reason. Can we stop killing our own? In every context. Can we just start again? Can we just make better choices? Because that’s what it all comes down to in the end. Our choices. We choose to participate. We choose to be part of the system. We can choose to change the system. Or scrap the system and start new. But that’s too scary. Too much fear in the unknown. We’ve imagined that route and it rarely ends well. Usually we end up worse than we started. The main reason is because we screw ourselves over. Humans fighting humans for control. Control of a planet that we’re killing. And we’re so determined to win that we’ve built weapons that can destroy large swaths of said planet, and not only that but pollute it beyond the capacity of life. And we’re proud of this. Our power. Our madness. Our words.

So that’s it then? Just a downer message with no real point? No. If that’s what you took from it then I fear you missed the point. So let me state it here simply. Make better choices. A simple statement, but not an easy task. Start small. Let it grow in you. Just try to be the best you there can possibly be. Choose to be your best you. But the choice is important. For you must decide. It cannot be decided for you else it is not choice.

So there I leave it. Enjoy.