Living in the Past

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.

🔥 With your help, we passed Title II net neutrality protections. Now we need to defend it.🔥

On December 14 the FCC will vote on Commissioner Pai’s plan to repeal Title II rules. This week he tried to justify that decision with a “myth busting” explainer where he makes a lot of sweeping claims he doesn’t think you’ll fact check. 

So let’s go through his big points:

❌ Mr. Pai claims ISPs won’t block access or throttle content

These are the real facts. Before Title II, the internet was so “free and open” that… 

Comcast blocked P2P file sharing services (EFF).

AT&T blocked Skype from iPhones (Fortune) and, later, wanted FaceTime users to pay for a more expensive plan (Freepress).

MetroPCS blocked all streaming video except YouTube (Wired).

In today’s media market where the same huge companies make and deliver content, Commissioner Pai wants us to trust that corporations won’t use their dominance to bury competitive content or services. 

❌ Mr. Pai claims Title II keeps ISPs from building new networks

Here’s another claim Commissioner Pai doesn’t want you to fact check, but:

AT&T’s own CEO told investors that the company would deploy more fiber optic networks in 2016 than 2015 when the FCC passed Title II protections (Investor call transcript). 

Charter’s CEO said “Title II, it didn’t really hurt us; it hasn’t hurt us” (Ars Technica).  

And Comcast actually increased investment in their network by 10% in Q1 of this year (Ars). 

❌ Mr. Pai claims repealing Title II won’t hurt competition

As we mentioned above, ISPs tried to interfere with the services their customers could access and courts had to step in to stop them.

The FCC tried to craft net neutrality rules in 2010 called the Open Internet Order but the ISPs sued and won. The courts told the FCC that the only way to guarantee a free and open internet was using their Title II authority. Without those protections, any of these things would be legal:

Your ISP launches a streaming video service and starts throttling other streaming services until they’re unusable.

Your phone company cuts a deal with a popular music streaming service so it doesn’t count towards your data cap but lowers your overall data limit. If a better service comes along (or your favorite artist releases new tracks somewhere else) you can’t use it without incurring huge data fees.

A billionaire buys your ISP and blocks access to news sites that challenge their ideology. 

Repealing Title II would be like letting a car company own the roads and banning a competitor from the highways.

❌ Mr. Pai claims there won’t be fast lanes and slow lanes

Let’s break this down: We won’t have fast lanes and slow lanes, we’ll have “priority access” and…non-priority access? Well gosh.

🚨 Please help us protect Title II one more time! 🚨

This week we co-signed a letter with more than 300 other companies—businesses Mr. Pai gleefully ignores—urging the FCC to retain the Title II internet protections. Now we need you.

Go to 👉 Battle For The Net 👈  to start a call with your representatives in Congress. Tell them to publicly support Title II protections. 

The FCC votes on December 14.

We’re only powerful when we work together.

Oh, also: that post about automatically unfollowing the #net neutrality tag—it’s not true. It’s really not. That’s not who we are. Whatever happened, we haven’t been able to reproduce it. We tried. A lot.

But if it were true—which it’s not, we feel compelled to say again—THAT’S EXACTLY WHY YOU SHOULD CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES and demand a free, open, and neutral internet.

Civil discussion

Missed the point.

For real, long-lasting love, the No. 1 trait to seek is niceness: expert

Make a mental list of attributes you’d require in your perfect mate. Do you picture a handsome, tall man, with six figures in the bank, a sharp wit, a sweet sensibility and an Ivy League diploma to round him out?

Well, I have a bridge to sell you.

That’s because in love, as with genies, we only get three wishes, says relationship expert Ty Tashiro. The more traits you pick that are above the average, the lower the statistical odds that you’ll find a match. And three is the tipping point.

Imagine you have a room of 100 men. If you choose mediocrity — the trifecta of average income, looks and height — you’ll have, statistically, only 13 suitors out of 100 to choose from. Increase your criteria to an attractive man at least 6-feet tall who makes $87,000, and you’re left with only one.

Add another trait — funny, kind, even a political affiliation — and it becomes statistically impossible to find him out of 100 men.

Tashiro, a professor at the Center for Addictions, Personality, and Emotion Research at the University of Maryland, has run the numbers and thinks we’re approaching this whole finding-a-mate thing wrong. He urges singles to be more statistical in their approach to the “irrational” world of dating.

“All this wishing has led to a case of wanting everything and getting nothing,” Tashiro writes in his first book, “The Science of Happily Ever After: What Really Matters in the Quest for Enduring Love” (Harlequin). Dating should be “about learning to weed out the undesirable traits and rethinking our views about what really matters in a romantic partner.”

Our fairy-tale view of romance — 88 percent of adults believe in soul mates — has contributed to the fact that although 90 percent of people will marry in their lifetimes, only three in 10 will find enduring love, Tashiro says. (He gets this statistic by adding unhappy marriages and separations to the 50 percent divorce rate).

When finding a long-term partner, don’t waste your wishes, he warns.

So what should be on your list? Keep attractiveness off the table, if you can. Looks are not a predictor of sexual satisfaction, nor do they correlate to happier marriages. In fact, there “is no reliable association between physical attractiveness and relationship satisfaction,” he writes, quoting from his own research.

A study at the University of Tennessee, which recruited 82 newlyweds to rate each other’s attractiveness (to keep it honest they also had the research assistants rate their hotness factor), corroborates his conclusions. What they found was that there was “no relationship between either partner’s level of physical attractiveness and either partner’s relationship satisfaction.” The only significant association found was that the most physically attractive men were least satisfied with their marriages.

In addition, money does not a happy marriage make — at least over a certain point. Money makes a difference on the low end of the income scale (which has the highest divorce rates in the first 10 years of marriage), but there seem to be “diminishing returns” on happiness in marriage above a financially stable $75,000 a year.

“Once this $75,000 threshold is crossed, there is no significant association between more wealth and higher levels of psychological well-being,” Tashiro writes. “There comes a point when affluence becomes associated with social pressures and social isolation.”

It seems smartest, then, to focus on finding someone who can “help you create a household where basic needs are met and there is a low probability of experiencing economic hardship.”

So what is the best personality indicator for sustaining a loving relationship? The answer is … drum roll, please … agreeableness, a. k. a. “the nice guy.”

Agreeableness, one of the Big Five personality traits in the Five Factor Model of human psychology — the others being extroversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness — describes someone who is “courteous, flexible, trusting, good-natured, cooperative, forgiving, soft-hearted and tolerant.”

Sure, it’s unsexy, but it’s the most reliable sign that your mate is a keeper for the long haul.

One study of 168 couples found that “the best variables for predicting who would stay married, even better than love, expressions of affection or negativity, was responsiveness, which is closely related to the trait of agreeableness,” Tashiro writes.

Plus, agreeable people are often better in bed.

“Men high in agreeableness are not only more likely to be kind, but also more likely to keep the sexual desire alive in relationships,” he writes. They are more giving and often more sensitive, which makes for better between-the-sheets action.

In other words, when looking for marriage material, nice guys should finish first. This is equally true for men looking for women: Niceness trumps all.

If

you’re playing the odds, it’s best to invest in a nice mate instead of a hot or filthy rich one.

Even more so, nice guys tend to stay nice. Looks and money do not come with a lifelong guarantee, while personality traits (i.e. those Big Five) tend to stay constant over a lifetime, according to longitudinal studies.

So what is the No. 1 worst trait for relationship sustainability? Sorry, Woody Allen and friends: This one is neuroticism, defined as those prone to anxiety, depression, embarrassment, emotional instability and insecurity.

One study found that neurotic partners were more likely to break up with partners with lower rates of neuroticism “as if neurotics could not stand their good fortune.”

Many other studies have found that neuroticism is the No. 1 predictor of future relationship success — or lack thereof.

“The only variable that distinguished happily married couples from those who were unhappily married and from the two groups that divorced was contrariness, which is the variable most closely related to the personality trait of neuroticism,” Tashiro writes.

That’s not all. Openness, though a good trait on the surface — cultivated, cultured, imaginative, original — makes for a relationship disaster when combined with low levels of conscientiousness. This novelty-seeking mate is almost certain to cheat, he writes.

Unfortunately, because of the magic tricks that love plays on perception, we often don’t see the tell-tale signs. There’s actually a term for this trend: Researchers call it “positive illusory bias,” when people inflate the positive personality traits and future potential of their mates, compared to outside judges like family, friends and even strangers.

Take this sobering study conducted by John Gottman at the University of Washington. Couples came to the “Love Lab” and were asked to talk for 15 minutes about “continuing disagreements” and “events of the day” as researchers who had never met the couple observed.

Certain behaviors — like signs of defensiveness or resentment — were noted. With these details, trained researchers were able to detect whether or not the couple would divorce in 10 years with 90 percent accuracy. In another similar study done at Harvard, even untrained undergraduates were able to guess the couples’ futures based on a 15 minute interaction with an 81 percent accuracy.

While researchers can see clearly, so many of us are blinded by love.

So what are we do to?

To properly fall in love, you need to have sound levels of “liking” and “lusting,” Tashiro writes. It sounds simple, but maintaining both factors is complicated — especially when you take into account attrition rates.

Like and lust diminish over time, but at different rates. According to studies, liking declines at a rate of 3 percent per year, while lust deteriorates faster at 8 percent per year. Clearly, putting our eggs in the like basket is a much smarter investment strategy, Tashiro says.

Knowing all this — and most of us should — doesn’t stop the fact that finding a mate is largely an “irrational” process. Statistics and love are like oil and water, but Tashiro hopes to make the mixture a bit more palatable, especially for those looking for long-term love.

Be clear about our goals, he says. Are we looking for a fling? A marriage? Do we want stability or a hot affair? Once we know this, move on to the traits that we require in a lover. (Remember: No more than three.)

“A grown-up love story should not be a fairy tale or a romantic tragedy, but instead should be approached as a mystery,” he writes. “If the goal is to find the truth in love, to search for love that is real and enduring, then love cannot be left to fate.”

One thing you can do is to take seriously those early red flags, the peccadilloes in our loved ones we’re certain we can change.