Forest

Τζουμερκα / Shaped and built into a steep rugged rock, the Kipina Monastery was a secret hideout throughout the Greek Revolution and still offers a feeling of hospitality and serenity to its visitors.

For those of you who haven’t seen this announcement, tumblr recently made some changes to the iOS version of the app, purportedly to comply with Apple’s content guidelines. These changes took effect on Dec 21, starting in version 22.5.1 of the iOS app. As some of you may recall, Apple’s strict guidelines were the driving force for the infamous Great Purge of 2018, which coincidentally also happened around this time of year, but it seems banning all of the female-presenting nipples wasn’t good enough for Apple.

Below is a summary of the important changes. Note that these changes technically ONLY affect those using the iOS app. If you’re accessing tumblr through a different app or operating system (Google Chrome, Android app, etc) it won’t affect you directly but it will affect your followers who use iOS so you should definitely be aware of it.

The list of banned tags has been expanded. As before, there’s no way to know which words or phrases have been banned until you try searching for them, in which case you’ll either get no search results or the following message: “This content has been hidden because of potentially suggestive or explicit content.” You may think this doesn’t concern you if you don’t post explicit material, but do not make the mistake of expecting the banned tags to be logical or reasonable. I’ve already encountered multiple completely innocuous posts (random fandom gifsets) that seem to be hidden on iOS for no discernible reason.

Blogs that have been flagged as explicit can no longer be viewed. Previously, flagged blogs just had their posts hidden from searches, but if you knew the username you could still visit it after clicking through a warning about sensitive content. Now you can’t access it at all.

Likes and reblogs from blogs that have been flagged will no longer show up in your notes. This one won’t affect most people’s user experience as much as the others, but it does mean you may be missing notes. It’s unclear if likes and reblogs from flagged blogs will still count towards the overall note total (and only be missing from the activity feed and note viewer) but I suspect that’s the case.

THE BIG ONE: ANY POST TAGGED WITH A BANNED TAG WILL NO LONGER SHOW UP ON YOUR DASHBOARD. Previously, if you tagged a post with a banned word or phrase (even if the words were used inside another tag), that post would not show up in searches, but your followers would still be able to see it on their dashboard. Now those posts are hidden from your own followers as well. This includes both original posts and reblogs. And if that wasn’t bad enough, here’s the real kicker: even if you don’t tag something with one of the banned words, if the OP used a banned tag, any reblogs of that post will not show up on anyone’s dashboard (on the iOS app). The only saving grace here, and I hate to even call it that, is that the blocked posts are still visible if you visit a blog directly or if you have post notifications turned on.

As usual, tumblr was extremely unclear and evasive about all of this in their official announcement. Not surprising, of course, since if more people were aware of these new draconian tactics I can’t imagine there wouldn’t be more of an uproar about it. Tumblr claims that these changes are somewhat temporary and that they are currently working on something that will allow for a less restricted iOS experience, but they refuse to say what that something is and when it will be implemented. And let’s just say, considering their track record, I’m not hopeful.

All of this is horrible and infuriating for many reasons, but the worst part is how insanely counterproductive it is to creating the “safe” environment tumblr (or more specifically Apple) supposedly wants.

Tags have always been used for both blog organization and filtering purposes. Tagging posts with triggers and content warnings is a common practice that gives users the ability to filter out content they may find upsetting or just don’t don’t want to see for whatever reason. By choosing to ban a bunch of unlisted “sensitive content” tags, all they’re doing is encouraging people who want to share that kind of content to come up with alternative less well-known tags or simply not tag that content at all anymore if they want it to show up on their follower’s dashboards, thereby making it more likely for someone to encounter it when they didn’t want to.

And it's not just my job. That chocolate guy that everyone loves to watch? He's got skilled muscle memory. Maybe he's never crafted the exact thing we're watching him make today, but he's made similar things. He knows the knife strokes. He knows what any particular pressure on a filling bag will produce for him. And it's not just fancy jobs. The folks who pick up garbage in a lot of places have to know how to handle large, heavy cans. Folks on assembly lines can do their motions with speed and accuracy. Even office jobs, with the muscle memory of hello addressee and their sincerely lines experience this.

And that's sort of the thing about writing stories isn't it? Typing is a sort of muscle memory but there's muscle memory in what you do with it. When you do it enough, your muscles remember how to craft a dialogue tag. They know how to conjure adjectives. And if you do it enough, your mind picks up the muscle memory of how to write dialogue and create descriptions and craft a plot, and you do it when you've only set out to write a story, not a plot. When you do it enough, your mind and body learn how to do it almost without you. It becomes a dance.

Dying microblogging site where “remember to reblog art” and “remember not to guilt trip people for not reblogging art” go viral on repeat

Site with no gallery view and no way to organise your own posts, you also don’t get to customise the rectangular thumbnail of your non-rectangular art but at least you can zoom in. Also if anyone reblogs your art but makes a comment on it then from that point on they get the likes, sorry!

Site with gallery view  but everything has to be square and 1080p and you can’t zoom in. Hope you like squares and institutionilised art theft and repost accounts with thousands of followers making money off your work. If you don’t upload a new post, a story, a reel, a tweest, a song and a dance and a blood sacrifice every single day, the Algorithm will bury your posts and no one will ever see them.

Pretentious art site for professional artists with VERY good gallery customising options that nobody actually uses to network or gain an audience but everyone feels compelled to still update their portfolio on because this is the only place you *can*

This site was good in 2010 but now all serious artists have fled it and it mainly hosts uncensored fetish art, actual porn, and shitty memes by people who think this is Photobucket