Obscure Fandom Trash Heap

the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like. 

So you know. 

👏🏾Education 👏🏾is 👏🏾a 👏🏾right,👏🏾 not👏🏾 a👏🏾 service 👏🏾

"To me, WonderlandsxShowtime is...a precious jewel that perpetually glows with color and brightness."

By which I mean, asks used to be WAY more of the tumblr economy. They used to be more common to send, and receive, and see. They were integral to the collaborative, forum-like behavior of old tumblr communities, not even to speak on the HUGE number of ask-blogs that used to exist to only be interacted with in ask-form.

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May I present to you, nationalclothing.org?

The Sari Series: a digital anthology documenting India's regional saree drapes though short films

Purushu Arie's blog; started when he was studying at NIFT, the blogger has gone on to become a leader in the neo-traditional fashion scene in India.

AI companies are acquiring content across the internet for a variety of purposes in all sorts of ways. There are currently very few regulations giving individuals control over how their content is used by AI platforms. Proposed regulations around the world, like the European Union’s AI Act, would give individuals more control over whether and how their content is utilized by this emerging technology. We support this right regardless of geographic location, so we’re releasing a toggle to opt out of sharing content from your public blogs with third parties, including AI platforms that use this content for model training. We’re also working with partners to ensure you have as much control as possible regarding what content is used.

Here are the important details:

We already discourage AI crawlers from gathering content from Tumblr and will continue to do so, save for those with which we partner. 

We want to represent all of you on Tumblr and ensure that protections are in place for how your content is used. We are committed to making sure our partners respect those decisions.

To opt out of sharing your public blogs’ content with third parties, visit each of your public blogs’ blog settings via the web interface and toggle on the “Prevent third-party sharing” option. 

For instructions on how to opt out using the latest version of the app, please visit this Help Center doc. 

Please note: If you’ve already chosen to discourage search crawling of your blog in your settings, we’ve automatically enabled the “Prevent third-party sharing” option.

unfortunately, a lot of the userbase won't opt out. those who don't see this post, those who have posted to tumblr but don't anymore, users on older versions of the app who forget to opt out next time they're on desktop, etc. the point of making it opt-out is to take advantage of people who wouldn't have opted in but don't/can't opt out in time. automatically opting out people who have discouraged search crawling is a gesture that helps Tumblr look more kind, but from the fact that everyone else has to manually opt out, Tumblr is definitely not looking benevolent.

I wonder, will Tumblr/Automattic be selling images from deactivated blogs? I assume deactivated blogs can't opt out.

when will they start selling this data? Is it already too late to keep them from selling every image you've posted before you opted out?

and if they're especially malicious, I wonder if they could get away with saying "this image is from a blog that's opted out, but it was reblogged by a blog that hasn't opted out, so we're selling the image that's on that non-opted-out blog."

An ex-colleague of mine mentioned yesterday that there may be contacts between Automattic and midjourney in that direction, but nothing is public yet and I don't have any more info. They probably won't have anything specific to share either, since they left the company weeks ago too. That being said:

I have no reason to doubt my ex-coworker word, they are a trustworthy person.

Tumblr's CEO has been absurdly enthusiastic (comically, even) about AI, and is a big fan of LLMs and 'AI' companies.

A deal with midjourney could solve tumblr financial issues (not the same company, but openAi is paying up to 5 million/year to news companies to use their content as training data... tumblr generates several orders of magnitude more content than any newspaper or any media company and it only would need a 20 to 30 million per year deal to be profitable)

Nightshade your photo posts now.

Even if you don’t post your own art anymore, go back to your old stuff and watermark it.

Do it ASAP, before the deal goes through and the scraping begins.

This will not only protect your art, but has the opportunity to fuck over this deal on a pretty large scale. The more of these posts that are glazed or poisoned, the less valuable this deal becomes for tumblr and midjourney.