#broccoli-bitching

Laughing so hard lmao

orz

Ultimately my goal is to make enough money from my artwork to travel around the world and live with my future partners (haven't met them yet!!)

As far as passions goes, I'm just a passionate person and that finds its way into everything I do. I love art, science, the details of things and the relationship between them - I love learning new stuff and teaching people things, I love love and I love loving people for who they are... honestly I could spend the rest of the day on this text posts and it still wouldn't be enough to describe everything!! So I'll leave it at that :3

People are way too worked up about it, tbh.

First of all: The chronological dashboard is staying! No one ever said anything to fucking threaten that. People literally made that up, and @staff had to make a whole separate post about it.

The "algorithmic changes" would affect things like recommended blogs and the notoriously broken search feature we've all been begging for a fix to for a decade now.

This is VERY much the tumblr user base being hostile out of habit. Literally the announcement gave us two (2) features we've been begging for for years. Fixes to search AND the ability to make custom chronological dashboards featuring only specific blogs.

But instead of celebrating, everyone is losing their actual shit over the word "algorithm" with no idea what it actually means. Algorithm does not mean "super evil magical AI boogeyman that takes away your ability to blog with your friends." I know that's how facebook and google use it, and the fear is well earned, but it's misdirected in this case.

Of course, it's worth noting that I'm biased. I am very lenient with tumblr's current staff. I've lived through every era in tumblr staffing, and this is the only staff group that has ever taken user feedback seriously.

Unfortunately, people seem to think that the exorbitant excesses of the indie era and the obnoxious censorship of the corporate era are also the fault of the current staff.

In actuality, those are inherited problems that have been nightmarish to untangle from the heinous spaghetti code that they also inherited.

The stuff we love about tumblr (chronological dashboard, ability to turn off ads and recommendations, custom urls and blog themes, etc) is here to stay.

Has the site always been this horny/sex positive?

idk if it's just the circles I'm in but it's so refreshing to see people just be this...openly horny you know? Really encouraged me to get more comfortable expressing that. Especially coming from a private puritanical/sex negative upbringing.

(also the willingness of people to ask for/ participate in horny DMs has been fun for me ngl lmao)

Actually, this is our medium setting.

In the heyday, before SESTA/FOSTA got passed in the US leading to sweeping porn bans across many platforms (and slow creeping porn bans across others, eg twitter)? Tumblr was MUCH more sex positive than even this.

Things started going dramatically down hill circa 2015.

It was so openly expected that people would treat sex as just another subject of discussion and art on tumblr, that it actually left us surprisingly vulnerable.

See, in the US especially, sex is regarded as absolutely evil. Something to be allowed only in the briefest moments of a marriage, solely for popping out kids.

So tumblr's extremely sex positive atmosphere meant it was often rather alarming to newcomers.

And when they expressed any discomfort, SWERFs (Sex Work Exclusionary Radical Feminists; TERFs but for sex instead of gender) would immediately pile onto them, love bombing them and reassuring them that their discomfort is Good, Actually, and all those nasty sexy queers are just trying to sexually abuse them, etc etc.

They would use a combination of extreme affection and isolation to separate these kids from their social groups and families, and force them to watch hours of porn with the specific intent of creating a traumatic trigger around sex, so these victims could be trusted to go out and start harassing the shit out of anyone who mentioned it.

They especially targeted children. The reason "minors do not interact" is such a common phrase is because of that. Same with "don't you know I'm neurodivergent and a minor."

These SWERFs would start huge discord servers and skype groups where they would collect any kid who saw a dick on tumblr and didn't like it, and basically brainwash them. I know how that sounds but it's NOT an exagerration. They literally formed an actual, honest to god cult.

That army of SWERF addled kids not only drove several people to suicide, but actually raped people, hospitalized artists, and caused irreparable damage. If you see someone complaining about "antiships" on here, that's the name of the cult movement in question. You may see people call themselves "ex-anti" in the same way they would "ex-catholic," and those people who got out of that cult can attest to how horrific it is.

Unfortunately, you'll also see them insist that they aren't a cult, or that anyone who calls them a cult (including parents, therapists, and doctors) is just Too Online and needs to Touch Grass instead of "fighting with a minor." Some of these people insistently call themselves minors despite being 25!!

Because of all that, when SESTA/FOSTA forced the porn ban in 2018, there was a massive portion of the user base who literally celebrated it. Even among regular users, it was heralded as an end to that sheer fucking violence.

Of course, the cult just started organizing on twitter so they could continue harassing people, or worse, attending conventions to assault people, etc.

I would say that 2018 was the low point. In the last 5 years, recovering any modicum of sex positivity has been slow, labourious work.

Actually, hand to god, y'all redditors coming in hot with your femboy fridays and your bottomposting made a HUGE difference. I haven't seen this much casual, carefree sexuality in years.