Be sure to submit your feedback about the new age verification
Tumblr is a place to express yourself, discover yourself, and bond over the stuff you love. It's where your interests connect you with your
I do not expect to hear back from @staff but this is what I sent them:
Hello people of tumblr. Tumblr is like an online home to me, I've been here since I was a teenager (now [age]), and now that I have adult money, I even support the site by purchasing an annual subscription to premium.
That being said, my premium renews soon, and in the past year some rather malicious patterns have been pointed out to me that make me question if I will renew or not.
Firstly, there is the issue with Staff banning trans women left and right for no reason. Like, seriously what is up with this? Almost every single person on this site is gay or trans. You claim to be the "gayest place on the internet" but the rampant homophobia and transphobia persists. One of my mutuals got nuked by you guys recently for the "crime" of pointing out blogs that were deactivated for no reason. What reason did you have to nuke a whole blog that did nothing to violate the terms of the website? This is insane and needs to be examined. Someone, or maybe everyone on staff, needs to come right out with it and say they hate trans people and get it over with so that we're all finally clear on what the heck is happening there.
Secondly, I am still very skeptical of the "we will make reblogs better" post. People come to tumblr because it is set up the way that it is. We stay on tumblr because it is a chronological dash with no algorithm, and because everyone is able to view all reblogs. The correct people already get notifications for the things they post. I am anxious in a bad way to see what new "improvements" will be made, ones that may essentially make tumblr the same slop as the rest of the internet.
Thirdly, the new age verification. Tumblr has changed since the days of "go nuts, show nuts, whatever." Why does a website that doesn't even allow NSFW content need to have age verification? There is no NSFW side of tumblr. It was all scorched ages ago.
As we all know, the "mature content" label is unreliable in most cases. I saw post that was literally just a picture of the color yellow labeled mature. The "mature content" label does nothing to actually signify if content is mature or not. I ran a fan works event and the introductory post was labeled mature despite the event going on for the past ~8 years without issue.
Restricting access to blogs and posts via age verification to something that is still in worse-than-beta stage is completely unhinged and utterly absurd.
And more to the point, I will not be trusting you with my government-issue ID. No one in their right mind would trust tumblr.com with their government-issued ID. You might say "oh, we don't store the information" or "the verification is secure" but no one will believe that. If someone does give tumblr this information, I feel sorry for them because it is 100% going to end up in a data breach by the end of the week.
I might enjoy tumblr as a website, but I will never trust you with anything more than my email address.
If this website keeps doing more to piss everyone off instead of doing things the users have been asking for for the last 15+ years (like being able to send asks from side blogs) then people are just going to take their money and leave. Tumblr might be the most popular bastion of anti-algorithm blog posting, but it is not the ONLY site left like this. It is not the last place on the internet where people enjoy a setup like this. We stay because it is convenient to stay.
If tumblr continues to get more and more inconvenient, there will be no reason to stay. Tumblr may be special in our hearts, but at the end of the day, it's not so special that it cannot be replaced.
I think that if tumblr found some balance that included staying in their own lane, we could all continue to coexist, but every time users draw a line in the sand, Staff pretends it isn't there. It is getting old. Tumblr may be counting on the older user base to phase out and new users to not ask questions because they don't know any better, but that will take another 15 years to accomplish, and by then there will already be a better alternative to tumblr.
As you are acutely aware, there is only so much that we can take (changing the color blue, moving the reblog button, making us have to use xkit extensions to make the desktop version even slightly usable). This grace that the users give to you will not last forever. It is a finite resource.
I hope wisdom finds you well. Otherwise, you may find that when you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.
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