The World, Suffused with Sound...

Tumblr ‘How To’s

I had no idea about Tumblr’s shadowban until it happened to me. Since then, surprisingly quite a few number of people have texted me about them getting shadowbanned as well. Now that I’m aware of it, I realize it’s becoming increasingly common for legit blogs like mine to get shadowbanned for no reason at all. So hope this helps everyone who has to unnecessarily go through this.

What does shadowban exactly mean?

Basically, your blog exists and mostly functions as it normally would, but Tumblr has made it invisible to everyone else. Tumblr lets you believe that everything is fine and that you can interact with others, but actually you can’t. (Look at the wikipedia definition here.)

Why does this happen?

From what I understand, blogs get shadowbanned since they are suspected of being bots, or just sketchy, or they might be going against Tumblr’s guidelines. I’m not sure, but it might also happen if someone has reported your blog. 

But more often than not, it’s just a tumblr glitch. 

How to tell if your blog has been shadowbanned? And most of the things that happen during this state.

(These are the things that I personally went through. It might not be the same for everyone. Also, my main blog (@that-damn-girl) was shadowbanned. My side-blogs were fine. So in case your main blog is fine but your side blog is shadowbanned, you might have a different experience.)

(P.S. remember that commenting on a post and sending an ask are features reserved for the main blog only.)

Not voting isn’t the same as a boycott. Because you can’t bankrupt a government by not voting. All you get by not voting is less control over what the money is doing.

The money comes from taxes, not voting. Abstaining from voting does nothing to reduce the governments ability to get money and spend it on shit.

So yes, sometimes you vote to reduce harm because not voting WILL NOT REDUCE HARM.

(‘Accidentally reported you’ scam)

So it’s just another day on tumblr when a beloved mutual suddenly DMs you (or a random stranger) claiming that someone impersonated you and has scammed them out of $900 be it art or crypto or because of content related to CP. They tell you they’ve accidentally reported you by mistake and that the only way to clear up this issue is to contact someone on discord. They even show a screenshot claiming your account was reported for fraudulent activity and action must be taken within 24hrs or else your blog will be terminated. You just need to contact the “official” report dispute discord account in a timely manner and clear everything up!

You panic! You don’t want to lose your blog so you immediately DM the discord account who begins asking you questions before ultimately asking you to change your email address to theirs so they can ‘fix’ the flag on your account. All is well, and you assume that the false report is going to be cleared up…Right?

Unfortunately no. That’s not what happens.

You get locked out of your account and now the scammer logs in as you and starts to send the same message to anyone and everyone they find. The same message that now you accidentally reported the receiver and you need them to contact the same discord account to repeat the same process over and over again and you yourself seem to have no way of accessing your blog to stop the phishing. But don’t fear! You can fix this! Just contact the real support email and let them know you’ve been hacked and give them any information they may ask to confirm your the real owner of the blog.

Here are things to keep in mind:

- There is no official report dispute discord account ran by tumblr that isn’t a thing and has never been.

- Any discord account claiming to an official tumblr report dispute staff account is a scammer.

- You do not need to ever contact Discord for a tumblr related issue no matter how official the screenshot looks.

- This scam can affect anyone, even your friends. Keep them informed and if you can contact them offsite to let them know they’ve been hacked please do so they can get their account back faster.