me, a former comms team person, watching whatever is going down over at tumblr and rolling myself into a carpet to be carried away
okay I should probably clarify: my read on the will-they-won't-they Tumblr Restoring Porn update is that they've been trying really hard to signal that as long as you use the correct filters they won't ban your porn, but they can't actually say porn is allowed again because that moves it from "whoops! well, we can't control what people post entirely" to This Is A Proud Porn-Hosting Site. My secondary read is that there is a communication breakdown between individuals or teams internally and someone either jumped the gun in writing the new content filter descriptions or someone on their support team was told something entirely different or similar crossed wires.
The language in the community filters messaging that, if I had written it with intent, would have been code for "porn is back just please be cool about it":
- Two examples chosen for appropriate filter use (sexy fanart and "graphic" gifs from a movie with sex in) are both things that everyone understands to have been forbidden following the porn ban.
- The line where they say certain content isn't welcome specifies porn bots.
But they cannot actually walk the decision to ban porn back meaningfully without entirely changing their policy toward it, and the deleted tweet from Tumblr support earlier saying that, no, their policies have not changed at all is why: they already demonstrated that they were willing to treat adult creators like vermin they just hadn't gotten around to cleaning up yet once, so why wouldn't it happen again unless they were willing to stand by us? And they can't stand by us because whatever money they're making apparently depends on pretending that they're not porn-likers.
Which means that if they have a community filter for "erotic imagery" and that does not mean that erotic imagery is now allowed, they have inadvertently implied that people need to start tagging their k*ssing pictures.
My "oof" here is sympathetic. This has got to suck ass.
Not gonna link to anyone's blog but for no specific reason, here are a few simple guidelines anyone can follow to keep their coworkers from sobbing at work while they watch weeks' worth of their efforts to manage something spiral completely out of their control beyond repair:
- if it is not your project and you don't know what's happening with it, do not talk about it publicly
- especially do not answer questions you don't really know the answer to, not even as a joke
- remember that if you are publicly known to be an employee of a company, everyone interested in that company thinks you know everything
- the last thing you want to be, ever, is under the direct scrutiny of 100k+ people who are all combing every known employee's social media for clues as to what's happening, and you especially do not want to be the place where they find one