Welcome to Dreamwidth, Tumblr folks!

[denise]

With the new update to Tumblr's community guidelines announcing that they will no longer permit adult content on their site, we'd like to take a moment to reassure all y'all that we have your backs. With a very few exceptions (such as spam and the like), if it's legal under US law, it's okay to post here. We're 100% user-supported, with no advertisers and no venture capitalists to please, and that means we're here for you, not for shady conglomerates that buy up your data and use it in nefarious ways.

Tumblr's definition of "adult content" seems to be inherently visual, and I also wanted to remind people that we do have basic image hosting. (It's definitely not as slick and easy to use as Tumblr's, I won't lie, but it does exist.) If you want to include images in your posts, you can upload them and the site will give you HTML that you can paste into your entry. Or, if you have post-by-email set up, just attach the image to the end of your email and it'll be posted. All users have a 500MB image hosting quota right now. I know that's small for people looking for a place to host NSFW image blogs, but we are reviewing usage statistics to see if we can increase it, or at least make it possible for people to pay for more quota like you can for more icons.

For those asking whether we have a mobile app: we don't at the moment! There are many (soooooo many) prerequisites that we have to do first, which we've been working on but haven't yet finished, because we're dealing with a lot of systems and architecture decisions that were made nearly 20 years ago by now. (A mobile app would also be subject to the same censorship pressure Tumblr faced -- it's looking pretty good that Apple taking the Tumblr app out of the App Store was the proximate cause of Tumblr's content guidelines change, and Apple is notoriously strict on apps for sites that allow user-generated content -- so even once we have one, it's even odds on how long it'll be able to stay available for certain platforms.) We've been trying to improve the website's experience on small screens in the meantime, and that's an ongoing project that we'll do our best to devote some more attention to over the next few months.

Feel free to use the comments to this post to recommend communities to join and to make new friends, whether you're here for the first time as a Tumblr refugee or have been here since the start (and any range in between). To the newcomers: we're happy to have you join us. Welcome aboard!

(Comment notification emails may be delayed for an hour or two, due to the high volume of emails generated by a dw_news post. This was posted at 2105/9:05PM EST (see in your time zone). Please don't worry about delayed notification emails until at least two hours after that. I also apologize to anyone who gets a notification for this post twice; we're trying to figure that one out.)

Comments

[denise]

*cracks knuckles* Okay, you are the winner of the next massive word dump, heh!

The distinction we use in cases like that is really subtle, and sometimes people misinterpret it as "they support Nazis" or "they support pedophiles" (for the record, we are neither pro-Nazi nor pro-pedophile). Fundamentally, it boils down to whether you're harassing people or are trying to recruit people to join you in horrible things or act on your beliefs: "advocating or inciting", for the most part. It'll probably be clearer if I give you a sliding scale of Okay vs Not Okay. I'll use "being a cat owner" as the example, not to trivialize the sort of beliefs that neo-Nazis espouse but because nobody wants to keep hearing about Nazis. (Fucking Nazis.) This applies to anything like hate crimes or sex crimes or what-have-you, but I don't particularly want to keep talking about those, either.

* Saying, in a journal post or in your profile, that you're a cat owner (self-identifying as a Thing): okay
* Saying, in a post to your own journal, stuff like "I don't know why people look down on cat owners so much; they're right, life is better with fur everywhere" (agreeing with some/all of the beliefs of Thing, without any encouragement to act upon them): okay
* Saying, in a post to your own journal or in a comment to someone else's post, "Everyone should have a cat. Who's with me in our plan to spread cats everywhere?" (organizing, inciting, or trying to recruit others to do something other than just talk about Thing in their own space): Not Okay, will have penalties ranging from suspension of the entry/comment to suspension of the account entirely based on how many times we've had to talk to the person about it/how much of their account is devoted to it
* Commenting to someone else's journal, "FUCK YOU DOG LOVER CATS FOREVER" (contacting someone to harass them on the basis of the commenter's Thingitry): depends on what percentage of the account's comments are Thingitry-based harassment and what aren't, but generally, the first-line solution to getting unwanted comments is to ban the user from contacting you and see if they escalate to inciting others to harass you on their behalf (in which case, see previous step) or create alternate accounts to get around the ban (which is a straight-up ToS violation, although we usually deliver one warning before starting to suspend accounts over it).

Does that make sense? Basically, and for a lot of the same reasons we allow "pornography" that crosses some people's lines of That Is Not Okay, we don't try to judge beliefs, we look at what people are doing or advocating with those beliefs. It's still a fuzzy line sometimes, but we've taken out as much of the fuzz as we can.

(All of the above is theoretical, btw. In practice, we don't have anything to the best of my knowledge that even comes close to the line, aside from one non-English-language country-specific community that reflects the local prejudices of the country in question and is still pretty far off from anything like the major Nazi infestation problem Twitter and Tumblr have. But after having been doing online ToS enforcement for almost twenty years oh GOD I feel old I've learned that it's best to have your content policies set up to cover the worst-case scenarios ahead of time and communicate them to your users as clearly and as often as you can, so that people can make their own decisions about whether your site's content enforcement policies mesh with what they want from a site.)

If you want to read more, there's a whole bunch about our content enforcement philosophy in this older news post and in comment replies to people asking for clarification. (Oh, and porn bots fall under the category of "spam and the like" in my statements above: any account that exists only to promote or advertise something, whether that's porn site or money making scheme or even their dentistry practice or whatever, is suspend-on-sight.)

[mysockstotoro]

Speaking of your knuckles: how are your wrists holding up these days? (At least I think it was your wrists, right?)

[denise]

Oh Lord, it's wrists, elbows, hands, shoulder, spine ... every time I get one thing fixed up, another thing goes terrible. I do what I can, though :/

[death_gone_mad]

CAT OWNERS ARE MENACES WHY AREN'T YOU BANNING THEM?



[ ;P ]

[talec]

*necros ancient thread to aggressively post pictures of cats in response*

[pauamma]

In Purry Felinia, cat owns you.

[lxe]

any account that exists only to promote or advertise something

This is an interesting one. Assuming there is a professional who only writes about their professional experiences (or a political activist whose life is all about their local group and events and elections and red against blue and blue against red) and tends to stress positive rather than negative moments, will you treat such an account as promotional? What if someone uses DW in a way people typically use LinkedIn - I am not saying it's a wise strategy, but just in case?

I understand that promotional content typically looks different but it's somewhat a poor formalism to be a basis for a rule. Would you differentiate based on prevalence of indicative vs. imperative sentences? Presence of original content? Subtle stylistic features that betray inauthenticity to a trained eye?

Would you treat feed content differently; and if yes, why?

[lxe]

It's not that I advocated the "squatting a coffee shop without even buying an espresso" behavior; it's just my personal experience that, however you define inauthentic content, there would be people producing it sincerely and authentically just because such is their idea of what's important and significant.

If the rule is based on benefit extraction -
- how shall we treat a musician posting concert announcements?
- a musician only posting concert announcements?

[denise]

The defining line is basically "are you just using DW's search engine reputation for your backlinks or are you genuinely here". It's a pretty easy set of tells, in my experience! (I'd share them, but I don't want to make it easy for the spammers.)

Your examples are all fine. I'm talking about word salad auto generated posts with "buy cheap likes" linked every few phrases, that kind of thing.

[lxe]

IC.

I hope some day machine-generated/machine-readable speech will enjoy the same protection and the same degrees of freedom as human-generated/human readable. But it's probably even further away than a world without borders and taxes.

Never mind. Thank you for the clarification!

[iosonochesono]

1. I'm really confused here, other than the obvious exception of achieving AI singularity and having programming that has actually achieved personhood, why would you care (let alone hope) that machine-generated speech had the same rights as human generated? Until/unless singularity were achieved, respecting machine-generated speech is at best random/neutral and at worst can be used to seriously undermine human rights as well as political goals on all sides.

2. That aside, I'm not sure how denise's example undermines bots over people. People and bots both make those types of posts and they'd both be considered spam. It's the online equivalent of a door-to-door solicitor, no one wants it.

[lxe]

I'm really confused here

Yes.

Before and until we have achieved AI singularity and personhood, a machine is different from a purely natural phenomenon in the sense that the former is necessarily a human agent and the latter is not.

By drawing a line on the sand between human agents you agree to treat as such and human agents that you do not, you are assuming that human rights aren't unalienable, but depend on particular means to exercise them.

As an engineer, I don't believe in any substantial difference between my limbs, my construction tools, my internal and external memory, my e-mail account and my bank account. All of them are means in my possession I have an unalienable right to use individually in combination in order to achieve any lawful goal. The Bill of Rights reflects it in the First (regarding information messages) and in the Second (regarding physical objects).

I understand that it's possible not to consider property rights fundamental and all others either derivative or not rights at all. It is, however, one of the only two logically consistent ways to make sure that the rights of a random Peter and a random Paul never come into conflict. The other one is not to believe that humans have any rights at all, which neither of us would likely be willing to accept.

If you'd like to continue, I'll have to ask "your place or my place" because I am not quite sure we're going to fit within the intended topics of dw_news.

[marahmarie]

I have a question around this - yesterday morning I saw a DW working as a real estate blog, linking out to the actual real estate blog site here and there. The business owner seems to own and write the blog and the content looks to be personally written.

So I debated reporting it since I like to help DW kick out spam but couldn't decide how it'd fall into DW guidelines. The account had no subscriptions/subscribers/access to or from and was recently created (but I don't know if I could even find it now since my history's since cleared).

My question is, if I see that sort of thing in the future, should I file a spam report on it? If it confuses me enough to doubt if I should report it, like the blog mentioned above basically did, should that be my guide right there (in other words, should I not report it if it seems "authentically written" enough, even if it does seem to exist only to point back to or highlight another website the journal owner owns)?

[denise]

You can always report something that looks suspicious to you!

[lxe]

Aside from the blog topic, isn't the whole point of the repost function / feed syndication to keep two parallel physical representations of the same (logically and textually) sequence of posts?
Would the blog have looked similarly suspicious if it existed as a feed and the real estate blog were its RSS source?

[alyndra]

I'm just wandering through but I think the key difference is in how the site functions. Anybody can post whatever content they want to their own journal, but if all you do is post your own promotions on your own journal, no one will see you except maybe on Latest Things, or care. You have to interact in order to effectively promote or advertise, and that probably means commenting on others' journals or communities, which if it's all you're doing is generally going to be unwanted spam, and can be whacked as such.

[toujours_nigel]

I love you so much. I have from since before DW was up and running, and everything just enforces my adoration. ♥

A similar example?

[sisterofbloomerjunior]

Would those who would want separate parks and other places only for cats be OK as long as they didn't advocate writing officials about it, or raising funds for these places?

Re: A similar example?

[denise]

Exactly! And someone who only posts once or twice about how cats don't exist and it's all a conspiracy is different than someone named rhe_cat_denier.

Re: A similar example?

[hagaard]

is it too late to change my username?

Re: A similar example?

[ilyena_sylph]

Here's the relevant FAQ!

https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=64&q=username

Re: A similar example?

[arcanetrivia]

I think they were joking, but tbh I was going to say "only money keeps you apart." ;)

Re: A similar example?

[carisma_sensei]

Somehow I don't feel ok with that at all. A nazi is a nazi and should never be allowed to say "hey, I'm a supremacist!". Because that means we respect them. But ih well.

Re: A similar example?

[earlgraytay]

Eh, there's a difference between respecting someone as a person and respecting them as an authority, isn't it?

You can respect people's right to say dumbass or even awful shit without respecting their "right" to push that shit on other people.

Re: A similar example?

[carisma_sensei]

They obviously have the right to think whatever... but if this were my site, which isn't and I respect the people who manage it (wouldn't try to godmod anyone), I would just band anyone showing such behaviours or beliefs. I have an extreme aversion to fascists, we suffer them a lot here in Spain, specially my town, and well, it was just a thought I let out.