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Who is the hostile taking over?They own the website

I would that say that Live Journal could get business back, but since it's under Russian law now I don't think people will be happy about their censorship laws. I guess this means that Discord is going to become the new system to to use in favor of tumblr.

I mean hostile takeover of certain content. Imagine youtube deleting all mature videos.

Right,but it's their website

... yeah, no offense but that's... jibberish. It's like complaining about TV Tropes infringing on your First Amendment rights for thumping a stupid post.

Newgrounds, in on the situation, took this opportunity to tweet how they "still allow NSFW content just like we always have".

... Live Journal is under Russian law!?!?

Edited by kyun on Dec 4th 2018 at 1:18:06 AM

It's been that way since 2017. Most people that hadn't already left migrated to Dreamwidth or Tumblr, though I know at least one internet acquaintance who still uses LJ.

George R R martin was on Live journal till very recently

Well damn. Posts about how to find better alternatives to Tumblr are apparently being removed or hidden now. Now that they've deleted a large amount of people's reasons for using the site, they're now trying to keep them chained to it by force.

The bot pandemic is older than a year. This new breed of bot started last year, but tumblr got hit with at least two previous waves.

The older bots were more primitive in behavior. They flooded tags with countless unrelated clickbait articles, memes or porn. They used two word strings with a numeric sequence for names that attempted to sound like a foreing name, and used innocent selfies and the like as background/profile pictures to appear legitimate.

A later batch would ditch the names in favor of alphanumeric sequences and non-distinct profile pictures, often times just random graphics or maybe a political meme of some sort (preferably made out of stock art) or maybe some scenic picture or a stock portrait.

IIRC it was with this batch that they started following users and creeping up on the recommended list.

The latest batch is far more aggressive in its activity, capable of sending private messages and commenting and/or reblogging normal posts in order to find targets. And they have ditched attempts at subtlety with sexy names and profile pictures, and explicit content in their posts.

Tumblr attempted to deal with earlier batches, being successful eradicating the first but only after a couple of months of chaos.

But with the second batch they started losing the fight, with slower responses despite more organized reporting/blocking by the user base. That one got stopped eventually.

With this newest batch, it doesn't seem they were even trying.

The rabbit hole is getting deeper.

The most surprising thing to come out of this is the resurgence of Newgrounds

The Crownless shall again be King

Live Journal has been owned by Russian companies since 2007, and had a ToS update in 2017 to require content "inappropriate for children according to Russian law" to be marked 18+. So like the Strikethrough of old, bye-bye queer content

This montage does sum it up pretty well.

The Crownless King of crashed sites because it is down again. >_>

fitting music

So according to this article, this has been planned for months.

Guess this goes back to that "the company is never your friend" thing, and in hindsight it darkly recontextualizes any attempts by the site itself to be inclusive towards pretty much any movement/minority/community on it.

"We promise not to screw it up" -Yahoo Chief after buying out Tumblr

...... if this has been planned for months, how come people say it was caused by Apple taking down the app from their Store, which clearly happened like a few weeks ago?

Time table accelerated.

Obviously. As the article said. To the people who read it.

Edited by unnoun on Dec 4th 2018 at 9:26:52 AM

It was in that article. There were apparently measures they were taking that was making it harder for certain (especially NSFW) users to use the site effectively for a while, it's just that the Apple Store app thing happened to give Tumblr a convenient excuse to purge NSFW content on a site-wide scale at a much quicker pace.

I'm digusted, but not as surprised as I should be. And here I was considering joining the site to support some of the content creators there...

Edited by Customer on Dec 4th 2018 at 9:30:35 AM

How can Tumblr possibly win back users now?

You do realize that there are a bunch of people on tumblr who don't post NSFW content, right?

Most people I know who aren't Rule 34 artists seem to be treating this whole thing as a laugh riot, going along for the ride, seeing where this goes while watching the tumblr staff fail more and more. It's only a matter of time before they will have to dump this new algorithm (after all, it's been flagging itself as much as it's been flagging pornography), otherwise there won't be any content left after a month or so.

Whether or not they'll dial back on the "no nsfw" or not is the real question here (I don't think they will, unfortunately), but the crappy algorithm will have to go at some point, lest it make the site physically unworkable.

Even outside of NSFW groups the haywire algorithm's already done a good deal to scare off niche communities that don't really have anywhere else to go, with the above-linked article noting a small group of Furby collectors getting struck down in the struggle. Even if it gets reversed the damage is massive and I don't see the site having anywhere near as many people this time next year as it did a week ago.