I wanted to say something about this situation on tumblr.
As you all know, tumblr has recently been removed from the IOS store on Apple and also has caused some major issues with their tagging situation due to having pornography on their website. A lot of people have recently came forward and pointed out that because of this, it’s affecting creators (like myself) from getting recognition for their work on tumblr and causing people who do a lot of their advertising on tumblr to lose profit.
I personally agree that this is a huge flaw in their system. While I understand it’s to filter out porn bots and all the nasty nasty stuff, it’s basically also removing internet freedom for the content creators. I’m currently reading a web comic series on Webtoons that reminds me a hell of a lot like the situation were in. It’s called Let’s Play by Mongrel Marie (seriously go read it it’s REALLY good!)
The idea behind Let’s Play is it follows a young woman named Sam who dreams of becoming an indie gaming artist, she posts her first video game on an indie gaming engineer website only to have it tested by a famous “Viewtuber” who didn’t play the game correctly and thanks to that, mob mentality occurred and shot her chances of becoming a game designer down before it started.
At one point in the series, Sam decides with her coworkers to try and figure out a solution to the issue with the gaming engineer and prevent mob mentality for good on the website. I feel right now with tumblr, the exact same thing is occurring. I think while they want the website to stay safe and be a healthy environment, the new system has created a big flaw in their website.
I personally think instead of creating more mob mentality and shooting the website down, we should try and think of a permanent solution to prevent things like this from happening again. I’m creating this post for everyone so they can share it and if any web designers who aren’t affiliated with tumblr are reading this, I want you to post your ideas on this post so if tumblr does see this, it can take these ideas to improve their situation.
Personally, I’m beginning to think Tumblr outgrew it’s current serving system and might need a new one to run the website.