Tumblr

I’ve used Tumblr for years now, because I’m really not an artist. More of a wannabe writer that also likes to color drawings by others. Yeah, it’s a form of coattail riding, I’ll be the first to admit. But I also have tons of stories where I inserted images in appropriate places – some of them lewd, some not so much. But now most have been flagged and I’ve started backups on all my blogs to get everything off Tumblr as fast as I can.

What I’ll do with it all, I really don’t know – but at least once I’ve got everything out of the cloud and onto a nice USB drive, I’ll be master of my own content’s destiny again. And that will be a good thing. Unlike a lot of people, I’m really not all that pissed at Tumblr. I don’t like it, but I understand it. However, I do have a nice chuckle imagining the eyes of their ‘powers that be’ as massive numbers of people depart. The issue as I see it is a common one these days – do social platforms bear responsibility for the posts generated by their users? And it’s a question that has raged since the days of BBS’ in the 1990s. (I always come back to that since it’s my old stomping ground).

My personal feeling is that no, they don’t. Unless they decide they do. But once you take up the mantle of Content Police, you’ve also just taken up the inherent responsibility for it. Seems fair to me really – after all, platforms like Tumblr are making their $ off freely-donated content in exchange for a platform that allows others to find their content relatively easy. If Tumblr thinks that keeping their app on the Apple App Store is most important (they’re wrong, but it’s their decision), then Congratulations! With luck, their app will get back on the App Store and no one will care about it any more.

No, the real problem as I see it is with Apple. They pull the app from their App Store because SOME people that use it post objectionable content. Well, okay. Good thing NO ONE on Twitter does anything like that, right? There are surely no objectionable posts on Facebook either I’m sure. They could easily put a caveat and/or warning on the app, but no – they just pulled it. Again, it’s Apple’s right to do so – it’s their store. But I really hope all you iOS users think about that. Why you’re using any Apple product I really can’t fathom. (Full disclosure, my SO also uses an iPhone, as much as I’ve tried over the years to get her to stop.)

So at this moment I’m backing up all my Tumblr blogs. (I hope. Tumblr SAYS they’re backing up. I bet that server farm is suddenly balls-to-the-wall backing up though.)  Don’t worry too much about the disk space, Tumblr! I promise once I get all my content off, I’ll wipe my blogs and save you every bit of space I ever took! Just think of all those squeaky clean servers you’ll have pretty soon, and bandwidth problems will be a thing of the past as your usage drops to a trickle! Woohoo! You did it! You’ve made yourself SQUEAKY-CLEAN! Kinda like a desert.