The Great Tumblr Exodus
ghastlycomic
Posts: 2,531
So I know a number of you, as I was, have been using Tumblr as your art blogs and some of you have no doubt run afoul of Tumblr's new Adult Content Policy. A lot of artists have been fleeing Tumblr for other art blog sites. So many that the day the policy change was announced Newgrounds' server crashed under the weight of all the new accounts being signed up.
I just moved my art blog to Newgrounds as it seems Tumblr will be completely useless as an art blog once the new policy takes effect. This was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.
Now Tumblr's new policy is supposed to make allowances for artistic nudity and illustrations as long as it's not sexually explicit content.The first round of censoring came in the form of bots. AI combed the accounts looking for content it deemed unacceptable and then flagged it. Once flagged it will be deleted when the new policy takes effect on December 17th. But because AI is a little wonky there is an option to have your bot flagged posts reviewed by human eyes. Now I'm a pretty ecchi guy so naturally a lot of images in my art blog got flagged so I submitted them all for review by an actual human being and what happened next was what made me give up on the idea of continuing on Tumblr. One drawing, a sexy nude was deemed to fall into the exception for artistic works. Cool. Another almost identical drawing however was judged to be in violation of the new rules and banned. All the elements of the two drawings were the same. One was not more overtly sexual than the other and yet one got banned the other didn't. Then another very risque drawing (which honestly I would not fault them if they deemed it over the top) was judged by human review as being well within the artistic works exception on Tumblr and allowed to remain. Yet another drawing of a figure that was fully clothed and not even posed in an overtly sexual way was deemed to be in violation upon human review. It seems there is no consistency or meaning to Tumblr's new policy and whatever is against policy is entirely up to the arbitrary tastes of the person reviewing it and not whether or not it meets stated guidelines. This is unacceptable for me. Now I'm cool with sites having community standards and what not but they have to be clearly stated and they have to be enforced consistently. Completely arbitrary rules made up on the fly by whoever is reviewing the artwork just aren't going to work.
So I decided to give Newgrounds a look and set up an account. The site is... very clunky looking. It looks like a turn-of-the-century site. There's not a lot of user customization options either. But that said, it was pretty easy to set up a new art blog and I like that it has little tabs for your news blog, music art, video art, and drawing art. You can also catagorize your artwork as fine art, illustration, or (important for people here) 3D artwork which is really nice. The artist themselves get to determine the rating (E,T,M,A) of their artwork by indicating where it falls on a scale in 4 different categories and users looking for artwork can select which categories they want to exclude from their search. Their user content policy is very clearly spelled out. I think, in the end I'll be happier here.
So if you're an artist who has been using Tumblr as your art blog and are wondering what will happen to your blog come Dec 17th, I can personally recommend Newgrounds as an alternative. Best of all because the site is receiving so much more attention due to the exodus there are a number of upgrades planned for it (they already upgraded their servers to handle the new traffic).
So anyone else out there who has also fled Tumblr for a new art blog site please share in this thread what site you're now using and how you feel about it.
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Comments
Well, if your image had "Female Presenting Nipples" in it, then that's probably why it got flagged. Since apparently those are evil and bad now.
The memes practically make themselves, don't they.
HAHAHAHAHA!!!! They sure do!
Non-sexy nipples:
Okay, they are pipe nipples... Maybe robots might get turned on.
Yeah, what a pity. I'm curious which platform will grow the most as a result of this. Hadn't heard of Newgrounds yet, will check it out.
Pillowfort is still in beta, but I think it has definite potential.
...I have been looking for a new site because some of the stuff I see on DA goes beyond extreme. It bothers me when I check to see who faved a pic of one of my characters to find it amidst a gallery depicting bondage, vore, underage nudity and sexually explicit themes.
I have no issues with artistic nudes or classic pinup art, however I draw the line when it comes to the categories I mentioned above.
You dont know whats gone on at DA this year with all the art being deleted and people loosing thier accounts or getting banned? I did some research into some who were deleted and shut down and DA was right to do so but they also went on a witch hunt and just deleted a bunch of artwork from various artists and banned them too. It seemed to be very biased against 3D artists.
yes they also had a bunch of other violations as well like animal abuse & other violent images some tumbler accounts had a number of DMC TAKE DOWN notices for celebrity nude photos & other copyright infringements if i remember right.
Let's blame the fact that awful people post awful stuff and it's really hard to easily control that.
Tumblr may be making suboptimal moves to address the problem, but I'm sure they'd be just as happy doing absolutely nothing if they could.
I've got to be honest, I'm feeling similar. I don't see the point of having a mature content filter that involves you having to mark what category of "adult" it falls under... which you cannot then give users the option to filter by. I'm fine with artistic nudity, gore, violence, strong language or ideologically sensitive stuff, but for the love of sanity, why am I not allowed to say "Don't show me anything in the fetish category?"
I don't want to be seeing weight gain, breast expansion, foot fetishes or vore... and particularly things like kidnapping and bimboification, which I find to be deeply disturbing power fantasies - but this stuff has become an increasingly large portion of the site. Even if you say "avoid the front page", I've got a project for a science fantasy setting (based around the core idea that AI proves immune to the glamours that stop humans noticing the supernatural world), and while when I first started up loading the art over there I was sort of expecting things like the centaurs or succubi to end up favourited in vaguely risque collections, I really wasn't anticipating the androids ending up in collections where women were forcibly converted/uploaded into sexbots.
Although I'm sure consistent moderation is difficult, there really does need to be a middle ground between no adult content and all adult content.
I'm surprised that sites can't implement solutions like validating users. To use an above example, if a user regularly uploads pictures of men kissing each other and this gets reported for not having the right flags then the moderators should have the option to mark it as "acceptable" such that when things are next reported, the moderator gets to see that the user has previously been exonerated X times compared to censured Y times, so the user can build up good behaviour credit such that they get given the benefit of the doubt about a few reports, with the work getting to stay up and being made low priority on the moderation queue.
Push the limit and you lose your good behaviour credit, so artists are pushed towards tagging their work correctly.
You could also have "boy who cried wolf" applied to people filing reports that are frequently discredited.
A good AI implementation given the instruction "reduce the amount of time that art remains miscategorised on the site" could quickly learn about how to manage such a system to work out how to prioritise reports shown to moderators and rank user's trustworthiness. Once you've got some robust flags in place, you can implement a filtering system that should keep most users happy.
It looks as if this thread is going to gravityate towards forbidden topics (politics, religion, and their hinterlands) so it is being trimmed and locked.