AmbientShade posted at 7:46AM Wed, 23 January 2019 - #4343266

randym77 posted at 4:25PM Mon, 07 January 2019 - #4342518

Basically, it comes down to money. Tumblr was hemorrhaging money.

And now they're hemorrhaging users, as many have left the platform as a matter of principle even when they have not been directly affected. So what has Tumblr really accomplished beyond killing their site. Same with Patreon and their selective application of their own tos, which is now costing them hundreds of thousands of patrons.

And really, when these social media platforms receive hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government for operating and "research" funds, they can no longer legitimately be considered a private entity. Definitely not the same as a truly private entity that operates solely on the revenue it generates on its own. And yet, those truly private businesses are subject to more laws and regulations regarding who they're allowed to deny their services to than these so-called privately owned social media platforms are.

Dunno if Yahoo/Verizon/Tumblr gets hundreds of millions from the federal government these days. They're the minor leagues compared to Facebook and Google.

Tumblr may not survive, but if it didn't make money, it wasn't going to survive anyway. Like so many others. I've been thinking about all the content that has been lost over the years. The message boards at CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy, GEnie. Personal web sites at AOL, Geocities, FortuneCity, Simplenet, Tripod. Mailing lists at eGroups and Onelist and Yahoogroups. (Yahoogroups survived, but nuked almost all the archives.) The Usenet archives at DejaNews, Remarq, and others. (Google bought out DejaNews, IIRC, but the archives are not complete.) Someone compared it to a digital burning of the library of Alexandria.

It's really amazing that Renderosity has persisted as long as it has. So many other Poser sites are gone.

I'm still on Tumblr, and the censor bots do seem to be getting better. Fewer "false flags." They tell you now if a post of yours gets flagged, and there's a special section on the menu where you can look for flagged posts if you miss the notice.

But there are still issues with the system, particularly with re-blogs. If someone re-blogs your post, and their re-blog gets flagged, you are not notified, though your original post is hidden, too. You won't see it even if you check the "review flagged posts" section on the sidebar. You have to hope the person who re-blogged you asks for a review. If they don't, you probably won't even know. If you find out, you can ask from a review of your original post, but that means scrolling through all your old posts (which may be hundreds or thousands) to find the one that's hidden.

It's even worse if you re-blog something and the original post gets flagged. If the author of the original post doesn't ask for a review, your re-blog remains forever hidden. This happens fairly often, because the original poster may have left Tumblr, deactivated their account, or just doesn't use Tumblr very much.