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Jan. 6th, 2019 03:08 pmAnd after all this, after the "sensitive content" was banned, after the female-presenting nipples went quietly into that good night, after cat gifs, elbows, raw chicken, naked Kirby, nearly every SFW post, and several of Staff's own goddamn posts were flagged as sensitive by robots, after I had to abandon my artblog because new posts were getting flagged as "sensitive" every few days and it was an unreasonable amount of work to keep training their robot for free, after I threw up my hands and mostly just took a break from social media, I still, still, get constantly followed by pornbots/spambots.
I just boggle at the screen for a moment. Tumblr's rogue robot is like my rheumatoid-ridden immune system--it's a dysfunctional wreck that mostly attacks its own tissue. Can it be that even that wasn't enough? What does it take to kill these things?
(I did get followed by some with actual porn on them post-purge, but they do seem to have changed tactics slightly. One they were already doing pre-purge that's still popular is having stolen/scraped mirror selfies of women in their underwear, with links like, "Wanna fuck?" or "Get laid now!" A lot of them seemed to have shifted to something more...gamer-oriented? But it's still just the same old hat of link spamming tricks as before! The problem wasn't just that it was unsolicited and stolen/reposted porn, it's that robots are abusing the follow and reblog system to get free advertising and SEO, and I don't go on social media to talk to a bunch of selfish robots that only want to use me for my search engine cred!)
I have been begging, for years, for tumblr to put a fucking CAPTCHA on the follow button, even as an opt-in thing per-blog. There are other ways tumblr could curb this. For example, on Facebook, not only are you limited in how many friend requests you can send, but if enough people mark that they don't know you, you get flagged as a spammer. (As I tragicomically found out when I tried to hold out the olive branch and friend some estranged homophobic relatives on Facebook. Just say you don't LIKE me, not that you don't KNOW me, you turds!) Limiting how many blogs you can follow at once, and subjecting that to more scrutiny if the people you follow keep flagging you as spam would at least be something.
It's bringing up memories of how, years after I private-locked my old, dead LJ, I got an influx of comments, mainly on old fanfic in comms, selling penis pills and ripoff designer clothes. There's just something so post-apocalyptic about a once-thriving platform where most of the users are asshole robots. It's weird that these places become so spam-infested, since there aren't even any people left to look at the spam. It seems like more frequented places actually do a better job of weeding that out, whereas in the abandoned house, weeds can be king. And actually, while I didn't predict that tumblr would coup-de-grace its self destruct so phenomenally and catastrophically (seriously, it's outdone LJ. I can't help but be impressed.) I did suspect that it was nearing the end of its life cycle, in part because robot interaction was starting to outcompete human interaction. There weren't more robot posts than human in tags, but you couldn't browse a page or two without seeing robots, robot reblog comments were outnumbering human reblog comments on viral posts, and I wasn't the only one getting more robot new follows than human ones. I don't know if that signals to the human users that the devs don't care about the site anymore, or if it is indeed an honest signal that the devs don't give a fuck and the site's days are numbered, but that has always been vultures circling. Now, when you're already near exhaustion and vultures are circling, and you light yourself on fire and fling yourself off a cliff, that, my friends, is what we call STYLE.
I just boggle at the screen for a moment. Tumblr's rogue robot is like my rheumatoid-ridden immune system--it's a dysfunctional wreck that mostly attacks its own tissue. Can it be that even that wasn't enough? What does it take to kill these things?
(I did get followed by some with actual porn on them post-purge, but they do seem to have changed tactics slightly. One they were already doing pre-purge that's still popular is having stolen/scraped mirror selfies of women in their underwear, with links like, "Wanna fuck?" or "Get laid now!" A lot of them seemed to have shifted to something more...gamer-oriented? But it's still just the same old hat of link spamming tricks as before! The problem wasn't just that it was unsolicited and stolen/reposted porn, it's that robots are abusing the follow and reblog system to get free advertising and SEO, and I don't go on social media to talk to a bunch of selfish robots that only want to use me for my search engine cred!)
I have been begging, for years, for tumblr to put a fucking CAPTCHA on the follow button, even as an opt-in thing per-blog. There are other ways tumblr could curb this. For example, on Facebook, not only are you limited in how many friend requests you can send, but if enough people mark that they don't know you, you get flagged as a spammer. (As I tragicomically found out when I tried to hold out the olive branch and friend some estranged homophobic relatives on Facebook. Just say you don't LIKE me, not that you don't KNOW me, you turds!) Limiting how many blogs you can follow at once, and subjecting that to more scrutiny if the people you follow keep flagging you as spam would at least be something.
It's bringing up memories of how, years after I private-locked my old, dead LJ, I got an influx of comments, mainly on old fanfic in comms, selling penis pills and ripoff designer clothes. There's just something so post-apocalyptic about a once-thriving platform where most of the users are asshole robots. It's weird that these places become so spam-infested, since there aren't even any people left to look at the spam. It seems like more frequented places actually do a better job of weeding that out, whereas in the abandoned house, weeds can be king. And actually, while I didn't predict that tumblr would coup-de-grace its self destruct so phenomenally and catastrophically (seriously, it's outdone LJ. I can't help but be impressed.) I did suspect that it was nearing the end of its life cycle, in part because robot interaction was starting to outcompete human interaction. There weren't more robot posts than human in tags, but you couldn't browse a page or two without seeing robots, robot reblog comments were outnumbering human reblog comments on viral posts, and I wasn't the only one getting more robot new follows than human ones. I don't know if that signals to the human users that the devs don't care about the site anymore, or if it is indeed an honest signal that the devs don't give a fuck and the site's days are numbered, but that has always been vultures circling. Now, when you're already near exhaustion and vultures are circling, and you light yourself on fire and fling yourself off a cliff, that, my friends, is what we call STYLE.
