cesperanza: janothar: sorensfw: What is almost certainly

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cesperanza:

janothar:

sorensfw:

What is almost certainly happening with Tumblr’s image classifier is that they’ve deployed the bot entirely untrained, and are relying on user complaints to train it what NSFW content on tumblr looks like.

Making people participate in their own censorship in this way and punishing them with the threat of being silenced even if in compliance with the rules should they not participate, is, IMHO, abuse of their userbase.

Source: I’ve worked for three different top-five social networks, and at all of them this type of work would have been done by making the userbase do it as much as possible.

Please signal boost. I don’t care if you reblog or repost, just get the word out so that people know what they’re doing as they interect with this thing.

My twitter is @soren_tycho (nsfw, sfw account coming soon) and my github username is sorentycho.

Just chiming in as a machine learning expert, this is almost certainly the case (and knowing tumblr, they weren’t even smart enough to throw in pre-trained weights)

GOD THIS MAKES ME ANGRY.  Is this just a big game of “Click all the squares with <strike>nipples</strike> cars in them?  Is that it? You’re making us work for you on the way out you bastards? *normally sanguine Ces turns into giant rage machine*  The (W#)*% *(* with this @$&!!!!
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oo we’ve got thundersnow!originally my neighb

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oo we’ve got thundersnow!

originally my neighborhood was in the 1-3″ accumulation band of today’s fuckery, but it’s been revised and we’re expecting 6-8″, which is significant but not approaching Snow Day territory. Traffic will be awful, because it started at 6:45 in the morning and so by morning drive time it should be nicely shitty, but I’m going on foot as usual so I expect it won’t be too terrible for me. 

My coworker lives in the 12-18″ band, and he hadn’t been paying attention to the forecast but I pointed it out yesterday. He has to take the awful highway that goes right across the lakeshore (building it was an awful idea, why would you tempt Lake Erie like that? and also why would you make the beautiful lakeshore inaccessible for, like, houses and beaches and stuff? it was a dumb idea and they keep wanting to tear it down but uh it’s a functional highway and there’s no other highway going that direction SOOOOO to sum up, the Army Corps of Engineers has $12B earmarked for us as of this last budget session so maybe?) and so he might not make it in, and I’m prepared for that and for once prepared not to be cranky about it.

Another flash of lightning and immediate clap of thunder! You know, thundersnow used to be rare around here and now we get it all the time. The sky’s not purple or green, though, so I’m less worried than I sometimes am by it. Chita the cat is furious and hiding under the bed already. She Does Not Appreciate sky-booms. 

Ugh maybe I’ll eat breakfast before I hike in, snow doesn’t make it hazardous but it does make for hard going when it gets too deep. It takes most people a few hours to get around to shoveling their walkways, and some of the sidewalks around here are pretty badly heaved and I’m always like why is that such a big deal and then we get a tiny bit of snow and I start cracking my toes into the holes and I’m like oh yeah that’s why it’s a big deal and the city fines you and such.

Yeah I’m gonna go fry an egg or two.
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raveneuse: The blanket application and treatment against nudity and adult content in relation to...

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raveneuse:

The blanket application and treatment against nudity and adult content in relation to Tumblr’s recent being caught-out for its years of negligence over its rampant child pornography issue is a really disgusting and thoughtless action of association. So many users (including users who largely or exclusively post adult content) over so many years have sought administrative support in addressing the issue of child pornography on this site, only to be met with lack of real decisive and thoughtful action on the subject. Now that it has become a financial concern (due to its being removed from the app store), action arrives in the form of a tactless and inconsiderate purge of all adult content. This purge draws an unreasonable association between general nudity and child pornography through its blanket treatment. It makes the assumption that there is a clean and clear division in content and values between blogs that exclusively post pornographic content and those that abstain completely. Such a division is non-existent as many blogs observably and commonly have played with a curation that accommodates both adult content and non-adult content as well as everything that falls in between. 

This ban, if it’s anything like the measures and procedures shared by Facebook and Instagram, will certainly be a strict and indiscriminate one as it relates to the moderation of nudity that may also appear in artistic and cultural artefacts, imagery and photography (and those images that drift between art, the candid and the everyday which include nudity, which, through their dissemination and transmission have become cultural and aesthetic artefacts), and it will not be surprising when masses of these artefacts, artworks, photographs and images are erased without any further consideration. This ban is a clumsy and heavy-handed panic of corporate and financial concern masquerading as a caring and progressive project of ethical betterment. The ban’s authors absolve themselves of responsibility by applying this blanket-treatment, while failing to take responsibility and be held accountable for their own years of negligence on the issue, for their wilful accommodation of the issue. Perhaps, in the years of the issue being addressed by its users (who have certainly shown greater and more sincere dedication to the upholding of a morally-guided online community), the issue could have been addressed more thoughtfully and a more sophisticated solution could have been designed by those corporate administrators who only noticed the grave importance of the issue when their wallets started burning. 
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an aesthetic note

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For so long now, I’ve been in the habit of waking up and looking at my computer, and going to my Tumblr activity page, and refreshing, and seeing notes and most of them aren’t things I can respond to at all, they’re notes of commentless reblogs and likes and such. So I’d get, on a really good day, like 2-3 replies to posts, and you can’t natively reply to replies, but if you have xkit you can kind of fudge it, so I’d get to do that. But remember the dark times when we had no replies? yeah then i would often have absolutely nothing to respond to. Sometimes I’d have asks, but I rarely got many of those, and if I did for some reason they made me so anxious– how was I to know whether i ought to reply publicly or privately? public replies make other people send asks, but is that rude, to make a conversation public? how do you know? sometimes that just meant i didn’t reply, which seemed like it also must be rude, but definitely meant that i got even fewer asks going forward.

Anyway.

Then with PF I’d go and try to force it to refresh, and remember of course, it doesn’t work like that, so I’d click over to my replies-dash, and get lost trying to answer replies, and wind up opening a shitload of tabs and accidentally closing the wrong ones and such, and then there’d be no indication of whether I got any likes, so I’d greedily go back to my own posts and scroll down and see if there were any, and sometimes there were and that was great, and for a bit I knew how to see who had actually done the liking but then they changed the feature slightly and so I actually now don’t know how to tell who liked a post, all I can see is that someone did at some point, so there’s that. 

Now I refresh my email and have a bunch of comment notifications from Dreamwidth, and it’s like a voyage back through time to when I was in my 20s and had a pretty active social media life on LJ that a lot of, I could conduct without going to the webpage, because the comment notif emails allowed you to reply right in the email and they’d send it for you, and at varying times, they even had the full text of the entry in the email itself so you could scroll back up and remind yourself what you’d been discussing. So you could pretty much live from your email inbox and not have to load any webpages that might have images and things, and I didn’t appreciate that while I had it. (Also: if you replied to a post you liked, then you’d have it in your email, and if you had a POP mail service like I did, that meant you could reread it offline, which was how I genuinely lived for a while there.) 

So that’s nice. I like that. It also helps me a lot because I lose track of conversations, and having a written record in email threads is kind of nice. 

I’m still Tumblring but my heart’s not as in it, I’m being lured away. I’m gonna make yet one more appeal, there’s a few holdouts among you who haven’t said you’ll go to either Pillowfort or Dreamwidth, and I’m begging you, come away with me, to a land where we’ll never grow old– ok ok I’ll stop. 

(Side thought: does DW privilege the Fandom Olds? Are we being smug about it? Do I count? Am I smug? I’m not meaning to be smug but God it’s so homey there, I’m so comfortable, I’ve already found the blogs of two or three Tumblr-lurker-likers who it turns out are actually beautiful longform essayist bloggers who never felt comfortable on Tumblr so they just scrolled and liked a lot, it’s been fabulous. Please come and let me win you over. Add me and comment to me and I will do whatever I can to help you feel loved, I promise.)
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