Recently, Tumblr was removed from the Apple app store due to an incident involving child pornography. This incident is incredibly unfortunate, but it doesn’t stand alone. Tumblr was also removed from the app store due to the large influx of porn bots and pornographic spam, users claiming to be proud to be pedophiles, blatant Nazism, racists who are not deleted for sending hate and harassing users, and more. I myself reported someone for harassing me, but because I had blocked the person and couldn’t access the messages where they harassed me, they were still able to send me anonymous asks. Your support staff, with back doors to the website (presumably), claimed they could not access the messages, and I was left SOL. Many features on this website do nothing to actually protect your users from harassment, racism, homophobia, transphobia, Nazis, pedophiles, predators, porn bots, and more.
You claim in your statement to us that you “have been working on these problems for a long time”. This is blatantly untrue. Please do not lie to us and patronize us. We’ve been here. We’ve seen you do nothing over, and over, and over again.
We complained to you for months and months about the rampant porn bots, and you did nothing except add a report button on mobile which only reported sensitive content or spam at best. You could have addressed this problem with an effective algorithm, but you did not. We complained to you about being harassed and sent hate speech for being LGBT+, and you did nothing. We complained to you about blogs being randomly deleted, and sometimes you’ve restored them, other times you have not. We complained to you that there were people proudly claiming to be “Minor Attracted Persons”, or pedophiles, and you did nothing. We complained to you about people proudly claiming to be white supremacists, and you did nothing. All of these things are “against the community guidelines”, and yet over and over, you have not found effective ways to handle these problems or suppress the feeling of welcome that these users claim to get here. You have had a long time to work on these problems, but you haven’t addressed them. To say you have is untrue.
Multiple other social networking websites, such as Wordpress, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and others have effectively dealt with rampant pornography, racism, pedophilia, and other problems without causing massive issues for their users who are not misusing the platform. They are continuing to find new, effective ways to deal with these issues without causing problems for their userbase as a whole. There is no reason that you are unable to do this effectively other than that you wanted to do it quickly. You have once again chosen your stock holders over your users. And we have had enough.
You have already started to ban “Adult” content with a new algorithm. Here are screenshots of just a fraction of the posts you have flagged as containing adult content:
Your new system of simply tackling everything at once is not working. At all. And each of these screenshots is proof of your utter incompetence. None of these posts contain pornographic acts, “female nipples”, or any community violation of any kind.
We, the users, have been asking you for months to deal with these problems - particularly, the porn bots and bots that spam. In order to block a bot from a side blog, I have to do it manually, even though they are in my side blog’s feed. This is a huge issue for mobile - only users. They keep cropping up in droves, taking over our posts and tricking google into making it look like a legitimate blog linked to a pornographic website. We have complained to you for months and months now, and your solution to simply “ban all adult content” is ineffective. I agree that children should not be able to access pornography - but this is not how you tackle a porn bot problem. Your system is utterly useless, allows for racists, pedophiles, porn bots, and Nazis to remain untouched. It also harms sex workers and real people who may use this website for some forms of adult content responsibly. Moreover, as seen above, it harms plenty of users who have in no way violated your terms of service.
If you keep this up, you threaten your website and company as a whole. Many of us are backing up our blogs and planning places to go to.
You already have a content filter for “sensitive” content (content inappropriate for younger viewers). You could have improved this, instead of attacking your entire user base. It seems to be a very lazy “solution”, if you could call it one at all, and one that harms your entire userbase.
If you are going to keep this filter in place and make Tumblr, a website that has never been known for being family friendly and has never claimed to be, you are going to lose millions of your users. We are already planning our exodus. It isn’t hard to follow. Censor us, and we will go somewhere else. That is not a threat. It is a promise.
Browsing antique stores is always the most wild fucking time. I found an insanely cursed Sean Connery Barbie in my favorite antique store which is nothing new there are like 20 super cursed dolls in that store but they sell men’s flannels for $12 so
The antique store with like 50 pocket dimensions underneath it is playing “What A Feeling” from Flashdance. There’s a giant bloody wooden tooth hanging from chains. This is so surreal
FYI I was using bloody as in there is red splatters on the roots of the teeth not the expletive
Shaggy Rogers is here and he has a giant beard
There is a Greco Roman helmet in one of the the pocket dimensions on top of a typewriter
THERE IS SECRET LIBRARY ???????
People have definitely fucked up here. I can sense it.
This door doesn’t even wiggle there’s no way that lock is what’s keeping it closed
What the fuck
Y’all I’m gonna die going up this
This place is so terrifying im looking for bodies now
Trying to find exit. I’m actually starting to get anxious now.
Hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Jules walked into silent hill
So I have absolutely been inside this specific antique store (unless this is a pocket dimension that exists in many places, the store I know of is in downtown tacoma, WA). It’s spooky as hell, you can’t ever find anyone working there (the one time I did find a clerk he looked like he hadn’t left this garbage mansion in years, his hair was ginger and way too long and way too crunchy), it’s always disturbingly quiet despite being on a main downtown street, and to leave you have to meditate on that desire to summon an exit less you be trapped forever. The floors are incredibly uneven with lots of ramps and rooms on a slope. The library is my favorite part. There’s chairs and shit hanging from the ceiling all over the place. There are several false doors and windows. The inside in undeniably larger than the outside. This place is filled with a miasthma of chaotic energy.
To heal your soul, I recommend going to Mad Hat Tea just around the corner which also has a very real Vibe but it is healing and calming to a magical degree. A classmate of mine said once she had a terrible cold and went to Mad Hat between classes and asked the woman to give her something good for colds, she drank it without question and immediately her cold was gone. Shit theres so many like, old-magic-aura areas in downtown Tacoma guys, it’s crazy.
Looking through the pictures and feeling like I’ve been here before but reading the notes and knowing I haven’t. I’ve seen something eerily similar this place in my dreams and boy is it weird.
I wonder if I had seen it before in early internet or in a show cause those dreams had happened back in middle school
trained video game designers who get paid thousands of dollars for making video game: some things are way too difficult to create with this engine, you have to understand that we are very limited in our possibilities for this game
modders with a pirated version of photoshop who work full jobs outside the video game industry: hey guys I made 100 hairstyles and re-textures of 750 outfits during my lunch time. Also this female character now has proper armor and can be romanced by a female protag. I was kinda busy last night but here are 20 new complexions you can download for free
hi, resident games art student here! i am. bad at articulating stuff but let me explain why there aren’t 100 hairstyles and 750 re-textures made by game devs! there are a LOT of misconception about the game industry, most prominently maybe that there is this Huge Capitalist Entity™ behind them when in fact there is a team of hardworking devs. These people spend SO much time and work on these games, they’re the last ones who want to release a shitty product. I’m sure that at this point everybody has heard about how stressful making games is but let me tell you exactly HOW bad it is. Because this industry truly treats their people like crap. Like they literally made up a new term for overtime, “crunch”, so they wouldn’t need to pay people extra. Let me add a quote from Blood, Sweat and Pixels, a book that follows the development stories of popular games such as Diablo 3, Dragon Age Inquisition, Stardew Valley, etc.
“The developer’s team had to spend the next few months “crunching”, working eighty- to one-hundred hour weeks (…) Some of them slept in the office so they wouldn’t have to waste time commuting”
So yeah. It’s not really an issue of “do we have the skill?” but more “do we add another hairstyle or do we fix these game breaking bugs?”. When you literally have to decide which bugs you have to fix in time and which ones you can’t there simply isn’t enough time for adding more cosmetics. All games are released unfinished because it is simply not feasible to fix everything. Game development is brutal. Our lecturer told us that people in the industry usually work there for no longer than 8 years simply because it is so demanding and soul sucking. So why is crunch a thing, you may ask.
“I think it remains to be seen whether crunching actually works. Obviously a lot of literature says it doesn’t. (But) I think everybody finds a time in their development careers where you’re going ‘I don’t see what other options we have’” (Aaryn Flynn)
One huge part of that is because the games industry doesn’t have something which almost every other industry has: unions. This has recently gotten more attention with the whole voice actor thing, but the simple fact is that as of now there are no unions for people working on games, something big publishers want to keep that way. Working in games still has kind of a “rockstar” image, it’s a small industry and there are thousands of eager people who would take any kind of job. As a result there are no real actions that get taken against overworking as everyone is ultimately seen as replaceable. Not only that but individual studios are largely at the mercy of their publishers. Let’s look at Ensamble as an example. Instead of making the original IP the studio wanted to create they were told by Microsoft to make a game within the Halo franchise. Only to be told that after the release of what was now “Halo Wars” the studio would be shut down.
So while they might not add tons of additional content in form of cosmetics a TON of the work goes into the less glamorous systems like inventory, pathfinding or 3D modelling hundreds of assets only 10% of players are going to look at in detail. And don’t make me go into the topic of 3D modelling because THAT is a whole other rant bc it is difficult AS FUCK and incredibly underappreciated.
And lastly, it is a job. a not very well paid one so you can shove that “thousand of dollars” up your ass.
Last time reblog. Because THE COMMENTARY is important.
I legit love discussing games on here but seeing posts like this getting THOUSANDS OF NOTES despite its fallacies, misconceptions and outright ignorance of how our industry works is beyond frustrating.
Hi, yeah, dev here, let me add a few more points to this.
Modders do not have deadlines. We do, and they often are handed down by people who don’t give a flying fuck about our well-being or, yes, technical limitations. I have shipped some hellaciously bad code, you guys, because of execs who decided we were going to ship a feature three weeks early, consequences be damned. I’ve been pushed into a monthlong crunch that never needed to happen, because management was in too much of a hurry to actually let us do things right. And I’m not even working on AAA titles, we don’t have nearly as much pressure from investors as they do. You want to know why you can hardly play Knights of the Old Republic II without an extensive mod? It’s because LucasArts suddenly wanted it by Christmas, no matter what the devs at Obsidian told them about its real state of readiness. But the people who made the massive hoard of Dragon Age haircut mods that I have installed? Did not have a deadline for those. Amazing what you can get done when you’re able to budget your project time however the hell you want. (I do specify project time, because OF COURSE many modders have school and jobs and what have you. But whatever time they spend on the mod, that’s by their own pacing.)
Executive meddling also prevents us from putting in features we really want to give you sometimes.
Not every game dev is a designer, mate. Often when something doesn’t make it into the game, it’s because they were missing resourcing in a given discipline. I can write you beautiful code; I can’t make beautiful haircuts for your avatar. If there aren’t enough artists on my team because of management’s resourcing decisions, and the ones we have are tied up on assets for key NPCs and backgrounds, then we are going to be S.O.L. on the extra haircuts front.
This is not to say resourcing decisions are absolved from all criticism, of course; if a game has the resourcing for 10 light skintones and includes 0 dark skintones, then it had the resourcing for 5 light skintones and 5 dark skintones, and someone made a bad decision re:inclusion and that is ABSOLUTELY very much worth criticizing. But depending on resourcing, the plausible solution there may have been to make sure they have 10 diverse skin tones; having there be 20 may have been out of reach.
Related to not every dev being a designer, I want to get this out there: Not all game dev roles are paid equally. QA (who are INCREDIBLY important) and artists are grossly underpaid, and in many places so are designers. Engineers tend to fare better, but I know there are still some fairly beloved game companies in the area that do not pay their engineers enough to live nearby. (Most of the games industry is incidentally centered in some VERY expensive areas; the Bay Area, LA, Seattle, and so forth.) The point made further up the thread about there being no union in this industry is relevant here. There have been rumblings lately and I really hope we can get something started, but for the time being, there’s no organization protecting people’s jobs (you know what else we have a lot of? mass layoffs due to poor planning by execs!), wages, and working conditions like that. Overall the OP’s implication that because professional devs can’t do some of the things that modders can do for free, somehow means they shouldn’t be able to make a living off their work, is pretty godawful.
I have no intention of implying that game devs are above criticism. There are SO MANY issues with video games, my dudes. And I appreciate the hell out of modders, both from the “they make a bunch of stuff I like” player standpoint and the “important relationship with the dev community” standpoint! But their role is fundamentally different from ours, and the implication that their free work somehow invalidates the facts that we do this for our job, are subject to executive requirements that they are not, and need to make a living off our job, is bullshit. PLEASE keep applying constructive criticism to games, and PLEASE keep modding if it brings you joy, and support modders that do. But as it turns out it’s 300% possible to do that without being a shitbagel about it.
