she got deleted so im reblogging this again. SPREAD THIS.
Hes accusing her of threatening staff too very strong allegation to be making considering hes backing it up with absolutely zero verifiable proof. Its a classic reversal to flip the facts on her heads that shes actually been on the receiving end of a targeted harassment campaign that staff is culpable in and has enabled.
i’m always wondering about the abandoned timelines. like, the failed “quick save” ones. one moment you’re idk playing a game with ur friend and the next they just fucking off themselves after a bad roll. how do u even deal with that. the world goes on for you.
As a trans person who pays the bills hawking my Patreon on this site, Photomatt’s behavior has been disappointing to say the least. I hope staff can come to a more reasonable conclusion.
I think I speak for everyone when I say we would appreciate some insight and transparency into the content moderation systems.
Having a blog you’ve run for 7+ years nuked out of nowhere, with no communication, reason, or recourse beyond navigating a maze of broken automated systems, is pretty frustrating. I can’t really blame users for saying some TOS-breaking shit, because sometimes it feels like the only way to communicate with staff here is publicly.
Matt for the love of God stop fucking posting and talk to your PR team.
matt is supposed to be on fucking sabbatical rn. the last time he refused to log off and caused problems swinging his dick around was on the wordpress.org twitter hawking a fundraiser for his birthday and claiming that as founder he didn’t need to get permission fr marketing or otherwise worry about not offending people.
i am, thank fucking everything, no longer working for him, and yet. i quit before leadership could force my lead to fire me. a disproportionate amount of queer people have been fired or forced to leave in the last year, bc he has personally been sending messages pressuring all leads to pick a “weak link” and going on about culture fit in ways that are fucking loaded. and then there’s the exodus of ex-leads who have been saying clearly that they quit instead of being forced to fire people, and the whole team of quality engineers that was axed late last year (oh but it’s not a layoff, they all magically had bad performance despite great individual performance reviews, one of them being on parental leave, and all of them being blindsided), and so on and so on…
honestly it fucking sucks bc for a long time i was able to say, despite matt personally being behind half the bad ideas that have plagued tumblr in the last few years, that i think automattic was still doing a better job than most other companies who could afford to take on a liability like tumblr would do. and i thought that about wordpress.com too, and kept recommending it bc automattic’s ethics were at least marginally better than most companies in the same space not built on open source. there were people i knew who were working on the transmisogynist moderation issue, but [gestures] decisionmakers have decided they’re selling tumblr data (including private data!) to midjourney instead of doing anything but doubling down i guess. now that matt’s weighed in it’s not gonna get better. the queer staff remaining have used what leverage they had in every way possible and stopped being listened to a long time ago.
support staff are paid far too little for what they deal with. i get messages from my ex-colleagues regularly because they’re all trying desperately to jump ship. anyway usually i think people are misguided in putting the blame for corporate decisions directly at the feet of the figurehead ceo but in this case he is genuinely detested and keeps personally making the worst decisions and doubling down on them
You gonna do anything or make any statement about the rampant transmisogyny on this hellsite, especially in cases like predstrogen recently? Or yall gonna stay silent and keep letting/making us get pushed off of it.
I have a number of asks about this, so this is to address all of them, I won’t do each individually.
We generally do not comment on individual cases, but because there seems to be mass misinformation around this, I will make an exception and comment on predstrogen.
First, Tumblr has a number of LGBT+ including trans people on staff, and they see things from the inside fully, and they’re not protesting this case.
Why do we wrongly have a transphobe reputation? We did have an external contract moderator last year that was making transphobic moderation (and also selling moderation, criminally). As soon as we were aware that person was fired, and we later terminated the entire relationship with that contracting firm and have brought almost everything in-house (at great cost). I have previously commented on this publicly, several times.
I am not aware of any Automattician (people who work at Automattic and Tumblr) who has made any transphobic moderation actions. If it’s reported it is investigated immediately, if anything were found that person would be terminated for cause immediately.
In predstrogen’s case in addition to some mistagged sexually explicit posts, which on its own wouldn’t be that bad, we have documented cases of harassment against other users. Most importantly, and why she is banned from Tumblr for life, is she made threats of violence against Tumblr staff.
That is never okay. Threats of violence is not protected speech. We will work with police and FBI where appropriate. I just got a death threat yesterday from someone mad about predstrogen, and that account was immediately terminated.
So regardless of whether you still think Tumblr staff is somehow a bunch of transphobes, know that threats of violence or death are still not acceptable and will result in immediate and serious action. Know that when you rile people up, they can do dumb things with possibly permanent consequences.
(2 hours later update: I have changed instances of the pronoun “they” or “their” to “the account” because I am unaware of pronoun preference in this instance and don’t want to misgender anyone. Thank you for the people who reported this as an issue. Update 2: “She” is apparently better, the post now says that. Sorry for the mistake.)
Here’s one (of many!) examples of the harassment violations, this one targets me but there are others targeting other users on the site.
The second part seems to indicate she wanted to be suspended, I’m unaware of why, perhaps to create this sort of uproar.
beyond it being unimaginable that the CEO would be thin skinned enough to try to do a flame war with the users of his own social media site like a SomethingAwful mod and be made to look like a total pussy in the process, it’s bizarre that you just sort of dropped “yeah the people we were contracting for moderation were transphobic until we moved in house, where we still allow people to abuse the report button”. i’m a bit confused as to what changed because i recall the same exact auto-response-only moderation when i got banned last year that users are complaining about now. the frustration comes from the fact that you only send out canned responses infrequently in response to moderation emails that don’t address anyone individually until one of the staff members throws a temper tantrum like this and tries to reveal “The real reason for the ban”. this happens all the time. you guys just sort of unbanned me randomly after not even giving me the courtesy of an automated response to my appeal for months. the fact is that you let mean girl cliques of fascists dog walk the automated moderation on here and you finally ran into enough bad press for it. it’s got you scrambling around looking like an idiot trying to passive aggressive PR-speak the zoomers who have been incubating on this site’s disourse cycle their whole lives. that’s crazy man, good luck though
