Tumblr Changes - My Thoughts

Tumblr Changes - My Thoughts

I know this post is not about space and astronomy, but I wanted to voice my thoughts about the upcoming ban on Tumblr and how the automatic algorithms are going to affect everyone on there.

First off, I do not post or follow any NFSW Tumblr, so the primary ban does not affect either my Space Engine Tumblr or Rabbit and Shark Tumblr or other Tumblr’s that I follow in that regard, but the algorithms Tumblr has created are already beginning to affect my space engine posts. I mean seriously, how are my pictures of planets, alien landscapes and nebulas being flagged as adult material?

I understand that there are nearly 450 million users on here, but Tumblr has just 400 or so employees and for their employees to go through perhaps billions of images is not practical so they had to write a program to do the work for them. Auto-flagging images however, is a major problem for us non-NFSW Tumblrs, and we are only just now seeing the start of this problem. Eventually it is going to get to the point that we all have to wait weeks even months for our “sensitive marked” pictures to be marked as safe, since an actual person will have to review it.

Final conclusion. This ban and the way it is being implemented is a bad idea, and to be honest I also think an assault on free speech. More importantly, Tumblr better fix its auto-identification programs before a lot of us leave out of frustration when pictures of planets, rabbits, and sharks are all marked as adult.

PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD AND REPOST.