Three days ago I opened a new Tumblr account. This morning I did my first post. Two minutes later, Tumblr abruptly and permanently suspended my account. The reason they wet themselves is an eye-opener.
Spoiler alert: It was out of fear.
I'm not new to Tumblr. Another blog of mine I have on Tumblr for several years now was pretty successful, till I abandoned it around three years ago. So, I know the site's rules, and I abided by it.
I should add that I am running many of my blogs and online accounts through proxy servers and different devices, each for specific reasons. Tumblr definitely does not know that the old blog and the new one has the same author, or my new blog may not have gotten suspended. Or, the other one may have gotten suspended too, if they knew. Difficult to say, when a bunch of skunks in a boardroom controls your 'free' speech.
On a quick side note: I have always been very critical of Tumblr's heavy data consumption, which is the main reason I abandoned Tumblr three years ago. Yes, it's a photo blogging platform, and photos tap one's data plan. But that's a lame excuse for several years now.
Why is a full photo of 1+ MB downloaded when the technology exists to scale it down on the server side to as low as 30 KB's? Or when the industry-standard for displaying web-photos is around 150 kilobytes. Facebook is using such tech, so is pretty much every other site dealing with a lot of photos. It speeds up page load too. Why isn't Tumblr doing it? Or at least, not properly.
Many photos load without the viewer even scrolling down to see it. A useless overload of recommendations of other blogs to follow adds to distracted blogging. (That's why Medium grew so fast, BTW, they allow users to write and surf the site fairly distracting-free.)
Plus, and this is a biggie, it appears as if Tumblr still does not offer the option not to load annoying .gif's, those little scumbags can easily each steals 3 MB or more just by loading. Why do users have to install a spying third-party add-on in their browsers to block that real spam? Tumblr is hugely, unnecessarily heavy on data usage.
Back to the story. This morning I pasted a post that I wrote originally for my one BlogSpot blog - and then pasted days later without issues at SteemIt - on Tumblr as well. Perfectly according to the rules. With credit to the original source at the bottom, which is my other blog in this case, as writing etiquette in our war against plagiarism dictates.
My post included around 17 photos of bedrooms, that I found breathtaking. Here it is on SteemIt. Nothing explicit, nothing unruly, nothing raunchy.
The post then appeared on Tumblr as expected, and I surfed the site a bit. But three minutes later, I was suddenly required to log in again. I tried repeatedly, no success. Till, after four tries, I got the unpleasant message 'This account has been suspended.' No reason given. WTF man. I was flabbergasted.
With it being a new account - and with Tumblr not knowing that I'm an experienced blogger - why no warning, or some indication first that I did something mysteriously wrong? Why immediately metaphorically execute me? Even Mark Fuckerface knows to first warn an offending user, before chucking him into FB jail. (Now you know why FB keeps on growing while you are in decline, Tumblr.)
I clicked over to Tumblr's rules, to see what act of terrorism I must've committed to justify such a tough death penalty. But no, nothing, I did not break any written rule.
But then it dawned on me.
After discovering blockchain sites some time ago, and realizing it is most certainly the future of the internet, I started adding a short quip beneath my posts, saying I'm also blogging on SteemIt, Ecency, and others. And of course, a link to each. Kind of like we all did before when we said we're on Facebook and Twitter. Except, this time I listed decentralized networks not being controlled by 'the elite', but by the users themselves. Thus, a Twitter boss couldn't quickly phone a Fuckerface to discuss the free speech behavior of an unruly minion and how to get him back in check, see.
I've been posting my little blurb (will be underneath this post as well) on my BlogSpot blogs too, and Google that owns that platform has no problem with it. That's because Google - which we all love while pretending to hate the company - since its inception had the attitude of 'Let users promote our competition if they want, we'll just keep on improving to offer a better product, so that users go and test those sites, then come back to us.' And apply some dirty monopolistic techniques, but that's for another article, today we love Google, okay.
In fact, part of my blurb below my posts is for the search engine PreSearch, which I'm very impressed with. It is direct competition to Google's flagship product. And it is mentioned underneath my posts on BlogSpot.
I fully expect Alphabet (that owns Google) to start switching over to blockchain too, in some form or another, within 5 years. Google never resisted change, it adapted, one of the core rules for success.
However, the company Automattic (with two t's) that owns WordPress.com - and since a while ago, Tumblr too — does not share this philosophy, in my opinion. Instead, they claim to be all for freedom of speech, but in reality I found (yes, I had WP blogs before) that I have more freedom of speech on BlogSpot blogs and elsewhere. Their rules on their blogging platform WordPress.COM (not the .org site, where you just download the software) are pretty restrictive, and kind of a killer of creative writing.
Furthermore, Automatic appears to desperately wants to keep some form of control over the internet, with their gigantic and unhealthy share of the market. A significant percentage — something like 42% or more — of all websites on the internet runs on WordPress code. While the code is open-source and users can download it for free for self-hosting elsewhere, their WordPress.COM blogging platform is pretty controlling, and limits new bloggers on true free speech. Real free speech is often controversial, and to me it seems Automatic does not really tolerate that, while they claim they do.
While Tumblr claims to have 500 million+ blogs on there, how many are really active, and of good quality? Many I've seen today are plain spam from train-girls (every guy in town took a ride), that openly asks for money in exchange for nude photos. And yet Tumblr bans my new blog?!
And what's up with ripping off users at 18 US dollars for a domain name at WordPress, while one can get the exact same thing at 10 US dollars at other domain name sellers like NameCheap? It's all really only about the money, with a fancy mission statement to cover it all up, huh.
Automattic, like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and pretty much every huge well-known company that operate one or more websites where users can give input (Web 2.0 sites), are currently all centralized. Meaning, it has a board of wealthy directors, ruling the lives of you peasants by controlling what you are allowed to say and do online. That gives them an enormous, 1984-style degree of control. We had become so used to it that we don't realize the dangers of it anymore.
Tumblr has a tumultuous history itself. It used to belong to that criminal syndicate Yahoo, that used to — and maybe still do — collude with federal agencies in giving the private data of users to the feds, because, you know, f*ck users rights. The NSA paid Yahoo hefty sums each year for that data, as WikiLeaks and other exposés revealed. And then we complain about the Chinese government doing the same with Chinese companies like TikTok and Alibaba and WeChat?
Yahoo has such crappy server security due to their disregard for users, that the record for being a victim of the biggest hacks in history belongs to them. Twice, at least. They allegedly also sold users private data to advertisers, and likely also to hackers posing as advertisers. Some of my info only Yahoo had, ended up on the dark web. Thanks imaginary god-thingy for my strategy of disinformation, I knew immediately where a telemarketer got my info from when he addresses me on a fake name I gave to only one company. Lately Yahoo is spamming every email account holder with low-quality crap about phone and antivirus upgrades.
Well, that lax attitude towards the rights of users seems to have carried over to Tumblr when Yahoo bought it out, and I'm not sure that culture disappeared after Automattic acquired Tumblr.
Blockchain networks with blogging sites built on top of it, like SteemIt, Ecency, PeakD, Publish0x, Read.cash, and others are ruled by its users, not by centralized companies. And such decentralized websites are having the companies behind centralized websites like traditional blogging platforms scared out of their wits.
This morning I became the victim of that fear, and I'm not going to take it laying down.
It appears to me that Tumblr may have it hard-coded into their algorithms to immediately ban accounts that promote or even just mention their competition that resides on blockchain networks. Which is what my blurb at the bottom of my long article this morning kind of did. But, my article wasn't spammy, which is the only excuse I think Tumblr could possibly use as motivation for their overreaction.
My bedroom article itself will give anyone that loves sleeping a lot of ideas. Many photos, that I worked hard on. I scaled them down to 600 pixels in width to fit a screen nicely, quality still good at 95% while size in KB's came down significantly, adding nice descriptive text on each, and so on. Didn't even add a watermark on any of it, while I considered doing so. As such, my article adds value.
I even planned to pin my photos on there, getting users on Pinterest over to my new Tumblr blog. But that ain't going to happen now. Way to kill yourself slowly but surely with your stupid, control-greedy, narrow-minded attitude, Tumblr. Ever heard about interconnectivity?
After my inexplicable suspension on Tumblr, I sent a quick message via the platform, asking for an explanation. By the time of writing this, many hours later, I am still waiting for even a 'screw you' reply. I am certain they will have a well-crafted excuse ready, since I'm definitely not the first to mention alternative blogging platforms on there.
But they should know that their ‘free speech’ claim can fool some people all the time, but not all people all the time.
TAGS:
#blogging #blockchain #censorship #tumblr #wordpress #automattic #blogspot #freespeech
*This post first appeared on my blog at https://remilrules.blogspot.com/2021/11/how-to-get-tumblr-to-wee-wee-itself.html
Something You Should Look Into…
Would you like to get paid for using Facebook, Twitter, and others?
I am also getting paid on various decentralized, Web. 3.0, true free-speech social media platforms with its millions of new users, simply for doing the same stuff you're doing on Facebook. Join up (it's all 100% free) through my invitation links below to get you approved sooner, if you want the same. You missed the free Bitcoins in 2011, don't miss this bus again!
(Right-click on a link and select ‘open in new tab’ to check them all out.)
Ecency - HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
Read
Noise
publish0x
SteemIt
Lately I switched from Google Search to PreSearch, and recommend you consider it too. It delivers highly accurate, relevant search results to my queries, is vastly more private without tracking, and they pay me for every single search.
PreSearch is now a default installation choice on Android phones in the European Union.