This is a comment (with my reply, in reverse chronology) from a NewTumbl user, Thewonderfulo, who often posts about the siteâs rating system. Iâve no idea if itâs official, but it certainly passes itself off as authoritative.
I usually find myself agreeing with them but hereâs a prime example where I donâtâbecause, first, I canât see anything in the NewTumbl rules that confirms this (excepting one sentence below which Iâll get on to); secondly, NewTumbl has told me of some of their positions personally and I feel theyâve confirmed my position; and thirdly, if bare behinds can be seen in PG-13 films (including in their country), then a single ‘buttcheek’ is even less offensive and couldnât possibly be M, which is where NewTumbl classifies nudity.
There is one sentence under the O category (âOfficeâ, or safe for work): âImages that would be considered sultry or provocative qualify as O provided the people in the photo have both their tops and bottoms covered â not just hidden from view, but actually wearing clothes.â Weâd then have to argue about how much âcoverageâ there is, and here Iâd fall back on being alive for nearly five decades and having kept my eyes open about popular culture. Swimwear, for instance, provides acceptable coverage which wouldnât offend most of us in the occident. From memory thatâs the level of skin the post in question was dealing with.
Itâs exactly as I said in my last post on NewTumbl. I love the concept, and the people who run the site, but the moderators are in some sort of Handmaidâs Tale Gilead. In fact, Iâd venture to say that Tumblr wouldnât consider a buttock to be offensive enough for removal. Given NewTumblâs history, as a Tumblr alternative that would be more tolerant, I believe that the moderators really donât understand the whole picture, and where the lines should be drawn.
To think, after chatting directly to NewTumbl I was feeling a bit more chipper about the site, only to have a one-sentence comment and zero willingness to engage by a user who is, I fear, typical of the âstandardsâ that are actually being applied by the overenthused American puritans.
Incidentally, speaking of Americans, the sort of divisive talk that they are infamous for is all too present. Have a look at the thread from my earlier post. Frankly, if they have a problem with a buttock on a woman who is actually wearing clothes, while this sort of mudslinging is fine on a family-friendly post, then I wonât be in a hurry to return. Sorry.
Posts tagged ‘internet’
All you need is one NewTumbl user to undo management goodwill
14.01.2021Tags: blogosphere, culture, internet, NewTumbl, photography, USA, Web 2·0
Posted in culture, internet, politics, USA | 1 Comment »
Is NewTumbl hiding posts critical of it?
16.12.2020Postscript: Alex, who maintains three spaces on NewTumbl, can still see my “missing” five posts. In addition, NewTumbl has responded and it’s believed there was a bug. More on that here.
This is interesting: talking to Bii on Twitter, who is also a NewTumbl user, I discovered that he canât see my last five posts on NewTumbl.
I sent him a permalink (using the recommended NewTumbl method) to my last post there, but he gets a 404.
In fact, the newest post he can see is my sixth-to-last. And itâs interesting to me that of the last five, three were critical of NewTumblâs moderation system.
Hmm, that link 404s for me. 😕 What is its datestamp? The last post that I can see from you on there is "A coupĂ© thatâs almost a van" from Nov 24. pic.twitter.com/v8LzPooJOF
— B. {🐝👀} (😷 and 💦👐) (@bii) December 16, 2020
This reminds me of Google Plus, which used to hide my posts that were regularly critical of Google.
Bii would kindly prefer to give NewTumbl the benefit of the doubt though my thoughts jumped immediately to censorship. The last five posts are all public.
Top: The way my NewTumbl blog is supposed to look, in its top left-hand corner. Above: What Bii sees, with the last five posts hidden. Coincidentally three of them are critical of NewTumbl.
Like I say, my blog posts here have a pretty good audience, and the first one on NewTumbl comes up very high when one searches for that site. You do not want to be playing these games.
To think, I was so supportive of that place.
For the sake of completeness, then, here are the three critical posts, which have been excerpted before.
November 27, 2020
Do the mods here know their own rules?
Had a couple of modelling shots marked M by the moderators here and I cannot understand why. I had them marked O.
Thereâs no nudity (M) but they contain sexy or sultry imagery (O). Do the mods here know their own rules?
See for yourself: this was the latest. As this is a US site, maybe I should use The Handmaidâs Tale for guidance? I hear itâs a big hit over there. This is after a post with the word w*nk (literally written like that, with an asterisk) got marked as M.
November 28, 2020
Simple rules
I have some pretty simple rules in life. If you are a professional and I am an amateur, I will defer to you in almost all cases in your specialist area, unless you make a call that is so outrageously stupid and beyond reason. And when it comes to the use of the English language, I am a professional, and can say with some authority over what is and isnât permissible. If an amateur makes a call contrary to my expectations in areas I know about, then they had better back it up. I am referring to the moderation here.
This is the problem with Wikipedia: a place where actual expertise is hated and seen as Ă©litist. Itâs why I tend not to use the site, where a few have scammed their way to the top, and, if you criticize them, you get five days of abuse from a senior editor directed at you. If this is the culture that is being instilled at NewTumbl by people not educated enough to make certain calls, then itâs a real shame. Read the guidelines.
I was on Tumblr for over a decade before the censorship got crazy, and they supported the two-speed internet advocated by big firms. It would be a real shame if I were to cut my stay short here after only a couple of years. The difference is I own a lot of sites and have plenty of creative outlets. So, rather than help Dean and his friends make a few bob, I can happily put that same energy into my spaces.
This seemed like a fun site but if a professional has to make his case in a post like this against the decision(s) of amateurs (which is the case with Wikipedia: look at the talk pages!), then that just gets tiresome: itâs not a great use of my time. If you donât know the culture of the majority of countries in which the English language is used and somehow think 1950s white-bread America is the yardstick, then youâre already not on my level. Itâs not terribly hard to put together an image-bank site where I share those âirrelevantâ thoughts, as I call them here. I donât have Deanâs skill in making it a site for all, but my aims are completely selfish, so I donât have to.
After all, Autocade began because I was fed up with how poor the quality was for motoring entries in Wikipedia (indeed, to the point of fiction) and sought to do something I wanted. Now it nets 1,000,000 page views every three months and Wikipedia links to it: thereâs real satisfaction in that.
There has to be a simple image plug-in out there for WordPress and Iâll just add that to my blog. which runs that CMS. We all win: the holier-than-Mary-Whitehouse types who see their job as puritanically patrolling posts here wonât have me to deal with, and I get more hits to my own space, on which I will sell ads. Weâll see. Hunting for that plug-in might be my task tonight. Or I might hang about here and post more stuff that by any measure is O, and gather up a few more examples from Angry Ward Cleaver out there.
November 29, 2020
See you at my blog gallery
That was pretty simple. Iâve put the New Image Gallery plug-in from A WP Life on to my main blog. And since that blog gets an average of 700 views per post (and the viral ones getting six figures), Iâm betting that whatever I put there will get more eyeballs than here. For those interested, itâs at jackyan.com/blog/2020/11/november-2020-miscellaneous-images/. [Postscript: the galleries can be found at jackyan.com/blog/category/gallery/.] New entries will be added on a monthly basis. Itâs not as cool as NewTumbl but Iâm going to be interested to see if itâs as enjoyable as what Iâve been doing here.
I wanted in all sincerity to see NewTumbl grow but as @alex99a-three and others have seen, some moderating decisions have been questionable. I know first-hand that Wikipedia is a place where true expertise, that of professionals, is not welcomeâfounder Larry Sanger has said as much, which is why he left. The late Aaron Swartz echoed those comments. And here, if professionals are being overruled by people who are not at the same level, then Iâm not sure what the point is. I feel Wikipedia has no point, and my own dissatisfaction with it led me to create Autocade, and thereâs a sense that, in its very real wish to make sure it could keep up with its growth, NewTumbl is heading down the same path.
I donât begrudge this siteâs founders for adopting the approach they did in post moderation. In fact, I think it was very clever and itâs a great way for NewTumbl to punch above its weight. However, in practice the absence of an appealsâ system doesnât work for me any more. I totally get that they havenât the resources. So maybe I will return when they do.
As @constantpriaprism pointed out, Dean is not really present these days, either, so one big drawcard to NewTumblâits transparencyâis now also missing.
And itâs those of us in the F and O spacesâpeople that NewTumbl said they wanted to encourageâwho seem to be bearing the brunt of puritanical moderating. Iâm guessing we are being sidelined by people who donât have the context (e.g. Alex has posted some really innocent stuff) or knowledge outside their countries. Both Alex and I (if I may be so bold as to guess his intent) have been marking as F or O things that were safe for us on prime-time TV when we were younger. I use the same standard with imagery and language.
To confirm this lack of knowledge, I read one comment which absolutely highlighted that one moderator had no idea what they were doing, advancing what I felt was a particularly weak argument. In that case, a newspaper front page was taken down and marked as M. You have to ask yourself: if a word appears (censored) on a newspaper front page, then itâs probably not M; and if a word is used on prime-time television without bleeping, then itâs also probably not M. There are other words which may be adult in nature but are commonly used that even Mary Whitehouse would be fine with, but you just know that with the lack of knowledge that some display here, youâre going to have it taken off the site and marked out of range.
Iâve done my share of rating posts here and I like to think Iâve taken an even-handed, free-speech approach based on decades of experience and life in different countries.
If this is to be an adult siteâand I know the majority of posts lean that wayâthen good luck to it. I will be back as @vergangene-automarken has some excellent stuff, as do the regulars whom I follow, but for now I really want to see what itâs like doing the same thing in my own space. See you there.
Tags: 2020, censorship, Google, internet, NewTumbl, Twitter, website
Posted in internet, USA | 1 Comment »
Searching for Murray Smith
09.12.2020Earlier today Strangers, the 1978 TV series created by Murray Smith, came to mind. Smith created and wrote many episodes of one of my favourite TV series, The Paradise Club (which to this day has no DVD release due to the music rights), and penned an entertaining miniseries Frederick Forsyth Presents (the first time that I noticed one Elizabeth Hurley) and a novel I bought when I first spotted it, The Devilâs Juggler. He also wrote one of my favourite Dempsey and Makepeace episodes, âWheel Manâ, which had quite a few of the hallmarks of some of his other work, including fairly likeable underworld figures, which came into play with The Paradise Club.
Yet thereâs precious little about Smith online. His Wikipedia entry is essentially a version of his IMDB credits with some embellishments, for instance. It doesnât even record his real name.
Donât worry, itâs not another dig at Wikipedia, but once again itâs a reflection of how things arenât permanent on the web, a subject Iâve touched on before after reading a blog entry from my friend Richard MacManus. And that we humans do have to rely on our own memories over whatâs on the ânet still: the World Wide Web is not the solution to storing all human knowledge, or, at least, not the solution to accessing it.
Itâs easy to refer to the disappearance of Geocities and the like, and the Internet Archive can only save so much. And in this case, I remember clearly searching for Murray Smith on Altavista in the 1990s, because I was interested in what he was up to. (He died in 2003.) I came across a legal prospectus of something he was proposing to do, and because it was a legal document, it gave his actual name.
Murray Smith was his screen name, and I gather from an article in The Independent quoting Smith and his friend Frederick Forsyth, he went by Murray, but the family name was definitely Murray-Smith. Back in those days, there was a good chance that if it was online, it was real: it took too much effort to make a website for anyone to bother doing fake news. My gut says it was George David Murray-Smith or something along those lines, but thereâs no record of that prospectus online any more, or of the company that he and Forsyth set up together to make Frederick Forsyth Presents, which I assume from some online entries was IFS Productions Ltd. Some websites’ claim that his name was Charles Maurice Smith is incorrect.
Looking today, there are a couple of UK gazette entries for George David Murray Smith (no hyphen) in the armed forces, including the SAS in the 1970s, which suggest I am right.
Even in the age of the web, the advantage still lies with those of us who have good memories who can recall facts that are lost. Iâve often suggested on this blog that we cannot fully trust technology, and that thereâs no guarantee that even the official bodies, like the UK Companiesâ Office, will have complete, accessible records. The computer is a leveller, but not a complete one.
Tags: 1990s, 2020, Altavista, government, history, internet, Richard MacManus, SAS, Scotland, TV, UK, website, Wikipedia, World Wide Web
Posted in business, culture, interests, internet, TV, UK | No Comments »
Looks like Twitter makes up your settings, too
02.12.2020Speaking of Twitter doing weird things, I checked out some of Lucireâs settings on there today, something I haven’t looked at for a long time.
I do not ever recall telling them I was in Malaysiaâit’s not a country we’ve even had a correspondent inâand Estonian and Welsh were never marked as languages. I’m not even that sure about Romanian since our edition there shut in the 2000s and the Twitter account dates from 2009.
Given yesterday’s post, I should be able to be more certain: I didn’t put in Malaysia, and I didn’t put in Romanian.
I will give them one compliment: the advertising preferences were a damned sight more accurate than anything I saw on Facebook (back when Facebook let me see them). I still deleted them though.
Tags: 2020, advertising, Big Tech, bug, internet, Lucire, Twitter
Posted in internet, technology, USA | No Comments »
Two big reasons not to use Gmail
03.10.2020I was absolutely shocked to learn this is how Gmail works.
If I read this correctly, #Google lets more than one person use a single email address (in this case, over 200!)? How daft! Why would they do that? pic.twitter.com/KtTO6PnDEI
— Jack Yan çç”æ© (@jackyan) September 27, 2020
As youâll read in the thread, this has been confirmed by other Gmail users.
That should rule out ever using Gmail for secure communications. Not that you should be using a service like that for anything important, but the fact is Gmail has become ubiquitous, and I believe a lot of people donât know any better.
Just imagine being able to receive some emails meant for your rival by signing up to an address that varies from it by a full stop or period.
Secondly, we’ve noticed a large amount of spam where we can trace (via Spamcop) the origins back to Gmail. Oftentimes they have Gmail reply addresses, as in the case of 419 scams (where they may use another ISP or email service with a “sacrificial” address to send them). Why would you risk being among that lot?
Add this to the massive list of shortcomings already detailed here and elsewhere and you have a totally unreliable platform that doesnât really give a toss. They didnât care when they removed my friendâs blog in 2009 and then obstructed any attempt to get it back, until a product manager became involved. They didnât care when their website blacklisting service libelled clean sites in 2013, telling people not to visit them or link to them. And they donât care now.
There really is no reason to use Gmail. Youâll risk your emails going to someone else with a similar address, and youâll be among the company of unethical actors. I can truly say that if Gmail werenât this ubiquitous, and used by so many friends, Iâd just set up a rule on our server and block the lot.
Tags: 2020, ethics, Gmail, Google, internet, Medinge Group, monopoly, privacy, spam, technology, Twitter, USA
Posted in business, internet, technology, USA | 3 Comments »
The “fortress America” approach to the internet fuels piracy
21.12.2019There are websites such as CBS News in the US that no longer let us here in New Zealand view them. US Auto Trader is another one. Itâs a damned shame, because I feel itâs a stab at the heart of what made the internet greatâthe fact that we could be in touch with each other across borders. These two US websites, and there are plenty more, are enacting the âfortress Americaâ policy, and Iâve never believed that isolationism is a good thing.
Letâs start with the Auto Trader one. As someone who found his car on the UK Auto Trader website, it seems daft for the US to limit itself to its own nationâs buyers. What if someone abroad really would like an American classic? Then again, I accept that classic cars are few and far between on that site, and if photos from the US are anything to go by, the siteâs probably full of Hyundai Sonatas and Toyota Camrys anyway.
I went to the CBS website because of a Twitter link containing an interesting headline. Since weâre blocked from seeing that site, then I logically fed the same headline into a search engine and found it in two places. The first was Microsoft News, which I imagine is fine for CBS since they probably still get paid a licence for it. The second, however, was an illegal content mill that had stolen the article.
I opted for the former to (a) do the right thing and (b) avoid the sort of pop-ups and other annoying ads that content mills often host, but what if the Microsoft version was unavailable? These geo-restrictions actually encourage piracy and does the original publisher out of income, and I canât see that as a good thing.
Some blamed the GDPR coming into force in the EU, so it appears CBSâwhich apparently is against Donald Trump talking isolationism yet practises itâdecided to lump ânot Americaâ into one group and include us in it. But so what if GDPR is in force? Itâs asking you to have more reasonable protections for privacyâyou know, the sort of thing your websites probably had 15 years ago by default?
I still donât think itâs that hard to ask users to hop over to Aboutads.info and opt out of ad tracking on each of their browsers. We havenât anything as sophisticated as some websites, which put their controls front and centre, but we at least provide links; and we ourselves donât collect intrusive data. Yes, some ad networks we use do (which you can opt out of), but weâd never ask them for it. The way things are configured, I donât even know your IP address when you feed in a comment.
Ours isnât a perfect solution but at least we donât isolateâwe welcome all walks of life, regardless of where you hail from. Just like the pioneers of the web, such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Make the internet great again.
Tags: 2010s, 2019, advertising, business, car, CBS, GDPR, internet, isolationism, law, media, Microsoft, news, privacy, retail, USA, World Wide Web
Posted in business, cars, culture, internet, media, publishing, USA | No Comments »