Postscript: 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 can’t 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 it’s interesting to me that of the last five, three were critical of NewTumbl’s 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 coupé that’s 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.
   There’s 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 Handmaid’s Tale for guidance? I hear it’s 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 isn’t 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 élitist. It’s 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 it’s 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: it’s not a great use of my time. If you don’t 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 you’re already not on my level. It’s not terribly hard to put together an image-bank site where I share those ‘irrelevant’ thoughts, as I call them here. I don’t have Dean’s skill in making it a site for all, but my aims are completely selfish, so I don’t 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: there’s real satisfaction in that.
   There has to be a simple image plug-in out there for WordPress and I’ll 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 won’t have me to deal with, and I get more hits to my own space, on which I will sell ads. We’ll 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. I’ve 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), I’m betting that whatever I put there will get more eyeballs than here. For those interested, it’s 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. It’s not as cool as NewTumbl but I’m going to be interested to see if it’s as enjoyable as what I’ve 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 welcome—founder 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 I’m not sure what the point is. I feel Wikipedia has no point, and my own dissatisfaction with it led me to create Autocade, and there’s 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 don’t begrudge this site’s founders for adopting the approach they did in post moderation. In fact, I think it was very clever and it’s a great way for NewTumbl to punch above its weight. However, in practice the absence of an appeals’ system doesn’t work for me any more. I totally get that they haven’t 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 NewTumbl—its transparency—is now also missing.
   And it’s those of us in the F and O spaces—people that NewTumbl said they wanted to encourage—who seem to be bearing the brunt of puritanical moderating. I’m guessing we are being sidelined by people who don’t 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 it’s probably not M; and if a word is used on prime-time television without bleeping, then it’s 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, you’re going to have it taken off the site and marked out of range.
   I’ve done my share of rating posts here and I like to think I’ve taken an even-handed, free-speech approach based on decades of experience and life in different countries.
   If this is to be an adult site—and I know the majority of posts lean that way—then 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 it’s like doing the same thing in my own space. See you there.