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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘Verizon’
12.07.2019
Remember Tumblr, the platform owned by Verizon that I left?
I left because of Verizon’s policies, of placing their corporate agenda ahead of the users.
I went to NewTumbl insteadâa site that Tumblr users might not know about, since Verizon has ensured that searches for its competitor come up empty.
I was very surprised to find that Verizon Media has opened an account at NewTumblâa site that they effectively tell their users does not exist.
And what are they doing on it? Running their sit vac ads for free:


It’s not technically in violation of NewTumbl’s terms, but what is interesting are their hashtags.
One of the hashtags is sexy, albeit misspelled as sexu.

Now, either you have to be sexy to work for Verizon (given the other hashtags used), or they are hashtag-spamming, in the hope their ads will be seen more widely.
It is, basically, douchebag behaviourâbut this also tells us that NewTumbl has them rattled. Why else would they advertise here instead of a regular job site?
The effect on their brand is very negativeâsince people can see these ads for what they are: a cheap shot across the bow. This is how petty big US companies are. We see this from Google, so why not Verizon?
PS.: Unlike Big Tech and the bigger players in corporate America, I own up when I learn more. The Verizon account on NewTumbl was revealed to be a fake, and has since been deleted. However, Verizon’s censorship on Tumblr continues (you can’t find NewTumbl but you can find Pornhubâall hail their potential buyers!).âJY
Tags: 2019, advertising, blogosphere, censorship, hypocrisy, NewTumbl, spam, Tumblr, USA, Verizon Posted in business, culture, internet, media, publishing, USA | No Comments »
24.04.2019
How quickly an opinion can change.
I have been on Tumblr for 12 years, signing up in 2007, with my first post in January 2008.
For most of that time I have sung its praises, saying it was one of the good guys in amongst all the Big Tech platforms (Google, Facebook) that are pathological liars. Even a few years back, you could expect to get a personal reply to a tech issue on Tumblr, despite its user base numbering in the millions.
Last year, as part of Verizon, Tumblr enacted its âporn banâ. I didnât follow any adult content, and I didnât make any myself, so it didnât affect me muchâthough I noticed that the energy had gone from the site and even the non-porn posters were doing far less, if anything at all. As mentioned yesterday, I had been cutting back on posting for some time, too. It had jumped the shark.
While I didnât agree with the move, since I knew that there were users who were on Tumblr because it was a safe place to express their sexuality, I didnât kick up as big a stink about it as I did with, say, Googleâs Adsâ Preferences Manager or the forced fake-malware downloads from Facebook.
But what is interesting is how Verizon ownership is infecting Tumblr. I see now that Tumblr can no longer say it supports ânet neutrality because its parent company does not. This isnât news: the article in The Verge dates from 2017 but I never saw it till now. Of course Verizon would have wanted to keep this under wraps from the Tumblr user base, one which would have mostly sided with ânet neutrality.
And now, after posting about NewTumbl on Tumblr last night, I see that Verizonâs corporate interests are at the fore again. Tumblr returns no results for NewTumbl in its search, because itâs that scared of a competitor. Apparently this has been going on for some time: some NewTumbl users in February blogged about it. I was able to confirm it. This isnât censorship on some holier-than-thou âmoralâ grounds, but censorship because of corporate agenda, the sort of thing that would once have been beneath Tumblr.

If I was ambivalent about leaving Tumblr before, this has made me more determined. I still have blogs there (including one with over 28,000 followers), so I wonât be shutting down my account, but, like Facebook, I wonât update my personal space any more after my 8,708 posts, unless I canât find a creative outlet that does what Tumblr currently does and am forced to return. Right now, NewTumbl more than fulfils that role, and itâs doing so without the censorship and the corruption of long-held internet ideals that seem to plague US tech platforms. Tumblr users, see you at jackyan.newtumbl.com.
Tags: 2019, Big Tech, censorship, culture, deception, internet, NewTumbl, social media, social networking, Tumblr, USA, Verizon, ânet neutrality Posted in culture, internet, media, technology, USA | 2 Comments »
23.04.2019
Postscripts: click here to read why I’m considering ceasing to post on NewTumbl, in November 2020. Click here to read about NewTumbl’s encouraging response in December 2020. And, just over a week later, how the site really has become too puritanical for its own good.

Tumblr is dead, long live NewTumbl.
I came across NewTumbl (formally newTumbl) a few days ago, after finding my Tumblr feed just wasnât what it used to be. Itâs not that the dirty pictures are goneâI only ever followed one blog where the images might be considered sensualâbut that the energy was. Those friends whose posts interested me werenât posting much any more, and it wasnât just them: my posting had diminished significantly. Platforms, I imagine, have a shelf life, and when announcements such as Verizonâs last year, which became known, perhaps incorrectly, as Tumblrâs âporn banâ, it was bound to affect the platform. It was the language that opened Verizon up to ridicule: apparently, they had a problem with âfemale-presenting nipplesâ, and some innocent content was flagged for removal.
What Verizon had really underestimated was that among the adult imagery were communities that were having free and safe discussions about sexuality, and sex workers themselves had a place where they, too, could post. It wasnât an âadultâ site per se, considering the overwhelming majority of the content was family-friendly. That perhaps kept the place relatively safe: you could have these private discussions while coming across general posts featuring interesting photography or good political viewpoints. Tumblr also hadnât descended into the political divisiveness that plague platforms such as Twitter.
I liked Tumblr for many reasons. It became a fun place to post interesting graphics for me, and to put anything that I didnât want to structure into long-form thoughts. It was image-based. Every now and then I would put up a quotation. The Font Police blog is still there, with over 20,000 followers.
I liked the fact that for years, someone would get back to you when you posted a query. This was true even after Yahoo acquired it.
But during the Blogcozy experiment, which sadly resulted in that platformâs closure, I cut down my time on Tumblr, because I had found a more suitable place to put those brief thoughts and to share with friends. Had Tumblr been a greater draw, I wouldnât have considered it. After Blogcozy closed, I didnât really resume my Tumblring to the same extent. Social seemed to be dying, since it was being run by Big Tech firms that lied as their main position. Even if Tumblr was more honest (and it was), the age of social media seemed to be at an end.
I may have been wrong, because since posting on NewTumbl Iâve been impressed by the sense of energy there. Yes, it has attracted a great deal of the adult posters who left Tumblr. But if you donât want to see X-rated stuff, you say so in the settings, and adjust to M (for mature), O (for office), or even F (for family). You won’t see anything coarser than what you chose (with the occasional exception when posters did not have a clue how the ratings’ system works). The interface is familiar-but-different-enough for Tumblr users and Verizon lawyers. Yet it goes beyond what Tumblr does, with the smart use of Interstate as the body typeface, and photos in multi-image posts actually appear in the order you load them.
Itâs not perfect: I couldnât link a video but I could upload; and I managed to stumble on a 404 page by following links, both of which Iâll report, since they make it so easy to do.
But hereâs the really good thing: the transparency. One of the main developers, Dean, talks to users and provides feedback. Heâll even post when an error occurs during developmentâthatâs something youâll never see Facebook do when its databases die.
He and I have already exchanged notes via DMs after I joined for two days, and I said I saw so many parallels between what he was doing and what I saw with Tesla when Martin Eberhard was running it (transparency over ego), or even in the days when Jerry and David were building YahooâIâm old enough to have been submitting sites to them while they were still being run out of a garage. Thereâs an exciting sense with Dean and the small NewTumbl crew that theyâre building something useful for the world, celebrating free speech and humanity. Am I being overly optimistic? I donât think I am: I enjoy the UI, I like the openness and honesty, and these are just what the tech sector needs. I see a draw for spending my time here even though I have zero followers to my blog. The buzz feels similar to when I discovered some sites back in the 1990s: it seems new and exciting.
Itâs also rather nice being the first person to populate some fandom hashtags, though I was second for Doctor Who, and for anyone ever searching for The Avengers, they will see, rightly, a photograph of Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee.
Iâll see you there at jackyan.newtumbl.com. Lucire also has a NewTumbl at lucire.newtumbl.com.

Above: The one thing I posted to Tumblr that went viral, in 2011.
Tags: 1990s, 2018, 2019, Blogcozy, blogosphere, design, graphic design, history, internet, NewTumbl, social media, technology, Tumblr, user interface, Verizon, Yahoo! Posted in business, culture, design, internet, marketing, New Zealand, TV, USA | 3 Comments »
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