azziikko

[azziikko]

What is this about the tumblr staff wanting to sell art data to midjourney?

An ex-colleague of mine mentioned yesterday that there may be contacts between Automattic and midjourney in that direction, but nothing is public yet and I don't have any more info. They probably won't have anything specific to share either, since they left the company weeks ago too. That being said:

I have no reason to doubt my ex-coworker word, they are a trustworthy person.

Tumblr's CEO has been absurdly enthusiastic (comically, even) about AI, and is a big fan of LLMs and 'AI' companies.

A deal with midjourney could solve tumblr financial issues (not the same company, but openAi is paying up to 5 million/year to news companies to use their content as training data... tumblr generates several orders of magnitude more content than any newspaper or any media company and it only would need a 20 to 30 million per year deal to be profitable)

So I don't have any extra info yet, but I'm keeping my ears open.

[azziikko]

if ur gonna send me transphobic anon hate at least get the suicide rate dogwhistle right, ur right wing besties aren't gonna care about "43%"

[azziikko]

I mean this genuinely: the ceo couldve absolutely just gotten away with this still right after the c/a/r h/a/m/m/e/r posting saga if he just stayed on vacation.

Following a woman to a second website (AFTER SHE SAID SHE WAS DONE WITH THIS ONE) and continuing the drama, blaming her for being banned (when the crux of the issue wasn’t even the bans, it was the repeated harassment staff did nothing about!)

I seriously don’t think he realizes how much this undermines this platform and staff. Like, dude, come on. “If you don’t like it, leave!” Is not a good response, especially if you’re going to follow her to a different site anyway and personally bother her.

He’s even complained about receiving death threats- and death threats are bad! It’s bad to have death threats sent to you. So why is it ok when they’re sent to her? Like that was the issue. THAT was the issue. And from all his posting it seriously seems like he doesn’t get that.

The time to own up to shit and apologize was a few days ago at this point. This is putting a lot of really bad behaviors on display in front of two websites now.

[azziikko]

like y'all know me. i keep my nose down on here. i don't reblog posts about, or participate in, tumblr discourse, no matter what for. but this has gone beyond bickering or petty fights, at least on the user end.

this is despicable and unacceptable public behavior from a man who knows his power and position allows him to goad and harass users without consequences, testing the waters to do this on platforms that aren't even his own, but... for what? for mentioning the name of the site his company owns??? this has gone revenge or petty mod abuse. this has accelerated to a public call to dogpile a trans woman who, self-admittedly, ALREADY had multiple stalkers and groups of harassers.

how do you justify that? how??? she can't hurt you, matt, no matter how many gifs of cars exploding or mentions of hammers she posts, on tumblr or otherwise.

genuinely- i hope you never get peace from this, matt. i hope these choices you've tripled down on follow you for the rest of your life.

and nobody likes WordPress either.

[azziikko]

[azziikko]

personally speaking i dont think committing several severe data protection law violations while harassing a former user of my million dollar service on another website is a particularly great way to make yourself look good

[azziikko]

Matt is harassing Avery on twitter now

[azziikko]

https://x.com/photomatt/status/1760647056597946851?s=46

CEO of Tumblr, Matt Mullenweg, has started openly harassing tumblr users on other platforms. This dude is actually incredibly scary and malicious and should not be involved with this website going forward. Theres just no excuse for this behavior.

[azziikko]

it almost goes without saying but for posterity's sake i want people to remember that during @photomatt's meltdown last night he dmed dozens and dozens of people (near exclusively trans women, For Some Inexplicable Reason), sometimes less than a Minute after they left a reply, responded to a post of his, or even just Made Their Own Post about it.

like. pure intimidation tactics at their most blatant and obvious. why else would you sit on your namesearch, refreshing and refreshing and Instantly jumping into our dms the second we participated in the conversation. that isn't normal, not for a ceo and not for like, Anyone Else for that matter.

matt spent a lot of his little episode making sure everyone knew he didn't think he was a transmisogynist. that was very important to him, that he defended himself from that. congratulations bud you fucked it

[azziikko]

my "we fired a former moderator who was openly transphobic and taking bribes" aside is raising a lot of questions answered by my "we fired a former moderator who was openly transphobic and taking bribes" aside

[azziikko]

i know its been discussed already but it really is insane that @photomatt threatened to get the FBI involved because a user on his website, who does not live in the USA, said she hopes he gets hit by a wile e coyote situation. like were past bad moderation this is straight into mid 2000s forum moderator behavior

[azziikko]

freedom of speech

(acrylic on canvas, 20. Feb. 2024)

art by op

[azziikko]

car hammer CEO explosion

[azziikko]

idk how many of you remember this but a few years ago tumblr ran a universally panned ad campaign for (us american) pride month that went "the gayest place on the internet".

well someone planning that campaign dropped in to ask the queer automatticians for advice on that and universally me and the other trans people involved were like "don't do it. i am so serious. don't do it. people on tumblr won't understand that it wasn't automattic who instituted the porn ban, or they will, but they'll recognize that automattic hasn't done anything, hands tied or not, to reverse it. nobody will like this. it will be a disaster." and they thanked us for our thoughts and went ahead with it anyway and then had to do retrospectives about how badly it went and were like "we just didn't know" and [gestures] yeah [edit: i think the person who rbed saying it was queerest place on the internet was right, my brain is fried, sorry! and that's... even worse lmao]

[azziikko]

2021: Extremely cartoonish non-threats of violence are a point of pride and meme on tumblr.

2024: The CEO threatens to send the FBI to perform an extrajudicial extradition on "an account" because she mentioned hammers while trans.

[azziikko]

[azziikko]

You gonna do anything or make any statement about the rampant transmisogyny on this hellsite, especially in cases like predstrogen recently? Or yall gonna stay silent and keep letting/making us get pushed off of it.

I have a number of asks about this, so this is to address all of them, I won't do each individually.

We generally do not comment on individual cases, but because there seems to be mass misinformation around this, I will make an exception and comment on predstrogen.

First, Tumblr has a number of LGBT+ including trans people on staff, and they see things from the inside fully, and they're not protesting this case.

Why do we wrongly have a transphobe reputation? We did have an external contract moderator last year that was making transphobic moderation (and also selling moderation, criminally). As soon as we were aware that person was fired, and we later terminated the entire relationship with that contracting firm and have brought almost everything in-house (at great cost). I have previously commented on this publicly, several times.

I am not aware of any Automattician (people who work at Automattic and Tumblr) who has made any transphobic moderation actions. If it's reported it is investigated immediately, if anything were found that person would be terminated for cause immediately.

In predstrogen's case in addition to some mistagged sexually explicit posts, which on its own wouldn't be that bad, we have documented cases of harassment against other users. Most importantly, and why she is banned from Tumblr for life, is she made threats of violence against Tumblr staff.

That is never okay. Threats of violence is not protected speech. We will work with police and FBI where appropriate. I just got a death threat yesterday from someone mad about predstrogen, and that account was immediately terminated.

So regardless of whether you still think Tumblr staff is somehow a bunch of transphobes, know that threats of violence or death are still not acceptable and will result in immediate and serious action. Know that when you rile people up, they can do dumb things with possibly permanent consequences.

(2 hours later update: I have changed instances of the pronoun "they" or "their" to "the account" because I am unaware of pronoun preference in this instance and don't want to misgender anyone. Thank you for the people who reported this as an issue. Update 2: "She" is apparently better, the post now says that. Sorry for the mistake.)

Here's one (of many!) examples of the harassment violations, this one targets me but there are others targeting other users on the site.

The second part seems to indicate she wanted to be suspended, I'm unaware of why, perhaps to create this sort of uproar.