What is almost certainly happening with Tumblr’s image classifier is that they’ve deployed the bot entirely untrained, and are relying on user complaints to train it what NSFW content on tumblr looks like.
Making people participate in their own censorship in this way and punishing them with the threat of being silenced even if in compliance with the rules should they not participate, is, IMHO, abuse of their userbase.
Source: I’ve worked for three different top-five social networks, and at all of them this type of work would have been done by making the userbase do it as much as possible.
Please signal boost. I don’t care if you reblog or repost, just get the word out so that people know what they’re doing as they interect with this thing.
My twitter is @soren_tycho (nsfw, sfw account coming soon) and my github username is sorentycho.
Just chiming in as a machine learning expert, this is almost certainly the case (and knowing tumblr, they weren’t even smart enough to throw in pre-trained weights)
I don’t remember agreeing to beta test 🤔
A well known AI blogger I follow also supports this theory.
The Vox article that I was interviewed for is up and running, and it contains some serious fuckign information about this whole fiasco.
Information that tumblr just straight up refused to provide to its userbase at all.
Unsurprisingly to those of us watching this website deteriorate over the last year, this full content purge and ban has been in progress for a solid 6 months. The date got moved up because of the child porn thing, but it was always coming for us.
Equally unsurprising: Tumblr’s management and ownership are absolutely destroying the actual staff working on it. The company has been hemoragghing senior staff without so much as a token attempt to keep them in place. So the drops in site quality are real, and wil probably only be getting worse.
Truly astonishing is the fact that apparently this crap was supposed to “double” the userbase by the end of next year. Boy, howdy, that’s not gonna work out well for them.
good luck with your plan to sell ads targeting a user base that doesn’t exist any more, @staff.
@staff@support you may want to read this. No one seems to think this nsfw ban move is a good thing. Your credibility is circling the drain at this point.
This has all been done in such a tragically stupid fashion. And it makes it worse that they actually planned it for six months before initiating it.
The Vox piece doesn’t even really portray the extent of the devastation. They’ve broken this website for ALL of their users.
Second, this means any poor person with a phone and the new Burger King app can literally get food for a penny just by going to McDonalds, which is probably a goddamn lifesaver if you’re regularly worried about where your next meal is coming from
Hey I know a lot of false links have been passed around to see which of your posts are flagged but here’s the real one. Please make sure you won’t be losing your blog on December 17th!!
:^) 