staff:

One of the great things about Tumblr is that people use it for just about every conceivable kind of expression. Every single one!! All of them!! Like think about that for a second like stop and think “what’s the CRAZIEST shit someone could do on tumblr” and you know what? Someone’s doing it. Yesterday, I saw somebody reply to a weird askbox question with a funny face of themselves. One time, someone put a Homestuck head on top of a gif from Supernatural. I think it was the clown one (Gamzer?) but don’t quote me on that. But that’s the tumblr community for you, always coming up with innovative new ways to express themselves. Anyway. People being people, though, that means that Tumblr sometimes gets used for things that are just wrong. We are deeply committed to supporting and defending our users’ freedom of speech, as long as it doesn’t make us look bad. Remember when we could let you black out your blog for SOPA? See? We love free speech. It’s the greatest. Or when we turned purple for those dead gay kids? That’s free speech. Big fan of it. I ‘Like’ it on Facebook. As a company, however, we also love making money. For example, we prohibit spam and identity theft, because that’s other people making money, but not us!

Our Content Policy has not, until now, prohibited blogs that actively promote self-deprecation. It has been used to arbitrarily ban bloggers we don’t like, and occasionally we’ll cite completely nonexistent clauses in it, but we haven’t blatantly started censoring blogs based on content, yet. But we’re gonna change that, is what I’m getting at. Blogs that glorify or promote poor body image; drawing rude things on yourself; “kink-shaming”; comically lovable low self-worth; or jokes all portray an image that we are having a really hard time selling right now. These are messages and points of view that we strongly oppose, because you are beautiful in your own special way, and don’t want to be hosting, because like have you seen what brings in the server money? It ain’t some sadsack piece of shit kid in Nebraska posting about his feelings. It’s mild-mannered egotism and impact font. The question for us has been whether it’s better to (a) prohibit them, as a statement against the very ideas of free speech that we were talking about earlier, or (b)permit them to stay up, because we’re really lazy and that sounds like work.

We are planning to post a new, revised Content Policy in the very near future, and we’d like to ask for input from the Tumblr community on this issue. In order for your input to be considered, you must attach no less than three (3) but no more than five (5) “reaction images” detailing, in-depth, your feelings about each policy.

Here’s what we think the right answer is:

1. Implement a new policy against pro-self-deprecation blogs. Here’s draft language we are planning to add to our Content Policy:

Active Promotion of Self-Deprecation. Don’t post content that actively promotes or glorifies “making fun of yourself”. This includes content that urges or encourages readers to cut down or make light of themselves; embrace pessimism, negativity, or other “downer debbie”-isms; or commit acts of comedy rather than talking about nicer things, e.g., the new episode of Sherlock, or posting Glee gifs (hereby limited only to Klaine). While we’ll pretend that any discussion of self-deprecation is still allowed as long as it does not advocate it, let’s be honest, do we ever really pay that much attention to differentiate things when we get a ban request. For example, joking that you need to starve yourself after Thanksgiving or that you wanted to kill yourself after a humiliating date is acceptable, because it’s ok if you’re flippant, because then we don’t have to take them seriously, but screenshots of Google results pages for “how many shots until I black out” or asking “What paganistic religion promises to help me Lose Weight Fast” is unacceptable.

We aim to begin implementing this policy next week. That should be enough time for you guys to get your shit together, right? Oops accidentally banned a few of too soon. Ha ha Marc be careful with that thing!! Marc loves to ban people, sorry about that.

2. Do you guys like pop-ups? Of course you do In addition, we plan to start posting “public service announcement”-style language whenever users make posts that our sensors flag as being “a lil self-loathing.” In addition to the regularly scheduled “Missing E” pop-up, when a user posts something with text such as  “fat,” “fml”, “ugh”, “ugly”, “gross”, “TMI”, “don’t read”, “sadbrains”, etc., we would show PSA language like:

Self-deprecation can cause serious problems in bringing down the mood. Like, you know that scene in Twin Peaks when Audrey Horne tells the Swedes about her friend getting murdered just to drive them away and piss off her dad?? That’s you right now, that’s you, stop complaining and please buy some stickers for your posts. God, monetizing this fucking shit is hard enough you ungrateful little shits.

If this proves to be ineffective, we are currently working on a collaboration with the DailyWhat to create “Demotivation” style funny images that encourage users to “lol” at things other then themselves, such as a cat asking for a cheeseburger.

3. Fix the website, David

We’re probably not going to do this one unless there’s overwhelming demand for it, but we’ll look into it.

So that’s our plan. We’d like your feedback. If you have any comments or suggestions, please email them to policy@tumblr.com.