Community Guidelines Should Come from the Community

Tomorrow will be an interesting day in social media history. Tomorrow Tumblr will purge its platform of NSFW content.

Tumblr is a social media platform that works well for sharing photos. I just uploaded this picture of Christmas Cactus to the site. I made little tumblrs that showed all the pictures I could find of Arizona, Colorado and Utah.

The site got huge largely because it allowed people to upload nude photos which they were instructed to label as NSFW "Not Safe For Work"

NSFW started with "art-nudes" but the site was soon swamped by porn. The creators didn't care. The porn expanded their user base.

Like most dot-bombs, Tumblr never made any money. Tumblr built a huge user base offering free services then sold to a larger company. Yahoo bought the site hoping that the tumblr user based would revitalize its declining user base. Yahoo overpaid for the site, then failed. Verizon bought Yahoo.

On Dec 3rd, Verizon announced that they would purge the NSFW content on Dec 17.

Apparently the way that they are doing this is that Verizon unilaterally wrote new "community guidelines" and are purging the sites that violate the new "community guidelines."

Verizon owns tumblr. Apparently the site has been nothing but a money pit. Verizon can do with the site what it wants.

What strikes me is how Verizon is executing the purge in the name of "community."

In traditional circles the term "community" meant "with unity."

Communities tend to develop their own norms. In a true community, the norms should develop from within the community and not from the top down.

Verizon just created a situation in which its "community guidelines" are far outside of community norms.

The Tumblr purge will be interesting. I suspect millions of people will stop using the site.

Steemians would be wise to invite people from Tumblr into the SteemIt community.