Looking For 12 (Squared) Good Fen

Short: We need 12 x 2 fans to join Yahoo Groups to save 12,000 Yahoo Groups. You do not need to be a Yahoo Group member. You only need a computer and a browser. Deadline: Dec 11.

Long: With only 10 days to go, Verizon has cut off the Archive Team/Internet Archive from accessing 80% of the Yahoo Groups they spent November joining. For transformative fandom, this equals to a 100% loss of the public fandom Groups we submitted to be saved on the Internet Archive.

At the same time, Verizon has made changes that are preventing some moderators and members from using 3rd party tools like PGOffline to access their data

We need 24 fans - anyone with access to a computer and a browser - to join Yahoo Groups using IDs that we will supply. This is a manual process - after the first 20 groups, you will be asked to solve Captcha puzzles to join each Group  - but the work can be done over a full day

Step 1: Contact us for your YahooID and password: [email protected]

Step 2: Claim a tab (add your name)

Step 3: Join all the groups on your tab.

Step 4: Email us at [email protected] to let us know you finished.

Questions? Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/DyCNddf

Google Doc:  tinyurl.com/yahoo-gedden

*12 (Squared) = 144. We’d be happy with 24 people. But the more who join, the easier the job will be.

Signal boost! 144 fandom heroes needed! Dec 11th is less than one week!

What’s funny is when you read articles about what happened, they never mention how Yahoo promised no ads only to put in ads anyway, pissing off and alienating users. They never mention that Verizon’s idea of “no adult content” was to implement poorly trained bots to clear the site of anything that looked like a tittie, which utterly failed at clearing the site of adult content or spam bots and instead forced millions of SFW users, especially artists, off the site. Instead they just say “Verizon’s decision to ban adult content upset and alienated many users.” Like no, that’s not even remotely what happened. I get new porn/spam bot follows daily even now, the problem is the worst its ever been, Verizon failed spectacularly at doing what they said they’d do (including protecting artists etc. from being targeted by their algorithms). The news wants the public to believe that we all threw a hissy fit and left en masse like a crowd of depraved neckbeards when tumblr banned adult content, driving the site into the ground as we left. Not a single article I’ve seen has discussed how Verizon/Yahoo is at fault. Not one.

I can’t fucking get over this oh my god

the critical role kickstarter made over eleven million dollars

tumblr was sold for less than three million dollars

critical role could have conceivably bought tumblr three times over and still had enough money left over to fund its animated short at its original goal of 750k. and i think that’s beautiful

In response to the news that:

This is what capitalism does. I’m just glad there was a decent company out there willing to catch Tumblr before it hit the ground but it’s not common.

I still don’t think WordPress will ban the nazis but it’s better than Verizon.

Congratulations tumblr

We are officially responsible for a 1 billion dollar loss to Verizon let’s all give ourselves a round of applause

Shrewd business tactic on behalf of Verizon to tank the userbase of this site and a few months later offer it up for sale at what I assume is a price lower than what they purchased it for. Its a tad unorthodox in terms of business sure but still interesting

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.

Then they’re def gonna let Tumblr die on the vine when it doesn’t pan out. It’ll take a few years but mark my words, this is going to work out about as well as when Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace and everybody left. Also, fuck Verizon forever.

Plz lemme know if you reblog this and it disappears. I have Suspicions.

I mean, there are already mutuals of mine reporting that they can’t see this post, only a “post was deleted"notice on my blog, and I’m the OP. So, whatever your suspicions are, I suppose mark them as confirmed.

i’ve seen it disappear about 5 times off my dash. 

Tweet thread from the Internet Archive lead who’s been running the crawls to archive tumblr blogs that are on the chopping block.

Tumblr has thrown a pretty large spanner in the works. ugh.

god this is so ridiculous; what could they possibly have against people simply archiving the stuff they plan to delete? They aren’t liable for any of it once it’s off their servers.

some context for yahoo’s excellent product management that not a lot of people know about:

remember yahoo instant messenger? i’m guessing basically everyone stopped using that after like the early 2000s. but until about two years ago, almost all of the world’s oil trading was conducted through yahoo instant messenger. every day hundreds of millions of barrels, billions of dollars in equity, was traded by a bunch of dudes through yahoo instant messenger. traders and brokers loved that they could be speaking with tons of people at once, and their compliance officers loved that there was a transcript of conversations and deals left behind for auditing and regulatory purposes.

but yahoo decided, perhaps reasonably on the surface, that they did not want to support this service anymore. they wanted to migrate the messaging platform onto something a bit more integrated and 21st century. except their new service was not compatible with any kind of conversation-recording capability, so traders would not be allowed to use it anymore for compliance purposes.

chaos. billion dollar companies all around the world were scrambling. how would they conduct their business? i know this sounds silly, but traders talk to hundreds of people a day, brokers are showing them markets all day long. phones are inefficient and not all are set to record. they explained to yahoo what the compliance issue was. they offered to pay – these companies can afford any kind of subscription necessary. they assured yahoo that a massive pillar of the world’s economy, as fucking insane as it sounds, is actually conducted through their service. just let us use it. (here’s a reuters article about it, and here’s a financial times article on it)

yahoo didn’t change its plans.

now everyone uses something else to trade the world’s oil.

Just to make the point of this allegorical anecdote explicit for anyone not getting it: Oath(Verizon/Yahoo) is not going to back down from this purge nonsense just because they’re going to leave money on the table, or even lose money, by doing it. That’s not how US business management works. THEY --the Board, CEO, and Corporate Management-- “know what’s best”; THEY, as their huge pay-packages assure them, are the Best and Smartest people; Their opinions and biases, and the decisions they make based on them, are Unquestionably Correct and can Never Be Wrong and Nothing --not angry “Consumers”, not even “The Market” they pretend to deify-- can convince them otherwise.

As I said Yesterday: US capitalism is not about pure profit, it’s about establishing and maintaining a particular hierarchy. And that hierarchy is one in which the super-rich investor(capitalist)-class and the “Business Men”(and so many of them ARE men) who run their businesses are at the top, and consumers like us, who actually use this site and built the communities which made it a successful “business” in the first place, are either at the bottom or, as the product being sold via our data and attention, not even considered.

Remember the last time the FCC nearly killed net neutrality?

Tumblr had this nice big banner at the top of your dashboard alerting any active user about the problem. Guess what has changed since then? Verizon, one of the companies gunning for the death of net neutrality owns yahoo who in turn own Tumblr. Spread the word, tell everyone you can: battleforthenet.com tag posts you see about net neutrality with popular tags so the news spreads.

source: https://tumblr.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115007729788-Heads-up-for-AT-T-customers

In other words, if you’re using an ATT email for your Tumblr account, you need to go change your email or you will pretty much be…

banned

Tumblr is now owned by a phone company, so it's stopped fighting for Network Neutrality

Yahoo’s sale to Verizon means that Yahoo’s sub-companies – Flickr, Tumblr and a host of others – are now divisions of a phone company, and as you might expect, being on the payroll of a notorious neutracidal maniac with a long history of sleazy, invasive, privacy-destroying, monopolistic, deceptive, anti-competitive, scumbag shakedowns has changed the public positions these companies are allowed to take.

This matters a lot. The previous fights for net neutrality were won in part with the support of scrappy online companies like Tumblr, whose CEO, staff and users worked together to send a strong message to Congress and the FCC about the importance of a neutral internet, free from ISPs who slow down your connections to services unless they pay bribes for “premium” carriage.

With Trump’s FCC set to slay Net Neutality, the internet is once again planning a day of coordinated action: on July 12, sites across the net will send their users to the FCC and Congress to demand that ISPs be held to a public service standard befitting the trillions of dollars in public subsidies they receive every year in the form of access to rights of way through our cities and between them.

However, Tumblr is not among the companies presently slated to participate, and sources within the company told The Verge that the company and its CEO, David Karp (once a staunch Net Neutrality campaigner) have been given orders to sit this one out.

https://boingboing.net/2017/06/22/corporations-arent-people.html

Source that yahoo was sold to verizon: https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/13/verizon-closes-4-5b-acquisition-of-yahoo-marissa-mayer-resigns-memo/

Keep an eye on your ‘net neutrality’ posts guys.  they may suddenly and for no reason up and vanish because the new parent company decides that they may not like what their new social media platform is announcing.

Just in case anyone is confused like I was, this pretty much means that networking companies are going to block what we post on social media if they don’t like it. So that is denying freedom of speech.

:(

oh right yahoo is selling tumblr to verizon

thats gonna be an experience

welcome to the “slow decline” period of a social network as it’s handed off to a succession of companies that don’t really know or care abt the site aside from that it’s something that’s losing them money

this is neopets all over again

neopets actually had a functional staff to lose, in the first place

hey verizon can you fix my samsung galaxy s4 model SCH-I545 it broke and i need to get pictures off it but everytime i visit your stores the sales associates tell me to talk to someone else

No, yahoo did not sell tumblr to Verizon.

Verizon Bought Yahoo :|

Why a telecom would want an email/social media company... might have something to do with the FCC’s current plans to nix net neutrality, which would allow carriers(such as verizon) to penalize their customers into using only the sites they own. Or it’s just part of verizon’s campaign of acquiring internet content companies as part of building its advertising business like the article says, but that’s not conspiratorial enough for me atm u_u