Everybody is whaling on tumblr and no-one on the real villain in this battle for free expression

[type_wild]

As the current stories go, although official word of course does not confirm it:

Tumblr is only the disc one villain in this story. The final boss is the ghost of Steve Jobs

The one thing I oddly have yet to mention in either of my lengthy missives about my ill-fated love of the Windows Phone OS, was the fact that like half the reason I'm here in the first place is becaues I'll be dead before I'll own a bloody Iphone. It's a long and very petty story, but suffice it to say that my bitter annoyance with Apple naturally grew into a keen interest in criticism of Apple. The criticism of Apple that existed a decade ago was mainly concerned with its Walled Garden politics.

Quickly summarised: A walled garden is platform where the content available is curated by the people running it - in the specific case of the Iphone, the fact that the only software you're allowed to install on your device is software that follows the guidelines of the IOS app store.

With the way the internet and the usage of computers has evolved the last decade and half, it's hardly surprising that walled gardens are par for the course of the everyman. Most people I know use the internet mainly for social media and media consumption, all of which happen either on apps or on proprietary websites. The generation before me learned to use computers in order to use spreadsheets and text editing at work; the generation after are the digital natives who cannot imagine a world without youtube. But nineties kids were young when the internet was young.

I entered fandom when the web was still the open sea that required some fundamental tech knowledge to be navigated, but which was gloriously anarchic and gloriously equal when you learned how to make and share your websites. Even the fandom hubs were non-profit and run by amateurs. My computer was a tool, and the idea that the people manufacturing the tool was going to tell me what I was allowed to use it for was ridiculous. Even if my childish boicott of Iproducts wasn't a thing, I'd still be uncomfortable, to say the least, about using a platform that effectively wanted to dictate how I was using it. (ironically, the Windows store too is a Walled Garden. Let's talk about my hypocricy later)

But fandom, for all that it was full of early adopters in 2001, found its home in the proto-social media on LJ, and when it migrated from LJ, it didn't go to the known fandom-friendly LJ clones, but to modern social media. Finding out why people went to tumblr instead of dreamdwidth is nigh impossible at this point; whichever came first, fact is that the migration from LJ coincided with the smartphones taking over the mobile market. The result: A considerable amount of fandom is happening on phones, not computers. Phones use apps, and the stats say that about half of those apps will be curated by the IOS app store.

And the Apple business model is to be accessible to all users, and to be accessible to all users there needs to be handholding and protecting of the children, so ix-nay on the porn.

There is a debate going on about the World Wide Web vs. the app-based internet usage that I sadly have not followed nearly close enough to say something insightful about, but the tumblr strikethrough is the point where it hits fandom. Because if tumblr is purging the smut becaues it lost half its mobile users, then there is a lot to be said about how Apple's policy makers are effectively no-platforming creators on third-party software, and policing the content consumption of their own customers. Ideally, you could say that this is of course the choice the IOS users make when they buy an Idevice, but if Apple is using their size to dictate the content on a third-party platform, then the internet just got a great bit worse than I used to think that it was.

I might never have been a particularly avid fan of tumblr, but dear god, if there ever was a reason for arguing that the move from the web to app-based internet was Bad News, it is if the policymakers of some multinational company is going to decide what kind of pictures I get to look at on a website which they do not even own.

ETA 15/12: The latest story going around is that tumblr was planning the porn bann already in August or September, though I can't find this confirmed anywhere. If it's true, it disproves the causality I speculate about here. Though not, I'm afraid, the theory behind it.

Comments

[soundofwonder]

Haven't read the article you linked to, but this made me realize the similarities between the way things are going in the western world and China's app focused ecosystem. Not sure if that's an ominous sign or not..

[duskpeterson]

"Phones use apps"

Could you say more about this? Because the app I am using to read this on my iPod Touch is Safari, which, as far as anyone knows, has no restrictions on accessing the web. (I wish Dreamwidth were a little more mobile-friendly, but that's a different topic.)

I got my first iPod Touch for accessibility reasons: it was the lightest mobile device on the market, at a time when I could barely lift a paper plate without pain. Where content is concerned, I mainly use my iPod Touch to create content, access my cloud backup, or visit the web. If a particular app does something better than a website, I'll switch to it, but I don't consider "censor the content" to be a reason for switching to an app.

On the iPod Touch / iPhone / iPad, a website bookmark on the home screen looks identical to an app. If a website has a mobile version that works the same way as its app, there is no way to tell the difference between the website and the app when it's open, other than to see the url at the top of the page. And in alternative broswers, you can even go full-screen and get rid of the url bar.

I just went through my iPod Touch and couldn't find a single app that couldn't be replaced with a website, other than productivity tools that don't supply content, such as word processors.

I don't want to sound like an Apple apologist here; I think there are major problems with the Apple system, one of which you rightly call out in this post. But I do want to distinguish between actual problems with Apple, and people using apps because companies are too lazy - or, in my case, too ignorant - to create completely mobile-friendly versions of their websites.

Tumblr, incidentally, has a mobile-friendly website. I found the angst over it losing its iPhone app to be totally baffling.

[gingicat]

The thing is, any parent setting up an iphone can choose “block explicit content” and set age limits (and now screen time limits, FINALLY) so saying “because of the childrenz” is specious at best.

I’ve been using personal computers on a daily basis since 1985 or so when I got a hand-me-down luggable computer running CP/M. I started a work-study job in the public computer lab at Brandeis in 1989. I’ve used early MacOS and MS-DOS and an Amiga and every iteration of Windows.

After doing tech support for Windows 95, though, I opted-in to the Mac universe when I spent a bonus check on an iMac (back in 2000?) so that I wouldn’t have to fix things. Macs still Just Work, provided you know the right commands. I’m locked into using Macs and iPhones now unless I want to spend six months learning Linux and then a month on a data migration project.

So, yeah, trapped in the megalith.

[sovay]

Because if tumblr is purging the smut becaues it lost half its mobile users, then there is a lot to be said about how Apple's policy makers are effectively no-platforming creators on third-party software, and policing the content consumption of their own customers.

Here via conuly; this is a useful post. Thank you for it. I have a laptop and a flip phone: I do not interact with the internet via apps at all. I have consequently been following this emerging aspect of the story with fascination and a fair amount of horror.

[nicki]

Google tries the same walled garden tricks and it irritates me to no end. I specifically keep downloading firefox onto my devices because if I want to bloody listen to a youtube video in the background while I do something else, I should be able to do so.

(I was an 80s kid, learned my computing on an apple IIc, had an apple II GS in middle school and was embittered toward Apple when they orphaned the IIGS. The only Apple device I've owned since was an ipod.)

Chromes, BTW, are OK dummy devices for kids to use in school, but I wouldn't buy one for myself.

[fayanora]

What I heard was that the reason for Tumblr's recent behavior and the ban from Apple was the there is a whole bunch of child pornography on Tumblr and rather than actually do something about the child pornography they just made a blanket ban on all pornography. After all, they've got a system in place already (or they did) for the "not safe for work" blogs, so it was never about the pornography in general but specifically about child pornography, and specifically about the fact that they didn't want to take the time and effort to specifically go after child pornography.

In other words Tumblr got banned from Apple because the people running Tumblr were too lazy to enforce the law on their site, and now they're overreacting. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater so to speak.