Tumblr Staff

Three weeks ago we posted a preview of our new Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and Community Guidelines to get your feedback.

We’ve been delighted to read all of the thoughtful feedback you’ve sent to our policy team, and have hopefully answered every single email. Please let us know if we missed you.

Based on all your notes, we’ve made a few tweaks to the upcoming policies. Here’s a short summary of the changes:

• We’ve clarified that our policy against “tag spam” doesn’t apply to creative and meaningful uses of tags. You should tag your posts with any useful tag you can think of and feel free to use them for punchlines. #britneyspears
• We’ve overhauled our policy on contests, sweepstakes, and giveaways, making it a separate policy that is, we hope, easier to understand.

You can review every change to the policies, letter for letter, on GitHub.

Finally, we strive to apply all our policies fairly. When there’s a concern that a user is violating a policy, our team will evaluate the situation carefully before taking appropriate action. Accounts are only suspended in cases where a violation is particularly severe or where warnings have been ignored.

Thanks again to everyone who took the time to write in. We’ll be rolling out the updated terms and policies later today.

One of our service providers just suffered a major network outage, reducing our web capacity significantly for the past two hours.

We’re frustrated with the amount of time it took to resolve this issue, but are more disappointed that this issue had such a dramatic impact on our service. We’re already working to remove this component as a single point of failure.

Our deepest apologies for letting you down tonight.

South by Southwest brings together some of the world’s most creative people in film, technology, and music. We’ll be heading to Austin to put on a bunch of Tumblr meetups, panels, and shows. Come hang out with us!

Meetups and Events (open to everyone, even if you aren’t attending SXSW)

• March 10 @ 4pm: Tumblr meetup at the The Jackalope (404 East 6th) NEW LOCATION!
• March 12 @ 4pm: Don’t Mess with the Internet party at Conduit Corner
• March 12 @ 7pm: The Barbarian Group and Tumblr present: Robotrip, a three-stage megashow at the Mohawk
• March 17 @ 4pm: Another Tumblr meetup on the Lawn of the Austin American-Statesman

Interactive Panels

• The Right Tool for the Job: Native or Mobile Web?
• Misuse the Internet and Make People Love You
• SOPA/PIPA: Why the Open Internet Needs Us
• Social Discovery: Implicit and Explicit Graphs
• A drink with Tumblr President John Maloney

Music

• Tumblr day at the Virgin Mobile Live House
• Panel on Reblog Culture: Tumblr and Social Music Fandom
• Polyvinyl Records’ showcase @ Emo’s East
• Shirts For A Cure showcase @ Red 7
• Home Tapes presents Friend Island @ Papi Tino’s Backyard
• Small Plates Records’ showcase @ Lovejoy

We’re also very excited to see festival entries of three films on Tumblr: Gayby, Gimme The Loot, and Girl Walk // All Day. And of course we’ll be posting updates throughout to the #sxsw tag — feel free to do the same.

As we previewed a bit in the past week, we’ve been hard at work updating Tumblr’s policies, rewriting the three primary legal and policy documents that underlie your use of Tumblr: our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and Community Guidelines (formerly “Content Policy”).

We’re really proud of the new documents. We think they’re easier to understand and better for you and our community. In particular, we’ve clarified some of the content ownership language in our Terms of Service, dropped a few legal restrictions, and revamped our Community Guidelines to better reflect what we’re seeing and how we’re enforcing our policies.

It’s worth noting that, while the Community Guidelines have gotten longer, the only new policy in the draft that we weren’t already enforcing is “Promotion and Glorification of Self-Harm”. The other additions are meant to clarify our existing policies.

We’re planning to officially launch the new terms in the coming weeks. But in the meantime, we’d really love your feedback.

You can preview the new documents with the links above. And starting today, we’ll be making all policy revisions historically viewable (and diff-able) on GitHub!

If you have any questions or comments, please drop us a note.

Last Thursday, we posted a draft of a new policy against blogs that actively promote self-harm, along with some PSA-style language to appear next to searches associated with self-injury. The reaction was overwhelming. The post itself provoked more than 25,000 likes, reblogs, and replies; and more than 2,500 of you sent in comments by email. Thank you.

By far, the most common comment was some variation on this:

This is really great, but what about people who just talk about it? They aren’t promoting it in any way, but like some of us just express ourselves through posting about it. I don’t promote self-harm or eating disorders or anything, but I do talk about my experiences with these things. Do those count as something that’s going to be banned?

That’s an important concern, so we want to be totally clear: While we won’t allow blogs dedicated to triggering self-harm, we will not act against blogs engaged in discussion, support, encouragement, and documenting the experiences of those dealing with difficult conditions like anorexia, bulimia, and other forms of self-injury. We absolutely want Tumblr to be a place where people struggling with these behaviors can find solace, community, dialog, understanding, and hope.

We will apply this policy on a blog-by-blog basis. There won’t be any wholesale suspension based on tags or text. We’re not under the illusion that it will be easy to draw the line between blogs that are intended to trigger self-harm and those that support sufferers and build community, but, thanks to the tireless efforts of our amazing Support team, we will do our best.

With the benefit of all your input, we’ve written a new draft of this policy, changing some wording and adding some clarifying language:

Promotion and Glorification of Self-Harm. Don’t post content that actively promotes or glorifies self-harm. This includes content that urges or encourages readers to cut or injure themselves; embrace anorexia, bulimia, or other eating disorders; or commit suicide rather than, e.g., seeking counseling or treatment, or joining together in supportive conversation with those suffering or recovering from depression or other conditions. Dialogue about these behaviors is incredibly important and online communities can be extraordinarily helpful to people struggling with these difficult conditions. We aim to sustain Tumblr as a place that facilitates awareness, support and recovery, and to remove only those blogs that cross the line into active promotion or glorification of self-harm.

In addition, we got some helpful suggestions from the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) to improve the language that we’ll start showing alongside searches for tags associated with the promotion of self-harm, such as “pro-ana”, “pro-mia”, “thinspiration” and “thinspo”. Here’s an example of the revised language:

Eating disorders are not lifestyle choices, they are mental disorders that when left untreated, can cause serious health problems, and at their most severe can even be life-threatening. For treatment referrals, information and support, please contact the National Eating Disorders Association’s Helpline at 1-800-931-2237 or www.nationaleatingdisorders.org.

We’re working with other health organizations to help us craft similar language around pro-cutting and pro-suicide search terms.

After the jump, we’ve pulled out several thoughtful messages from the community on both sides of this issue:

Read More →

One of the great things about Tumblr is that people use it for just about every conceivable kind of expression. 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, but we do draw some limits. As a company, we’ve decided that some specific kinds of content aren’t welcome on Tumblr. For example, we prohibit spam and identity theft.

Our Content Policy has not, until now, prohibited blogs that actively promote self-harm. These typically take the form of blogs that glorify or promote anorexia, bulimia, and other eating disorders; self-mutilation; or suicide. These are messages and points of view that we strongly oppose, and don’t want to be hosting. The question for us has been whether it’s better to (a) prohibit them, as a statement against the very ideas of self-harm that they are advancing, or (b) permit them to stay up, accompanied by a public service warning that directs readers to helplines run by organizations like the National Eating Disorders Association.

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.

Here’s what we think the right answer is:

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

Active Promotion of Self-Harm. Don’t post content that actively promotes or glorifies self-injury or self-harm. This includes content that urges or encourages readers to cut or mutilate themselves; embrace anorexia, bulimia, or other eating disorders; or commit suicide rather than, e.g., seek counseling or treatment for depression or other disorders. Online dialogue about these acts and conditions is incredibly important; this prohibition is intended to reach only those blogs that cross the line into active promotion or glorification. For example, joking that you need to starve yourself after Thanksgiving or that you wanted to kill yourself after a humiliating date is fine, but recommending techniques for self-starvation or self-mutilation is not.

We aim to begin implementing this policy next week. Of course, we will allow any affected blogs a grace period in which to edit or download your content.

2. Start showing PSAs on search results for related keywords. In addition, we plan to start posting “public service announcement”-style language whenever users search for tags that typically go along with pro-self-harm blogs. For example, when a user searches for tags like “anorexia”, “anorexic”, “bulimia”, “bulimic”, “thinspiration”, “thinspo”, “proana”, “purge”, “purging”, etc., we would show PSA language like:

Eating disorders can cause serious health problems, and at their most severe can even be life-threatening. Please contact the [resource organization] at [helpline number] or [website].

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

The Shorty Awards, honoring the top content producers on the social web, are once again presenting the 2nd annual Tumblr of the Year Shorty Award. The winner will be honored at their ceremony in March in NYC. This year the Shorty’s are also honoring the best Tumblr Brand Presence.

Last year the ceremony was hosted by The Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi, and past winners include Conan O’Brien, Cory Booker, Sesame Street’s Grover, Suze Orman, Ted Leo, Neil Patrick Harris and NASA. You could be next!

Start making your nominations today and follow the Shorty Awards on Tumblr!

For several hours this evening, an issue resulting from a software upgrade caused the Dashboard to be slow or unresponsive for many users. While your blogs were not directly affected, we know that incidents like this are inexcusable.

We’re incredibly sorry and appreciate your patience with us tonight.

Tumblr gives you complete control over all aspects of your blog, and once you know some HTML, you can make them look pretty much any way you want! On the other hand, many of us would rather benefit from the skills of the thousands of brilliant designers whose work is featured in the Tumblr Theme Garden.

The top themes of 2011 were…

Binaural recording is a method of recording sound that uses two microphones to create a 3-D stereo sound sensation of actually being in the room with the performers or instruments. This effect is often created using a technique known as “Dummy head recording”, wherein a mannequin head is outfitted with a microphone in each ear.

QSound Labs is an audio technology company based in Calgary, Canada. Back in 1996, they created a binaural audio demo entitled Virtual Barber Shop for a client.

On January 1, 2011, awesomaticeric shared the Virtual Barber Shop, and today it has over 150,000 notes.

Listen now →

July 14th, 2011, marked the debut of our upgraded Photosets feature. Within minutes, the Tumblr community was using it in ways we never imagined. Here are five of our favorite creative Photosets from 2011.

• Fireworks shared by keisotsu.
• Friendly Fire shared by thefrogman.
• Every Single Day shared by lulinternet.
• Time in the Library shared by yukuyulan.
• Godspeed shared by Photojojo.