No. Don’t sign the petition. Tumblr @staff doesn’t care.
Think about it. Tumblr did nothing about literal child pornography until they were forced to. They don’t care about us, they don’t care about kids.
What they care about is money. That’s why it took getting banned from the app store to make them do this reckless, uneducated, misogynistic, knee-jerk reaction.
They don’t care about sex positivity or sex education or safe sex practices or literally anything. That’s why it took them so long to deal with child porn (it’s also why they don’t give a shit about Nazis or hate speech), and that’s why a petition won’t make one bit of difference.
So what do you do?
When the ban hits, get off tumblr.
I’m serious. Stay off of it. Don’t make clean or SFW blogs, don’t bend to their ridiculous ban, just stay off.
Show them how big a part of the tumblr community we are. Show them how much their stats drop when we’re gone.
Why? Because advertisers, that’s why.
When tumblr loses us, and their site is only getting a fraction of the traffic it used to, their advertisers will notice. I read that Yahoo is already losing money (don’t quote me on that, though, I didn’t verify it), so when tumblr takes that big of a hit, it’ll hurt.
So let them do their ban. Let them learn from experience why ignorant, knee-jerk reactions are never the answer.
If necessary, let them go the way of Myspace and geocities. In the Trump era, we sure as hell don’t need another “service” telling us we don’t belong.
But it’s possible that, when they lose us, they’ll have another series of emergency meetings to figure out why they’re hemorrhaging money, and how to avoid having to sell their second private jet, and maybe, hopefully, there will be at least one properly educated, intelligent humanoid in that room, who can figure out a way to get rid of child porn without being so impressively, breathtakingly stupid.
I mean literally, my 7-year-old could have come up with a better solution. You think people that idiotic will respond to a petition?
No. But they might, they just might, respond to losing such a big portion of their business.
I mean, I highly doubt it, but there’s a higher chance of that happening than them responding to a petition when they didn’t respond to actual child pornography.