"Friends don’t Markov friends."

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 23:22:05 +0000

“Friends don’t Markov friends.”

- Tom Armitage, quoted in Fake Twitter You at styledeficit.

Tumblr battles the Pink Robots

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 23:28:00 +0000

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”).

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.

From the Community Guidelines:

Mass Registration and Automation. Don’t register accounts or post content automatically, systematically, or programmatically.

Once upon a time, Tumblr allowed you to populate a blog from RSS: that’s how craneporn is meant to work. Does this guideline mean that writing a third-party service to translate or aggregate content would be allowed, or is the word “post” in there a misnomer?

I’m also interested in mass-moving posts from ffffound to Tumblr, and again, that’s programmatic, systematic posting, and hence against the new guidelines. I accept that might not be what the site’s owners think it’s for, but to me, it seems like a valid use case.

Ah well. Perhaps I shouldn’t be doing any of this on someone else’s platform anyway. (That Git history of revisions, though: nice idea.)

notes.husk.org

"Friends don’t Markov friends."

Tumblr battles the Pink Robots