elsagold: the WUMBLOG

The story below is from tumbledore, another tumblr. It pretty much blows. Tumblr, I love you, but you are sucking hard right now.

[READ UPDATE]

I’ve run pitchfork.tumblr.com for almost a year now. I had several posts up and I followed 28 people with the account. All my posts are now gone and my address has been changed to pitchfork1.tumblr.com. Where my blog once stood now stands the official Tumblr for Pitchfork Media Inc. Watch out, Soup, I hear Campbell’s is gunning for you next.

Recently, one of my friends who is subscribed to my pitchfork tumblr was surprised to see a sudden change in the content I was posting. That’s because Tumblr stole my subdomain and gave (sold?) it to Pitchfork Media Inc. Keep in mind that the word “pitchfork” is not a proprietary name, it is a noun dating back to the year 1364, so they had no legal right to the word or the subdomain. It clearly wasn’t a case of impersonation as none of my posts had anything to do with music. If there was some kind of content quality threshold that failed to be met which led to my blog’s demise, then 98% of Tumblr should now be blank. Is it possible there’s a certain amount of time that can pass between posts before Tumblr deletes your blog? If so, they should probably make that information public just in case someone accidentally makes the mistake of going on vacation.

The worst part of all this is that if you subscribe to the RSS feed for the “new” Pitchfork Tumblr (http://pitchfork.tumblr.com/rss), you’ll see the first five posts I made are still there! There’s even a post with a screenshot from my March Madness pool standings with my name and face on it. Sadly, I apparently no longer control this image or this information, nor can I exercise my right to remove it from the Internet. But hey, it’s not like these amateurs haven’t pulled this crap before, they’ll probably just write some new content policy after the fact in order to justify it like last time.

So make sure you back up all your content!

If you think your content shouldn’t be deleted and moved arbitrarily at the whims of corporate latecomers, then you should consider contacting the Tumblr team to ask them to stop disrespecting their loyal users:

Email support@tumblr.com and or call them out on Twitter