Unpopular opinion: this site is free and owes us nothing. If they decide to ban any word, genre or topic, that’s their decision and we are free to stay or leave as we choose. You may not like it but it’s not oppression.
I’ll agree with “it’s not oppression”… there were many alternatives to Tumblr that popped up around the time that Karp and Arment were launching this thing, and we could have chosen any of them. (I remember creating both a Tumblr and a Posterous account back in 2008. I thought Posterous would win. 🙄) If you have options and choose the wrong ones, that’s not oppression. That’s just life.
But I’ll disagree with “owes us nothing”. In fact, they owe us lots. Protection of our personal data, a reliable means of exporting or removing our original content, protection from the shitty people their tools inevitably empower, and a general willingness to live up to their own sales pitch.
Tumblr’s parent company has been a laughingstock on the first point, exporting seems broken on really large blogs, the less said about protection the better, and, I mean, c’mon… Adult Tumblr didn’t just pick this site out of a hat. For a long time, their ToS openly encouraged us to build communities around explicit sexual material. I know their tits were in a wringer, between Apple and the law, but if you ask people to make a home with you, you don’t get to cavalierly switch things up with a few weeks warning and expect nothing more than a sigh of capitalist resignation.
I love Tumblr. Also, fuck Tumblr.