Boy howdy and howdy to the boys and girls who have decided to grace my blog with their presence, and welcome to the skewered literary world of G.B. Miller, where the past 12 years of blogging is simply a continuing learning curve to be explored and used.
After roughly a two year hiatus {mid 2016 thru 2018} from using the Blogger platform, I have decided to, albeit with some reluctance, come back to the platform where my blogging & writing career had begun. I know an explanation is in order (or perhaps a mea culpa) as to why I'm returning to Blogger, so this particular post is an explanation as to why, as well as the reasoning behind the why (we hope).
Earlier in the week (this would be around 12/3/18 or so), I found out that Tumblr (my previous home) was planning on doing a wholesale purge of their platform of any/all content that was above the rating of PG/PG-13 on 12/17/18. Now considering that Tumblr built itself into a platform of creative artistic expression of all types (yes, I do mean ALL TYPES), for them to take this step is a rather draconian action that is tantamount to killing a mosquito with with a blowtorch. In other words, they now want to make themselves as relevant as MySpace is today.
Suffice to say, a lot of users are very upset over the fact that they have less than two weeks to move/save their content before it's permanently purged from the 'net. This summation is the very short version, as having been a user of that platform for the past few years, I have learned a lot of stuff that I probably would have not learned had I not been a user of the platform.
Because I abhor censorship in all of its purulent forms, having dealt with it both in the cyber world and the real world, this crass decision by Tumblr to purge itself of the people who built it up to the point to where they sold themselves to Yahoo! (yes, that is a death knell, because we know what happened to Yahoo!, right?) forced me to choose between staying on a platform that will no longer be relevant, or going back to a platform that is still somewhat relevant while spending gobs of money to fix all my marketing materials.
By reading this blog, you know what the ultimate decision was.
Additionally, I also made the decision that I will permanently delete myself out of Tumblr, most likely on the Sunday before, 12/16/18. Yes, I do realize that I will lose about two+ years of blog content, but sometimes drastic times call for drastic measures. On the upside, because I discovered the hard way that Tumblr did not have the same kind of mechanisms in place that Blogger has when it comes to writing posts (i.e. saving your post as draft until you're ready to publish it, I pre-wrote all of my blog posts in Word, which I have safely tucked away on my computer. Made my life a lot more easier.
So I thank you from the bottom of my skewered heart for taking the time out your busy day to stop by and read this little post. I would also like to suggest that you stop by later in the week for another informative post that will explain in greater depth what this blog is all about and the like.
{c} 2018 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved
Censorship is a terrible thing! What we thought was purely fiction as portrayed in "Fahrenheit 451" and "1984" (Not to mention "The Handmaid's Tale") is fast becoming a reality. Sends chills down the spine! Let me be the first to welcome you back to the "real" blogging world. Cheers!
ReplyDeleteThank you Ms. Debbie.
DeleteCensorship is getting ugly indeed. I already censor myself to a certain degree on FB, mostly with pictures. I have pics that I know would get yanked, simply because people like to take things completely out of context in order to make themselves feel superior.
The censorship thing really irks me. It does sometimes feel like oppression, like 1984 Wells brain-washing...
ReplyDeleteThat was one of the few things that I liked about tumblr was the minimal censorship. Blogger comes a very close 2nd when it comes to minimal censorship. by and large, people do police themselves on Blogger, so Blogger only gets involved when a need of minor censorship is required but not done by the offending blogger.
ReplyDelete