We believe it is of utmost importance for users to have control of their content and how it is accessed. Tumblr’s structure encourages users to think of other people’s content that they reblog as partially their own, but we think that that mentality leads to a lot of the harassment and plain rudeness that has grown on Tumblr over the years. The fact that a post can be reblogged by others, ridiculed, and passed around endlessly after the original user has already decided they don’t want that content to exist and represent them anymore has always struck us as a massive design flaw. On Pillowfort a user’s post is always their post first and foremost, and all reblogs and comments to that post are still under the control of the original user. So yes, while it may be unfortunate to have a post you like disappear from your blog or lose a comment you left, we think it is still more important for a user to be able to delete their own content when they choose. I can’t think of any benefits to non-destructible reblogs that is worth having a user’s control over access to their own content taken away.
It’s worth noting that users can also delete any individual comments left on their post, because we want to encourage the notion that when you comment on someone’s post you are in THEIR space. It’s a bit of a shift from the way that Tumblr and Twitter have forced users to deal with anyone and everyone putting their own thoughts on your content, but we don’t think users should have to deal with the responses of people who may only be trying to spread harassment or otherwise exploit users’ lack of control over responses to act in bad faith, as we have all seen happen quite often.
I just want to make sure people thinking about migrating to pillowfort see this one, because this is an incredible example of a policy that was clearly not thought through by people who have ever tried to keep abusers from doing their thing.
This is a great policy, if your primary goal is to ensure that abusers cannot be challenged or disputed, ever. It is a great policy if you want to actively punish people for putting in any effort at all in conversations.
Yes, we think of things that we write in response to other people as “partially our own”, because we wrote some of the content in the post. When people put effort into responding to me, that effort is theirs. If I make a silly shitpost and someone responds with a 2,000 word essay, their post was more effort than mine.
Fuck’s sake. Look at the writing prompts blog. Think about how this plays out in Pillowfort’s world: You post writing prompts which are a sentence long, other people write multi-page responses, and you get to delete any of those responses any time you want leaving them with no record of the work or effort they put in, no way to retrieve the data, nothing.
Conclusion: If you go there, do not attempt to interact with other people. If you want to comment on something someone said, do it by starting a brand new post with no trace of direct connection to theirs, so it will probably be safe.
But really, just… Don’t. This is not sane.
“We designed a reblog system that discourages people from ever substantively using the reblog system.”
The maddening part is that I get it. That first paragraph does lay out real ways in which Tumblr is uniquely good at making sure that the dumbest thing you ever said on a social blogging platform becomes an unbanishable ghost that haunts your notifications forever. Clearly that’s not ideal.
But this doesn’t seem like a solution to me.
Why not, say, keep the content but divorce it from the original poster? Any deleted comments show up in reblogs with no attribution, or just a grey “deleted” icon, while disappearing from the OP’s blog.
To quote @chemicalkin:
Pillowfort is not a clone of tumblr, and does not have a reblog like tumblr.
Pillowfort reblogs are shares that point to the original post. You can’t add commentary to them.
Comments all take place in replies to the post, like livejournal on the OP’s blog. You’re not pulling them into your own space. Anyone who wants to read the full comment chain is going to the OP’s blog. Replying happens in OP’s blog. Again think of livejournal.
Hmm, that’s a potentially good point, especially as someone whose top choice for alternative is currently Dreamwidth. I might be being hypocritical about this. Let me check whether the above is true in the sense that I care about.
[a few minutes later]
Nope, it’s not [link]. Pulled the URL of the post on the top of DemoUser’s dash†, fed it into the Internet Archive’s “Save Page Now” field. The Archive *thought* it succeeded, but the archived page is a useless jumble of broken elements with none of the actual content (edit: upon closer inspection, the page title *is* intact, but nothing else). Compare this archived Dreamwidth post [link], which is perfectly fine right down to the formatting.
Since my plan for coping with the lack of reblogs on Dreamwidth is to post link roundups in which–and this is important–*every crawlable page includes a Wayback alternative link* [link], Pillowfort is still meaningfully worse for me.
(And, given how much Pillowfort uses [being able to erase your posts from existence] as a selling point, if I *did* figure out and enact a PF backup solution that worked on other people’s OPs, I expect a lot of people would be pissed about it. Pillowfort has deliberately tried to attract users who would be pissed about that in a way that Dreamwidth has not.)
—
Note that you *can* still erase your DW post from existence if you really want to: you can make it uncrawlable (most simply by friends-locking), delete it before the Internet Archive notices it, or request the Archive take it down. But Dreamwidth archivability is opt-out, while Pillowfort archivability is–at *best*–opt-in.
(I should probably note here, in case anyone is getting worried: I promise that if you give me access to your friends-locked posts, the only part of them that I will keep copies of is my own comments. No other comments, no OPs.)
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†Link to the original post, and for when the post inevitably gets deleted some year or other: it’s a pair of pictures of sleeping cats by TheTiniestLizard.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #Dreamwidth #Pillowfort #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #amnesia cw
Brinens and Things 
One thought on “syntaxcoloring asked: Could you elaborate on the rationale for having reblogs deleted along with the original post? If I write out a lengthy, thoughtful response to something, and then the original poster gets embarrassed or whatever…well, it kind of sucks that they can just wipe out my response, doesn’t it?”