The erasure of every trace of Leelah Alcorn's short life online continued today with the apparent removal, from Tumblr, of her 'satan's wifey' account.
It was from here, earlier this week, that the Ohio teen posted two notes shortly before her death, claiming that her parents' refusal to accept that she was transgender made it impossible for her to continue to live.
Those searching for Leelah's account are now greeted by a standard Tumblr 'not found' page, which states: 'There's nothing here. Whatever you were looking for doesn't currently exist at this address. Unless you were looking for this error page, in which case: Congrats! You totally found it.'
At time of writing, Gay Star News been unable to contact Tumblr to ask what has occurred.
However, an investigation last year revealed that Tumblr appeared to have banned a number of tags from its mobile app, including 'gay,' 'lesbian,' 'bisexual' and 'transsexual.'
They had also banned 'depression' and 'suicide.'
Leelah's last posts may have been removed either because she claimed to be transgender - or because their content related to suicide. This would not, however, explain why her entire blog, including artwork and images that she created for her sisters, has now gone.
When I was 14, I learned what transgender meant and cried of happiness. After 10 years of confusion I finally understood who I was. I immediately told my mom, and she reacted extremely negatively, telling me that it was a phase, that I would never truly be a girl, that God doesn’t make mistakes, that I am wrong. If you are reading this, parents, please don’t tell this to your kids. Even if you are Christian or are against transgender people don’t ever say that to someone, especially your kid. That won’t do anything but make them hate them self. That’s exactly what it did to me.
My mom started taking me to a therapist, but would only take me to christian therapists, (who were all very biased) so I never actually got the therapy I needed to cure me of my depression. I only got more christians telling me that I was selfish and wrong and that I should look to God for help.
When I was 16 I realized that my parents would never come around, and that I would have to wait until I was 18 to start any sort of transitioning treatment, which absolutely broke my heart. The longer you wait, the harder it is to transition. I felt hopeless, that I was just going to look like a man in drag for the rest of my life. On my 16th birthday, when I didn’t receive consent from my parents to start transitioning, I cried myself to sleep.
[. . .]
After a summer of having almost no friends plus the weight of having to think about college, save money for moving out, keep my grades up, go to church each week and feel like shit because everyone there is against everything I live for, I have decided I’ve had enough. I’m never going to transition successfully, even when I move out. I’m never going to be happy with the way I look or sound. I’m never going to have enough friends to satisfy me. I’m never going to have enough love to satisfy me. I’m never going to find a man who loves me. I’m never going to be happy. Either I live the rest of my life as a lonely man who wishes he were a woman or I live my life as a lonelier woman who hates herself. There’s no winning. There’s no way out. I’m sad enough already, I don’t need my life to get any worse. People say “it gets better” but that isn’t true in my case. It gets worse. Each day I get worse.
That’s the gist of it, that’s why I feel like killing myself. Sorry if that’s not a good enough reason for you, it’s good enough for me. As for my will, I want 100% of the things that I legally own to be sold and the money (plus my money in the bank) to be given to trans civil rights movements and support groups, I don’t give a shit which one. The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights. Gender needs to be taught about in schools, the earlier the better. My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say “that’s fucked up” and fix it. Fix society. Please.
Interest in Ello, the ad-free social network posited as a rival to Facebook, seems to be collapsing, according to data from Google Trends.
A graph of searches in the past 30 days on “Ello” shows that after an early peak on 26 September, followed by a higher one on 30 September, the number of searches has now declined to a level almost as low as on 23 September, when the network was just starting to grow.
[. . .]
Ello opened to the public on 7 August with 90 users on an invite-only basis. By early October it could claim more than 1 million users and to be receiving up to 100,000 invite requests per day.
[. . .]
Interest in Ello, measured in terms of web searches, seems to have peaked at about one-tenth that of Twitter - a relatively high measure, but miniscule compared to Facebook, which garners 95% of searches relating to the three companies over the period, while Twitter gets between 4% and the remaining 5%.
"Look at the iPhone. You get the iPhone, it’s this awesome simple thing. It has most of what you need on it," Budnitz says. But no one leaves it at that. "Almost everyone chooses something that they like—a special map app, a weather app. But the basic iPhone is great!"
Ello is designed to be a microcosm of the iPhone: Users will eventually be able to choose from an "enormous" feature list (if they want). Some of those features will effect the look and feel of Ello, while others will enhance its functionality. For example: Artists, journalists, musicians, and other public professionals may want to have two accounts with one sign-in: one personal, one professional. Pay a buck or two, and you can have that function. Or toggle between two accounts.
Critics aren't convinced this model can work. Appropriately enough, one of the first reports about Ello's first round of venture funding (if not the first report) came from Ello user @waxpancake. "Unless they have a very unique relationship with their investors, Ello will inevitably be pushed towards profitability and an exit, even if it compromises their current values," he observes. (In a followup, @waxpancake clarifies that he hopes Ello succeeds.)
Budnitz pushes back against this criticism. Facebook is a giant company, Budnitz says, because Facebook requires an enormous staff of data analysts, advertisers, and marketers. With a handful of staff, Ello already counts millions of users, and it works—albeit not perfectly in its beta stage.
"We’re going to prove that the Internet doesn’t have to be one giant billboard," Budnitz says. "This company’s Vermont-based. It’s the only state of the union that doesn’t allow billboards."
Ello doesn’t seem to have a means of determining a user’s sexual orientation, but Budnitz has said that his team has seen a particular spike in new LGBT users. According to Budnitz, Ello’s LGBT userbase is playing a “particularly helpful [role] in shaping their development going forward,” which could mean a number of different things.
[. . .]
As timely as comparisons to Facebook may be, Ello would have a much better shot at becoming the social for edgy, artistic gays by borrowing from Tumblr. Though Tumblr has made a name for itself for being a lightweight, customizable blogging tool for the masses, the service owes a large part of its success to its highly active community of pornography curators.
Tumblr hosts a wide variety of mature content ranging from hardcore, animated gifsets to erotic prose and poetry. Diving into Tumblr’s depths proves not only that Rule 34 is very real, but also that vibrant, engaged non-sexually explicit communities can exist on the same platform as the raunchiest of skin flicks. Straddling that gap could be the key to Ello’s future success.
LiveJournal is hanging out the “under new management” banner yet again. Last month, the company announced a new CEO, Katya Akudovich, who previously worked at Google, Box and Microsoft. Akudovich was confirmed in a unanimous vote by the board of directors, who believe her international experience at these major tech companies will help her make LiveJournal a top social media platform yet again.
“My Box experience, where I started the Deal Desk department, gave me unique insights into how a company turbo-charged an amazing product,” she tells us. “At Google, it was about bringing the right content in the right form to brand new Google Play markets. And this is exactly what we’re planning to do at LJ,” Akudovich says.
In addition to the new services Akudovich teases, LiveJournal is also rolling out new iOS and Android applications next month, designed to appeal to both writers and readers. And the company is hopping on the ‘anonymity’ bandwagon, now in vogue thanks to services like Whisper, Yik Yak and Secret, noting that LiveJournal “will remain anonymous and will never ask its users to identify themselves.”
[. . .]LJ’s new strategy for 2014 and beyond is one where it hopes to promote itself as a platform for longer-form content and self-expression in an era when users can’t seem bothered to post status updates, preferring Instagram selfies, looping Vine clips, GIFs and texts over longer articles, lengthy videos, and the like.
But that, thinks LiveJournal, is the opportunity.
“There’s a big market for this that really only we and Medium are filling – and with significantly more personalization, while still being easy to use,” says Akudovich. “Our users generate an amazing amount of deep content - half a million long-form posts a day – these are not tweets, these are real long-form posts where people write some very interesting things. We have amazing communities too,” she says.
Yahoo! Inc. is buying blogging network Tumblr Inc. for about $1.1 billion as Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer seeks to lure users and advertisers with her priciest acquisition to date.
Tumblr, headquartered in New York, will continue to host its more than 108 million blogs. Yahoo also says that “per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business” with David Karp staying on as CEO.
Mayer, CEO of the biggest U.S. Web portal since July, is betting that Tumblr will help transform Yahoo into a hip destination in the era of social networking as she challenges Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. in the US$17.7-billion display ad market. The price she’s paying — about a fifth of Yahoo’s US$5.4-billion in cash — underscores the deal’s importance to Mayer’s turnaround effort, according to Zachary Reiss-Davis, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc.
“It’s an aggressive move,” Reiss-Davis said in an interview. “They are saying, ‘where is our next group of people who are going to spend many hours per week on Yahoo properties?’ It’s big bet that the answer is going to be Tumblr users.”
The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2013, Yahoo said in the statement.
Founded by Karp in 2007, Tumblr grew to log more than 13 billion global page views in the past month. The site offers a free service for publishing blogs on the Web and mobile devices, and tools for sharing photos and other content across social networks.
[T]he big news is the free space — "we want all of your images," said Cahan. He said it was 70 times bigger than what other sites offer, and said it could store 537,731 photos in "full quality." Yahoo directly mentioned the 15GB of storage space "other" companies offer, and it was a pretty direct shot at Google — a company that has made no secret recently about making photos a key part of its services.
Yahoo also announced a new Android Flickr app, which matches the capabilities of the recently-updated iOS app. "Upload once, send to any device, any screen, any friend, any follower, on any service, and make it absolutely beautiful," said Cahan. Along with this new service, Flickr is revamping its Flickr Pro service. Previously, free Flickr users could only display 200 photos at a time, while paid users had unlimited storage and display capabilities as well as analytical data about your photos. However, Yahoo introduced a few new paid options — for $49.99 a year, all ads on the site will be removed, and you'll get access to the standard set of Flickr analytics. For $499.99, you can double your storage space to 2TB. All in all, it looks like a long overdue and hugely-needed update — but now Flickr has an arsenal of new tools to take on sites like Facebook and Google.
Canadian Jaime-Leigh Fairbrother (a.k.a jaimeleigh) is supposedly a Tumblette: young, sexy and an over-sharer. The Tumblette — a vogue-ish tag for a female type who blogs on the website Tumblr — “lifecasts” with an edge.
[. . . ]
On her “for the story goes” Tumblr, the Toronto-based Jaime-Leigh Fairbrother bares all daily — from a series of self-point-and-shoot photos the 20-something blond snapped for a Semi-Naked-Picture-Day, to a controversial posting that included a spreadsheet mapping her bed-hopping history.
“People have a weird love for these sexual things,” says Fairbrother, who in person, is surprisingly demure. “We all talk about it... yet if you’re honest and shameless about it, you’re judged.”
At first glance, Fairbrother’s Tumblr is a female version of Tucker Max, whose drunken bro-ish hijinks recently made it to the big screen in I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.
It’s made Fairbrother a love-her-or-hate-her Tumblette: She’s garnered a cult of 800 to 900 active followers and, last week, was ranking higher than other micro-celebrities and fellow oversharers, like Internet star Julia Allison.
Fairbrother’s quick to recognize her Tumblr began over a year ago as a lonely, soliloquy-ing stream.
Her postings quickly garnered followers, especially through Tumblr’s unique re-blogging feature — the re-posting of content allows users to trace how one post is amplified or subverted by other users — which created a dialogue that would bounce between her, her followers and even non-followers.
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