Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Oh, Blogger, should I quit you?

Uh-oh. Stacia's post "An Important Content Announcement for She Blogged By Night Readers" alerts me to Blogger's new Adult Content policy:


This may seem harmless enough? Well, not really---to begin with, who decides what "benefits" the public? (Would explicit Kirk/Spock slash art make the cut?) Further, Stacia points out:
"Over the last few years I’ve seen several LGBT blogs, horror movie blogs and art blogs get taken down by Blogger because of content despite Google’s policy stating that adult content was permissible. 
Some of these blogs were put back up with a splash page Content Warning imposed on them without their permission, while others were permanently shut down by Blogger. 
[That explains it: I (Fresca) was recently baffled by one of these warning pages on a blog about country living... written by a man who married his male partner--saying someone had complained to Blogger about inappropriate content.]

These experiences along with a poor interface and a hilariously rotten help system comprised of volunteers (including one guy who repeatedly harassed me off the boards and even tried to get SBBN shut down) made me leave Blogger for good."
I've wondered before if I should quit Blogger, but loyalty (read, mostly laziness + habit) always stopped me.  Maybe the time has come to move? 
To where? Can I move all my stuff?

Blogger bloggers/ readers---any thoughts?

6 comments:

The Crow said...

If you do this, leave your followers plenty of breadcrumbs. Then tell us how you like your new home and we can join you there.

I mean, seriously?!?? WTF is going on? Has Blogger/Google been overtaken by the Tea Army?

Michael Leddy said...

Elaine and I were just talking about this news, which I saw this morning. It seems to come out if nowhere. The idea of algorithms deciding whether there's artistic or educational value gives me Future Blues.

I've thought about buying a domain name, but I do like the relative ease of using Blogger. But they don't make it easy to have much affection for the service.

ArtSparker said...

I;m on Etsy, and at any time anyone can decide thay are offended by anything in the ofrums, upon which
Etsy will take it down. If Google is pursuing the same policy, they may be taking the low road to avoiding litigation rather than suppressing freedom of the press - if that makes a difference.

Where does the line get drawn? When I was blogging actively, someone suggested I visit his blog as the result of one of my posts which contained a reference to Svankmajer's Alice in Wonderland. This one did have a warning, but I continued on - turned out his post was a rant about a repeated sex act he wanted the ten year old girl in the film to perform on him, which continued into an explanation that all adult men wanted to do the same to all little girls. Well, that one did have a warning - but should this sort of thing be visible at all?

Fresca said...

Sigh.
Many things to consider.

Zhoen said...

The only thing worse than blooger is everything else. The deforumutilation site is besieged by content complaints, and that is tumblr. I tried wordpress, and found them impenetrable. Gave up on the site within a week.

I have often considered self-hosting, but it's hard to justify the expense, considering my own lack of skills with the html.

Fresca said...

Setting up Wordpress so far is pretty much like Blogger---but I'm just at the early stages. Maybe they've made it more simple/similar recently?