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Rumpus Book ClubTumblr responds to claim it stole Pitchfork domain
Meaghan O’Connell’s, Director of Outreach at Tumblr, responds on her blog:
I’ve run pitchfork.tumblr.com for almost a year now. I had several posts up and I followed 28 people with the account. All my posts are now gone and my address has been changed to pitchfork1.tumblr.com.
Actually when Tumblr released the domain to Pitchfork Media, pitchfork.tumblr.com was completely dormant and empty. There were not “several posts,” on that account, there were zero.
Recently, one of my friends who is subscribed to my pitchfork tumblr was surprised to see a sudden change in the content I was posting.
See above.
That’s because Tumblr stole my subdomain and gave (sold?) it to Pitchfork Media Inc.
As per our policy, we emailed this account’s address to inquire about the dormant account. After you failed to respond for 72 hours, we released the domain.
No content was deleted and no accounts were suspended.
So we are clear, Tumblr will release dormant domains to trademark holders pursuant to the law, just as all other web services, but never without advanced notice.
…
If there was some kind of content quality threshold that failed to be met which led to my blog’s demise, then 98% of Tumblr should now be blank.
Ha.
February 16th, 2010 at 12:40 pm
I do love how the Tumblr’s response did not even once rebuke the fact that when they gave away pitchfork.tumblr some of the original owner’s content was still present (and still is?).
Then again, the staff is incompetent so it’s really no surprise any of this has occurred. The once famous Buzznet.com did the same thing to various users, even while their account was in use and active every day.
February 16th, 2010 at 1:20 pm
Actually, pitchforks response, on pitchfork.tumblr.com, is a lot better at clering things up, along with the original “content” that was supposedly deleted.
Tumblr should probably have worked harder to get in touch with the original owner instead of helping pitchfork so swiftly, even though the posts on the tumblr really said it all.
February 16th, 2010 at 1:42 pm
Let me get this straight — and maybe I’m just not understanding something. But if someone doesn’t update their blog for a couple months, it’s eligible to be taken away with 72 hours notice if someone else wants it? I mean … I update my personal blog once every couple months. So if Seth Fischer the poker player decided he wanted my tumblr account, he could just contact Tumblr and have it taken down because it’s “inactive” if I haven’t updated recently? That just doesn’t seem right.
February 16th, 2010 at 1:46 pm
Seth,
No, not at all.
If you were squatting on a username, with a corresponding blog with absolutely no content, (as was the case with this account, contrary to what he reported) and a trademark holder approached Tumblr, we would change your account name, with notice. We would not delete your content and we would not delete your account. We would change the name.
February 16th, 2010 at 1:57 pm
Ah, I see. The Pitchfork response on the Tumblr site made it sound like he did have content up there, so I thought he did. It said something like “the last update was in November 09.” But if he had nothing, he had nothing …
February 16th, 2010 at 2:23 pm
Meaghan,
If people are using Tumblr for certain static projects, which are then linked to by URL. Isn’t renaming the account only a very small step up from deleting it? I mean you don’t redirect from the old URL to the new one, so the content would appear to be gone.
February 16th, 2010 at 2:29 pm
He did indeed have content there, meaghano! Why the hell do you keep on spewing bullshit? He also has a screenshot (which admittedly could have been tinkered with, but I doubt it) of an email sent to him from a tumblr employee admitting that he was NOT contacted beforehand. If that email is a reality, then you guys have fucked up royally.
February 16th, 2010 at 3:01 pm
Seth,
He *did* have content there. Meghan is either a liar or is incompetent or perhaps both. You can even subscribe to the blog’s feed to see the old content before the subdomain was given away.
February 16th, 2010 at 7:43 pm
For the record and for the 18th time, when you delete content on a blog it remains in an RSS feed. When you post content to Tumblr it pings RSS and the content is cached. Those were screen shots of an RSS feed. The blog, the actual Tumblr account, did not have any content in it.
The user’s account still exists. It still follows the same people and if it had any content it would have remained there.
I am neither a liar nor incompetent, but I do appreciate and understand your concern!
February 17th, 2010 at 9:25 am
Ugh. Some of the more mean-spirited comments (here and elsewhere) make me feel icky, and I want to officially say I want nothing to do with them. When I was 23 and working in politics, I got taken for a ride by a developer and caused an error that, if it had not been caught, would have wiped an endangered species off the planet forever. I’m not even sure exactly what happened here, or if there was any error at all or just a mixup, but no one said anything nearly as mean to me, and I’m pretty sure that error was a lot more serious than whatever this is.
February 17th, 2010 at 9:37 am
We should probably be moderating comments that are from anonymous posters.
February 17th, 2010 at 10:41 am
The tumblr response strikes me as mildly… livejournal-y for a business? I’ve been a participant on tumblr for some time, and as such I can say they’ve often been bad about doing things like this with no warning and no clear internal policy on how they manage this sort of thing. They once took down someone’s blog because it had unkind things posted about one of the founders’ friends, which, well, I’m not in support of super-harsh “reblogging” blogs either, but if the idea is to encourage people to play nice, they could implement that policy in a less arbritary and capricious way.
December 29th, 2010 at 12:08 pm
It’s funny hearing all these responses from non-tumblrs.
People who have joined in the past year are bringing with them lots of assumptions about what the platform is and how it should be used.
A blog that was up for a year ‘with several posts’ & 28 followers?
That’s not a Tumblr Stream. That’s called a place holder in the tumblr community.
The person obviously was not using it but that does not excuse Tumblr’s poor communication.
Also it’s a free service. Stop acting like they owe you anything. Just be glad they provide free storage & a platform that is simply revolutionary.
Don’t use it, loose it, but tell a tumblr before you do.