Earlier quoted context omitted.
I knew pro-anorexia groups use slang like "your friend Ana" to hide their actions, but had to google "thinspo" and "meanspo". Thinspo (thin inspiration) is positive anorexia reinforcement, like anorexic role model pictures. Meanspo (mean inspiration) is negative anorexia reinforcement, like aphorisms demonizing fat or destructive critic. Why are young girls so vulnerable to mental disease trends? What can we do bette…
It's not a gender thing. Young people in general are vulnerable to all kinds of negative groupthink because they don't have a fully formed identity, experience, or adult critical thinking skills. The nature of the toxic material seems to differ a bit by gender. Loads of teen boys are sucked into toxic online cults too including neo-Naziism, extreme misogyny, other kinds of toxic political radicalism, gaming addiction…
Tumblr will ban all adult content on December 17th
121–130 of 482 posts
Re: Tumblr will ban all adult content on December 17th
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
My daughter at 12 got sucked into Tumblr and developed an eating disorder. I'm really sorry to hear this, having gone through a similar thing with a now ex-significant other. She too became very active in the segments of tumblr you identified and others (showed me many of them, some seemed like teenage angst in blog form, others were far more...worrisome), developed an eating disorder along with severe anxiety issues…
I think a lot of people over-estimate the resilience of the human emotional state, especially their own. Time and time again we see regular functioning adults get sucked into objectively insane or self-harmful communities, be it the above phenomenon or 4chan crap like QAnon.
Re: Tumblr will ban all adult content on December 17th
#123Re: Tumblr will ban all adult content on December 17th
#124Re: Tumblr will ban all adult content on December 17th
#125This strikes me as a heck of an opportunity to create a system (with a tumblr importer) specifically replicating Tumblr, but for pr0n. "fumblr" ?
Given that the porn industry basically invented the monetized internet, I assume that the "opportunity" was seized long ago.
Fetlife probably does a good job for certain 'niches'.
What I mean is, all the 'tumblrees' and "their" 'content' ( so much air-quote) will want to go somewhere. En masse. Soon. Most likely in protest.
Re: Tumblr will ban all adult content on December 17th
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the new reality of the internet, best get used to it. Free speech is dead.
This seems like the opposite of free speech being dead. A website shut down and you can just... go... make or use another one, anytime you like, without having to worry about it even being illegal.
Re: Tumblr will ban all adult content on December 17th
#127My daughter at 12 got sucked into Tumblr and developed an eating disorder. She was in this gigantic web of pro-ana tumblrs with crazy diet plans that tell you to eat like 100 calories a day. Then the app would just keep suggesting more, "skin and bones", "thinspo", "meanspo". Holy crap there are some scary corners of Tumblr. I of course am more mindful of what she looks at, but she was hiding it and I can't monitor e…
Gosh, that's tough, and I'm hoping she came out the other side stronger. This doesn't seem specific to tumblr though. I can't think of a network that doesn't have the same dark corners and nasty reinforcement. It's the internet.
The internet is a bunch of channels (websites) with subchannels (groups). Sometimes channels that have earned far too much legitimacy overflow into illegitimate corners. And that is a problem. It is like CNN with great content and then having crappy content. How do you start ranking sites then? How do you as a website evaluator start white-listing domains then?
I know you are defending free speech while encouraging selective roaming. But that is not an easy act. Some have difficulty while others do not. Some can moderate themselves while others cannot. Restriction + Avoidance is better than Exposure + Ignorance towards these harmful things.
Re: Tumblr will ban all adult content on December 17th
#128Re: Tumblr will ban all adult content on December 17th
#129My daughter at 12 got sucked into Tumblr and developed an eating disorder. She was in this gigantic web of pro-ana tumblrs with crazy diet plans that tell you to eat like 100 calories a day. Then the app would just keep suggesting more, "skin and bones", "thinspo", "meanspo". Holy crap there are some scary corners of Tumblr. I of course am more mindful of what she looks at, but she was hiding it and I can't monitor e…
I knew pro-anorexia groups use slang like "your friend Ana" to hide their actions, but had to google "thinspo" and "meanspo". Thinspo (thin inspiration) is positive anorexia reinforcement, like anorexic role model pictures. Meanspo (mean inspiration) is negative anorexia reinforcement, like aphorisms demonizing fat or destructive critic. Why are young girls so vulnerable to mental disease trends? What can we do bette…
Nothing to do with young girls in particular, nor "mental disease" in particular.
Adolescents are constantly trying to find some axis along which they can excel/stand out, in a way that gives them societal power. (They're trying to "win", without really caring what it is they're winning at. They're just aware that right now they're not winning along any axis, and that has to change.)
For women specifically, being beautiful is one thing you can "win" at that can give you power.
Now, separately, anorexia can happen to anyone—recent research has suggested it's a sort of dual to obesity, another way the ventromedial hypothalamic nucleus (VMN) can become deregulated and cease to output the correct signal in response to fluctuations in leptin levels. For obesity, that makes people eat when they're "full" (because they don't feel full); for anorexia and bulemia, that makes people not-eat when they're "hungry" (because they don't feel hungry, and do feel disgusted/nauseous at the idea of eating more just like someone who's already stuffed full would.)
Like obesity, anorexia isn't necessarily genetic, but rather seems to be a disordered "state" that the brain can get into, which means that it potentially has environmental "triggers", even if it's purely a neurohormonal problem from that point forward. Some scientists hypothesize obesity as being the result of "re-training" your brain by forcibly exceeding your calorie budget. Anorexia is hypothesized similarly: "re-training" by forcibly starving yourself.
So: take teenage girls who want to "cultivate beauty" in order to gain social power. Some of them think they need to be thinner in order to be more beautiful. At this point, they're okay. After dieting, some are still okay. For others—perhaps the ones who saw the largest gains in social power from their loss of weight—something in their brain breaks a bit, and now they can't eat regular amounts of food any more without feeling sick.
Note that that could have happened to anyone, at any time, who decided to go on a diet. We don't understand exactly what makes people more "vulnerable" to anorexia, but adolescents aren't especially vulnerable. Teenage girls are just more likely to be people who are trying to diet for the first time, and therefore are more likely to be triggering and exposing an underlying vulnerability to anorexia for the first time—which we end up describing as "developing" anorexia.
Compare also: the guys who obsessively lift weights to gain muscle mass—because "cultivating your physique" is social power for teenage/college-aged boys—but then, once they start, their "unfitness" becomes a self-image problem, and they can never be happy with how they look, no matter how "ripped" they get.
Compare also: the development of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. People find that "cultivating a charismatic public image" gives them social power, but then become unable to stop optimizing their public image, even to the point that they habitually lie to their loved ones to present every action in the best possible light.
I feel like there's some unifying neurological principle to how these disorders develop, though I've never heard one suggested.
Re: Tumblr will ban all adult content on December 17th
#130If Verizon bought Tumblr with the sole purpose of having one more service to serve ads to, and if banning the adult content move aims to please the advertisers then oh boy, are they in for a nasty surprise. Tumblr will become a ghost town in days.
Something $3/mo, $30/y — and we'll save all your precious work without hassle! Could work for a significant portion of the audience.