Tumblr Bots: The Experiment

lil-mizz-jay:

So I did an experiment recently to find out if Tumblr actually gives a shit about porn bots, Korean spam bots, or other varieties of bots on this hellsite.

So the initial Hypothesis was this:

“If I report a bot and then block it, the report gets canceled and doesn’t actually get sent to Tumblr staff at all.”

I figured blocking them just canceled out the report, kind of like how blocking an account removes all of their asks from your inbox and all of their notes from your posts, I figured it also removed all pending sent reports involving them since by blocking them you’ve disabled your ability to interact with them at all.

Whether or not that Hypothesis was true, it meant that blocking them had to be removed from the experiment. Had a whole Schrodinger’s Tumblr Bot situation going on. The experiment had to be focused on Tumblr’s “Report” system.

So, the first rule of the experiment was making sure that I didn’t block the bots upon reporting them.

I used a post of mine that had about 35 bot messages in its notes.

I reported every one of them, logged on to a second account and reported them all again, and even gave the link to 10 different friends asking them all to report the notes.

This was done August 28th.

Today, October 1st, I went back to check on the post.

When you report notes, it says, “If this note violates our community guidelines, we’ll remove it.”

Well, I guess bots don’t violate the community guidelines, because despite 12 unique reports from 12 unique blogs, every single one of those 35 bot messages are still there, clear as day, in the notes of that post.

The conclusion here, after 1 month of waiting for Tumblr staff to do something, is as follows:

– Tumblr staff doesn’t give a shit about bots. They expect you to spend 15-25 minutes a day doing absolutely nothing but hitting Block on all of the bot notes. It’s not worth their time to investigate these bots because there’s just too many of them and there’s ultimately nothing, at this point, that Tumblr staff can do about them.

As such: DON’T EVEN BOTHER HITTING REPORT ON THEM.

Just hit block. Reporting will do nothing, Tumblr staff doesn’t care.