I don’t know how many folks here were ever aware of Tumblr, but it is a microblogging site that cultivated a series of rich communities of fan appreciation, as well as alternative communities often based on NSFW topics, such as fetish communities and other alternative lifestyles. It was often considered a pretty safe haven for sharing interests, as well as support, for people who found it difficult to find safe spaces to share. For one, it was anonymous (user name-based) and it also was a place where workers in adult-oriented industries could market their products without interference from corporations, etc.
In late 2018, Tumblr’s Verizon management banned all adult content, and many of these communities splintered. Tumblr is now considered basically a dead platform with many fewer users than before and mostly bland, repetitive content.
Does anyone know whether the former Tumblr communities were able to find a suitable replacement?
Can you store content on redditt? I’ve never looked for anything like that there.
I know there were a few sites that tried to spin off and used names like crumblr and tumble, but I don’t think they ever got any real traction. I was apparently the only person on the internet that didn’t know tumblr had porn until they banned it.
I’ve noticed a lot of stuff on Twitter and Instagram, as well as a renewed interest in DeviantArt. And, yes, there is a lot of fetish stuff on Reddit.
But of course, the main hub of Internet sex workers is OnlyFans, with the occasional tame stuff also being available on Patreon. But they advertise on those other places. Heck, some of the tamer non-nude fetishes show up on YouTube, who seems to crack down a lot less than they used to.
I take it we are not talking about hardcore porn. Did Tumblr have hardcore or just nudity? I’m on DeviantArt and I don’t think I’ve ever saw hardcore there, but I don’t look for it there either. Maybe no one tells me about that either.
OnlyFans is pay for content, so that’s a big difference from old Tumblr. I see that Tumblr now has different pay levels. Not sure if they allow porn now.
Of course everybody defines porn differently, but I don’t remember seeing any hardcore porn on tumblr, no penetration or explicit things like that. Maybe that existed too, but I wasn’t looking for it there anyway. The things I remember are similar to stuff I see on some deviantart pages, naked models, but no sex acts.
To this day I wonder how much time had anyone on team Verizon spent on tumblr before buying it from from Yahoo and how did they conclude that they just needed to clean up the Adult Content to make it “respectable” and “safe” and then they’d have the social media Next Big Thing in their hands.
They bought it from Yahoo for a billion and ended up selling it to WordPress for 3 million. Brilliant.
In my experience (on the gay side of things) those communities mostly ended up on Twitter. (Yes, there’s even hardcore porn on Twitter.) There is paid content on OnlyFans of course but it doesn’t really form a community. After the Tumblr porn ban a couple of Tumblr-clone sites popped up that explicitly allowed NSFW content but none of them seem to have really taken hold.
I have almost no experience (and interest) in Twitter other than following a Twitter link from some other place from time to time, but is porn even allowed on Twitter? Any nudity at least? I know that Facebook is very prudish about anything only resembling a nipple, so I’ve assumed that Twitter has a similar “clean” policy.
Wasn’t the whole NWS ban on Tumblr because they had legitimate child porn on there? And then when they got all deleted “artistic” porn that also happened to have kids in it got put in place to skirt the rules? That’s at least what I heard.
I believe it was a combination of things, including Apple’s strict rules for App Store downloads (Tumblr actually got de-listed for a time), the enacting of Sesta/Fosta (which resulted in a lot of sites shutting down), the fear that a reputation for adult content would make it difficult to sell advertising, etc. I don’t recall any stories about any actual problem with illegal material such as child porn or human trafficking, no worse than for any site that hosts adult content, anyway.
Apple has an enormous influence on sites with adult material. Last year, Discord had to re-adjust how its iOS mobile app handled adult material.
I never really saw any hardcore stuff on Tumblr, but I can’t say it wasn’t there. All of the sex workers I saw complaining tended to do more soft core stuff, and already had OnlyFans pages before the Tumblr exodus if you wanted harder core stuff.
I assumed anyone doing hardcore for free would just use Pornhub or similar, which has both a free and pay tier, and would actually pay them.
I do know there were tumblr fan pages that would just have a bunch of content from various locations. That is definitely something that is now available on Reddit.
Same experience, AFAICT tumblr did not have any more issues with people posting that sort of content than any other mid-sized online user-sourced platform.
More like, like Ascenray said, it had the issue that if you want to ever make your site commercially profitable then advertisers, payment processors, and application stores are going to really, really really look sideways at user-sourced adult content, because it’s not worth it to them the bother of having people crying out that they are “enabling” Bad Things™ and having them be called before committees to explain what are they doing about it.
According to this recent article, there isn’t a place to re-create Tumblr, because of the segregation of sexual interest sites from non-sexual interest sites. That’s unfortunate.
As of this publication, it’s unlikely there will ever be a true Tumblr replacement because of the current state of the internet. “The regulation of sexual media means that our pornography online has become ghettoized,” said MacDonald — both by legislation and the platforms themselves.
Sex and porn have been largely pushed to the margins in online spaces, and the result is a clean break between our sexual and non-sexual selves. “The way that we consume pornography now is so broken off from the rest of our lives,” MacDonald said. “It’s singled out, is not integrated into our other interests, it’s not integrated into our sociality.”
Yes, Twitter allows porn - surprisingly, as you say, given the much stricter policies on Facebook, Instagram and other mainstream social media sites. There are some restrictions around depictions of sexual violence, and of course all non-consensual media is prohibited. There is a “sensitive” flag which is applied to tweets with NSFW media which means that it doesn’t appear until the user clicks through a warning screen.
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