Tumblr can eat a gigantic bag of porn-sized dicks

The BBQ Pit
1

So this is happening.

Starting Dec 17, adult content will not be allowed on Tumblr, regardless of how old you are. You can read more about what kinds of content are not allowed on Tumblr in our Community Guidelines. If you spot a post that you don’t think belongs on Tumblr, period, you can report it: From the dashboard or in search results, tap or click the share menu (paper airplane) at the bottom of the post, and hit “Report.”

Now, for those of you who don’t know, Tumblr has, for a variety of reasons, become the go-to place for a lot of porn producers. Artists, models, authors, photographers, and more. Many of these blogs have hundreds of thousands of followers; some have millions. Porn on Tumblr is kind of a big deal. And now it’s going away.

So as someone who is most definitely going to feel the brunt of this purge, let me just say, from the bottom of my heart: fuck you, Tumblr. I’m sure there’s some business reason for this - I don’t care. I was working on a fuckin’ erotic Advents Calendar and now I won’t even get to finish it before you fuckers delete my blog. I had some really tasteful shit on there*! But even beyond that, it was where I reached out to lots of my contacts, met a ton of really great similar-minded kinky people, and learned a whole lot about myself. And now all of that is basically just gone in two weeks.

All that’s really left to say is (cosigned by basically every single fucking blog I follow) this: Fuck you, Tumblr.

Now who knows of a decent alternative platform? Maybe reddit? :frowning:

Anyone curious about what I do can take a look at Toymakers-Workshop.tumblr.com before it goes down. Fucking horseshit.

2

I read a story about this last week that said that they had temporarily disabled the searchability of adult-content blogs while they figured out a technical solution to a very specific and serious problem. The problem: they had too much underage stuff getting by whatever filters they had in place. Sounds like they gave up on finding a technical solution.

3

There’s non-porn on Tumblr?!

4

Alex Goldman, co-host of the Reply All podcast, would like to hear from you.

5

I understand that “people posting child pornography on your website” is a serious problem. I also know that countless other websites deal with it. 4Chan still exists for some godawful reason. Twitter has porn on it. Reddit has tons of porn on it. So best-case scenario, this is shafting a ton of your users, who have now lost their platform, because you couldn’t figure out how to solve a problem countless other sites solve.

This is especially bad for sex workers. A lot of them are on Tumblr, and many of them cultivate their following there, and make a living selling porn or art to those people. As my friend TastezLikeKandi (she has 50k followers on Tumblr and makes a living selling porn of herself) put it:

"Another day, another reminder that people dont give a shit if sex workers live or die. And we’re not just going to magically stop existing when we run out of places to turn online. more and more of us are going to be pushed back onto the streets and more and more of us are going to die. "

(If anyone is curious, she’s on Manyvids as “missbriehaven”. Normally I wouldn’t plug a porn actress here, but it seems apt in this case.)

But given that there was no official explanation given for why they decided to make this move (and “we can’t handle a flood of malicious child pornography on our site” is about as good of an excuse as you’ll get!), that’s merely the best-case scenario. We don’t actually know if that was the reason.

By the way, this is a big chunk of Tumblr.

However, now, we may have some answers. According to an analysis of Tumblr’s 200,000 most-visited domains, 22,775 of them are adult – or 11.4 percent. The analysis was performed by web measurement firm SimilarGroup, a company which raised $2.5 million earlier this year with the intention of competing with Alexa’s stronghold in web rankings.

The measurement firm analyzed the volume of visits to these adult subdomains, and found that 16.6 percent of the traffic that visits Tumblr takes place on adult blogs.

In addition, 22.37 percent of incoming referral traffic from external sites to Tumblr is from adult websites, making that the leading category for referrals. Meanwhile, 8.02 percent of outbound traffic from Tumblr goes to adult websites.

That was in 2013; I somehow doubt it’s shrunken considerably since then.

6

Other than people posting links to photos on the SDMB, I don’t think I’ve ever visited Tumblr for anything. Man, seems like I’m missing out on a ton of porn!

7

Well looking at that link was a learning experience.

8

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t 4Chan’s way of “dealing with it” to laugh at anyone “triggered” by it, especially since they have no big pocketed owners to sue?

Yahoo and Tumblr would know that too, though, which makes me think this was a decision not made lightly. How different are Twitter and Reddit from Tumblr technologically as platforms? It doesn’t seem to be a given to me that they have the same issues that would be solved just as easily; anyone more tech minded who can theorize?

9

I didn’t know.

That was pretty much the last major platform that allowed adult content (technically, Deviantart doesn’t allow it according to peculiar rules that make vore perfectly fine but a dildo off limit for instance, and in fact many artists were posting on Tumblr what they couldn’t post on Deviant art. In fact, I intented to do this myself. I guess I can forget about it. Patreon too has adult content, but there too it’s, at least in theory, against the rules.). There was also a thriving BDSM community there.

The usual suspects will rejoice at the ban of all this woman oppression, the parents who find that it’s everybody else’s business to make sure that little Timmy doesn’t see a nipple will have some champagne, and the Christians, Muslims and other conservatives and authoritarians will sleep better knowing that this hotbed of depravity ceased to exist.

I had been present a lot on this “dark side” of Tumblr but not during the last months. I’ll probably visit to see where people I was in touch with will go. At least the content won’t be deleted but only put in private (a lot of people have stuff pretty significant for them posted), and written erotica will be still allowed. I wonder however what will happen to all the posts I reblogged when they’ll go private. Will they all disappear from my page or will I still be able to see them?

I’d be curious to know what is the real motivation behind this ban. No doubt that the adult content was making Tumblr attractive for a significant number of people, since there wasn’t really any alternative in social networks. I guess they did their maths and bet on gaining more by getting rid of this nefarious reputation than by keeping the porn addicts, the BDSM enthusiasts, the artists, the sex workers, and people who enjoyed a social network not formatted to the preferences of the conservative catholic parents of a 6 y.o. However, I’m wondering what they have to offer that would make them able to compete with other, larger social networks that are equally sanitized. Personally at least I can’t see a reason why I would stay on Tumblr rather than joining Facebook where everybody else is if the adult content is removed.

10

I was under the impression Tumblr was nothing but porn and social justice warriors insisting that mayonnaise is a gender and that otherkin is actually a thing.

11

Sure. Paradoxically enough, Tumblr is also a hotbed of so-called SJWs (which led to significant frictions, since they aren’t typically fond of porn, BDSM or sex work). That’s where I “met” them for the first time and I gained my dislike for this kind of barely out of high school “activists” who think nothing of lecturing women twice their age about their life choices or sexual preferences (or ganging up to get their blog deleted).

12

It’s a bit exaggerated, but it’s not completely false. That’s the reason why I’m dubious about this decision. What specific appeal Tumblr has to compete with the like of Facebook?

13

I assume the motivation was that they crunched the numbers and decided it was prohibitively expensive to hire the requisite number of humans to adequately screen tumblr for kiddie porn.

14

And I now need never visit tumblr again.

15

Crotalus stated so, but what would make you (or Crotalus) buy this story? Have you ever seen child porn anywhere? Apparently, everybody, including all sites entirely dedicated to porn, and Tumblr itself, manage to get rid of it. I’m willing to believe that some people, presumably not bothered by the idea of spending some years in jail, post it. I’m not willing to believe that it’s such a prevalent problem that a huge staff would be required to filter it, especially since it would probably be reported by users within 7 seconds after being posted. On top of it, it has been years since Tumblr was bought. They would suddenly realize only now that they’ve have been paying tons of people to filter child porn for years?

16

Not in the slightest, especially since CP (child pornography) gets you partyvanned (raided by the FBI) anywhere in America. Posting CP will get you banned from 4chan.

17

Probably your best bet is to completely separate the blog from the pictures. If you have a Yahoo account, or are willing to set one up, you can use Flickr to post pictures. And Flickr allows hard-core porn.

18

Or they had been relying on an algorithm-based screening process with a handful of human screeners for QA and couldn’t scale it up to mitigate false negatives cheaply enough.

19

I rarely visited Flickr, and not recently in any case, but I believe that it does only image hosting, and isn’t a social platform that allows blogging, right?

20

Apparently Newgrounds is reminding Tumblr users that they have no problem with adult content. I find this somewhat hilarious as I haven’t thought of Newgrounds in over a decade, and remember it mostly for badly-made Flash cartoons and games.