Censorious scolds will never be content.
Ok, from what I read, there was actually one child porn incident that resulted in Tumblr app being removed from the applestore : https://www.fastcompany.com/90270595/apple-pulls-tumblr-from-app-store-for-hosting-child-pornography
And Dachshunds!
That said, as bad as being pulled from the applestore probably is, they can’t have decided such a massive change (nudity, and even a nipple will count as nudity, will only be allowed if it’s art, not photography, if the blog is flagged as adult, and if there’s no depiction of any sex act) on the moment.
From the various articles that I read, I gather that they intend to widen their audience (family friendly, acceptable in more conservative countries, etc…) to be on the same level as Facebook and such. So, they’re abandoning a semi-captive “customer base” for an hypothetical much larger one. I don’t see this bet succeeding. Once again, why would anybody use Tumblr rather than Facebook if the content is essentially the same? If I just want to communicate with family and friends and see lolcats, they’re all on Facebook already.
Okay, the last thing I expected to see in BPC’s blog link is this move being Godwined by Will Wheaton.
Well at least this made me smile.
One great thing I will say about this board is that there is a place where you could post about how awful this is and not have to face down some morality police who would say that you shouldn’t have been doing porn in the first place. I’m sure the equivalent thread on Reddit will even have that–even if though it will likely be downvoted to hell.
Anyways, yeah, fuck 'em. The child porn excuse doesn’t wash for the exact reasons you say. If other companies can figure out how to handle it, so can they. And the characteristics of what Tumblr is is already set in stone. If they try to become more like Facebook, the people who like Tumblr as a social media platform will abandon it. And, as long as they aren’t SWERFs (sex worker exclusionary radical feminists), the Tumblr “SJWs” won’t be happy, either.
Live Journal is not their only competition. DeviantArt has a huge porn section. And they also allow the microblogging stuff. I like it because it’s easy to find similar stuff by just clicking on the side. All they do is have an age gate.
Which, BTW, is how Tumblr could have handled this to avoid problems with Apple if they really were worried. Age gate the site, and don’t let the app access the age-gated stuff.
Gah. Sorry this affects you as a producer, BPC. If I remember correctly, some of your stuff is drawn, right? So DeviantArt might be a good place to check out. They do photos, including a specific Fetish Photos section.
It does pretty much remove my last reason to go there. All creators I know have a Twitter or Facebook page. The only time I run into Tumblr anymore is when an image shows up in an image search.
Yeah, DeviantArt is a weird one. They specifically have a Fetish Portraits section, and it tends to have a ton of porn on it. I haven’t actually read the rules since I don’t make content. Still, a lot of the stuff I would find on Tumblr I’ve also seen on DeviantArt.
The stuff I saw scrolling through BPC’s blog seemed to be stuff that would work on DeviantArt. I’ve seen stuff like it there before.
I also note that the explicit porn sites often have image sections and have followers and all that junk. Pornhub I know does.
Reports from Twitter indicate that this new initiative is… not going well, to say the least. Their new algorithm seems to be flagging completely innocuous photos and artworks while letting actual nudity through, and, ironically enough, it flagged Tumblr’s own post outlining the new policy.
Sounds like an “Oh shit we need back into the app store, no time for beta testing, DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW” approach to things.
Found the answer to this question, in case it would interest anybody : the older adult posts that will go private will disappear at the same time from all pages where they’ve been reblogged.
There are tools that allow to download all pictures of a blog (or at least there used to be), but they just download the pictures. All the texts will be lost. Which is not only erotica (most erotica was written along with a picture), since plenty of people hardly ever wrote about what they had for breakfast without a sexy picture going along with it. And it won’t even be possible to know whose picture it was, if personal, or by whom, if made by an artist. Basically all the terrific life stories or fantasies people wrote and posted for years will be gone, along with their carefully crafted (for some at least) pages, with their special spirit or style.
I guess that for many casual visitors, tumblr adult pages were just another big porn stash. But it was pretty different for regular users, for which it was closer to a Facebook and/or Deviant Art page. That’s a lot of personal investment by a lot of people that will go “puff” overnight. Personally, I didn’t produce much of anything, so that will be mostly the loss of an environment. While Tumblr team says that there’s no lack of websites for adult content, there’s none to my knowledge that is at the same time a social network (no Facebook XXX in existence, so to speak).
Basically the rules are (maybe I’ll forget some things) :
-No sex act.
-No penetration.
-No masturbation.
-No bodily fluid.
-No opened vagina.
-No erection.
-No sex toys.
And nothing that seems to be a placeholder for these things. In theory it applies also to written text, but I don’t think it’s seriously enforced.
So, you’re perfectly free to post a series showing a woman being raped (as long as you can’t see the actual penetration) and then hanged, but not the same woman lying on her bed with a hand on her crotch. The result being that despite Deviant Art stating that “adult content” is forbidden, it’s actually filled with it, but adult content following some weird rules, that would preclude a lot of Tumblr content to appear there. Of course, neither the users who don’t want adult content nor the users who produce adult content are happy. Obviously, someone who is suspended for his drawing of the woman with her hand on her crotch isn’t going to feel he has been treated fairly when he looks at the other allowed page.
On top of it, the moderation seems pretty arbitrary and hazardous, depending mostly on whether or not some moral crusaders have decided to try to take down your page, in which case DA will apply maximum scrutiny and delete content that is simply remotely evocative of what is banned (while still leaving the vore and hanging alone).
In any case, the problem isn’t just the content. As you stated, there are plenty of content that you find on both sites. It’s that they have a completely different spirit. Even though you could in theory use Deviant Art as a blog, in practice, it’s centered on content producer/artists and their work, not on people’s lives and experiences, as the adult part of Tumblr is (well, not all of it is, not by a long shot, but that’s what regular users are seeking, so that’s what they mostly see of Tumblr adult pages : sex-themed personal blogs).
Facebook may be about to get (relatively) face-planted by the Feds and more tightly regulated by other governments. Plus, a lot of people - a lot of users - from all over the world, are pissed at Facebook right now.
Maybe Tumblr’s thinking this is a chance to truly be an alternative to FB.
It figures. They do little to effectively control illegal content/access and then when they lose Apple Store access over it they panic and brick up the door.
(BTW, I see the new normal is that a social page/blog can only exist viably if it is an App? Way to make yourselves Apple’s and Google’s serfs. I mention this because my visits to Tumblr had always been through web access as opposed to through App. Then again my porn needs are modest these days anyway.)
Though good point, KarlGauss, they may feel that if the Bigs (FB, Twitter) get slapped around, that may create an opening for them…
OTOH observation suggests any platform that gets “big enough” or that the management wants to *make *big enough to turn into a big payday, will begin tightning what can and cannot be shown or marketed through it so that it’s more mainstream-friendly or so that it looks more like it’s on the “right side of history”. Basically it’s *“thank you adult content/fringe communities for helping us build this, we don’t need you any more, you scare investors/payment processors/magazine article writers.” *
And yeah, the “radicals” who would defend that “mayonnaise is a gender” do seem to be full of fail when it comes to people who want to get theirs on in ways *they *don’t approve of.
No one actually says this. It is a transphobic mockery of what trans and trans allies actually do say, similar to the “I identify as an attack helicopter” bullshit. (In this case, I think they mixed it with a SpongeBob reference, where silly idiot character Patrick Star argues that mayonnaise is a musical instrument.)
What we do say is that gender is not a binary, but a spectrum. People can be anywhere on that spectrum, and it’s not up to use to police the language they use to describe themselves. We just should try to understand.
It is actually quite rare to run into people who are both trans allies and sex negative. There is some animosity between the trans community and the transvestite (dress in women’s clothes for sexual reasons) community, but that is because trans people are worried that their sexuality is being reduced to a kink, not because they are against kink in general.
There’s a reason I used the acronym SWERF for the anti-sex-work feminists. It’s deliberately evocative of TERF, the trans-exclusionary reactionary feminists. Both are reactions to third-wave feminism: the kind that actually embraces sex and kink.
So, sure, there are some who would cheer the removal of kink and porn from Tumblr. But they are the ones who lie about trans people saying “mayonnaise is a gender.”
(Do note that I am glossing over the possibility of a particular kink being thought to be wrong by some but not all. And tons of internal debate. Of course the whole thing is messy. We’re dealing with people, not robots. But there’s no widespread attack on kink from the LGBT community.)
I find that foolish given how well-defined Tumblr’s identity is.
And they’d need a complete overhaul to actually work like Facebook. There’s a reason Facebook has so much stuff you can do. Tumblr is rather bare-bones by comparison. They aren’t ready to take on people used to what they can do on Facebook.
I mean, Tumblr doesn’t even use real names. Good luck finding your real life friends even if they do join.
Nah, I think this really is just about not being able to stop the porn bot problem, and using a nuke instead. But, at the same time, I do think it will destroy the site. There’s no new community waiting to move in after you piss off the very people your site is known for.
I visited Tumblr only because a data science class I took online made us post our assignments somewhere and recommended that site. I had no idea what the rest of the content was.
You’re right and it was entirelly uncalled for on my part to tack on the throwaway quote to my comment on that there are self-proclaimed radicals who will turn on should-be allies. It was distracting, it was low humour and as you said, it misidentifies who’s the problem. Pleace accept my apology.
When Yahoo bought Tumblr people asked “what will they do with all that porn”. Well, now we know, they haven’t figured things out so now they find it worth it if the general adult content and alternative sexual/gender communities get thrown out with the bathwater of unvetted porn.
You do realize that people in “conservative” countries are half their visitors? All the material of PornHub and no awkward questions…
I must admit “erotic Advents Calendar” are three words I never put together in my head before.
I stopped using Tumblr a while ago, as I felt they were getting more and more hungry for personal information. Something about that level of Big Borther oversight was rather a turn-off.
I think that may be part of why they are tossing the porn.
At some point, the amount of personal data it vacuums up may become a problem if it is primarily used as a vehicle for porn. Now I am a straight male and I don’t think my porn habits would surprise or shock anyone. But seeing it from the perspective of other people…
Plenty of straight women would be mortified if even vanilla porn browsing was revealed to the public. If we extend that to women outside the western world where porn may be less tolerated in general, many could be in real trouble.
Then we have people of all genders that are in some kind of closet, or enjoy some kind of kink that they absolutly don’t want outed, including those who live in very repressive regimes.
Tumblrs gathering of personal data together with porn habits and kinks has the potential to result in a vast number of personal tragedies. Any kind of data breach, or selling stuff to someone without too many scruples… Wasn’t there some kind of blackmail emails going round a while ago with passwords and threats of revealing pron browsing?
I don’t want to support Tumblr in this but I don’t think combining a business model that involves gathering as much data about the visitor as possible and then selling it on, is a good fit for a site that hosts lots of porn. Either the porn has to go or they have to rejig where their revenue streams come from.