Re: tumblr. I feel like some things are getting lost in the ‘omg the children’ stuff. Now, that is totally legit. There was absolutely some nasty stuff on the site that they weren’t catching. However, it goes deeper than that.
Tumblr really couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it for the last two-three years because in large part the usage base was young, broke, and at the fringes of the internet. I saw a stat yesterday that .0001% of people had a tumblr. No clue how accurate that is but what I do know is that it was heavily tilted to people on the LBGT+ spectrum, PoC, etc. Tumblr, in essence, was a conversation between people on a comment to comment level. Someone posted something and the real conversation happened in the reblogs and in the tags. It was a space in which you could follow a tag link and go down a rabbit hole of everything that was tagged with that post. And users liked it that way. They totally flagged things that didn’t belong in the tags (like pron) and it was a great way to find people with similar interests without having the gatekeeper of a moderated forum.
Here is where it gets into the real world tho – Tumblr got bought by Yahoo a while ago and Yahoo is owned by Verizon. The biggest investor in killing Net Neutrality and managing and controlling your internet experience. There is an interview with the president of Verizon that came out today that says in essence ‘we wanted tumblr but not the pron’. Well, yeah, except by going wholly in on destroying the pron they wiped out huge communities of people talking about their bodies. Chronic pain communities are gone. LBGT education communities, breastfeeding, trans support groups, sex education, and yes, fandom. They crushed huge categories of content where people were just figuring things out about themselves and they cloaked in SESTA/FOSA because what they want is sanitized content to serve ads.
So Verizon told Apple to pull the tumblr app a month ago because of the porn (Nov 17?). They removed a whole swath of tags from searchability (you had to know a username to find someone and then scroll their whole blog) in the week that followed. And yesterday they sent out their, guess what, we’re deleting everything we’ve flagged as sensitive which everyone is having a good laugh at, including me. Now, checking tonight it looks like they’ve removed a lot of those flags and people are calming down but I don’t buy it. A lot of that content is gone already and it’s not coming back.
Net Neutrality is failing, where it hasn’t failed already. Fandom as I know it is moving but the infrastructure isn’t there yet and I know a few folks are trying the distributed network stuff but we always, always lose folks when this happens.
Anyway, it’s about the porn but it isn’t about the porn.
Tumblr Exodus 