Tumblr

Alright, so I feel like I have to say something about this, both because I have some small insight that may actually be helpful and because I've thought about this quite a bit over the last few days which led to a lot of disconnected thoughts and ideas which I need to put down before they slip away. But first, just so we're all on the same page, let me give a short summary of what I'm actually talking about:

On December 3rd 2018, Tumblr announced that it would summarily ban everything it considers "adult" from its platform, starting December 17th. In the announcement they more or less went into some detail about what they consider "adult", drawing the line at the depiction of female nipples in a non-nursing fashion, so it and anything more explict than that would be considered "adult" and therefor banned. Now if that means your account will be banned if you have things of that nature on your blog or if it just means that the offending material will be removed is unclear at this point, but I wouldn't count on Tumblrs generosity.

This affects me to a great extent. I run dozens of explicit Tumblr blogs and Tumblr is where I have the most followers. (However, that doesn't mean I have MOST of my followers on Tumblr, because I'm quite diversified - more on that later.)

In the days since - it is now December 6th as I'm writing this - there has been some predictable outcry over this decision. I don't follow much of the Tumblr-centric discussions on Tumblr, but I did look into it some, mainly to see if people had any suggestions for an alternative. As is to be expected, people are threatening to leave in large numbers and are already announcing the "death" of Tumblr, and as much as I can understand that sort of reaction, my experience, having witnessed a large number of similar outrages over changes to other services in the past, I don't think throwing fits gets us anywhere. Tumblr (or "Oath" - i.e. Verizon, which they belong to for a year now, but for simplicity's sake, I'll just say Tumblr) has already made up their mind about this decision. They're not stupid. They knew what kind of reaction this would get. They've seen other services do it and what happened to them. They have the numbers. They know exactly how many users they stand to lose. And they deciced to do it anyway. So all the whining and crying that's going on right now is already factored into the decision and won't change its course.

So let's start off with assuming one thing to be certain: Tumblr will indeed ban all adult content starting December 17th. And yes, if you're in doubt if YOUR tumblr falls into that category, then it definitely does. In a helpful manner, I've noticed on my dashboard that Tumblr has already flagged many of my posts as offensive, so those posts are definitely going to go. Whether or not the actual image is going to be deleted from Tumblr's servers - thus eliminating all direct links to the image - or if they just remove the post containing the image, is still unclear at this point, but I wouldn't be taking any chances. Also, it would seem that for now, the new adult policy only affects graphic representations (i.e. images, videos, drawings, etc.) but not writing, but I won't hold my breath for my b********y stories to stay up much either, especially considering that my writing has been banned numerous times before.

Consequentially, when it's unlikely for the decision to change - and by the way, even if they DID change the decision, for now, it's just a matter of time for it to come back; the course has already been laid, and indeed had been clear for a time now, when they introduced safe mode, made it default, limiting the visibility of adult content incrementally - it's time to look for alternatives. I've heard a few alternatives suggested already, so let me go through them with you.

Right out of the door, I'd like to discard all the up and coming small startup Tumblr replacement services. Not neccessarily because they're all shit and couldn't be the next Tumblr, but because they just aren't at this time and it's unclear which one of them - if any - are going to be worth your (and my) while. So instead of putting time and effort into a service whose future and reach is uncertain, I'd rather put the same time and effort into services which have been around for a while and are somewhat "established" (and whose policies are settled in a way - new services are notorious to change their policies just as drastically and unpredictably as Tumblr just did).

So with that out of the way, what I've heard suggested falls into two categories. The first one are just pure image hosts - ImageFap, Pixiv, Imgur, etc. I think they can be useful to an extent, but Tumblr was more a social network than an image host. In fact, looking into this prompted me to think about what Tumblr actually was - because its functions seem so simple and trivial, and yet it amounted to something slightly unique. Its reblog feature (possible only through Tumblrs TOS which took plenty of rights away from the creators and put it in the hands of the Tumblr community) allowed anyone to curate their own collection of kinks, which also served as an appreciation of the items that were shared this way. It's nice to see a post get hundreds and thousands of likes and reshares, while at the same losing control over the distribution of said post. Plenty of the things I've posted and subsequently deleted off my blog are still around somewhere in the Tumblsphere, and I don't even know where anymore, because once gone I don't even get notifications about what happens to those posts anymore. So what the reblog feature really did was allow people with non-standard, kinky and queer sexualities to find others with similar interests (as is evident by the content of their Tumblr) and bring them into their own sphere of influence, thus displaying their own mix of kinkiness with something like pride. It made you feel normal, it made you feel less of a freak, and it actually helped you find related things you might be interested into that you weren't even aware of.

So the hosting aspect was actually the less important one of Tumblrs service (it didn't even allow the upload of adult videos and yet was the hub for people to share adult clips that were hosted elsewhere). What's more important is to find a social network to share those hosted images with. Again, it doesn't really require the service to host the content itself; it'd be entirely okay to have the image/video hosting and the sharing done by different services. So, for the social network I've heard mentions of Twitter, Facebook, Newgrounds (which has evolved from its flash games beginnings to something I can't really speak with any kind of competence to, since I haven't been on it in the past 10 years at least), DeviantArt, Hentai Foundry, E-Hentai, Pornhub and, of course, Reddit.

Now, I like most of these of these, but would caution against DeviantArt and Imgur which both specify that they DON'T allow adult imagery (despite the fact that on some NSFW subreddits, imgur is the only approved image host), as well as Facebook and Twitter - Facebook already banning adult content and Twitter being VERY restrictive about it and extremely nosy about the identities of its users (i.e. hardly any way to create a truly anonymous account on it). Also, I'd like to thow a few sites into the mix, some of which are a little specific to my own interest (sex stories and comics), like Xhamster, XNXX, Literotica (and a few others which won't matter to most people). None of these will completely replace Tumblr, but maybe that's not even the point? If anything's to be learned from the Tumblr crackdown, then maybe it is to not put all eggs into one singular basket which may, at any time, change course and destroy all the effort one has put into it?

I've been having a similar dilemma since I've started publishing erotica. Amazon is without a doubt the dominant player on the eBook scene; so much so, that most other authors exclusively publish on it (and Amazon's KDP gives some benefits to authors who are exclusive to Amazon). Of course, Amazon has guidelines of its own about what it does and doesn't allow, and all authors of risky erotica are walking a tight rope which Amazon can cut at any time. So I found it safer to diversify and publish with many other ebook publishers, and even though nothing bad (well, nothing REALLY bad) has happened to me... yet, I still sleep better at night with this approach. So for me, I'm trying to use as many services as possible and as few as feasible, even though it makes me sometimes feel like a spambot pushing my content everywhere I can. It's not so much about promoting myself on as many platforms as I can - even though that's a welcome effect as well - as it is about not losing all my following in another crackdown.

And on that note - maybe the Tumblr fiasco teaches us that it's safer to use actual porn sites to share porn content on, instead of a service that tries to be everything for everyone at the same time, because those services will inevitably turn into the suburbian mom's idea of a "fun time" when their bottom line is concerned. And yes, that includes Reddit - the jury's still out on how much adult content they will alow in the future, especially when a lot of what was contained on Tumblr will come there. (On another side note, I've seen the same issue affect the reddit app as has reportedly led to the Tumblr crackdown, namely the fact that Tumblr got banned from the App store due to Apple's policy of not allowing anything even remotely porn-related on its services, leading to newer versions of the Tumblr app where safe mode can't be turned off any more - just as with the reddit app.) So yeah, that won't stop me from creating sexy niche subreddits about all the things I like, but I will also not share my stuff solely on Reddit - or any other service.