I’m sure most readers will have seen the news that tumblr is going to ban porn from December 17th. It’s depressing but, after their acquisition by Yahoo and then Verizon, not entirely surprising. I’ve written about the challenges of dealing with adult content in corporate environments in the past. As a relatively small independent platform with a history of being friendly to porn, tumblr would never have wanted to decimate its user base like this. For Verizon, its a case of cutting a fraction of users of one product in one division. The risk/reward calculation for them looks very different. Of course, that doesn’t make it any less a shitty and horrible thing to do to a community.
As Bacchus at ErosBlog has been pointing out for over a decade now, if you don’t own your domain and do your own hosting, you’re always going to be at risk of being screwed over by your platform of choice. Sadly that’s not really an answer for the average tumblr user. I’m lucky in having the time and resources needed to run a site like this one, but it’s definitely a non-trivial investment. The average tumblr user, who wants to post some hot photos and share some thoughts, isn’t going to want to spend an hour with tech support trying to figure out why his database has crashed and why /dev/dva1 has run out of space (as I did over the weekend).
Unfortunately, I don’t really know of a valid alternative that I can point people at. There are other platforms for sharing adult content (like imagefap and various tube/hub sites), but they tend to have horrible UI, dodgy advertising practices, poor community tools and a terrible attitude to content creators. If I had VC level money, I’d be treating this as an opportunity to create a new platform and fill a sudden gap in the market. As it is, I can only keep my eye open for somebody else doing that.
In the meantime, there are tools for archiving your favorite tumblrs. Bacchus has a post on one approach. I’ve had some luck using TumblrThree, although it’s not exactly a polished UI. There are also people working on more broadly archiving tumblr content for posterity. If anyone else has either suggestions for archiving content or for good places to move it to, feel free to leave a comment here. I’ll share updates and suggestions as the situation evolves.
My own image page is packed with tumblr links, so it looks like I’ll need to delete most of those next week. This particular image is via 11dutch tumblr. I believe that is Mistress Baton.
A few years ago there was a mass exodus from Blogger, after they put up blocking pages on the NSFW blogs. A lot of people landed on WordPress, which later started closing blogs with overly graphic (for some value of) pictures, which led to a lot of people just moving to Tumblr for their pictures. A few years ago, I was looking at having my own domain/server, but at the time, getting an anonymous site was $10 a month, and I wasn’t sure it was worth it.
However, while I’m not pleased with the Tumblr situation, I’m also doing a lot of eye rolling over the collective angst. Tumblr offered a *totally free service,* yet some users bitched and moaned when they started introducing paid advertising.
Of course, I do the same kind of complaining every couple of years when Google discontinues a service that I’ve grown accustomed to using, so…
I don’t really have any issue with them advertising. In fact I’d have been happy for them to advertise more. From what I’ve read in the last day or so it was the need to attract more advertisers (who are wary to advertise on adult sites) that drove this decision.
I don’t think it’s wrong to make a profit and pay your workers. You certainly can’t complain if you’re getting free hosting for lots of large bandwidth hungry media. However, I do think it’s wrong to wipe away sites people have invested years in with only a couple of weeks notice. They had other options. It’s a bit different to a service that’s light on data and can easily replaced with one from another company. There’s basically zero migration story for people. Still, when the original tumblr founders sold it, that had to know this was a likely outcome at some point.
-paltego