Tumblr Purge: General Thoughts

[blackcoffeeanddarknights]

I felt like writing a bit about how I feel about the Tumblr Purge, so, in random order, here are some thoughts.

1. I feel like there's this assumption from people on other platforms that those of us leaving Tumblr are doing so because we can't get porn on the site anymore? It's a fair assumption, but it's not an accurate one. Not while Tumblr's bot system is flagging SFW posts.

How do you share art when any picture with skin is flagged?

2. Tumblr's been falling apart for a while now, and I think those of us on it were just counting down until it crashed and burned. I really feel that staff on Tumblr isn't really invested in the platform; I suspect that the only reason it exists now is because it provides some rudimentary income.

There's this idea I've seen floating around that one day, Staff will realize that they've kicked everyone off of Tumblr, and they'll regret their terrible decisions? Except I'm not sure that anyone in Yahoo actually *cares* what happens to the platform.

Hence why it's falling apart.

3. It's too bad that Tumblr *is* crashing, because I feel that a lot of people- myself included- were able to use it as a way of consistently exposing ourselves to new and different kinds of content, in a way that's hard to do on other sites. Tumblr exposed me to leftist theory and commentary, taught me about the history of LGBT people in the US, and provided easy-to-access communities focused around niche interests.

In some ways, it was actually a really useful source of learning and information! It's just... no longer Like That.

4. It's worth noting that while Tumblr is cracking down on NSFW posts (whether or not those posts are *actually* nsfw or not), it's done nothing about the radical right. And that... is only to be expected, I suppose, but it's still exhausting to see.

Comments

[mistydayjudge]

I agree with all of your points. The NSFW ban is a huge deal, yes, but there's a much bigger picture a lot of people seem to be forgetting and that's that Tumblr's staff is ill equipped to handle moderation of any kind. Their staff is very small for a website that large and their attempts at using bots fail constantly. As someone who has been on for more than 9 years I've seen a lot of it first hand.
Even if they do reverse the decision, this has shown their true colors and doesn't prevent them from doing it again. The Vox article only increases my concern with future issues.

Hopefully we can recreate communities here or somewhere else to continue learning from each other. :/

[mathemagicalschema]

"I suspect that the only reason it exists now is because it provides some rudimentary income" - I deeply doubt that tumblr earns enough revenue to even cover its own costs. Tumblr was never considered a valuable property on the basis of its current financial performance - like every other venture-funded social media company, investors simply assumed that they could focus on building the userbase first, and then figure out how to monetize.

Problem is, they're attempting to monetize without any real understanding of their site culture, and they allowed their site culture to develop in a rather advertiser-unfriendly direction. Millenials and Gen-Z are a difficult audience to market to. They have limited disposable income, and they're much more responsive to advertising that seems more personal and "authentic." (like the Denny's tumblr, or podcast endorsements.) Tumblr/Oath/Verizon wants to use Facebook-like monetization strategies on a social media site that is basically the anti-Facebook. And it's not going to work.

This is the start of a death spiral. The harder they try to monetize, the more users they're going to lose, which is going to make their ad space a less attractive investment, which is going to lower the price they can charge, which is going to force them to monetize more aggressively, which is going to push more users away, etc. etc.

Frankly, I don't see any way for Tumblr to survive in the long run without a change in ownership - I can explain why if you like.

And yeah, honestly, I'm going to miss Tumblr. More than any other site, it's great at showing me content that I never would have gone out of my way to find, and it has a really unique meme culture. Oh well, it was going to die someday.

[isabellerecs]

Wonderfully put, I agree entirely with you and the previous commenters.

I feel so . . . offended by the announcement that they put out. The blog I run is not NSFW, it's a text-based fanfiction recommendation blog but that smarmy message about going in a "positive direction" (as if sex was inherently negative) and "safe for the children" really stuck in my craw. There are tons of places to go on the internet that are wholly SFW, but very few NSFW LGBTQ+ that aren't exploitive. And that is my other point of offence, the real reason they've cracked down is that the current community (largely LGBTQ+) on Tumblr has been deemed too difficult to monetize and they hope by pushing the "undesirables" out that more influenceable parties will replace them. Nazis apparently are a marketable demographic.

So my rage leads me to explore my options away from Tumblr, which makes me sad because there was real good going on there. And I mean that on a personal level. At nearly 30, I learned quite by accident what an asexual was and it meant that I no longer thought of myself as "broken" because I didn't know that what I was was something that other people out there would recognize and identify as. That ability to discover things you didn't know you were looking for feels diminished. I really hope that a new platform that provides that, be it Pillowfort, or someplace else comes along soon.