News Dec 17, 2018 at 8:40 am

The internet could be next.

Comments

1

I've never used tumblr and knew very little about it (I just read the overview of it on its wikipedia page).

I didn't read Nathalie's entire post but... can't you just go to pornhub to get all the porn you want?

2

Xians ruin everything. I told you so.

3

Er, thanks for posting that ass and getting me fired, Nathalie.

(Disclosure: I wasn't fired. At least not yet.)

4

@1 FWIW, you can go to Porn Hub but I think Tumblr was a more creative place, not really like ordering up a sex flick or popping in a vcr to see live acts. This was different—a place for artists to show art that might be pornographic. Like that gif Nat posted there is that as well but for lack of a better description tumblr (that she remembers) was softer, more innocent than straight live action sex

5

But everything is FREE. And u r still complaining about it.
When u insist of free content, u leave it ultimately up to the gubmint to filter that content. Here we are.

7

Good thing there are dozens of other websites where people can talk about their gay Sonic the Hedgehog fantasies.

@2: Would be more accurate to blame the capitalists on this one. It is all about getting in the Apple store.

@5: How is the government involved?

8

Um, hasn't tmblr lost money every year? It's a bummer for people that had made a living on it, but how could it be expected to provide that service indefinitely at a loss?

10

~7 You have been on BOD for too long: now you are just a complete fucking idiot.
Last time anyone explains anything to you or reads the article for you: " Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Online Sex Trafficking Act passed by Congress in March"

11

Between FOSTA-SESTA, the end of net neutrality, spillover effects from the GDPR's overly broad copyright provisions, and the tremendous pressure on tech giants to cultivate the Chinese market, the stage is being set for the walled garden model of the internet to triumph.

12

@10: I don't know what "BOD" is, but you are hilariously wrong. So wrong I am not even going to bother to tell you why, I am just going to let others bask in your total wrongness.

14

Meh, I needed to quit tumblr anyways - taking up too much of my time. So really, this is for the best.

16

I frequent Tumblr and it's fine for furry porn and even on Facebook when no one reports it (it's called "YIFF" by the way)...I also see it on sites like Furaffinity,E621,deviant art and even forum sites or chan sites like 4chan and 8chan all the time and I'm a proud member of the furry community and the artwork doesn't always represent furs in the furry community! To me,It's just artwork like HENTAI or any other normal artwork around porn...

17

One of the really big problems is that there is a lot of collateral damage beyond the removal of just porn. As with everything else, they're implementing this change incompetently, using algorithms that are flagging anything with too much "flesh tone" such as brick walls, sandy deserts, and similar as NSFW, while also being easily circumvented by the ubiquitous porn bots. They have also purged a lot of tags relating to LGBT topics wholesale, porn or not.
It's a real issue, and just saying "you can get porn elsewhere" doesn't really address the kind of damage it's doing to the community.

18

I really need to have a tee-shirt made that reads "Ask me about my break from social media" from an Emily Flake one-frame cartoon in the New Yorker magazine. I would wear it proudly. Something tells me I'm fortunate to avoid Twitter and Tumblr altogether.

19

@11 Bingo. If you're old enough to remember BBSes from the 80s, you've lived this before.

20

I'd really like to know how this new legislation will affect independently run blogs. For about $20 a year you can host your own site with your own url and not need tumblr, livejournal, etc., or even any coding skills.

21

@13 it’s not a breech of free speech. You can say all the things you want, no platform is required to give you the soapbox to stand on while you say/do what you want.

22

Okay, so yesterday I watched a website eat itself. One post at a time.

I deleted my account a few hours later, partly out of protest, and party because I’d downloaded all the porn I could get for a few days and felt kind of over it.

I started thinking about the centralization of the internet. There have been fetish sites ever since the web became a thing.

So yeah, the twentieth century internet was harder to censor. There were lots of websites and usenet groups and Yahoo groups.. And to censor each of them would have been a massive pain in the ass. Most didn’t last, but they didn’t die from censorship.

Tumblr came along and it was easy to use, and the picture quality was way better. It was the democratization of porn. The older sites had poor quality images, so there was still a market for professionally produced porn. Niche porn was hard to find, but when you found it, the camera person knew what she or he was doing.

Tumblr porn was at the same time very well made and at the same time DIY. I saw guys wearing fetish gear I saw for sale on Amazon, and used that to decide which ones to buy- if it looked good on him, it might look good on me, too.

However, that Democracy of Porn was also centralized. Because everyone was using the exact same platform, if you could shut down the platform itself, the whole pornocracy would collapse with it.

Now, we’re back to zero. Pillowfort crashed within days, as it had never intended to be Tumblr’s replacement, and wasn’t able to handle the hot, sticky incoming loads.

Decentralization has it’s merits. Hercules had a hard time killing the hydra because it kept springing new heads everytime he cut one off. The internet can be like that too, if its decentralized. SESTA, FOSTA, these things can threaten big sites like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. And Tumblr.

A thousand small pages, though? Especially if new ones pop up to replace the old sites once they get censored?

23

Oh no! Wherever am I going to find informative posts about otherkin?!

24

Seems to me that there plenty of places online now that are content safe for children, adolescents, the mentally or emotionally impaired, the sexually immature adults and the prudes and bluenoses of the world. And of course also the Nazis and White Supremacists.

What's getting harder to find suddenly is a place where it's safe to be an adult and enjoy and share adult things. I wasn't very active on Tumblr most of the time, but I had built up a significant presence over the years. That will be going away and it's Tumblr's loss as much as it is mine. Sayonara, Tumblr.

25

The problem isn't that they banned porn. It was that someone, somewhere, decided they got to choose what I, an adult woman who lives in a country where the age of consent is 16, where prostitution is legal and where lgbtqa+ is accepted, can see/watch/write about/read about.

"Won't somebody think of the children??!" is a funny catchphrase. But as a 35 year old with NO children by choice, why is it my responsibility to police what the brats could possibly see? Its ridiculous. And frankly, I blame the Americans and their puritan ideas.


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