And then we came to the end.
Tumblr has chosen to make a decision that many speculated would come some day: to avoid the headaches that accompany āadultā blogs (at least if they arenāt going to monetize the content like PornHub).
Many people do not realize that sites like Tumblr operate in a legal āsafe harborā that shields them from almost any responsibility for what is posted on these blogs. To be sure, when notified that a post is questionable (e.g., copyrighted material), Tumblr has a duty to yank first and investigate later. But otherwise? Profit.
Recently, the U.S. Congress passed a law to create an exception to this: child porn.Ā And Tumblr does a horrible job of moderating for child porn (well ā¦ a horrible job of almost everything, but horrible in the sense that even when users flag and report child porn, Tumblr seems indifferent). In fact, unlike many other prominent sites (e.g., Facebook, Twitter), itās almost like Tumblr isnāt trying. Iām certain that 99.99% of readers object to child porn and find law to be of virtuous intent. But in passing this statute, certain unintended (or intended?) consequences were predictable. One is that corporatized social media would go fleeing so as to not jeopardize advertising or potential multi-billion dollar buyouts. And then Tumblr got caught a few weeks back with kiddie porn online (<<insert shock-face>>), by Apple, which promptly banned Tumblr from its App Store.
So ā¦ of all the reactions Tumblr could make ā Tumblr-style ā they made the worst one of all, namely, remove anything that anyone might call āadultā (the modern euphemism for āsexualā since theyāre not about to ban paying advertisements of half naked models in $200 underwear!).
Now weāve been āpeak Tumblrā for some while now - users have been fleeing as fast as new users sign up. And Tumblr has exasperated the community on many occasions by maliciously deleting blogs with little ā or false ā explanations. You can find a fair amount of commentary online predicting they were headed the way of MySpace (or AOL) for some many months (both examples of prior social media-like spaces run by supposedly smart people who thought they could force a top-down version of their offerings rather than listen to what users from the bottom-up indicated they wanted, right up to their near total collapse). I cannot predict exactly where Tumblr goes from here but irrelevance seems quite likely at this point.
Unlike others, I actually have 17 Tumblr blogs (something Tubmlr is not set up to do!) ranging widely in content. Several āadultā blogs but also cooking, literary commentary, and travel. Even politics (my blog was cited by a major American newspaper once!). Consequently, I have decided that ALL of my content will be taken down by December 17th as I find it unconscionable that I would continue to prop up Tumblr-Yahoo-Verizon Inc. by supplying it content. All told, my 17 blogs have almost 800,000 followers so that it quite a loss for Tumblr - but that is their choice.
(BTW: it is important, dear readers, to DELETE your blogs and close them on the way out so that Tumblr does not count you among its users for monetization purposes.)
And so we come to the end. I do not plan to provide any additional postings or reblogs at this time other than perhaps some from the archives.
Also, I do not know if this blog (or any of the 17) will resurface elsewhere. As awkward as Tumblr always was as a social media space, never quite knowing what it wanted to be, I had grown used to its quirks, and no one else seems to provide something similar. I will not be moving to Twitter or Facebook/Instagram. But in looking around over the next week an alternative may come to light (yes, I know there are quite a few but none seem āready for primetimeā).
For now, I will leave things with this ā thanks for the memories.
janainaart
kaledo-art
stormborns
gummygunk
blakekathryn
snowghoul
ellievsbear
yousharknotpass
