So will the new Tumblr rules effect you? You don’t have nudity s you’ll be fine, right?
Sorry for the wall of text but all that Tumblr fiasco screwed me up real good. I stayed up 6 hours longer yesterady and could sleep only for 3 hours until waking up and worrying about what to do next.
Now to the topic: They do affect me. Some of my posts been flagged as suggestive so most likely they will be deleted. But this thing affects me even if I would not have posts removed. Here’s how I see it:
Tumblr suffers from bots and whatnot that causes them to lose the sweet profitable spot at the appstore. They know they suck at programming and everything else and if you are a realist you can just admit the fact - they can’t eradicate all the porn bots and stuff that prevents them from being at appstore. So, in pursue for money they announce that HEY WE HAVE NO ADULT CONTENT ANYMORE ANYTHING THAT HAS AS MUCH AS FEMALE NIPPLES IS AGAINST OUR RULES, NOW TAKE US BACK TO APPSTORE SO THAT WE COULD GET MORE TRAFFIC AND ADVERTISING MONEY FROM GOOGLE!!!!!
Does it solve the problem? Well, partly. If the site takes a huge hit and loses 30% of it’s users the bots may lose interest in it. But since bots are still making money on this website they won’t likely to go away. So as a result we have the same situation that happens with let’s say videogames when you MUST have a 100% stable+fast internet connection to play single player games to prevent games from being pirated. And we all know that games are being pirated just as much, yet the paying customers suffer non the less.
So what do we have as a result: you are now forced to undergo hardcore censorship and even with that things will be just as bad because porn bots are not going away. YET pornbots are 100000% totally against the rules now so Tumblr is not losing any money and they are happy.
And that IF systems at place work properly. I already joked about “send dunes”, because I for a fact have a picture of dunes that was flagged for inappropriate content because Tumblr bots thought that it’s pornography. I have many posts that are not even “questionable” and straight forward SFW yet they are flagged. And at the same time I have dozens of drawings with horsecocks, vaginas, boobs, nipples, depiction of sexual acts and all that smut which is NOT flagged by the Tumblr bots. So you can imagine how wild the ride will be.
But ok ok let’s imagine they fix this and purge all the NSFW content properly and there are no porn bots anymore and this website is Christian now:
A lot of people (mainly NSFW artists and their followrs) abandon the website and go for alternatives be it Twitter (ehhhhh), Newgrounds (EHHHHHHHHHHHHH) and whatnot. Imagine website losing 30% of active userbase who are actually visiting the website, providing original content and spreading it around the website. What we have left are people who have nowhere else to go (who are being censored and will probably feel threatened all the time) as well as puritans and minors. How great of a website target audience is that? So you can imagine how active these said people would be. Site’s traffic will go down drastically, less activity, less reblogs, less likes and comments. Sure there will be like 5 posts per year and they will be tumblr famous and trending, but these will be the only 5 posts that were deemed appropriate by tumblr staff.
Now imagine me as a content creator how great it is for me to have a website that is going down traffic wise that much. And now imagine that I am not in favour of the website to begin with and I am actually a problem to them!
Tumblr is still NOT removing the search engine restrictions from blogs that are flagged explicit. And Ask-Backy was forcefully flagged explicit years ago. This means that I’m NOT getting any new followers from the website promoting me as a reliable or maybe even interesting content creator (There is a saying in Russian along the lines of “Nobody will praise you unless you do it yourself.”). I’m not being a part of any search engine, I can even stop caring about writing tags because nobody will literally ever see these unless they open my page AND to open my page you need to be registered on Tumblr and probably provide ID that you are not a minor (at some point in the future). But jokes about the last bit aside. How many people would register on this website after 17th of December to look at suggestive butt puns if I manage to pull that off under the censorship blanket? Your guess is as good as mine.
So in the end what does a purge means for me: my blog doesn’t exist and is hushed under the rug on a website that lost major part of it’s userbase because of it’s own actions and on top of that I am forced to censor myself even more. But since there is no good alternative for the format of Ask-Backy I have to stay here for as long as I can. And no don’t say Twitter. Twitter is banned where I live and if I were to use VPN to access it, I still don’t have a mobile phone to use it (aka you need a phone number).
And I am not even talking about my modblog with 1000+ posts and 9100+ followers that is going down the drain in two weeks.I already posted my Furaffinity link in there so people who like the smut I draw might as well follow me on FA. FA is not such a great platform for exposure and posting stuff is rather annoying in there, the file size is shit and so on but at least it is somewhat popular among the content creators and people who follow them. But when it comes to Ask-Backy there is no good alternative to tumblr for me. And even IF there is that would be stupid to expect that even 1% of my followers would go to some god knows forsaken website that works just like tumblr just to follow me.
On the bright side Patreon is still letting me post things without censoring them much (even though my patreon is flagged mature but at least they are not forcing me to delete pictures of pony butts yet). So Patreon may turn into premium-yet-free askblog content with new posts staying up even if tumblr decides that these said new posts are against the rules and simply deletes them.
These are dark times.
