MONSTER YOUTH OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

(this is gonna be shameful as all hell, and it’s gonna talk about being a fucking mess pants-wise if you know what I mean (I mean it’s in part a story about my sad boners))

so, it’s mid-2014, I’m 22, and a whole bunch of people I know keep tweeting about a game called DMMd, it’s about these hot cyberpunk twinks wearing nothing but aprons and gasmasks, and sometimes also fucking each other in the ass, there’s probably other stuff, I’m not good at following stuff, the asses were very well sculpted, and, because it had light BDSM elements as well as cyberpunk, it felt to an extent tailor-made to a whole lot of my obsessions at the time

and it made me wanna crank it, so I did

this was new, I’d never been horny for fake men before, and, well, it brought on a lot of questioning my own identity, with a specific question being: “would you want to fuck chris evans?” the answer turned out to be a resounding “hell fucking yeah”, and so here I was, attracted to men but still also attracted to women, whatever those ideas meant

in quick and dirty language-based math, I was heterosexual plus homosexual, and that equaled bisexual, which is still how I explain it to this day, I don’t know, maybe it’s weird, it’s an island of language I settled on, who gives a fuck, the important thing is I’m bi, fuck off

anyways, in addition to being bi, I’m also fat, ugly, and an introvert, which makes dating pretty hard (especially the part where I don’t leave the house and I don’t meet people, I mean, law of large numbers, there’s gotta be someone out there that finds me hot)

this was kind of a huge problem, because while it’s all well and good to say you’re bi online, there wasn’t really a place in the tangible world where I could practice being attracted to men, there isn’t really a way to do that when you’re not dating anyone in the first place, it’s just kinda there and you have to take it on faith that it’s still gonna be there every day, I’d spent 22 years just being straight (or just good at denial) because society just made it so fucking easy not to question it, and now, here I was, questioning it

and that led me to what I now believe to be a fairly common experience: Bi Imposter Syndrome, a constant nagging feeling that I wasn’t being bi enough, or in the right way, that I was just looking for another way in which to be fucked up in the head, trying to rationalize my falling out with shitty friends in terms of identity-based rejection, and look, while I was too cowardly for the suicide attempt (a life-saver, that), I sure as shit had the thoughts, always, in really loud ways

but then there was tumblr, and, very important for the purpose of this story, there was the porn: incredible quantities of it, from many incredible people, artists, curators, people adjacent to the whole mess. high quality shit, from this, an era where, because everyone can do porn, people have to do porn really fucking well to stand out (or have a really beautiful dick shout-out to mickey mod)

so I found myself liking a LOT of porn on tumblr, like, not as much as I was seeing, obviously, but, a lot of really hot shit, stuff that made me dry-heave or feel it hard in a way that’s complicated to understand, maybe not Tex Avery Wolf shit, but like, pretty close? like, whatever inspired that, YOU PROBABLY KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT, IT’S AN EXPERIENCE YOU CAN HAVE YOURSELF

and then I found myself liking so much goddamn porn on this hell-forsaken website that the thought came up of putting it all together in blog form and sharing it with the world, I’d only share the link with really close friends but I’d make no real attempt at hiding it, it’d be there, I’d say it’s there, and whatever happened happened, it would be a genuine repository of people and pictures I thought were hot

putting it together was a really cool process, except for the part where tumblr’s queue system fucking sucked and whatever was in the queue was going out no matter what, you couldn’t fucking pause it, you couldn’t fucking specify at which end of the queue you’d like to put the posts you added so I had to grab something off of XKit in order to shuffle the queue any time I added anything so as to have the older stuff come up, no one really gave a shit (out of 83 follows I’m about certain that only 4 aren’t bots), but it didn’t really matter

what mattered was the process itself; what mattered was being out there, the process of turning “I think these hunks and these hotties are hella fine” into something real, something existing outside my head, a proof out there in the world that I was a genuine 100% ugly bi mess, and fuck you, this is real, this is happening

anyways, today in their shitty cloying blogpost trying to explain why they’re removing any and all porn from their terrible fucking attempt at monetizing us, tumblr said that they wanted their site to be “a safe place for self-discovery”

site that has the same problems

site no body uses 

site that doesnt load

site that requires payment to sign up

1. Last year, we added “Safe Mode” which lets you filter out NSFW content from tag and search pages. This is enabled by default for new users and can be toggled in your Dashboard Settings. As some of you have pointed out, disabling Safe Mode still wasn’t allowing search results from all blogs to appear. This has been fixed.

2. Some search terms are blocked (returning no results) in some of our mobile apps. Unfortunately, different app environments have different requirements that we do our best to adhere to. The reason you see innocent tags like #gay being blocked on certain platforms is that they are still frequently returning adult content which our entire app was close to being banned for. The solution is more intelligent filtering which our team is working diligently on. We’ll get there soon. In the meantime, you can browse #lgbtq — which is moderated by our community editors — in all of Tumblr’s mobile apps. You can also see unfiltered search results on tumblr.com using your mobile web browser.

3. Earlier this year, in an effort to discourage some not-so-nice people from using Tumblr as free hosting for spammy commercial porn sites, we started delisting this tiny subset of blogs from search engines like Google. This was never intended to be an opt-in flag, but for some reason could be enabled after checking off NSFW → Adult in your blog settings. This was confusing and unnecessary, so we’ve dropped the extra option. If your blog contains anything too sexy for the average workplace, simply check “Flag this blog as NSFW” so people in Safe Mode can avoid it. Your blog will still be promoted in third-party search engines.

Aside from these fixes, there haven’t been any recent changes to Tumblr’s treatment of NSFW content, and our view on the topic hasn’t changed. Empowering your creative expression is the most important thing in the world to us. Making sure people aren’t surprised by content they find offensive is also incredibly important and we are always working to put more control in your hands.

This was Tumblr Staff’s response to a Change.org 20,000 signature petition in 2013 to stop exactly what’s going on right now. Tumblr Staff, with David Karp at the head, clarified these things and put these guidelines into place to ensure that the site would remain safe and they would continue to allow NSFW content.

Cut to 5 years later we have literally 10 times as many people signing a petition right now in less than ¼th the amount of time for the exact same reason

Tumblr, we made this clear before and now 10 times as many people are making it clear again: You’re handling this in the wrong way.

You should be focusing on improving features like Safe Mode, the tagging system, blacklisting, whitelisting, filtering, blocking, reporting, etc.

Rather than deciding that destroying the foundation you’ve built and garnered for 11 years as a place where NSFW artists can easily get their work out there.

Staff:

The Vox article that I was interviewed for is up and running, and it contains some serious fuckign information about this whole fiasco.

Information that tumblr just straight up refused to provide to its userbase at all.

Unsurprisingly to those of us watching this website deteriorate over the last year, this full content purge and ban has been in progress for a solid 6 months. The date got moved up because of the child porn thing, but it was always coming for us.

Equally unsurprising: Tumblr’s management and ownership are absolutely destroying the actual staff working on it. The company has been hemoragghing senior staff without so much as a token attempt to keep them in place. So the drops in site quality are real, and wil probably only be getting worse.