This is the most succinct, simple timeline and explanation I can offer.
People keep coming to me with a partial understanding of what’s going on I keep getting repeat messages about some things I’ll have to clarify again and again, so let me try and get everything in one post, as succinctly as possible. I know some of you will feel like I’m beating a dead horse, but the sheer amount of confused/alarmed/misinformed people I’ve been dealing with leads me to believe this is something that is best addressed clearly and often.
Tumblr had its app removed from the iOS App Store a few days back, which led to a few days of Tumblr being vague about what was going on, which led to THIS UPDATE where they explained that they are dealing with rampant amounts of child porn on this site and are working to purge the site and presumably reach a point where it can return to the App Store.
During this few day stretch, various NSFW artists (and some SFW) had their blogs deleted. Some of these deletions were proper, but there are a lot of innocent blogs that were hit. There’s a post about it being a “glitch”, detailing how to get your blog back by emailing support. The problem here is that blogs are STILL being deleted, when that whole glitch thing was reported on the 16th. It appears to me that those who have followed the rules and are on the up and up are safe, but that may be wishful thinking.
There are all sorts of rumors and hearsay about how you can avoid being deleted, but it’s all just guesswork. People thought at first that Tumblr was trying to combat the rampant porn bot problem, but considering the info in bullet point #1, this is clearly something much more serious than bots giving people viruses. Ultimately, I feel that these deletions are most insignificant of the issues that are rising up now.
Tumblr has removed posts with any links in them from tags/searches, this is what people presumed was the measure to combat bots, a fair assumption. Reasoning aside, this is obviously bad for all artists who need to link their Patreon/Social Media/Etc.
As of 11/20/18 various NSFW tags have been completely blacklisted in Tumblr’s search. This means if you type in “nsfw” you will find no posts. Essentially they have forced safe search on, and you can not turn it off. This is across the app AND browser.
So what does this mean? It means that the legs have essentially been cut out from under all sorts of artists when it comes to building any sort of following or producing content for their chosen niche. It appears to me that blogs that have been playing by the rules (i.e. flagging their blog as mature content in the Tumblr settings etc) have essentially signed up to have their content hidden from EVERYONE since safe search has been flipped on universally with no option to take it off.
This could last a few days, or it could be the start of a massive wipe. From a big picture perspective, you have to realize just how serious of a situation Tumblr and their parent company Yahoo now find themselves in. Tumblr as a business is already pretty ehhhh because whooo boy, those ads are SO compelling. Tumblr has gone from questionable business acquisition to real life legal liability, and at some point they’ll have to wonder if it’s even worth it.
We find ourselves at a point in Tumblr’s history where now more than ever we should be wondering what better alternatives there are, because this is an already fringe social media platform that is now in very, very hot water. If NSFW stuff on Tumblr is essentially kaput and it’s not just temporary, there are many people who won’t be bothered to stick around.
For my blog personally, I’ll still be posting my content here as usual, until the wheels fall off. I’m not leaving Tumblr or ceasing typical content production here willingly, but when something like THIS happens, you have to adjust accordingly. It’s never a good idea to keep all your eggs in one basket, and so on.
I hope this helps. I’ve received so many confused messages, people thinking I’m leaving or changing things. As it stands, I myself haven’t changed anything and my content is still going to be coming out, as usual. Hopefully this helps clarify things.
