I’m gonna be honest here, I don’t post a lot of explicit content. I’m not the person who is consuming it, either. If that were all tumblr had in mind with this, it wouldn’t honestly make a huge difference for my browsing experience. I work in an adult store, I see enough of people doing the frick-frack on the daily while dusting video bins and reorganizing the rental room.
If this would get rid of the porn bots I’d be fine with it, but that’s not what it’s doing. It’s removing art, it’s removing years and years of content and a decade-plus of people’s hard work building up a clientbase, a niche in a fandom, a livelihood. But there are either too many flesh-colored pixels or someone doesn’t like the content and spam-reported it, so these users have to go.
Terms of service like this are absolutely ridiculous, not because we all want to look at porn all day, but because that’s absolutely not what’s being targeted. I’ve been through this before, on more than one occasion; it’s never about porn. It’s usually about a bunch of people in a group deciding that their opinion is the only valid opinion and doing whatever it takes to get dissenters removed. It’s staff that doesn’t care about the userbase they’re supposed to be working with and will just kill everything that seems slightly controversial rather than do the necessary footwork to keep younger users safe.
They’re not doing this because of social extremists, they’re not doing it because there are literal Nazis on the site, they’re not doing this because young people are starving themselves to look “better” so that maybe someone will love them, they’re not doing this in the hopes that it will remove the toxicity from fandom that has literally made it impossible to talk to anyone on this site like an adult for years.
They’re doing it because it’s the easiest, simplest way to excuse the systematic shutdown of one of the most vocal subcultures on their site, and it makes them look better to their shareholders.
Tumblr doesn’t care about explicit content. They don’t care about protecting anyone. They don’t want to foster a safe environment for younger users. They want to kill their own social network so they don’t have to do the work it would require to actually clean it up.
What’s particularly great about this post is that there’s nothing to tag it with, because tumblr is purging all tags we choose to relate to this event. The only thing any of us can do is hope that the things we say get signal boosted enough to be visible to other people.
What if you were dating a moth prince and living in his kingdom and he knew how out of place you felt so he made you dozens of silk dresses and blankets and gave you lots of fuzzy shawls and scarves so you wouldn’t stand out so much and always said you were so beautiful you were glowing and occasionally bump right into your face because it was a little joke and he would pretend you were a light bulb and give you tiny kisses
Half of me is like “what the fuck am I looking at” and the other half finds this inexplicably adorable and good.
