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[potofsoup]

neomeris posted a link to the CollegeHumor video where the "tumblr CEO" discovers that tumblr is just 98% porn, and it reminded me of when I tried to explain the Great Tumblr (un)Fuckening to people who aren't on tumblr.

Usually, their first reaction was "oh wait, I've heard about this -- tumblr is removing porn, right?" followed by a quizzical look, "Why is that such a big deal? Why is everyone leaving?"

And my answer is: it's not that all of tumblr is porn. Probably, by sheer volume, maybe 1% of tumblr is porn. BUT, that 1% can't be easily separated from the rest of the 99%. I'm sure the tumblr staff were like "oh, we're just removing 1% of the people, that's not a big deal." But they messed up on 2 counts:

1) They didn't realize that one major attraction of tumblr platform, with its reblogs and sideblogs, is that it is a place where people can share *all* of themselves: the political activism, the creative projects, *and* the porn. Tumblr is where you find or create "niche" porn that creative, politically-active people enjoy, and then you share it on a sideblog. There's a reason why "horny on main" is a thing that happens on tumblr. So instead of getting rid of 1 person out of 100, they're actually threatening the sideblogs and dashboards of a large chunk of their users.*

2) Their algorithm sucks. And by flagging every beige-ish pixel, they made it onerous for the remaining people who might actually just be on there to post pictures of bread.

While I'm fairly happy that we're moving on from that mismanaged hell site, I do hope that wherever we end up, it'll be a place where I can have the political activism, the creative projects, *and* the porn, all in one bundle (or a complicated network of 19 sideblogs))


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* Yanno, sometimes I wonder if tumblr would have made a different decision if someone there actually looked up the data on (a) how many of the pornblogs were actually sideblogs of sfw primary accounts, and (b) how many likes on porn posts were by actually sfw primary accounts.

Comments

[potofsoup]

oh yay! ::waves::