The final banishment of adult content from Tumblr was an entirely predictable shit show. Huge swathes of carefully curated content vanished, including pretty much every link on my image page. It was pretty depressing looking around it in the last few days, with a lot of people saying goodbye to their followers and goodbye to all the time they’d invested in the platform.
People who actually tried to follow the rules and clean up their site found that it was impossible to flip it back to a non-explicit status, rendering their site worthless. Meanwhile I found endless examples of very explicit images still being shown, often right next to images that were blocked. Either the blocked ones were so graphic they’d have made my eyes bleed or, more likely, tumblrs filtering algorithms are useless. So they destroyed a lot of online communities, pissed content creators off, lost a huge chunk of their users and still ended up showing people porn. All in all, a great week of work for them.
Luckily their incompetence does have a minor benefit. As I posted on twitter, you can actually still use TumblThree to rip any tumblr back to your local hard drive. This includes tumblr’s that send you to the block screen or that have explicit images covered up. All the content is still there, and you can typically pull a tumblr with a few thousand images in just a few minutes. I’m sure they’ll close this hole pretty soon, but right now it’s still a good option for archiving any favorite sites you had.
In the meantime a lot of people seem to be heading to bdsmlr as the tumblr clone of choice for kinky people. I get the logic of their name, but it doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. I’ll post some follow-up thoughts on that site tomorrow. In the meantime he’s an image from a tumblr that I definitely archived for my personal future ‘reference’ purposes – Alternative Femdom.
I believe this was originally shot by Alvaro Hernandez
I looked at bdsmlr and could find nothing on their site about who the owners are, what their company is, how long they’ve been operating (the domain has been owned since 2013), nothing.
BUT, when I was poking around (Dec 9th) their TOU said this:
“You grant to http://bdsmlr.com a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, adapt, publish, translate and distribute your user content in any existing or future media.”
WTFFFFF??!!!
I tweeted it, and someone followed up with them. They quickly changed it, which, I mean, okay, I guess. But when their entire platform is based on content created by users, and they thought this was okay and reasonable AT ANY POINT (or just… didn’t think about it at all, copy-pasted it from somewhere or did some other thoughtless thing), it does not bode well for their understanding, ability, or willingness to ethically manage that content.
They’ll still do okay though. People are pretty desperate for an alternative.
Ferns
Thanks for the info Ferns. That original TOS is kind of stunning. I have to think they just did a copy/paste without thinking (which is still terrible), because the idea of anyone sitting down and writing that is kind of mind blowing. And I agree, it’d be good to know exactly who was behind it, what their background was and what their philosophy was. It’s a black hole right now.
I just put up a new post on this topic, referencing your comment. So thanks again for that.
Hope you’re doing well. Happy Holidays!
-paltego
My blog is still there. Presumably, Tumblr decided it is not erotic. Very upsetting.
Clearly you don’t have enough female presenting nipples.
Although maybe, taking a very different tack, you should do more ‘turning point’ posts? They’re undoubtedly highly erotic, so if you just do more of them, I’m sure tumblr will eventually label you as the filth that you are.
-paltego
Late to this, but I second the “turning point” posts. I’ve been telling him for years that those are my favorites.
And it’s funny, but pretty much any hint of a nipple has gotten my posts yanked, but I’ve seen dick pics and men in chastity cages on the same pages.
Glad I’m not the only one who likes them. There’s no end of very obvious and unsubtle femdom captions floating around, but not many that are subtle with a touch of humor.
As for the tumblr detection algorithms, they’re pretty hopeless. I’v seen no end of explicit shots still published. I do have your site snapped however – with all the images, nipples or not, still intact :-). About 30,000 images I think – you’ve been busy!
-paltego
I had a lot of them queued, so in the couple of weeks before the shutdown I released whatever I had, in case anyone was interested.
I did, however, decide to start yet *another* stupid Tumblr for the non-explicit captions pics that I’ve collected. In free moments on chilly winter days, I comb through whatever I had, and repost them to: Mrs Edge Says
http://mrsedgesays.tumblr.com
I may take the liberty of pulling the captions off the explicit ones and recaptioning Tumblr-friendly photos, but it might be a while before I’ve got that kind of free time.
Hi Paltego,
Em and I have decided it’s time to close shop. We’ve said our piece and had our fun. No interest in rebuilding our net presence. We’re older and slower and feel a lot of “been there, done that” in our kink lives.
It’s been a great ride. We’re not dead in the water quite yet but definitely less active.
Wishing you well,
scott and Emma Kelly
Hey scott,
It’s nice to hear from you. It’s been a while! Glad you’re both still OK. Totally understand when you feel like you’ve been there and done that. I’m sure at some point this blog will come to a natural stopping point. Everything does.
Hope everything goes well for you in the future. Even if you’re not publishing yourself, you’re always welcome to drop by here and share a thought!
-paltego