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