It’s the one-year anniversary of Tumblr banning pornography and most nudity from the once-thriving social media platform.
“The biggest thing that’s changed [this year] is an overall lack of content with diverse and mature themes,” [wrote] Cat Frazier, creator of the popular Tumblr Animated Text. . . . “I never followed porn accounts, but many of the people I followed were either deleted or left the platform out of frustration last year. That’s left a noticeable gap. In fact a month ago I was scrolling through my followed accounts and about 100 of them hadn’t uploaded since the ban.”
“Now I mainly see the same memes I see on every other platform,” Frazier says. “Reblogs that have been making the rounds since 2014 or ads. I understand that many people had a Tumblr just for the porn. But even those people had something to share when they weren’t jerking off.”
At The Atlantic, writer Kaitlyn Tiffany beautifully captures the dynamics that once drove social Tumblr, and how its community is in significant ways a mere shell of its former self after the porn ban drove away a large percentage of users.
There are two stories about what Tumblr was like in 2019, its first year after officially prohibiting sex acts, nudity, and “female-presenting nipples.”
The first is that it barely survived. From 2018 to 2019, the average number of unique monthly visitors to Tumblr’s website decreased by 21.2 percent, according to data compiled by the analytics service SimilarWeb. The total volume of visits to the site is in decline, and the visits per unique visitor is in decline, and the amount of time that visitors spend on the site is also in decline. From 2018 to 2019, the average site visit dropped by nearly a minute, and the average number of pages per visit dropped by more than one and a half.
Even more strikingly, the average monthly volume of traffic to the Tumblr login page by US visitors dropped 49 percent, and the average number of daily active users on Tumblr’s Android app dropped 35 percent, making it unlikely that the dip in site traffic could be explained by users migrating to mobile.
. . .
While porn creators belonged to tightly connected subgroups, they were linked to the rest of Tumblr’s network “with a very high number of ties,” and their productions “spread widely across the whole social graph.” In other words, they weren’t quarantined off in some illicit corner of the site—they were woven into its basic fabric: The average Tumblr user in the sample followed 51 blogs, two or three of which tended to be specifically porn, and another two of which tended to be “bridge” blogs, run by users who were particularly likely to reblog porn.
“My personal opinion about this whole story is that the numbers were very clear,” Luca Aiello, one of the researchers, tells me now. “People were very engaged with that type of content, and banning it would determine the fall of the community.”.
So what’s the second story? What’s left on Tumblr?
Scooby-Doo memes, that’s what.
The second story about Tumblr’s 2019 was published yesterday on Tumblr’s Fandometrics blog, which releases weekly rankings of the site’s “ships” and subcultures, as well as a yearly data haul about its top communities, memes, and modes of thought. Without porn, Tumblr still has plenty: photography, studying, The Sims, cats, dogs, reptiles, “fitness,” the main category in which some nudity still hides, alongside the devastating anorexia blogs that haunt the platform no matter what tags it prohibits.
In late January, the “Shaggy’s Power” meme boomed. A transplant from Reddit, it featured screenshots of Matthew Lillard, the actor who played Shaggy in the 2002 live-action adaptation of Scooby-Doo, and captions portraying him as a god-like figure with a range of mysterious powers, swinging wildly between indiscriminate violence and pure benevolence. “You are reading this now because I compel you to,” the edited subtitle text on one still of Lillard reads. “You are never free.” (“I have no idea what the heart of it is,” Brennan says. “I think it’s just absurdist.”) It eventually expanded to include other actors from the movie, also praising Shaggy’s powers, and then to include Tumblr itself, in a discussion of the meta horror of a divine meme springing forth from seemingly nowhere.
Read Kaitlyn Tiffany’s entire piece here.
One Response
Some company will come along with a social media platform thats more or less uncensored and TW and IG will join AOL, Yahoo, and Tumblr is the social media graveyard.