Tumblr will ban adult content on 17 December. The move is aimed at eradicating porn on the platform and comes a couple of weeks after Tumblr was removed from Apple’s iOS App Store after child pornography was discovered on the Verizon-owned microblogging website. It’s a change that may affect writers of erotica, fan-fiction writers and artists, kinksters, and those seeking and sharing information about sex magick on Tumblr.
In a blog entry earlier this week, Tumblr CEO Jeff D’Onofrio said:
Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.
Banned content “includes photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content—including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations—that depicts sex acts.”
“Certain types of artistic, educational, newsworthy, or political content featuring nudity are fine.” The guidelines exclude breastfeeding, birth-related photos, health-related situations, nudity found in art, nudity related to political speech, and written-based content such as erotica.
Why you should consider leaving Tumblr
Two major problems with Tumblr’s new policy are the subjective nature of art and how it will enforce the guidelines. If you’re not sure if your work meets the new guidelines, it’s best to err on the side of caution and assume it doesn’t. Even if your content falls within the new guidelines, there are good reasons to consider leaving Tumblr.
Explicit blogs will be heavily censored
According to Tumblr’s Help Center page on adult content:
Blogs that have been either self-flagged or flagged by us as “explicit” per our old policy and before December 17, 2018 will still be overlaid with a content filter when viewing these blogs directly. While some of the content on these blogs may now be in violation of our policies and will be actioned accordingly, the blog owners may choose to post content that is within our policies in the future, so we’d like to provide that option. Users under 18 will still not be allowed to click through to see the content of these blogs. The avatars and headers for these blogs will also be reverted to the default settings. Additionally, posts from these blogs are kept out of search results.
The algorithm gets it wrong
Users are criticising Tumblr’s algorithm for incorrectly flagging inoffensive content as explicit.
Tumblr hard-peaked pic.twitter.com/2hhn3d2OLL
— Leon (@SirPawsies) December 4, 2018
My only #Tumblr that got flagged (I always forget to post on there so everything is quite old)
— Monica (@Monica_ion) December 4, 2018
I mean
Those dogs ARE naked technically.
Watch out for slutty pooches y'all. pic.twitter.com/b8f1XvOX7R
so I've just had a look through my archive to see what's been flagged and *entirely* predictably, Tumblr's new porn filter is working *very well* pic.twitter.com/rJomXdde0z
— Marie Le Conte (@youngvulgarian) December 4, 2018
Tumblr has a solid history of deleting blogs without warning or explanation
It can happen for legitimate reasons such as copyright infringement, but it also happens for seemingly arbitrary reasons. You may never know why your blog was deleted or be given the opportunity to correct any mistakes you might have made. If you haven’t backed up your work, you could lose it along with the community you’ve built there.
Tumblr is not yours
Verizon Communications owns Tumblr under its Oath subsidiary. You have no say in its policies, which can change any time. The only way to have as close to complete control of your content as possible is to own the platform that it’s on.
What to use instead of Tumblr
Here are some alternatives to Tumblr.
WordPress.com (free with paid upgrades available)
WordPress.com is a free, almost all-inclusive, publishing platform. There are paid plan options and other paid upgrades available, but you can run a WordPress.com blog for free or very cheaply. The WordPress.com community is massive, and there is a lot of support available.
WordPress.com allows mature content “including text, images and videos that contain nudity, offensive language, and mature subject material” provided it is marked as Mature in their system. However, blogs marked as Mature will not appear in the Reader, Top Blog listings, recent posts, related posts listings, or the user’s WordPress.com Forums profile, all of which could negatively affect discoverability. There are other limitations. WordPress.com does not permit anything “that can be considered pornographic”, which is subjective, nor does it allow ads. You can read about WordPress.com’s Mature Content policies here.
Although it hasn’t been updated in years and never seems to have gotten off the ground, Advanced Sexual Magick is an example of a free WordPress.com blog featuring mature content. Rob’s Magick Blog is more general but also features some entries on sex and magick.
WordPress.org (not free)
WordPress.com is a hosted publishing platform. The basic version is free to use, and they own and manage your site, so you don’t have to worry about updates or security.
WordPress.org is free, open source software and self-hosted solution. To build your website on WordPress.org, you need a web hosting service – a company to house and store it. You will need to install it, manage it, secure it, and back it up. It doesn’t offer the ease and immediacy of a hosted solution like WordPress.com, and it may cost more, but you own it and, therefore, have a lot more freedom. You can read more about the differences between a hosted and self-hosted website here.
You can use WordPress.org for a sex-related site. However, keep in mind that you will need a web hosting company willing to host it, and some developers won’t allow their plug-ins on sex sites.
Examples of sex-related sites running on WordPress.org include (these are NSFW, by the way):
- Oh Joy Sex Toy, a weekly comic with reviews.
- Cara Sutra, a blog featuring sex toy reviews, news, sex and relationship advice, and erotica.
- Sugarbutch Chronicles features queer, kink erotica.
Dreamwidth (freemium)
Dreamwidth is an online journal service based on the LiveJournal codebase.
An American programmer started LiveJournal in 1999 and it quickly grew to become a massive blogging community. In 2005, American blogging software company Six Apart purchased the company that operated LiveJournal, which sold it to a Russian media company in 2007. In 2016, LiveJournal moved to Russia and, in 2017, it updated its terms of service requiring user content to comply with Russian law. Concerns over Russia’s anti-LGBTQ laws, many LiveJournal users left to other platforms.
One of those platforms is Dreamwidth, which is now welcoming Tumblr refugees. I’ve been using it since the LiveJournal exodus of 2017. It’s not as slick and visual as Tumblr, but if you’re looking for a free service, this might be your best choice.
Basic Dreamwidth is free, and then you can pay for more options such as a higher number of visible comments, the ability to add polls to your journal, and Google Analytics.
Other communities
Remember Ello? Ello opened in March 2014 as an ad-free alternative to existing social networks. Namely, it was the ambitious anti-Facebook and claimed never to sell user data or enforce a real-name policy. Ello didn’t kill Facebook, but it is still around, and the Pinterest-like website showcases art, photography, fashion and web culture.
Ello permits adult content as long as it is flagged as Not Safe for Work (NSFW). It’s not specific about what it allows, but its terms of service warns users that they may be “exposed to content that are inaccurate, offensive, indecent, sexually explicit and other adult oriented content”.
Medium is a popular, free, online publishing platform with a huge established audience. Medium does not allow pornographic images or videos, but it does permit erotic writing and can be an excellent option for an emerging writer. NSFW examples include The Nu Romantics, Erotic Beginnings, and My Erotica.
Wattpad is a community for writers to publish stories in a variety of genres and for readers. It’s free to use, and a premium subscription removes ads and gives you an exclusive theme. Wattpad allows mature content including explicit sex scenes, but it does not permit pornographic material or non-consensual sexual content.
Literotica is a free erotic fiction website. Register as an author and submit stories, poems, and essays. You can co-write stories with other authors and readers can rate stories and provide feedback.
If you want a dedicated fandom community, try FanFiction. Although pornography is not allowed and the terms of service do not define what constitutes pornography, there is plenty of erotic fan fiction on the website.
What to do now
If you’ve decided to leave Tumblr, the first thing to do is export your blog. That is, download and save all of your content. Here are Tumblr’s instructions for exporting your blog.
The next thing you need to decide is what kind of platform works best for the type of content you are creating. Writing erotica or erotic fan fiction, blogging about sex magick, and sharing your photography of rope bondage are all different things. If you’re looking to share your homemade sex videos, none of the platforms mentioned above are good options. You need to clarify what you want to do and who you want to share it with.
Another important consideration is cost. Free options are available, and those might be good enough especially if your blogging is mainly for fun and you’re not too attached to what happens to it. The main drawback of these is always the same: it’s not yours. You could lose ownership of your work, and these websites can change its practices or close its doors, and you could lose your platform, your community, and an archive of your work.
For the serious writer, a self-hosted option is best. You could still use a free site such as Medium as a secondary platform to expand your readership, find inspiration, increase interaction, and drive readers back to your main website.
