Even in its prime, Tumblr was never profitable. It was sold and resold to several companies who never had a clear vision for what to do with it, other than run ads to generate revenue. Its main draw was its users. For several years it was the social media platform for LGBTQ and fandoms, along with many niche interests.
Like Reddit, many users had a love-hate relationship with it, and as its policies grew more and more at odds with its power users, the communities which existed fell apart. Banning NSFW content and the heavy-handed automated moderation meant to enforce it was the final straw for me. AI was used to try to detect images of nudes, but tagged a huge amount of false positives such as pictures of animals or even sand dunes. I had my main blog incorrectly tagged as NSFW which made it harder to keep in contact or be discoverable by other users, so I quit. Reddit’s over-reactions to large subs being set to NSFW shows this is a pain point for them. u/spez has made it clear that he will push through whatever policies he wants, regardless of vocal feedback for the actual users of the site.
Tumblr still exists, but it’s a shell of its former self. I check in every so often. Only a handful of the blogs I followed are still active, mostly ones that didn’t interact much with others to begin with. Trending content is incredibly generic, even moreso than /all. Very few of these posts hit more than a few thousand “notes” (for comparison I, a fairly obscure blogger, had about 80,000 notes on my most viral post). When July 1 rolls around I expect Reddit will start to follow a similar pattern. The power users who haven’t left already will drop off the grid one by one until Reddit loses its center of gravity.
Further reading, first one with NSFW-ish photos
https://boingboing.net/2018/12/03/the-death-of-tumblr.html
No one knows what it will look like this is an entirely new shift but I do have this feeling that things are at a real turning point right now. The massive rise of AI, the monetization and enshitification of social media and entertainment reaching a peak, bizzare economic conditions, a feverish culture war in the west. I’m sure I’m missing something but there is a strange cocktail of factors mixing right now and the changes happening with Reddit seem like just another piece. I’m optimistic about what it means. I think a lot of people feel like the status quo as it has been is not infinitely sustainable.
I want small personal home pages back.
Except the midi and custom cursor elements.
I started messing around with gemini a while back, it’s a little involved to set up, and intentionally-limited feature-wise (it’s heavily inspired by Gopher). Very fun messing around with it though, and customizing my HTTP proxy was pretty satisfying. You could access my site either through a gemini browser or a normal one, and the normal site had a few extra bells and whistles that made browsing it a little better
That was well said. I think it is a sign of a larger shift in attitude for many facets of modern day life, that many of us have struggled to really come to terms with. Social media is just more in our control to do something about and I hope to see it shift to other things as well, as we all realize we control our own fate.
I don’t think eternal September will ever end, outside of platforms that are small enough not to attract those sorts of users.
Once you hit a certain level of popularity, it’s going to be September no matter what unless you’re very strict with moderation to keep things from going off the rails.
Tumblr is kinda back imo. But the main reason for it’s death was also that the company that bought tumblr back then thought it would be the new PDF…yes you heard me right… https://qz.com/708295/yahoos-grand-plan-for-tumblr-was-to-turn-it-into-the-next-generation-pdf
Tumblr CEO David Karp reported to Yahoo’s Simon Khalaf, founder of the analytics platform Flurry (also acquired by Yahoo). In an anecdote from an unnamed former employee, Khalaf walked into one team meeting about Tumblr saying the popular blogging platform was “going to be the new PDF.”
“It didn’t make any sense,” the employee recounted. “We’d walk away scratching our heads.”
I’m with them on this. That makes zero sense.
My biggest concern when I first came over and had a look at Lemmy was the fact that all the main Lemmy instances had big “No Porn!” rules front and center. Porn is the lifeblood of a free internet, and the foundation of human inventiveness and drive for innovation.
Fortunately that seems to have largely been swamped by the Reddit refugees. Along with the disturbing prevalence of tankies, the second biggest concern I had when I first came over and had a look at Lemmy. Things seem to be well on track now.
My hope is that federation will be a good solution to these issues. Users can choose a home instance based on the types of content they do or don’t want to see. Instances with conflicting focuses or policies can defederate from one another.
There’s legal issues involving hosting, and that includes mirroring, or acting as an aggregator for, porn. Many admins simply don’t want to deal with the headache of that.
It’s fine if the fediverse is (mostly) split into sfw and nsfw sides, after all, most people had different accounts for both on reddit in the first place, and much of the rest should have.
And it’s not like admins are defederating lemmynsfw.com – they’re only blocking nsfw posts, lemmynsfw wisely has a strict “tag everything” policy. Which means that if someone wants to use their lemmynsfw account to engage in discussion on the sfw side, nothing’s stopping them, as long as it’s sfw.
If there’s no porn how come I had to get a user script to block all the god-damned porn?
The infinite feed bug kept forcing porn into my face so often i still don’t feel comfortable looking at lemmy at work.
I don’t see how NSFW content can make its place on non-profit fediverse. NSFW is very taxing to moderate, so it makes perfect sense to me that volunteers would refuse to deal with it and outright ban porn (while still being more understanding of non-pornographic nudity than say Instagram, which banned a museum from publishing pictures of nude statues 🤦).
Porn is the lifeblood of a free internet
Your view of the internet must be pretty sad
This isn’t Reddit people! Don’t downvote a perfectly good comment just because you don’t agree.
Add a reply (or upvote one that already shares your thoughts) and move on. Keep the discussion thriving. Downvote hate and spam.
lemmynsfw.com is an instance specialising in exactly that type of moderation. It’s easier when you specialise and don’t simultaneously have to deal with other stuff, at least in a fine-grained way (that is, more fine-grained than “import standard instance blocklist to not federate with instances full of nazis, griefers, and other types of brigades”)
If you can’t get porn on it, then it isn’t a viable platform.
That’s just how it is, the ability to use a medium for pornography affects the popularity of that medium. Consumers want porn, and if they can’t find it here they’ll go somewhere else.
Wtf? Why are people upvoting this garbage?
Google, Facebook, Tiktok, Youtube, there are TONNES of “platforms” that literally ban porn content from being uploaded to them. What are you talking about? Not viable? The biggest fucking social media site on the internet does not allow porn, the biggest video site on the internet does not allow porn.
Redditors have seriously broken brains and only know how to repeat what they’ve read other broken redditors repeat and upvote ad-infinitum without every actually thinking for 5 seconds about how ridiculous what they’re saying is.
Porn was one of the things that drove development of many of the tools of the internet. It just happens that those innovations have non-porn benefits as well. Things like video and audio compression rates that allowed low-bandwidth streaming. I still find it amazing that I can watch moving video with synchronized audio at speeds barely faster than dialup.
In a post T1 world, we sometimes fail to see what our ingenuity and our desire for certain outcomes created.
We can always debate whether or not the normalization of nudity and sexual experience is good or bad for a community or society. But it can’t be denied that the American desire for pornographic materials was a significant factor (if not the defining factor) in the development of consumer-driven internet.
This is the best analysis I’ve seen so far. The majority of posts I have seen say “reddit is an inch from death”, which isn’t even remotely close to accurate. A site can be a 3rd tier, boring, corporate-owned collection of content that has non-exciting revenue, but that’s not dead.
I’ll never forget the Tumblr titty ban and then the fact everyone’s SFW art got marked as NSFW by their very strange bot.
Sfw art? I remember it flagging a picture of the Sahara. Although my favorite was the one that said something like “How far can I zoom in on my elbow before it’s flagged,” and it never even made it past the first photo. Those were entertaining days
