LOS ANGELES — The inexplicable decision a year ago by Tumblr's owners to ban all sexual content from the platform — including, most ridiculously, "female-presenting nipples" — decimated a once thriving, diverse online community that refused to "quarantine" sexual expression away of other cultural interests.
These are the conclusions of the perceptive article “Tumblr’s First Year Without Porn,” written by The Atlantic’s tech reporter Kaitlyn Tiffany, and published today.
Tiffany’s premise is that “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 two stories are seemingly antithetical: if one is against censorship and in favor of sexual expression, one would prefer the narrative that the platform has catastrophically lost value and relevance over the last year, while if one is inclined to be optimistic about the platform’s future — for whatever reason; for example, because one works for Tumblr — one would emphasize the fact that non-explicit subcultures and memes still “thrive” there.
The hard numbers back narrative No. 1: choosing to endorse censorship dealt an irreparable blow to Tumblr. “From 2018 to 2019,” Tiffany writes, “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, as is the number of visits per unique visitor, as is the amount of time that visitors spend on the site.”
In the 12-month period in question, “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 striking, the average monthly volume of traffic to the Tumblr login page by U.S. 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.”
The numbers, she concludes, “are stark, but not surprising.”
Just Absurdist
But current, porn-free Tumblr’s (paid) cheerleaders are busy trying to offer a counter-narrative. Tiffany reports that a press release 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.”
This Fandometrics blog, incidentally, seems patterned after Pornhub’s influential Pornhub Insights data-disseminating initiative. Pornhub floated the idea a few months ago of purchasing Tumblr for pennies on the dollar and restoring its sexual content.
Tumblr’s new regime, Tiffany points out, is eager to highlight tame, PG subcultures like “photography, studying, the Sims, cats, dogs, reptiles and ‘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).”
“Fitness,” “art modeling” and “bodybuilding,” the censorship-history-minded among us might recall, has a long tradition of being the place where nipples and butts go to reside when “concerned citizens” launch their periodic moral panics against sexual expression (see, the 1950s obsession with “beefcake” and “cheesecake” photography).
The porn-free Tumblr is all about the memes; the site's biggest meme of the year was Area 51.
“Tumblr loves aliens,” data-insights manager and “meme librarian” Amanda Brennan told the Atlantic. “Users were particularly into the ‘Naruto run’ sub-meme of the meme, which was drawn from a popular anime series. Tumblr also saw a Minecraft ‘renaissance,’ another big year for Keanu Reeves and a resurgence of ‘incorrect quotes,’ the Facebook feed’s favorite joke circa 2009.”
And then there was Shaggy.
In late January, the 'Shaggy's Power' meme exploded. A transplant from Reddit, the meme took screenshots of Matthew Lillard, the actor who played Shaggy in the 2002 live-action film adaptation of Scooby-Doo, and paired them with captions portraying the character as "a godlike figure with a range of mysterious powers, swinging wildly between indiscriminate violence and pure benevolence," Tiffany writes.
("I have no idea what the heart of it is," Brennan told The Atlantic. "I think it’s just absurdist.")
Although penises are very forbidden, Tumblr still houses plenty of queer action, in the form of ‘ships.’
This year’s “most popular romantic pairing,” Tiffany explained, “was between the main characters from Neil Gaiman’s ‘Good Omens,’ played in a new adaptation this year by David Tennant and Michael Sheen. No. 3 on the list, Brennan points out, was a couple from a telenovela: Juliana Valdés and Valentina Carvajal are a canonical female-female pairing, even more popular than 'Reddie,' the canonical male-male pairing from Stephen King’s It: Chapter 2.”
“The highest-ranking real-person ship was Park Jimin and Jeon Jungkook from the K-pop supergroup BTS.”
From "Shagging" to "Shaggy"
What has been lost is the way sexual content was harmlessly integrated into Tumblr pages among all user's other cultural interests.
“Porn on Tumblr wasn’t treated as disposable, something just to be immediately purged from your browser history, but an aesthetic, artistic component of your page and your life,” pornographer Vex Ashley wrote in what Tiffany describes as “a eulogy for Tumblr’s sexy-art and safer-sex-work communities at the end of last year.”
Luca Aiello, one of the researchers in a pre-censorship Tumblr porn study, was succinct with the Atlantic.
“My personal opinion about this whole story is that the numbers were very clear,” Aiello said. "People were very engaged with that type of content and banning it would determine the fall of the community.”
Speaking to XBIZ for the release of Bree Mills' groundbreaking film “Teenage Lesbian,” lead actress and adult performer Kristen Scott told us that when she was exploring her teen sexuality circa 2012, it was the Tumblr era of the internet’s evolution.
“I would look things up, anything that I was curious about,” Scott told XBIZ. “It was the first time I saw trans people! That was readily available when I was in high school. I could just be myself and be unapologetic about it. A lot of youth now don’t even think about it. We don’t have to face it to that extent. I found the different events we went through in the story fascinating to me.”
A year after Tumblr’s misguided decision to ban all sexual expression and regressing the cultural maturity of the platform, so to speak, from shagging to Shaggy, all that’s left of what used to be a thriving, diverse platform is increasingly nihilistic corporate pop-culture-riffing memes and the occasional glimpse of forbidden body parts (but not those “female-presenting nipples”) under the sad guise of “fitness.”
To read the Atlantic article “Tumblr’s First Year Without Porn,” click here.