Migrating Away From Tumblr
Lots of people (including me) started bitching after I discovered that Tumblr was locking away all the adult blogs behind a robots.txt designed to make them impossible to search or archive. Dr. Faustus has actually been doing something constructive about it, by exporting the best images from his Tumblr to individual self-hosted blog posts and this very fine thumbnail gallery. He explains his motives thusly:
In May 2013 Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo, a major corporation with at best a checkered record for dealing with its acquisitions.
While Yahoo executives insist that they’re not going to screw up Tumblr, their past record combined with their obvious interest in having the site generate more corporate advertising revenue off the site makes me profoundly pessimistic about its future, especially with respect to adult content. And my pessimism is shared by some of the most astute and experienced observers in the adult Internet world. I fear the coming of a day when my tumblr is simply deleted for its violation of some vague “community standard,” which deletion will take place without warning or possibility of appeal. The content that I will have worked so hard to curate will be lost. I am determined to have it not be lost, and that is why I am keeping it here on my own site that I control.
Even if this ugly day never comes, there is still a major problem with Tumblr, which is that its content is simply not searchable. Tumblr blocks access to the crawlers of search engines and the Internet archive, probably to make itself more appealing to the corporate suits who are now its overlords. To me, that is not the Internet. The Internet means openness. It means having content that people who want to find can find. And it means backups for the historical record.
I will not stand to see the content I have curated hidden – tucked away as if it were something shameful – any more than I can stand to see it lost. I intend to save at least some of it, and that is the purpose of both my “Tumblr favorites” blogging and of this thumbnail index gallery.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=9975
Yahoo’s standard procedure seems to be:
1) Acquire a promising/successful/useful company, telling the users “no changes, business as usual”;
2) Destroy the acquisition progressively through incompetence, bureaucracy and stagnation over about three years.
3) Strip the corpse for any remaining assets and shut it down.
They’ve done exactly this, dozens of times.