It’s official: Tumblr has banned porn, effective December 17, 2018. Rest in obscurity, Tumblr.

tumblr pornocalypse

This is not a surprise to me; I officially gave up on Tumblr for grownups in summer of 2017, when I wrote:

We all knew that Tumblr’s run as the place to run free porn blogs had to end someday.

And:

So it is now official. The ghetto walls are up and the gates are closed. The adult-Tumblr community is no longer part of the open web. The #pornocalypse has claimed another social media victim.

It was five, almost six years ago now that I offered adult bloggers on Tumblr advice on how to back up their Tumblr porn blogs and escape from that particular prison. I haven’t tested, but I don’t think the advice in that post would work any more, now that you have to be logged in to Tumblr even to view your own porn blog. (I could be wrong.) Still, it gives you an idea. It wasn’t hard to see this disaster coming.

Indeed, this disaster was always coming. It’s an ErosBlog byword: The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All. Wherever you are. On every platform. The #pornocalypse is coming. It will find you. It always does. The internet uses porn to jumpstart every new tech and platform, and then when things get respectable and profitable, porn gets thrown unceremoniously out with the garbage, to “clean things up around here” for the squeamish bankers and capitalists. Thus does the pornocalypse come for us all. Over and over again. It’s an endlessly repeating pattern.

Hence, Bacchus’s First Rule Of The Internet: “Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing at your own domain that you control.” Put it on your own website first and primarily. Use all the other platforms to promote your site. That way, the endless rolling #pornocalypse? It can’t hurt you quite as much. It still hurts, but it can’t disasterize you, not like it does if you build your digital life on a platform they can take away.

I wrote off Tumblr a long time ago. But I still hate them fuckers for all the people they are making digitally homeless in two weeks. I saw it coming, yeah. But that doesn’t make me feel smarter and smug; it just makes me feel helpless and ragey. I’m sorry, everyone.

The #pornocalypse comes for us all.

Update: Tumblr finally published a blog post supposedly explaining the policy change. It’s a bunch of disconnected marketing blather that does nothing of the sort; I won’t waste your time by reproducing it here. The closest thing to a concrete explanation given is that by banning porn they hope to “create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.” Yeah, good luck with that.