Well, Tumblr just announced that after December 17th, they will ban any and all ‘adult’ content. This alone will probably kill the website entirely, but whatever. Burning one’s own business to the ground for no reason is their prerogative.
Sadly for literally everyone else on the site, tumblr’s adult content detection algorithm is less an algorithm and more a random number generator that flags every 7/10 posts as NSFW.
A few years ago, most CC creators moved off of larger sites and forums, and onto personal tumblr blogs, where they exclusively post download links to their content. This actually made it pretty hard to keep track of new uploads, especially because most creators posted stories or personal posts between uploads, so new CC posts would easily get lost on one’s dashboard. It wasn’t a paradigm shift that I was particularly fond of, but it did end up spawning ‘find blogs’: blogs that solely exist for the author to reblog CC that they like. Oftentimes find blogs will use an extensive tagging system, so that readers can navigate easily to find something they’re interested in without having to scroll through pages of image-heavy posts. These kinds of blogs made tumblr’s horrible search tool and natural lack of organization bearable, and no find blog is more heavily curated than sssvitlans.
Unfortunately, sssvitlans has been marked as NSFW since August 2017, and tumblr’s proposed changes will likely lead to the blog’s banning or deletion.
Google translated from Russian.
I don’t doubt that a lot of CC creators themselves will also have to move elsewhere, as even those who only create SFW CC aren’t safe from an algorithm that seems to be flagging posts at random. Skin makers, who have to use nude models for their preview shots in order to, you know, show you what you’re downloading, will also probably be heavily impacted.
But even the ones who stay, who can avoid tumblr’s banhammer will be negatively impacted by this new policy, as their content will simply be harder to find by prospective downloaders.
Hopefully the next shift this community makes is towards a site with better management. Or, at the very least, one with robust categorization and search features.
In a world where a different big curation blog, MySims3/4Blog, went dead over a year ago, it feels like the modding and creation communities for The Sims are becoming more and more fragmented as time goes on, and what was being done to keep it all strung together is itself fading.
No really what is tumblr even for if not rule 34 of children’s’ cartoons?