#tumblr purge of 2018

[hjbender]

I appreciate Tumblr's honesty here and hope that maybe this is going to foster a new era of user-led improvements to this place.

[sarasade]

"Thank you to everyone who got me to 100000 likes!"

thanks! I think. No idea if that's a lot or not. People who are responsible for this are prob mostly TDP fans who really, really want to see Viren and Aaravos bang. You've got a great taste<3

[helldidntwantme]

Finally found the name of an artist I really liked like 5 ish years ago from an old art study I did of their art only to find out that they've deactivated all of their stuff

OP I hope you're doing okay I really liked your art

[uqb]

super funny going thru the archive of this account.. .. all the way back to 2015.... man.....👵

[animentality]

I gotta say, I am loving this reddit defection. The reddit separatists. The influx of reddit migratory birds, bringing biodiversity back to a ruined ecosystem.

I haven't seen Tumblr this lively and rife with good random ass memes since the porn purge of 2018 *smoking cigar

Just kidding

It's more like, haven't seen it this lively since Castiel Supernatural went to turbo hell and the heterosexual car went to heaven.

I missed that Tumblr vibe.

Welcome home.

[obscurevideogames]

Tumblr’s Core Prodct Stratgy

Here at Tumblr, we’ve been working hard on trying to keep our sinking ship afloat for as long as possible. This means desperately trying to copy every new fly-by-night social media app that some multi-billionaire sh*t out during their daily Peloton routine. What follows is the strategy we're using to accomplish the goal of user growth. If you find the things we say here worrisome, please understand that is our exact intention. You've outgrown our target demographic. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

The Diagnosis

It's lookin' pretty bad y'all!

After somehow losing hundreds of thousands of users during the great pr0n purge of 2018, we started to wonder if anything could be done to get back to where we were. We even brought in a management consultant who charged us a ridiculous amount of money. It would make you sick if you knew how much, but we got a few nice meals out of it at least. Anyhow, we handed this guy the app, and HE HAD NO IDEA HOW TO USE IT! It was f*cking hilarious! But suddenly it all clicked -- our users are a bunch of stupid idiots who can't even do basic arithmetic. I mean, they spend all day looking at their phones, so what do you expect?

Tumblr’s best feature is its unique content and vibrant communities. But who cares, right? We're just as happy getting traffic from people sh*t-posting memes, vague-booking, giving out-of-context hot takes to news events, and spewing whatever random thought is in their head at the moment. Plus that stuff doesn't p*ss off Apple.

To keep this thing going we need new people. And by "people" we mean teenagers, like we used to have back in the good ol' days. Unfortunately we're all in our 40s now, so we have no idea what they want. But teenagers are so cool! Imagine if they talked to us like we're one of them? We're getting hard just thinking about it.

Our Guidng Principls

To make Tumblr cool again, we must address these huge glaring issues.

People can look at a blog without logging in. How is that fair to all the poor schlubs who had to fill out forms to get an account? Also we haven't figured out a way to force ads onto the personalized pages yet. But we swear that's not the main reason.

People can see content they are looking for or linked to. People can keep up with blogs they follow. But the problem with this is, people don't know what they want. We know what they want! We're smart. We wrote this damn site, remember?

Promote posts that incite pointless conversations. Posts that are guaranteed to bait every troll into responding. Isn't that why all your Magat relatives love Facebook so much? We can do that!

P*ss off your content creators in every way possible (see #2).

Create algorithms that throw an unending barrage of irrelevant content in your face. Have you seen Instagram lately? We could do that so easy!!!

The app is slow. The website is slow. Obviously this is because of GIFs. Facebook and Instagram don't allow them, so why should we?

Conclusion

Our mission changes on a day-to-day basis. Right now we're super jealous of all the attention that new Threads thing is getting. We're still not sure what it is, but we're gonna download it after work.

[bashfulnights]

I haven’t really been on this particular hellscape in a while. It’s wild to think that the purge only happened almost 4 years ago. I learned while poking around one of my posts got flagged as “adult content.” It’s literally just a pic I took at a concert of two fully clothed guys being surprised as a third fully clothed guy brought a cake out on stage.

Anyway I believe in going down with the ship so I’ll stick around the bird app until it’s dying breath

[jaxkhatter]

I'm still living in 2022..even if I survived the purge of 2018

[peachdoxie]

If there isn't already, there should be a term for when corporations make such radical changes to a social network/media website that it effectively destroys the culture(s) that grew there. Like all the changes to Livejournal that erased entire fandom communities with NSFW purges, and the worries that fanfiction.net is one day going to do the same. It happened to large parts of Tumblr when the porn ban happened in 2018, and we've been witnessing it happen with Twitter. Now Reddit is facing the same thing. As long as corporations own the websites and servers, the death of internet cultures is always going to be a phenomenon, and I think it deserves a name.

[glysaturn]

the only post of mine that got permanently flagged in the tumblr purge of 2018, and you know what, i still like it, so i'm reposting it as cropped version, after all this time, yes

[duckprintspress]

Fandom 101: The Origin of the Citrus Scale

A guest post by Aeryn Jemariel Knox. (@jemariel)

Ah, the citrus scale. It’s like a cryptid roaming the edges of modern fandom communities. Long-tenured veterans speak of it with affectionate mockery while newcomers google curiously. A relic from a bygone fandom era, the citrus scale saw a brief resurgence in 2018 during the Tumblr porn ban, suggested as a way to avoid the new bot censors trawling for posts with the NSFW tag—though never, I think, in seriousness. 

That may have been jocular and short-lived, but it does point to the reasons why the citrus scale was created in the first place. Certain fandom activities have always had to fly under the radar to one degree or another. Whether you’re trying to evade legal action or simply avoid deletion based on explicit content, a certain level of obfuscation is sometimes worthwhile.

It’s not hard to find the generally agreed-upon definitions of the citrus scale’s levels. According to Fanlore, KnowYourMeme, and others, this is more or less the “official” citrus scale:

Orange: Light stuff, kissing, nothing below the waist or under the clothes. 

Lime: Groping, implied sex without details, fade-to-black, no intercourse or intimate contact.

Lemon: Sex, in full detailed glory. Woo-hoo! Regardless of the actual acts performed, if you can tell who had an orgasm (or, perhaps, had an orgasm denied), how, and where, it’s a lemon.

Grapefruit: We’ll get into this later.

But these tidy categories are clear thanks to the benefit of hindsight. In the Wild West of the early internet, it was not so easy to pin down exactly what you might be getting into based on which term was used.

At its origin, the citrus scale wasn’t a scale at all. It has its roots in hentai (and was always more popular in anime fandoms), stemming from a specific early hentai film by the title of Cream Lemon (1984). Hentai being what it is, this led to certain subculture communities referring to any story with explicit sexual content as a “Lemon.” And for a while, that was the extent of it. Then came fanfiction.net purging explicit content (2002), Livejournal suffering Strikethru (2007), and other events that pushed burgeoning fandom communities out of their growing hubs and back into smaller, isolated communities centered on a single fandom or pairing. In the relatively sparse early ’00’s internet, anybody could spin up an Angelfire website, pass the link around to their friends, and get a reasonable amount of traffic.  Websites devoted to the works of a single author or small group were common.

I mention this to describe the landscape in which fandom lexicons grew and evolved in the early-mid 2000s. Each pocket community had its own rules, lingo, and expectations; venturing outside of your home pocket could lead to some pretty major miscommunications. 

“Lemon” was established early and its definition has hardly shifted. It means that the labeled content (art, fic, mood board, etc.) includes sex. Intercourse, bumping uglies, etc. However, some yaoi fandom niches used it specifically to mean gay sex of the male variety. In some communities, “lime” developed as a corresponding term for feminine gay sex, while other communities brought it up with the usage that eventually “stuck,” “not quite a lemon.” Given that lemon and lime often go hand in hand when discussing actual flavors, the fact that we had some divergent term evolution is not surprising. But coming in from a different pocket of fandom and seeing “lime,” thinking you’ll be reading semi-softcore sexual tension and instead being confronted with graphic sapphic antics? Bit of a shock, I’m sure.

A more dramatic example is the rating level of “Grapefruit,” which occupies two completely different ends of the scale. In some circles, grapefruit was defined as “less intense than lime,” G or PG-rated stories that were more soft or cute than sexy. In other circles, it was used to mean the exact opposite. Kinkier than kink, smuttier than smut, grapefruit art and fic was where you went to have your eyebrows singed off. Some communities were even more specific, using grapefruit for stories featuring non-consensual sex. This was where darkfic lived – in modern day parlance, your “Dead Dove, Do Not Eat” works. To say that this usage difference caused some disagreements would be putting it mildly.

Nobody really worried about orange. Orange just existed, not bothering anybody.

When these terms were coined, the internet was not an assumed aspect of everybody’s daily life the way it is today. There was no Tumblr, no Facebook, no social media to speak of. There were no large repositories of internet lore and knowledge such as Urban Dictionary or KnowYourMeme. It was a playground. And what do you do on a playground? You make friends! The citrus scale, like so many fandom tropes and concepts, was defined by groups of friends that created them ad hoc to meet their own needs at the time. No one could have predicted that it would become so much a fandom history that it’d be enshrined, nor that I would be writing a blog post about it two decades later. From the common source of lemon, people extrapolated what the rest of the scale might look like, and there was no authority to tell them they were wrong. (Except other fans. That hasn’t changed.)

In conclusion, it’s best not to take the citrus scale too seriously. At best, it’s a cheeky way to avoid censors who try to bar a community from engaging with explicit works, but it’s also varied to a fault and open to interpretation. If you and your community have come up with a use for it that suits your needs, then congratulations: you’re part of a fandom tradition stretching back to the roots of the internet. Just don’t try and tell anybody else that they’re wrong. You might start a flame war.

References:

Prokopetz: Orange and Grapefruit

She’s Got Plans: What is the Citrus Scale in Fanfiction?

Unwinnable: Lemon and Lime

Past Fandom 101 Posts:

Everything About A/B/O Dynamics You Wanted to Know (but were Afraid to Ask)

How to Diversify Your To-Be-Read Pile

Recognizing AI Generated Images, Danmei Edition

[charliechapstix]

me when I stumble up the username of a porn blogger i followed from pre-2018 tumblr on twitter or some other site after being lost in the purge for years

[chaoticprussia]

hello countryhumans fandom!!

it feels so so good to be back i used to be SUPER into countryhumans back in 2018 to 2019 before the big purge and ive been secretly lurking ever since but ive decided fuck it im gonna start posting shit again ive already come up with years worth of lore and headcanons and character designs to the point where they all just may as well be my ocs so i guess ill share them on tumblr dot com for shits and giggles

this is kinda like an intro post and also just so i actually have something posted here enjoy this prussia doodle hes basically gonna be my mascot

[silkysong]

what was fandom like long ago?/gen (asking as a minor)

people actually had boundaries on what fanworks they would engage with and used the block button liberally (as one should) instead of leaping straight to harrassment and discourse. literally nothing in a fandom is important enough to treat another real life person badly. and its sad that ive seen this happen time and time again, both to myself and my friends over the dumbest of reasons. but i digress.

there was no predatory algorithm that would push popular works forward, and less popular ones backwards. everything was, in fact, readily accessible through the tumblr tag search no matter how old or obscure it was. it was easier to find your niche and friend group that way. entire archives of fanworks got wiped out when the Big Tumblr Purge of 2018 changed how this website worked fundamentally, not just for nsfw content, but EVERYTHING.

there wasnt such a severe parasocial phenomenon with the "big name fans" and the obssession with their validation and constant demand for attention. thats a can of worms i dont think i can unpack in just one singular ask anyway

im not saying fandom was perfect back then either, there were plenty of problems that would drive one to say "its not the same anymore :(" even then. but the state of fandoms right now is very, very bleak and i dont really find the appeal to commit myself to an online space anymore (without the guarantee it wont turn into a giant cesspool)

[b0tster]

did you move to Tumblr or have you always been here? I just moved from Twitter and I'm glad I can still catch up with my favorite bunny witch dev

i was on tumblr a long time ago until the great porn purge in 2018, then rejoined when the divorced man bought twitter

[getvalentined]

Patreon Nonsense: The "It's Actually Way Worse Than You Probably Thought" Edition

So. Patreon says Apple will remove the app from the store unless everyone on the platform accepts payments via iOS, which means everyone has to switch to their unusable rolling billing cycle. This has plenty of issues already, but there is a unique problem in this claim for a fairly large niche of creators on the platform.

You see, 18+ creators are not discoverable via Patreon's search or in the app; you can only pledge on web via a link. This means that 18+ creators cannot accept payments via iOS. Full stop. We can't. You can browse us on the app if you're already pledged, but there is otherwise no way to even see us on it, and no way to pay us through it.

This means, based on what Patreon has said, we are keeping the platform in violation of Apple's alleged billing ToS.

This means that the only way forward for Patreon is to ban us all.

Even if we all switched to "subscription billing" all at once, it wouldn't matter. We can't take payments via iOS because Patreon will not let us; Apple definitely won't allow us to be visible, since they hate adult content, so this isn't going to change. There is no alternative.

If we don't all get banned for the crime of Creating As Adults, and also don't suddenly become discoverable via the app, then that means Patreon is OPENLY LYING about what Apple is demanding of them in order to force everyone onto their preferred billing structure.

I guess we'll find out which it is by next November, but my hopes aren't particularly high. I think that starting next year, Patreon is going to start a new 18+ Purge (just like tumblr did back in 2018) because (again) getting a bite of that Apple matters more than protecting the userbase that made the platform successful in the first place.