Staff: We’re getting rid of all adult content on Dec. 17th to combat illegal content!
Everyone: You do realize this ban only hurts the people producing legal content, right? Like, those small pages posting illegal stuff never tag their pages appropriately, and don’t care about having to remake a new blog if theirs gets nuked because they can just make a new burner account to post that stuff again.
Staff: …
Everyone: The only adult content that will likely be spreading around would be the illegal content, since you are strong-arming the legally-abiding and responsible adult content creators who take care to tag and label their content and not post anything that’s god damn illegal.
Staff: …
Everyone: That’s also assuming that there won’t be people that just continue posting adult content, either with censor bars or cuts to bypass the adult content check, or by just posting whatever anyway and not caring.
Staff: …
Everyone: None if this even addresses the racism problems that people did have, including the adult bloggers you are now getting rid of. You can’t just get rid of text posts or images of disgusting rheotoric unless there’s a nipple in the mix, yeah?
Staff: …
Everyone: Speaking of which, this new plan of yours still requires moderation, which is seemingly the main responsibility you are actively dodging with this adult content ban measure.
Staff: …
Everyone: So now, basically nothing will have changed except for all the responsible adult content creators being gone that made up a decent number of your most active and loyal users, some of the most active critics and filters of racist content users being banned, and the only people being left posting illegal content or blatantly breaking your rules to post legal adult content to spite you.
As of today, November 17, 2018, any post with links, any links, even to other tumblr posts, just don’t show up anymore in tumblr’s search engine.
I just found out about it, after I posted a fic with a link to my masterlist and it got little to no notes (it shuldn’t). I was right – the moment I deleted the links, my post magically appeared in the search again. Wow.
Please spread the word to warn the others.
This affects artists who want to cross promote their work, writers who want to link to previous chapters or to a masterlist, and editors who want to link to their YouTube channels, among just a few. This new policy will kill content creators’ ability to spread their work, and for what? A poor attempt to use the algorithm to crack down on porn bots and scammers? Sad.
In the meantime, here’s what I suggest: post your work with no added links, and tell people to check the notes for your masterlist, story navigation, links to ko-fi, patreon, and other social media sites. Make sure you have all those things ready, then paste it into a reblog and have people access them that way. It’s stupid, but it’s a work around we’ll have to use until tumblr gets their act together.
Reblogging this here because I put links in pretty much all my posts so I’m going to basically disappear from Tumblr searches, more so than I already have (as a NSFW blog I’m already mostly invisible). I’ve been using a redirect for my patreon link that doesn’t even work on mobile, as many of you have contacted me about, but since it doesn’t matter anymore I’m just going to go back to using the direct link. All of my comics have links to other pages so this will also be unsearchable through the main tumblr platform.
Reblogging is pretty much the only way new folks are going to be able to find works with links in them anymore so consider reblogging works you like more frequently so that people will see them. At least until this terrible website dies lol.
tumblr backup 