Yeah I was thinking of those. There’s been a big up tick in stories and blogs involving underage (12 year olds and the like), gay to straight, homophobic, and/or extreme right wing themes.
I’ve been on tumblr for like a decade (I know, I know) and the rise of gay to straight has just been baffling to me. Aren’t we supposed to be gay? Isn’t tumblr the gay site? But in a way it does make sense because the scene on there feel very… I don’t know if this will even make sense but… disconnected from gay culture? I don’t think every piece of erotica has to be like a #pride manifesto but it doesn’t feel like a lot of tf/mc blogs on there really root their work in anything other than lust for hot men, so it doesn’t surprise me how easily it swung in a dark direction.
And the unfortunate thing about tumblr is that the tf/mc community is a niche of a larger site so the users tend to just kind of accept anyone and with open arms because they’re so excited to have any kind of content, and if you want to have a presence on the site then you’re just kind of stuck next to those people. The place really needs a deep clean but the community is basically on life support (we never really recovered from all the bloggers lost in the NSFW purge) so it’s never gonna happen.
Doesn’t help that thanks to tumblr’s post based format, trash blogs can pump out a lot of junk that gets disseminated widely by users with low-standards so the ratio of quality to questionable is not great. This is anecdotal but I get the sense that a lot of users are on the younger/more naive side and don’t really think about the implications of what they’re posting/reposting beyond wanting a quick fix.
Fortunately this also means most of those blogs would not be interested in coming to a site where they have to write at least 1k words to post and are subjected to a proofreading process.
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I definitely agree with this evaluation, and I would add that it’s very, very easy to start chasing likes on Tumblr. I have a very broad range of kinks, but my first several stories on tumblr were musky masculinisation tfs, and that was what I started getting asks about. The more masculine and dumb my tf was, the more consistently I got likes from that particular audience.
When I intentionally wrote stories with different themes, it took a while for them to get traction with a different subset of the gay erotica audience. It’s hard to post a story on Tumblr and not get immediate notes, because if that happens it might get buried on people’s dashboards and never resurface. I needed to know that I already had a (smaller, but even more engaged) audience who wanted different stories from what was already popular.
All this to say that I think the trend followers are uncritically aping the big g2s blogs because it’s a very easy way to get hundreds of likes and follows, which feels good. It seems like the community basically ended up walking itself into this trend through slow iteration as well. To keep getting those quick likes and effusive responses, you feel like you have to increase the intensity of your transformation, and for some writers whose kinks might emerge from disgust or fear, the most intense transformation they can do is to turn a character straight.
In terms of the quality of the writing in the community since the Tumblr Purge, it’s true the community never recovered. So many of the best writers now reserve almost all of their writing for paywalled sites like Patreon (or simply left the community never to return) that the audience on Tumblr is desperate for pretty much any content. 6 years since the purge means that well over half of the community has probably turned over and barely knows writers like the-craftsman and aardvarkia because they either post very rarely or just as patreon promos. There’s pretty much no one left in the community to set the bar as high as it was prior to the purge, and those writers who do write large-scale stories aren’t in vogue because the context of the community has changed around them to favour shorter stories.
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This is GOLD, can we ringfence this with a highlighter pen?
Like, sure, have the warnings (“needs tags”, “needs titles”, “needs category” etc) but have them only on attempts to publish (not on saving a draft).
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Also my own 2c with Tumblr/GKS in general:
I migrated over during the big porn ban (mostly for reasons of principle as it turned out my work itself was not actually affected; I guess the bots weren’t so great at parsing written text back then.)
GSS as it was then (gosh, five years ago!?) all the way up to and including as it is now, is consistently a league above Tumblr in every measurable metric; usability, community, accessibility, ease of use (and I’m not just saying that as admin).
The only downside — naturally — is Tumblr was all media; imagery, stories, shorts, captions, art, photos, and even just straight up blogs and personal diaries. So there’s no competition there, nor should GKS even try to “be what tumblr was.”
But yes, little usability nuggets like, do we actually need those pop-ups before saving drafts? what if someone is batch transferring, or literally just writing a draft and they wanna to click save, titles and tags and categories be damned “jus lemmie hit save!”
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Each time a product or service changes to attract a new audience, there’s a danger that those changes alienate the current audience. I agree that some of the extra process required to publish here could be streamlined, but in the end, we can’t duplicate the instantness of the experience of publishing on Tumblr. Just the approval process might be enough to turn off those who might want to migrate. I just think it’s a different audience and those of them who can migrate won’t mind adapting to our ways, and those of them who would require us to change too much to attract them are not necessarily likely to do so after we’d do these changes, but these changes are more likely to turn off members of the community here. That’s the pattern I’ve seen again and again.
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Welcome Frostides, AKA idesofrevolution on Tumblr! He’s crossposted a recent story of his and it would mean a lot if you gave it a read and told him something nice about it. He’s gonna be a great fit here, I promise <3
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This is some really fascinating possession, I love it! Glad he came over.
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