How do people feel about Tumblr? (Warning: this post is about porn)

[elfs]

I've been looking at Tumblr a lot recently. Both as a programmer-- I'm midly impressed with both their web performance and their processor, although the best article in that respect I've seen recently is from posterous, a Tumblr competitor with a much more open and interesting architecture.

That said, the other thing that I find wonderful about Tumblr is the way it has become the perfect porn source. Tumblr encourages "reblogging" (indeed, that's one of the community standards, and you can't get around it). If you like something on someone's tumblog, you can click "reblog" and that something will appear on your own tumblog, with a link back to the source. What ends up is All The World's Porn Pics get funneled and repeated on Tumblr, and various users end up with their own curated collections. You can eventually find a collection of curators whose tastes match your own.

This intrigued me, especially since Tumblr makes available all of its feeds, whether text or image or whatever, in a unified, standard RSS feed. I wrote a quick wrapper for those feeds using Liferea's scripted feed API (passing my content through two APIs and a cache... why yes, I am a geek) that allowed me to bookmark anything on Tumblr that came across my feed with a single keystroke. Eventually, the point of cadging all that stuff on my hard-drives ceased to make sense, and I created my own (currently obscure) tumblog that is nothing but reblogs.

But... and this is the big 'but'... Tumblr's community standards are not the world's. There's a ton of stuff on there I'm sure is copyrighted, and it comes down the RSS feed and gets bookmarked whether it is or not.

Is it wrong to like Tumblr porn? In some sense, it must be. I don't subscribe to any of the Furry feeds coming out of Tumblr because there were dozens of images marked "Do Not Distribute" in every single feed. But the porn feeds seem to be full of stuff that's either approved with a wink and a nod toward getting attention, or actively distributed with the hopes of garnering attention.

Comments

[lemur123.livejournal.com]

OMG! It's full of porn!

where to start?

[(Anonymous)]

So, how does one get started amassing this collection? If you're not comfortable posting your tumblog, can you point us, your fans, to some of your favourites? Or is there some other fun way to get started?

Re: where to start?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

The best starting place? Sex is not the Enemy (http://sexisnottheenemy.tumblr.com/).

Re: where to start?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Besides, do you really want to know my taste in porn?

Re: where to start?

[(Anonymous)]

At the risk of sounding super mega creepy, after reading your writing, and following your blog for 5 years (what can I say, you are interesting!) I feel I have at least a vague notion of what you like, and it has at least a couple of things in common with what I like.

Although now that you mention it, I might very well be better off not knowing the exact specific details.
- Not the same Anonymous person

[elbowfetish.livejournal.com]

We need some kind of DRM or at least the copyright statement in the digital image format.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I am of two minds about that. I'm generally completely opposed to DRM; I don't believe that it works. As we can see from the cracking of HDCP, someone finally got 50 machines together in a room and assembled the parts of it out of fragments, and the entire BluRay scheme goes down the tubes. Cryptography is useful when you want a secret message to go out between people, but a movie, a song, or a picture you want to share with 50,000 people isn't a secret. And it isn't a distinct artifact, a widget, whose existence is limited by the workman's time or rare materials.

On the other hand, Google has demonstrated that it's perfectly possible to find "images like...", even "video like..." They've perfected the means of identifying even tiny fragments of a whole film in order to prevent the uploading of copyrighted material to YouTube, they can certainly help people identify copyright violations. That's part of what search engines are for.

I also think that protecting copyright really isn't the state's responsibility. It never has been in the past, and current laws protecting copyright are way out of line compared to the penalty for other offenses.

[mouser.livejournal.com]

Great - thanks to you I've now discovered Tron Porn.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

But I've written Tron Porn!

[orcaarrow.livejournal.com]

First off, I finally have my own Tumblr. I only mention because I wanted to be clear.

I don't think there is anything wrong with liking porn in general or Tumblr porn specifically. I have to say there is a concern about how little controls there are on posting copyrighted material. I think you are mostly correct, I think most of the copyrighted material is posted with the hopes it will draw attention to the pay sites they are from.

Overall, I'm not sure I said anything of value here.

I do have to say there is a sense of validation, for me, when someone likes what I've reblogged enough to reblog it themselves.

[blaisepascal]

Following the one link posted in this post to a Tumblr site, within a few clicks I did run across a picture which made me go "um, I'd like to see the ID on her....", I realized another concern about Tumblr porn.

Mere possession of child porn is illegal. If the girl in that picture was under 18, and if the picture was more salacious (in this picture, she was nude, but shot from the hips up with game controllers covering her areola and nipples), then I would inadvertently be guilty. As far as I know, tumblr has no mechanism for preventing someone from uploading such material and criminalizing everyone on their RSS feed.

[orcaarrow.livejournal.com]

A very valid and cogent point.I still clear of ANYTHING I think is anywhere near underage. I agree Tumblr has no apparatus for dealing with underage photos.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting point. Tumblr's based in the United States (New York, if I recall correctly) and so is subject to the usual sanctions. I'd be surprised if they didn't use one of those content monitoring services, the kind where the employees get regular therapy after learning just how much truly ugly stuff some of their fellow citizens carry around in their heads.

I haven't seen anything that strikes me as quite so risky in any of the feeds I currently subscribe to. I did unsubscribe from one a while back, not because of age issues, but because every once in a while, between pretty shots of naked women, he would post the most disturbingly violent image, as if to get a fall (certainly not a rise) out of the viewer.

Not porn, but interesting photos on a real estate site

[lemur123.livejournal.com]

http://www.redfin.com/WA/Grayland/1747-Schmid-Rd-98547/home/22209348