Despite the looming fear of social media exodus, many fandom Tumblr users will staunchly remain on the platform

Since its inception in 2007, Tumblr has been famously (perhaps infamously) lax about its policies when it comes to NSFW posts. But in an effort to clean up its image in the name of creating “the most welcoming environment possible for our community,” Tumblr announced new policies last week to curtail adult content, which includes sexually explicit photographs, GIFs and videos, and nude images that contain “female-presenting nipples.”

The news has not been well-received.

Across social media — on Tumblr, yes, but also Twitter and other platforms where users are encouraged to share thoughts and original content — people are protesting these changes. Those opposing the new guidelines agree that there are massive issues with automated porn bots across Tumblr, as well as content such as child pornography, suicide and self-harm glorification, and rampant hate speech proliferating through the site’s darker corners. But they argue that filtering out all adult content indiscriminately was not the way to go.

The crackdown on NSFW content will obviously have widespread consequences for sex positivity blogs, but there’s another big question: What do these new policies mean for the fandom-geared communities that Tumblr has fostered since 2007?

For some longtime participants of the online fandom world, Tumblr’s adult content crackdown is an eerie reminder of the purges of content in other online spaces in the past. Particularly cited is LiveJournal, which — after the site’s implementation of heavy content censorship in 2007 — experienced a mass migration to other platforms and never fully recovered its user base or reputation.

In 2018, LiveJournal is basically just a memory, a name that doesn’t register with the younger members of the fandom world. The comparisons to what happened in the past are rampant, and those who were around for previous content crackdowns are quick to call Tumblr just as doomed as platforms like LiveJournal.

Despite these constant warnings and the impending policy changes, many Tumblr communities across the platform say they will stick around. They’re concerned, certainly, and they’re definitely not happy about the new rules, but a quick glance around the platform reveals that many users plan to stand by the site, even if it crashes and burns.

Death by censorship?

LiveJournal is part of the reason Tumblr has such a large fandom-driven user base.

Fan communities have existed since the genesis of the internet, and in the mid-2000s, fandom-specific message boards gave way to LiveJournal, which combined the archival space of blogs with the social interaction of forums. When the blogging platform instituted censorship policies in 2007, it deleted troves of content — fan art, fan fiction, whole communities came under fire because of the new guidelines.

The new Tumblr policies ring the same sort of bell.

“It’s so similar [to LiveJournal] that it’s one of the reasons why I think this could be pretty significant,” Dr. Casey Fiesler, assistant professor of information science at the University of Colorado Boulder and an expert on online fandom spaces, told Polygon.

“When LiveJournal cracked down on what they were deeming obscene content, they ended up deleting a lot of accounts of fan artists and even some fan fiction communities,” she said. “Also caught up in that were things like communities for sexual assault survivors. One of the results of that was that there was a mass exodus from LiveJournal from fandom participants.”

LiveJournal itself decided what was “inappropriate,” which meant that whole swaths of LGBTQ+ content ended up getting removed. Those on Tumblr who migrated directly from LiveJournal in the exodus are greatly unsettled by the new Tumblr guidelines, which remind them of what happened in the past.

“I am looking around at everything I’ve built and all the friends I’ve made and I know we’re all looking for the next safe space to jump to while hoping we don’t lose each other overnight like ‘the olden days’ where you’d wake up and your fave blogger was just gone,” wrote one Tumblr user. “And usually it was because they’d drawn or written something as simple yet explicit as a kiss. It was just the wrong kind of kiss.”

Tumblr’s guidelines seem tame for now; the site will not boot anyone off the platform, and it will not outright delete anything. Instead, Tumblr says it will make NSFW posts private so that only the original blog owner has access to them. Full blogs that get marked as explicit can continue to post, so long as they don’t violate the new terms and conditions.

That’s how LiveJournal started out, older users will counter, with terms that didn’t seem “too bad.” But the company kept changing those guidelines, becoming more and more strict, until the damage was irreparable.

”I don’t think that [LiveJournal] ever really got that community back,” said Fiesler.

If Tumblr follows suit and tightens its belt, the community says it could lead straight to the end. They may be forgetting one crucial detail: There’s a huge amount of Tumblr users who are stubbornly loyal to the platform, and they have no intention of going anywhere.

Weathering the storm ahead

“Just to be clear, I’m staying here as long as this site functions,” reads one post with over 100,000 notes in just a few days. “I have 0 intentions of deleting this blog, I will go down with this ship if only to see exactly how bad it gets.”

While plenty of users are crying out in panic, it’s very clear from a quick glance at the memes and posts across Tumblr dashboards that the average person intends to stick around.

That’s partly because a similar platform doesn’t really exist. Tumblr users have had issues with the site in the past, but there is nothing quite like it out there that can manage a user base as large as the one Tumblr has cultivated over the past 10 years. While alternatives like Twitter and WordPress, as well as confident newcomers like Pillowfort.io, are available, the first two are missing critical components of what makes Tumblr a good fandom hub (Twitter lacks a good blogging format; WordPress lacks a good social one). Pillowfort is still in beta and does not yet have the infrastructure or name recognition to be a viable alternative.

Fiesler’s research reveals that even after the content purges on LiveJournal, the site’s user base stuck around for another few years, until a feasible alternative (in this case, Tumblr) popped up. After Tumblr gained traction, LiveJournal lost its hold. Now, without a solid alternative for Tumblr users to leave for — and many users say they have tried out the suggested ones — many people are not planning on budging.

Digital artist Eluari, who’s active in various fandoms and takes portrait commissions for Dragon Age, Mass Effect and other video game series, tells Polygon that she is one of the people who feel too attached to leave.

“While I do use other social media as well, Tumblr has always felt like home to me,” Eluari said. “I couldn’t really get into either Instagram or Twitter, since I also enjoy text-based posts and both don’t seem to encourage it.”

She’s not totally averse to trying something new, though.

“There is a lot of talk about Pillowfort as a new and better replacement for Tumblr and I might try it out,” she said. “But once again, I don’t plan on leaving Tumblr unless I can see a massive decline in community activity.”

Multiple Tumblr-specific quirks help encourage a returning audience. The anonymity behind a personal URL and an icon is key, since many other sites ask for names and phone numbers. Tumblr’s feed curation is so much easier and more insular than Twitter that you could very well just surround yourself with 19th-century art prints, Pokémon fan art or song lyrics, and never get dragged into political discourse, as so often happens on other sites.

Tumblr has also fostered specific fandoms, such as vast role-playing communities, that aren’t easy to replicate elsewhere.

Amanda, an avid role-player who manages a role-play help site, said they’re also going to stay on the site. Tumblr role-playing is easy to get into, they told Polygon, and allows for more customization than other sites. But across the role-play community, they said, users are preparing for the impending content moderation.

“I don’t think [the role-play community will be] heavily affected,” Amanda told Polygon. “But I do think it will be affected somewhat.”

The community is circulating guidelines on what these new policies will mean for role-players, reminding people that while writing smut will still be allowed, they’ll have to stop posting pornographic GIFs. To many role-players, it’s not anything different from when Tumblr got rid of editable reblogs: They’re simply adapting to new formats.

“THEY AREN’T KICKING YOU OFF,” said one much-reblogged post in the role-play community, describing the new policy as a “removal of content, not people.”

This could sound idealistic, especially considering older users’ stories of the content purges that happened on LiveJournal and FanFiction.net. But as far as how the Tumblr guidelines read for now, no users will get banned from the platform for NSFW posts.

Tumblr’s most loyal are prepared for the ride

Amid the optimism, there is still fear. Protests and petitions are reblogged frequently. Users continue to list their other social media “just in case,” and post guides on proper etiquette for those platforms. There’s even concern that Tumblr will shut down if its parent company, the Verizon subsidiary known as Oath, deems that the site is no longer viable following the adult content ban. There just isn’t another platform that encapsulates the same features, community and plain ol’ weirdness (and nerdiness) that Tumblr does.

Tumblr breeds a stubborn sort of loyalty. Many call it a “hellsite” or some equivalent with ironic affection, and even though they’re posting about the site going up in flames —backing up their blogs, and admonishing the staff and management for making a ridiculous, out-of-touch decision — they’re going to be on it till the very last post, like and reblog.

“I’ve been on Tumblr for going on 7 years now, and it’s always been a shitshow,” Silv, a multifandom blogger and fan fiction writer, told Polygon. “But it’s also the only place where I’ve been able to [be] as unabashedly nerdy and weird as I am without being judged.

“It’s that weirdness that’s helped me to form some of the most important relationships of my life; some that stayed behind a screen and some that didn’t. It’s the people behind the blogs, the content makers that the staff doesn’t seem to understand, that makes it worth staying around Tumblr.”