the lost world of tumblr

Eight months after the Great Tumblr Purge, the site appears to be going the way of MySpace now. Press reports of its sale to the owners of WordPress this week suggested the price tag was just $3 million, down by a factor of 300 on what Verizon paid for it just two years ago. Which reminds us, again, of MySpace in the doomed tenure of Murdoch's empire.

Here is a very detailed article in El Mundo which cites the $3 million price as a fact, while the Guardian calls it unconfirmed.

(UPDATE 21.8. I like this analysis asking: Could WordPress + Tumblr create an alternative to Facebook? which would be good but I'm not terribly optimistic.)

Since the purge, I have made it a habit to log into tumblr just once a week to inspect the damage. The situation is very much as it was in January - the art has gone, much of the porn is still there. Clearly censorship has done a brilliant job at blowing this up.



Screenshot of my tumblr archive when I still had one (mid Dec 2018). At that time, I shared a bit more NSFW content than usual in protest against the censorship, upon which I was sent to the naughty corner - no archive, no profile pic, posts can only be accessed by scrolling in a sidebar, so older posts are basically unretrievable (they don't show up in searches either).

One of the effects of the purge is that some NSFW artsy things that would have been all the rage on tumblr are now a bit harder to find. Following my December listing of free the nipple things, here are a few more things that should be on tumblr but don't have a home there any more.

La perla expuesta (a Spencer Tunick style art project connecting public spaces with human forms, which happened in Guadalajara, Mexico, last year apparently).

Performance Leonardo Otero (this is the title of the youtube video, don't know anything else about it, but it also seems to be set in Mexico).

Tove Lo live - a compilation of revealing moments ...

... and speaking of LGBTQ-related synth pop, here's t.A.T.u. in a Sept. 2013 reunion concert which I only just discovered. The notorious stage kisses have given way to hugs, and there are dancers with hilarious costumes and inflatable props, so what's not to like? This has given me some serious noughties nostalgia now. And made me realise that I need to work on reviving my Russian.

Reminiscing of the lost world of tumblr also reminded me of Clayton Cubitt's iconic series of videos Hysterical Literature, which has since then been transferred into many other languages including:
Spanish (?),
Catalan,
Portuguese,
Russian,
Chinese (?) ...
and here's author Candice Dawn using the format to promote her book Reclaiming Eros
and here is one of the original videos with the artist's explanations of his thinking.

PS sadly the alternative site 2mblr which I mentioned in previous posts never became fully functional - last time I checked it still worked as an uncensored archive but not as a live site where you can blog and reblog things. And the last time they copied content across from tumblr appears to have been in early May, so maybe they have given up entirely now?