Tumblr Enantiodromia
“Enantiodromia” is the natural process of things transforming into their opposites. Kind of a yin yang dualism, but from the Ancient Greek. When you used to be a space of sexual liberation, and you transform into a violently bluenosed Mrs Grundy except with robots, that’s “enantiodromia.”
*It takes some ownership changes, commonly. Like: My God, did I buy this? I wanted exactly the opposite!!
About a decade ago, I met up with Tumblr founder David Karp at a SoHo coffee shop. I was a writer for Gawker Media’s porn blog, Fleshbot, and Karp was overseeing the relatively new and still growing microblogging platform. We’d met through New York City’s surprisingly small digital media scene. Over coffee, around the corner from Gawker’s Elizabeth Street office, Karp outlined his vision for what Tumblr could do for porn, and what porn could do for Tumblr in return.
At the time, Tumblr was incredibly friendly to adult content. Twitter was too text-heavy to properly showcase erotic art, and Facebook was too prudish (and not nearly anonymous enough). Tumblr offered a happy medium. It provided enough anonymity to allow users to indulge in porn without ruining their reputations, and it was image-friendly enough to allow users to scroll through pictures with ease (which, along with GIFs, were the most enjoyed adult content on the site).
Many porn professionals looked askance at Tumblr’s adult content, pointing out that much of what was shared on the site was stolen from paysites and redistributed without attribution. But the Tumblr community adored and embraced the cluster of sites that offered “curated” selections of hardcore content, pairing photos and GIFs with quick comments and captions, or oftentimes, just allowing the content to stand on its own, creating an endless scroll of the hottest smut the tumblogger could find.
AT THE TIME, TUMBLR WAS INCREDIBLY FRIENDLY TO ADULT CONTENT
By January 2010, the Tumblr smut community was established enough to get official endorsement; that month, the site’s staff unveiled an officially sanctioned directory of erotic Tumblrs, which was listed alongside similar directories of Tumblrs devoted to art, fashion, photography, and food.
Back when Tumblr was a scrappy startup housed in the offices of Frederator Studios — the company behind Adventure Time — this sort of attitude made sense. Like many tech companies that built their business atop a mountain of user-generated content, Tumblr embraced a “business in the front, party in the back” model of presentation. Casual browsers — or corporate investors — could come to Tumblr and see a clean, friendly site that promoted creativity and connection, while savvy users knew that with the tiniest bit of digging they’d be able to uncover all the smut their heart desired.
For a time, this balance worked out well. In 2013, TechCrunch reported that a full 11.4 percent of the top 200,000 Tumblrs were adult-oriented, and adult sites were sending Tumblr a sizable amount of traffic. Porn helped build Tumblr’s empire, and Tumblr gave porn fans a safe playground to explore their interests, one that enabled them to check out hot smut and hardcore porn without having to venture to the darker, more unpleasant corners of the internet.
But then Tumblr decided to cash out, and that beautiful ecosystem began to collapse.
In spring 2013, Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo! Just a few months later, there were signs that the new ownership wanted to make some changes. By July of that year, Tumblr had set up a complicated filtering system where blogs featuring nudity were now marked either NSFW or adult, with adult blogs disappearing from search and tag pages entirely (a precursor of the “shadowbanning” tactic that would later become the norm on sites like Twitter and Patreon). (((etc etc etc “don’t cry for me Argentina”)))
