Tumblr actually became huge because it is the anti-blog. What is the No. 1 reason that people quit blogging? Because they can’t find and develop an audience. This has been true of every blogging platform ever made. Conversely, blogs that do find an audience tend to keep adding that type of content. This simple philosophy boils down to the equation: Mo’ pageviews = mo’ pages.
But Tumblr does not conform to this calculus, and the reason is that a large percentage of Tumblr users actually don’t WANT an audience. They do not want to be found, except by a few close friends who they explicitly share one of their tumblogs with. Therefore Tumblr’s notoriously weak search functionality is A-OK with most of its user base.
Tumblr provides its users with the oldest privacy-control strategy on the Internet: security through obscurity and multiple pseudonymity. Its users prefer a coarse-grained scheme they can easily understand over a sophisticated fine-grained privacy control — such as Facebook provides — that requires a lot of time and patience. To quote Sweet Brown, Ain’t nobody got time for that.
Tumblr proves that the issue is less about public vs. private and more about whether you are findable and identifiable by people who actually know you in real life.
Most Tumblr content falls into three categories:
1.Photos of young people’s daily lives: studying, buying things, hanging out with friends. Many of these photos are from Instagram or the Tumblr mobile app, which is now quite good.
2.Entertaining memes and gifs they find on Tumblr and re-share with their friends. A teenage friend of mine told me recently that he tries to post something to his Tumblog on an hourly basis — which requires endless scouring of other Tumblogs for re-bloggable content. Fortunately, the Tumblr Dashboard is designed specifically with this goal in mind: consume lots of things and “reblog” easily. This is where the topic-based photobloggers add value to the ecosystem; it’s why we see Tumblr encouraging the seeding of “rebloggable” content — such as live-Tumbling The Grammys.
3.Porn and near-porn collections for personal use, usually under a different pseudonym. (Protip: searches on many keywords at 11 p.m. yield VERY different results than the same searches at 11 a.m. And there’s a NSFW setting if you truly don’t want to see any of it.)
I've messed around with Tumblr a little out of boredom. It can be a little buggy at times but it's interesting. I can post videos from my cell phone to it and it converts them. I mentioned in a previous thread that with Google Drive, I could convert cell phone videos to an avi format and upload them and it let me play them in a player, but it took out the sound. When Tumblr converts, it keeps the audio portion.
Interesting experience with Tumblr's terms of service. Didn't think anyone would pay attention to what was uploaded as long as a site was kept private and low profile. Not so. I couple of short videos I tried to upload never showed up and I got emails telling me they were in violation of the terms of service, don't do it again. Some other videos I uploaded were allowed.
Then I logged in this morning and three of the four videos were gone and I'd received more emails telling me they were in violation. Weird.
I also thought it was pretty much anything goes. But deep down in the TOS, there is a note that they don't allow posting of videos of a sexual nature because they take up too much bandwidth and that makes it too expensive for them to host. I hadn't even noticed that line until they sent me the notices.
All the videos were short 15 second vids I took with my cellphone with my ex-GF. The first group was four videos of her giving me a blowjob one morning and those were the ones that were immediately blocked. I get why they blocked those.
Two vids were of her masturbating with her hand and those were allowed for about a week. This morning, they were deleted and I got emails.
The last two vids were from one day when she wanted me to take pics/vids of her masturbating with a banana. The two vids were allowed to stay up for about a week. This morning, one was deleted but the other was left up. Weird. No idea why they took action now.
LOL. For the moment, you can probably attach short videos to your posts for download. There are embedding solutions but I'm not sure our web host supports them.
Not sure I want to do that. I know I can upload them to my photobucket account and keep it under the radar for at least a little while. But I wouldn't know how to post the embedded vids here if you guys wanted to see them.
Interestingly, I found that Tumblr does allow you to post dirty videos, so long as you host the video on a different site, then link to it on Tumblr. All about the bandwidth.
