Like other platforms, Tumblr is not one where I can be found, so I come at this from a distance. Others, apparently, were users and found certain content unsavory, which was pretty much Tumblr’s reason to exist.

Though Tumblr was born alongside most other modern social networks, it’s long been associated with a certain countercultural deviance. Founder David Karp launched it in 2007 when he was just 20, and his much-vaunted hoodie-wearing ethos helped give the site a permanently youthful attitude — even an air of “millennial narcissism.”

Tumblr’s younger, digital-savvy denizens made Tumblr into a center of internet culture, churning out memes and cultivating subcultures from fandoms to study bloggers to digital art collectives. But despite all this, the site has long been plagued by an unfairly dismissive cultural reputation that reduces the entire vibrant platform to a vast repository of porn, and not much else.

Does that mean Tumblr turned into a porn site, or was porn inherent in the deviant “digital-savvy denizens” culture? No matter.

Tumblr’s association with porn is part of a longstanding media narrative that has perpetually dismissed the site and its users for its relative youth, its progressive politics, its fandom leanings, and its predominantly queer and feminist user base.

Whether you’re a fan of porn, or anything else that appeared at Tumblr, its new owner, Verizon, decided to clean up the cesspool.

“There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content,” chief executive Jeff D’Onofrio wrote in a blog post Monday. “We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.”

Welcoming is a relative word, as Wesley Yang explained in a twit.

Story in four acts pic.twitter.com/ka8Luh7Wat

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) May 3, 2019

Tying a wholesome bow of “welcoming” around a platform, while ridding it of the demon porn, has enormous appeal to those condemning the awfulness of things they find repugnant. There is no shortage of things unduly passionate people find repugnant these days, and porn is high on the list (hat tip to Andrea Dworkin).

But the nice folks demanding that the internet be turned into PG entertainment, eschewing all the nasty things they find disgusting, aren’t the people who use it, who want it, who pay for it, and for whose eyeballs others will pay. You can’t maintain an internet consisting of a cabal of scolds telling you to stop being horrifying and exhausting.

It doesn’t appear that Tumblr is quite dead yet, but the irony of Pornhub picking it up at a fire sale has a certain tastiness to its irony. The broader message, and one that every platform wishing to survive should heed, is that its users want what they want, and they will not be micromanaged by the owner of the platform to sate whatever purity is demanded by the scolds.

For all the empty words murdered in furtherance of a more “decent” world, people will come or not with utter disregard for what the scolds want them to consume. If they want porn, whether for its artistry or prurience, then your options are to give them that or wave good-bye. You can’t force people to consume PG Tumblr if X-rated Tumblr is why they came. You can no more shame them into decency than demand they watch the WNBA so women players can achieve pay parity with men. It’s not personal. It’s just business.

Facebook just announced that it has banned Alex Jones, Louis Farrakhan and others.

Facebook’s move is one of the tech industry’s broadest actions to punish high-profile extremists at a time when social media companies are under fire for allowing hateful content and misinformation to spread on their services.

If you despise what these people have to say, you don’t have to see it. Facebook can’t make you. But the problem is that others despise it and don’t want anyone to see it, even though these are “high profile” extremists. What makes them high-profile is that people, apparently, want to see what they say, even if other people want to prevent that from happening because they are more decent and less hateful. At least that’s their story and they’re sticking with it.

Granted, Facebook is far bigger, and far more fundamental to the existing social media universe, than Tumblr, and is far more unlikely to commit suicide by cleansing itself of extremists. But at some point, at the insistence of the scolds to remake the digital world into whatever they deem to be sufficiently pure and decent, the people who liked it as it was, who used it as they did and who gave rise to this horrible internet that the scolds wish to destroy fix, like Carry Nation ridding America of demon rum, will find somewhere else to play.
People want what they want, regardless of what the scolds tell us to want.

You’ll like what I tell you to like.