Age distribution of different groups of producers and consumers of porn content on Tumblr (above) and Flickr (below). The mean age, median age, standard deviation and proportion of minor users (under 18) are indicated. Source: Social Media Pornography article published in Proceedings of the 10th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. ICWSM 2016, arXiv: 1612.08157v2

Many users of the Tumblr social network already know that from December 17, 2018, the site prohibits publishing porn on its platform . Site owners think they will get better content this way: see the blog post “Better, More Positive Tumlr”. But some experts believe that with such actions Tumblr actually cuts the bitch on which he sits - and this could be the beginning of the end of the social network that traditionally serves fans of “strawberries” and is largely identified with porn.

How Much Tumblr Pornography? Last year, it was attempted by a group of researchers from the IMT Vocational School in Lucca, the Institute of Informatics and Technology in Pisa (both from Italy) and Bell Labs. Their scientific article was published in January 2017. It turned out that about 22% of Tumlr users view mostly pornographic content on the site . Among them, the proportion of young girls is especially high.

The study is based on the behavior of 130 million users, which represents about half of the entire Tumblr user base. "About 30 million active accounts either actively consumed content for adults, or shared it again, or folovil account of producers of pornkontsenty," commentedLuca Aiello, one of the authors of the study, and now a senior researcher at Nokia Bell Labs. “I expect that [after the ban on porn] this audience will have a noticeable drop in involvement: some will simply go away, and many will probably significantly reduce the time spent on the site.”

In addition to 22% of active consumers, another 28%, or about 40 million users, accidentally encountered pornography on Tumblr. This means that they are not looking for porn, but they have fouled someone who published it. Probably, someone from these "casual viewers" complained about what they saw. Maybe a large number of complaints was one of the reasons why Tumblr made this decision.

The study showed that there are far more women among Tumblr users than on many social networks. On the estimates of scientists, the average age of users is 26 years, and among them 72% of women. At the same time, the most active consumer group of porn is young women aged 20–25 years. For example, the women's magazine Glamor recommends Tumlr to its readers as "a safe place to find a nice porn on the Internet."

The scientific article “Consumption of Pornography in Social Media” was published on January 20, 2017 on the preprints website arXiv.org (arXiv: 1612.08157v2), and then in the journal Proceedings of the 10th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media . ICWSM 2016.

Reddit enthusiasts are desperately saving porn with Tumblr

After the sad announcement of Tumblr, the Internet reacted with predictable fury, writes The Next Web .

On the famous Reddit website, special teams were organized to preserve porn content from the platform. Since yesterday, they launched a stormy activity. The campaign was initiated by the user u / itdnhr : he single-handedly saved about 67,000 Tumblr pornaccounts with all the contents — and made a huge list. Then shared the collected data in the r / Datasets community. Here, like-minded people helped filter out inactive accounts, leaving 43,000 accounts with really relevant information.

Preserving content from Tumblr porn blogs is not an easy task, let alone a potential violation of the law. Now in the porno archive there are about 25 TB of data. The easiest solution would be to download it as a torrent, but a file of this size will not be easy to download. It is not clear on which media to save it: most users do not have sufficient storage format. Alternatively, it is proposed to divide the file into parts or distribute through a single link or a series of links on a private server. But even if you divide the porno archive into 25 parts, downloading and saving a terabyte file is not a pleasure for everyone. In addition, there is a risk that the archive will be prohibited materials for the storage and distribution of which provides criminal liability in many countries around the world.

However, while legal risks do not quench the enthusiasm in the largest Reddit communities for archiving content. Users are still stubbornly looking for a solution on how best to preserve Tumblr’s unique, endangered content.