Yahoo, in its bid to stay relevant – or to become relevant once again – recently purchased Tumblr from its 12-year-old high school drop out founder for a gazillion dollars (consider my failure to fact check any of that information as an homage to the accuracy of the information highway). Tumblr, for those of you who have been living in a cave, is a free blog hosting website / social media site that encourages its users to interact through sharing – or reblogging – posts they find that they like and hope their blog followers will like too. It’s a formalized attempt to promote photos and videos to go viral. Easy to use and quick to click through, Tumblr is about microblogging. In other words if this post was on Tumblr instead of WordPress, I’d have to stop writing now as I’ve already said too much. That naked guy’s photo above is where it is really at. And by now it would have been reblogged about 56,748 times.

Tumblr hosts over 108 million blogs. Not bad for a web-hosting sit that couldn’t even afford to buy a vowel at its start-up. It’s popularity has made those who – with nose stuck firmly in the air (or stuck elsewhere) – like to whine about copyright laws and personal websites that fail to credit the source of photographs posted thereon look like the prissy bastards they are; the majority of the 75.8 million daily posts created on Tumblr are reblogged photos and videos. You may call it stealing, I call it sharing. And nothing is more fun to share than pictures of naked hotties.

Tumblr claims less than 5% of its content is adult in nature. Not that you’d expect a high school drop out to be good at math. Sure there are far too many Tumblr blogs devoted to photos of cute kittens doing funny things, but most of those bloggers spend the majority of their time on Christian Singles.com looking to meet the mate that God has selected for them, so they are easy to ignore. The rest of the platform is devoted to cute naked guys and gals doing even cuter things. At least in my opinion. Not that I actually believe naked fish doing anything is cute, but I am a broad minded individual and willingly allow others to pursue their personal perversions no matter how disgusting they may be.

And there’s the rub. As well as the tug. If you wanted to spend the better part of your day clicking through Tumblr blog after Tumblr blog filled with photos of hot naked Asian men, it was fine with them. And they made sure there were enough micro-blogs devoted to naked rice that if you wanted to spend your week instead of your day doing so, you’d never run out of fresh flesh content. That’s how you end up with a website with hundreds of millions of users valued at over a gazillion dollars practically over night. By offering internet surfers what they want: free gay porn.

And thanks to that no holds barred attitude toward content Tumblr – heralded as being bigger than Wikipedia – was cool. Yahoo once was too. But that was back before most internet users active today were even born. Now, Yahoo decided for a few gazillion dollars they too could be cool again. And drive a few million users to their site by purchasing Tumblr, lock, stock, and cuming barrel. How cool is that? Not very. Less than a week after the deal was struck those cool folk at Yahoo have decided porn is bad and there is no place for it on their version of Tumblr. Yahoo, it should be noted, is appropriately named as it describes those with decision making powers at the destined to never be relevant again company.

Yahoo didn’t purchase Tumblr for its content, it was purchased for its access to millions of internet users so Yahoo could sell advertizing. So the first thing they’ve done is to get rid of 80% of their intended audience. They could have bought My Space for a lot less moola and ended up with the same result. No problemo. I don’t own stock in Yahoo. So I don’t care that they figured out how to one-up Coke’s smooth move when it decided to ditch its insanely popular product for a new version no one wanted. But that they have entered the fray devoted to ridding the internet of porn pisses me off. To no end. And least not a happy one.

You can still find the porn of your preference on Tumblr. If you know where to look for it. But all adult sites as well as those that have ever posted NSFW content no longer show up on Tumblr tag pages – which is the popular way to navigate through Tumblr and the best way to find the type of content that gives you a chub. Tags were also the source used for indexing Tumblr blogs on search engines. So the next time you search for Big Dick Asians, Tumblr’s offerings will not be included in your results. It’s kinda like if you took a city’s world-renown red light district and plopped a night market smack in its middle so you could start drawing families with children to the area. Mom and Dad will still be concerned about explaining to little Tommy why he can’t play ping pong with the adults, while those with an itch to scratch have to push their way through hordes of wide-eyed couples who met on Christian Singles.com just to get to where they can pay for a fucking orgasm. It’s a lose/lose proposition. With no happy endings in sight.

Sure there is still lots of free porn available on-line. Porn was, after all, what the internet was invented for. Thanks to the internet, little future porn addicts no longer have to slink into a seedy, adult book store to surreptitiously buy whack off material and hope they don’t run into their fathers doing the same while there. Thanks to the internet, with just a few clicks of your mouse you can now discover what vagina really looks like. And why you should avoid it. Young gay men who have yet to learn the wonders of dick up close and personal, can find website after website that will teach them just what to do once they land the real thing. And because practice makes perfect, the ready availability of internet porn ensures those ready to lose their virginity not only know what to do, but are proficient at doing it the first time out of the gate. Sex, between two consenting adults is natural. It’s the part of mother nature we are all drawn to. And you should not fuck with Mother Nature.

Unfortunately – and even though searches for porn always rank in the top ten worldwide – the internet powers that be have recently begun trying to keep porn from the masses. Yahoo’s decision to de-porn Tumblr is just the latest shot in this puritanical battle. Google already has done its damnedest to make finding porn as difficult as masturbating without lube. Its ‘safe mode’ search apparatus is now the default – and just try to figure out how to cancel that puppy without signing in so that the company can track your porn surfing habits and forward that info to the government. If it is the good stuff you are searching for, Google is no longer gonna help you find it. Its search algorithms are now designed to seat sites with adult content at the back of the bus. It seems the internet is quickly forgetting that the pursuit of happiness is guaranteed by our Constitution.

Censorship and the internet have never gone hand in hand. Especially when the content was the stuff that got your hands busy. And despite the evidence that proves otherwise, Yahoo and Google will tell you they are not engaged in censorship. Just like those responsible for the new voting laws enacted in pro-racists states during the last election cycle claimed their actions had nothing to do with racism. Neither Yahoo or Google have banned porn. They have just built walls around it. And then imbedded broken glass bottles along the top of those walls to make them that much more difficult to scale. Like Yahoo, Google is no longer considered to be cool. And the company’s efforts at putting porn into the ghetto it feels porn deserves is part of the reason why.

I don’t have a Tumblr. This blog is hosted by WordPress; they offer their own brand of censorship for adult content. When I started this blog I decided to register it as a site with mature content, a form of self-censorship that conversely allowed me to post whatever photos and/or narrative I chose. Considering the main focus of what I intended to write about, it was the right call. Like with Yahoo’s decision to ban adult related tags on Tumblr, that meant anyone using WordPress’ tags for navigation would never find my blog. No problemo. Preventing little Tommy from accidently discovering why his uncle spends so much time visiting Pattaya is a good thing. And Google loved me anyway, happily returning my blog as an option when you searched for an innocuous phrase such as ‘gay Thailand.’ Ah, those were the days.

Since Google began it’s porn-free search paradigm you now have to be damn specific about what you are looking for before the search engine will admit this blog exists. Where once Google was responsible for sending over 3,000 surfers to my blog daily, now it directs about a third of those here. And today, a search on ‘gay Thailand’ instead returns oh-so-useful sites like Da Boss’ message board that even the Bitch Board can’t convince people to visit. Google’s decision to consider this blog diseased hasn’t hurt my numbers. The company’s other equally ridiculous decisions of late have driven enough surfers to alternate search engine sights, search engines that have not yet jumped on the porn censorship bandwagon. Google, no doubt in an effort to become relevant again itself will soon one day buy Yahoo. ‘Cuz everyone knows when it comes to the internet, cool is always for sale to the highest bidder.

I’d like to think the no-porn web of the future is more about advertising dollars than it is about censorship. Admittedly, it is more difficult to attract large corporate sponsors to advertise on your platform when it is known for large amounts of porn content. Like Tumblr once was. WordPress makes its money off of inserting advertising on the blogs its hosts, something you probably have never noticed on mine thanks to all the dick you may have noticed instead. But there has to be a happy medium. One that brings in advertising dollars as well as providing content to whack to. And those responsible for the internet’s future need to realize more surfers are in favor of the latter than of the former.

Thirty years ago no one could have predicted how ingrained the internet would become in our daily lives. Thirty years from now, it could be talked about as 8 track tapes are today. Emulating broadcast television and its attempt to offend none, instead of the success of subscription cable channels like HBO who rake in profits by giving viewers what they really want, may not be the best way to go. Banning something you do not approve of, no matter how slyly you attempt to do so, has never been an effective way to force your morals on others. Especially when dick is involved.

In the meantime, consider today’s post a vote for an internet filled with free porn. Or just enjoy the pix of naked, hard guys. Because the day may come when that enjoyment is no longer something the internet offers.

Related Posts You Might Enjoy: