Tumbling Into Paradise
I’m grumpy about Tumblr sites.
There, I said it.
Not all of them. The best Tumblrs are awesome, sharing tons of well-selected images with as much link credit and attribution info as the poster has available. Often that’s light to non-existent — who doesn’t have a hard drive full of unattributed pictures? — but you can tell, on these Tumblrs, that when the source is known, it gets a link or a mention.
But the worst? The worst are dreadful — reflexively reblogging from other Tumblr sites, never linking to anything from outside the Tumblr ecosystem, and never never never including anything that looks like metadata. Link credit? If it isn’t another Tumblr site, fuggetaboutit. Even when there’s a watermark on the photo, these Tumblrs can’t be arsed to link the source. It doesn’t get any lazier than that.
When I find one of these that’s been put together by somebody with an eye for nice pictures, it’s especially frustrating. All those awesome images, but nothing at all to help somebody track down more of the same, nothing at all in the way of traffic or “props” to encourage the creator to make more just like that, not even some encouragement for whomever scanned the thing and put it on the internet. I’ve got a huge tolerance for “I love this pic but I don’t know a thing about it” — I have to, given the number of these I post myself — but when you’re posting hundreds of pics a month and pretending you don’t know anything about any of them, where they came from, or who made them? The impression comes across, eventually, that you just don’t give a fuck about giving credit where credit is due. And that spoils my enjoyment of a good thing.
OK, rant over. And before y’all say it, I know this isn’t unique to Tumblr sites. It just seems like something about the slick low-friction Tumblr setup attracts or facilitates attributionless image blogging. I’ve seen plenty of blogs in other formats with the same issues; but I never saw so much of it, so attractively presented, until Tumblr came along.
But still, I can’t stay away. Here’s your payoff for reading my rant: a few tasty pictures found on Tumblr sites, provenance sadly unknown despite endless reblogging within the Tumblr network.
- cheerful and enthusiastic ass licking
- woman bound by the neck to an iron bed
- fellatio, a low-angle closeup view
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=4740
Hallelujah! I run a Tumblr blog, too, and it can be a real pain in the ass to try to track down attribution credit and set up links to this, that, and the other.
Still, it’s the right thing to do. In fact, I see it as the honorable thing to do.
Really chaps my ass to see people lazily clicking “Reblog” and then moving on without a second thought. Makes the rest of us look bad.
Huh. I never thought about it. I maintain a tumblr, but mostly to share images I like with my partner and some like-minded friends. I’m not building an empire, here, so sometimes the easiest thing to do is hit “reblog,” which I do quite frequently. I don’t hit reblog “without a second thought,” though; sometimes I use that tool to get into conversations with the prior posters, and I nearly always identify what about the photos I liked or was drawn to. I guess it depends on who your intended audience is and what your aim is. I’m not trying to steal others’ hard work, but to share it with people who wouldn’t encounter it otherwise.
What the heck is a “tumblr” site?
Three exemplary links were provided.
The lack of attribution is frustrating. Yet, the tumblr game – and that ‘s really how I see it, a game – is like heroin. I can’t stop.
Many of the flaws are built in to the system; for example, ‘reblog’ is a two-click action, so forwarding on pictures without any attribution but that already attached is the default. There’s also no meaningful way to contact the owners of tumblr blogs, so you can’t even say ‘hey, that’s mine please add attribution’.
But for now, i’m finding it delightful, if harmful to my productivity. It’s a sort of pornOtwitter, with an endless stream of erotic, odd and funny imagery. Tumblr’s 15 minutes will be up all too soon, but I’m enjoying the hell out of it for now.
Oh, and thanks for the link to my page, above. B^)
This is one of my favorite Tumblr sites…
http://easilyar....com/
Try paintingsilke.tumblr.com and many of the other sites under “painting” in the Tumblr directory. You will find that many of these people are serious about these works of art, providing links and often insightfull commentary.
I understand the frustration. You’ve been kind enough to re-post some of the things I’ve Tumbled here, always properly credited of course. The problem arises I think from the variety of uses people have for Tumbling — and yeah, you’re right, the slick interface makes laziness easy. I started Tumbling really as a way to give myself some incentive to scan and document the piles of old paper around my house and occasionally help promo my partner Angela Caperton’s erotic fiction. I was lazy at first too, but pretty quickly learned the Tumblr etiquette, at least as it applies to vintage stuff. For many Tumblrs, I don’t think Tumblr is anything more than a cascade of images and it would never occur to them to credit something. Frustrating, yes, but the Tumbling experience overall is one of the most graphically entertaining things I’ve seen on the web in awhile.
I’ve found flickr to be an excellent fountain of filth.
The images range from raunchy to the deliciously perverse. Using blogger as a posting platform does have an upside. In that it’s possible to give the photographer and the “girls” their due.
Drake, you’re one of the good ones — I’ve had Drake’s Way open in a browser tab for about two months now until I can find the time to finish mining you for goodies. ;-)
I’m getting the sense — from sauce monkey and Karl for example — that the Tumblr interface doesn’t exactly encourage adding info about image provenance. And yet it’s clearly possible to do it.
I *definately* don’t want to go too far out on a limb here, because it’s so easy to someone to come along and cast stones at me for my own sins. If I see something and immediately blog it, I try to be religious about credit. But if I right-click and “save as”, a year later when I find the image on my hard drive, I won’t know where it comes from and I won’t be able to give a good credit. I don’t let it worry me; I see the blogging credit ethos as being a “best efforts” sort of deal — you share the info you have, as Drake does when he’s still got the magazine in front of him that he scanned from.
It’s the Tumblr people who never once bother to drop a link, that bother me.
Drake, your Tumblr is awesome. (clicks “follow”).
I have often (and by often I mean far more than I should reasonably have done if I was as productive as I want to be) clicked on a link and found myself on a Tumblr site with exactly this problem – and no matter how good the images are I have always closed the tab, without hesitation, simply as a matter of principal.
There are a number of really good Tumblr sites (I personally visit http://syntheti....com/ daily – and have added those above to look at) but they are far and few between.
The fact that so few Tumblrs (tumblers?) make any effort at all is, to me, symptomatic of a wider internet culture that has no respect for anyone else and exists within a myopic world view where anything and everything is there for the taking – without any attempt to contribute in any original form whatsover.
Yes – this is a personal bugbear of mine as even a clever little idea like Stumble takes you to site after site of repeated and stolen content.
I guess I should finish with thanks to the content creators – amongst which I count all contributors (and links) on this site – you have my respect and gratitude.. for what it is worth.