Well, in this case it’s a little more like expecting a Nobel prize in medicine because you turned a hospital full of sick people into a vacant lot that you ended up selling for $20.
As for the debate about whether to call things porn, smut, erotica, etc., I expect it’s very local. Like when Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump the “c-word” and the reaction was:
US: Aghast!
Canada (where Bee if from): That’s not out of line with other stuff Samantha Bee says.
UK: What’s the big deal?
AUS: What are all those [c-words] in the US on about?
These differences in how we take naughty words are fascinating to me.
It’s funny to me that every other time tumblr has been sold my dash was filled with panic and worry but now the only people who even commented on it are just laughing at the drop in the site’s value.
I’ve joked that tumblr as of now is basically a whale fall, and those of us that remain are fully aware we’re living in a corpse and riding it to the bottom of the ocean. Basically either the site does better under these new owners and maybe revitalize the community, which would be cool, or we continue our descent as we were already resigned to doing.
I accept that they aren’t changing the rules about adult works but I’d love it if they ditched the algorithm that checks images for naughtiness because it is very bad at doing that and annoying.
Would also love if they brought the color modes from the app to the site because I fuckin hate that high contrast white and dark blue and have had to use an addon to make it not murder my eyes.
I think you’re both right. I think the term originally had connotations of extreme disgust and antisocial prurience among polite society, but it’s exactly because of that silliness, that counter-cultural elements embraced it, and it migrated from horror into sly wink and eventually into camp and nostalgia.
