lines-and-edges:

poeticarmageddon:

NGL I got kinda into the anti kink mindset a year or so back, so I do understand how easy it is to get into these things. You see something you don’t like and then someone else validates you for not liking that and here’s a whole bunch of buzzwords on why they’re the worst people ever. It’s pretty easy especially when you think you’re based in the write because in my mind the kinksters were crosstagging so they deserved to be called out. This is probably what gets a lot of young antis into this, so I get it. Y’all need to realize though exposing yourselves to something that grosses you out isn’t going to do anything. Flag a post if it’s crosstagged out into something it shouldn’t be. Block blogs that produce content you don’t like. You’re in charge of what you see online, so take some initiative instead of complaining.

Thanks for speaking about this.

I feel like there’s also a lot of need to talk about the way broken Tumblr infrastructure has been a major cause of this toxicity.

For several years it used to be that tags were discrete from each other and post contents did not dump the post into the tag.

So for example if you had a character named Wolfsword Weedbutt, there would be different search results for #wolfsword, #wolfsword weedbutt, and any other variants; and if you tagged a post #wolfsword wrapped in clingfilm (for example) it would not go into the main tags for that character.

Another way to keep things out of the main tag, in that time frame, was to put the tag after the first five on the post, so that you could tag a post: #/ #// #/// #//// #///// #wolfsword weedbutt, and have it organized into the Wolfsword Weedbutt tag on your blog without attracting anyone else’s attention.

Now site tags are broken and replaced with a standard search engine. So now even if someone tags their post #clingfilm, and only *mentions* the character in the main post, it still appears in the main tag.

And all of this happened, I recall, a little over a year ago. I don’t remember the exact date; only that discourse changed from a regular-ass garbage fire to a damn oil spill around then.

This change, like most of the changes on this ill-run mess of a website, was introduced by Tumblr without rolling out an explanation to users; so it’s easy to encounter people who still don’t know about it. This includes both the people who post about something and don’t expect their posts to wind up in the main tags, and the people who run across said posts and assume it’s happening on purpose.