N asks:

Did you leave tumblr because they removed the porn?
(But seriously why don’t you like it anymore)

There’s no “anymore” about it; I don’t think I ever really liked Tumblr.  I started using it in the first place back in 2012 because a friend recommended it as (I’m paraphrasing) the hip and happening place to be, but frankly it was never very well-suited to the style of my blog.  Over the course of 2012-2017, it somehow managed to lose functionality and become harder to use every goddamn time the platform was updated.  It’s like the development team were moving backwards in time, starting with a passable, albeit idiosyncratic, blogging platform and gradually breaking or removing every useful capability.  For about a year before I left, I’d had to copy-paste my writing into the post editor via my e-mail inbox because if I tried to do it directly from Microsoft Word, Tumblr would decide to convert the text into an image, for some inane and impenetrable reason of its own.  The final straw for me (early in 2018, some months before the announcement of the pornpocalypse) was when they arbitrarily changed the HTML editor in a way that broke the captions of every single image I’ve ever put in a text post.  WordPress isn’t perfect either: I have to pay for it, I’ll have to pay more if I ever want CSS editing or anything else even remotely interesting, and redoing all the formatting that I lost in the transfer from Tumblr has been (and continues to be) a headache and a half.  The editing process is so much less broken and dumb that it’s frankly comical, though. I no longer feel like I have to fight against a platform that wants to impose a contrary vision of what a “blog” is supposed to be. Also, I have to admit that there’s something appealing and official-sounding about having my own .com domain name.

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