cfiesler:

I have talked to four journalists today and have agreed to write a press piece that I need to start on, but obviously it’s important that I finally sit down and post on Tumblr, too.

This is a weird feeling: I literally think that I am the world’s foremost effort on the potential impact of Tumblr banning adult content.

Here’s why: I’ve done a bunch of research about the genesis of AO3/OTW, and most recently, a large-scale study of fandom’s migration across platforms over time. I can tell you for a fact that both fanfiction.net’s and LiveJournal’s bans on adult content resulted in fans leaving those sites–and in LiveJournal’s case, essentially the death of that platform for fandom. 

The image above, if you haven’t seen it before, shows fandom platform use over time, and the red line that dips drastically is LiveJournal, after “Strikethrough 2007.”

Here’s another finding from that study: That policy was the #1 reason that fans left LiveJournal. For every other platform, fans mostly left because something better came along, but nope, for LiveJournal, it was specifically because of their crackdown on “obscene” content, and what that signaled to fandom about how they were unwelcome there.

I’m going to be posting more about this in the coming days, so watch this space, but here’s my tweetstorm from today, here’s a CNN article I’m quoted in, and here’s another Tumblr post with an optimistic view. As I wrote recently in a TWC piece about how I see the future of fandom, “fandom is not helpless to external forces—to platforms, industries, or even policies.” I believe that.

If history repeats itself, then Tumblr might fall as LiveJournal did – but something better might come to take its place.