Beyond Porno is all about Sexy Win.
For a humorous collection of Sexy Fail, see my sister site, Beneath Porno.
Articles Worth Reading
Humanized Tumbling - My guide on how a few browser enhancements can make your tumbling experience a lot faster, easier, and more enjoyable.How This Site Works - A quick explanation about my content selection process, and why I'll probably delete most of this site's content at some point.
Mixed Feelings About Like - Is tumblr's Like feature useful? Helpful? Does it make the community more interactive? Somehow I don't think so.
Cock From A Reader... - A rant about porno-tumblrs getting lazy and expecting their users to supply them with content.
More Sexy Win
"Cock from a reader.."
Chagrin and BendMeOver are both in my newsfeed. Both of them have so far provided a steady stream of good content, but lately they’ve begun posting user-submitted content to their sites. After seeing BendMeOver’s recent post, entitled “Cock from a reader, thanks for sharing”, I began thinking about the practice of posting user content (particularly cock-shots) more seriously.
Recieving pictures from couples or women (see below for clarification) without solicitation, and being asked to consider them for publishing on your site is probably one of the highest compliments a tumblrist can recieve in this niche of sites.
However, if you solicited the photos from your users it somewhat cheapens the deal, and, in my opinion, discredits you as an author. It seems to say, “Well, I’ve run out of stuff to post or just don’t have the time, so I’ll let my userbase, doubtlessly consisting of hundreds of narcissistic hipsters, provide me with fresh images instead.”
My first thought is: “Why not just open a new community tumblog for this purpose?” Say, BendUsAllOver or TheChagrins. That way those of us who have followed you in order to see YOUR quality selected content can continue as usual.
My next thought, especially in regards to BendMe’s “Reader’s Cock” post, is: “Yeah…and?”
Being a cock-haver, I know how jumpy the damn things are. If you’re running a visually stimulating erotica site, it ought not be of any surprise nor significance should your male userbase experience erections. If they don’t, you’re doing it wrong.
Let me clarify what I said before: couples-in-action or women-in-a-visible-state-of-arousal is one thing. Solo men with a hardon - quite another. Also, couples posing together or girls in the bathroom mirror are passe. Let’s step this up a little, ‘kay?
Explaining the social and psychological ground beneath this line of reasoning is beyond the scope of this post, but can be summed up in a previous post of mine.
Mixed Feelings About Like
Pros:
Let’s you show appreciation for something without publishing it to your own site, giving non-niche viewers a chance to interact with the author instead of just lurking.
Cons:
1. Like reeks of either anti-commitment or cowardice. “I like this, but I don’t want everyone to KNOW I do.”
2. Likes can’t be blocked or filtered out of the newsfeed.
3. Like weakens the meme pool, perpetuating mediocre content. Before something was either good enough to pass on or it wasn’t, but Like introduces a “Kinda OK” rating which increases the chance of even mediocre memes being encouraged.
4. Like turns tumblr into an empty ratings game. Because Like is not a mutually-giving engagement (like Reblog), it functions like a rating. What’s next, a 5-star system? Karma? But unlike most ratings systems, Like isn’t even public. Only the author can see it. Which brings me to my final and most important point.
5. Like can be exploited as a self-promotion spam tool. By Liking something, your name/link is guarenteed to be seen by the author, prompting many to kindly click over to your site to check out the your content. Basically, Like can be used to draw more inter-tumblr traffic to your site without giving anything in return.
Sidenote: When I first saw the Like icon, I thought it was some kind of mashup with WeHeartIt. Poor choice guys.
Suggestions to users:
Click the Heart for everything in your newsfeed, even if you don’t like it. A link to your site will be displayed each time you click. Don’t be too obvious about it. Only Like 2 or 3 items per day for each user in your feed. You’ll probably get more traffic.
Suggestions to Tumblr staff:
1. Seperate dashboard page for viewing a chronological list of Likes from others.
2. Separate dashboard page for viewing stuff I’ve Liked.
3. Template tags for publishing {NumberOfLikes} or {LikedByWho} on both a per-post and site-total scale.
4. Ability to assign categories to followed users, and filter the news feed with those categories.
5. Option to filter out or disable viewing of Likes (and heck, Reblogs too).
Humanized tumbling
(originally posted on BeyondPorno.tumblr.com)
Firefox + Greasemonkey will allow you to run the following:
1. autopagerize - ‘Next page’ links become a thing of the past; pages load automatically as you scroll down. A lifesaver for viewing your dashboard feed, or any tumblr site. Also works on any site with pagination (i.e. Google)
2. TumblrLoginS - Perma-login and instant switching between multiple accounts. Reload your browser after installing this script. The setup screen will pop up. Insert usernames/passwords/titles for all your tumblr acounts. The plugin sits at the top-left of your browser window on all sites except gmail. Left click to select an account to activate.
3. tombloo - The best reblog plugin, covers all media types on several services. Setup is very straightforward if you’re used to working with Firefox plugins.
Warning: The last two are of Japanese design, and as far as I know haven’t been covered in the English-speaking tumblr community yet. As such, you’ll have to deal with a lack of English documentation. I’ve done my best in this post to get your started using them.
Bonus: Finding your tumblfeed a bit lacking? Nothing to reblog? Check out the tumblr Mosiac viewer for some fresh content related to your own. Another great Japanese tumblr API innovation. Insert your tumblr username in the box under “GAIN ID” to get started.