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People Are Already Making Amateur Porn with Tumblr’s New GIF Maker

It’s not without precedent; Tumblr is a wild-west for shortform amateur porn, unlike most other social media sites.

Tumblr has released a new GIF maker as part of its iOS mobile app in an attempt to ease the complexity of making your own GIF. And already, people are posting nudes and GIFs of them jacking off, in bonafide Tumblr fashion.

The app works pretty simply. Open up the Tumblr mobile app, tap to add a new post, add a photo. The app will ask you if you want to import a video, or a set of burst-shot photos for it to string together. The app will then ask you to pick a 3-second segment to make into a GIF, and boom, you're done.

This was a process that, even a year ago, would have entailed some level of Photoshop wizardry or a visit to back-alley GIF making websites. Similarly, if you wanted porn, say, five years ago, you'd be directed to a sketchy streaming site that would launch a barrage of pop-up ads at you before you'd get off. But now we have the best of both worlds: people are posting nudes, amateur porn, and 3-second snippets of them getting off on Tumblr.

If you search for the tag #made with tumblr while logged in with the adult content unlocked, you'll find that a good number of posts—perhaps around 30 percent of the top posts that received some dozen notes—are just people feeling themselves up or going topless.

Of course this would happen. This is the internet. But it's not without precedent. Tumblr has turned into a wild-west for shortform porn in a way that no other big social media company is really known for; it was fairly predictable that people would post porn with impunity. Although the numbers may have changed, in 2013, web research firm SimilarWeb estimated that porn blogs accounted for 11.4 percent of Tumblr's domains.

In the same way that Twitter capitalized on the 6-second Vine and Instagram has taken on the square photo and 16-second videos, Tumblr's claim to fame is its short GIF, made possible and necessary by the site's previous limitations on image sizes. Those images sizes were, for the record, 1.5 MB and 1 MB. You can't fit a lot more than a few seconds on any of those! But that all played out well for the porn GIF's growing popularity, a popularity that by now, is well documented.