Sharesome Review – Collapsing Like NewTumbl?

UPDATE: Scroll down for latest information.

Okay, this is not so much a Sharesome review, this will be more like a postmortem.

Unironically, it was almost exactly a year ago today that we reported on the death of NewTumbl. That was almost expected. We at least had some warning that things weren’t exactly going well for the fledgling adult social media site.

The same cannot be said for Sharesome, however.

I suppose we need to get into a little background and explain what Sharesome is. Or, rather, what it purports to be.

From the Sharesome “about” page:

Sharesome is an adult social platform that helps you connect with your favorite content creators. Better yet, think of us as a community where your kinks are finally free to run wild. Here at Sharesome, we try to create an environment where you are welcomed no matter what your fantasies are. It is free and will forever remain free.

Anonymity is ensured so go ahead, be free to let your freak flag fly!

Sharesome.com

Sounds great, doesn’t it?

After the nuking of anything remotely adult on Tumblr, and the death of NewTumbl, Sharesome looked like a viable alternative we could get behind.

If my memory serves me we’d signed up there after the death of Tumblr but we found NewTumbl to be more conducive to our community. Our account at Sharesome just kind of sat there as a placeholder, occasionally looked at but seldom touched.

It also had a serious flaw which greatly reduced its attractiveness – Verification.

If I recall correctly, while you could “like” content already on the site, and you could post content to communities, you couldn’t post to your own feed. This greatly limited our ability to find use in this “social” site.

When NewTumbl collapsed like a flan in a cupboard last year we shifted our attention to Reblogme. While Reblogme has potential, it’s also extremely buggy. The queueing or scheduling of posts simply doesn’t work. The text editor is extremely glitchy. Gaining a following is hard.

When we checked out Sharesome again we were given the option to become “verified”.

As a brand that has existed for 14 years (and prior to that as B8M8Network) we applied to be verified. After some back and forth over their limited understanding of what constituted a “brand” (they seemed to have little comprehension of erotic literature or community-based sites such as ours) we were successfully verified.

This meant we could post on our own feed, post in the communities we had created, and engage with others freely. That’s what you would expect from a social media site, right?

We would post content related to the theme of our site, and share posts from here to our following over there. You know, what a social media site is for.

We started to gain a good following of like-minded readers. In fact, Sharesome kept telling us how great we were doing. They kept sending us emails celebrating the fact that we were “upgraded” and in “the top 0.7% of all users!”

Hilariously, while writing this post, they just delivered another congratulatory email lol

While the platform wasn’t perfect, it was becoming a good location to engage with new readers and attract them to the community.

There were a few problems, such as unsolicited spam in private messages, and your feed being occasionally inundated by content you’ve never shown any interest in. These were minor gripes you would expect to experience with almost any social media site.

That’s the Sharesome review aspect over, let’s move on to current events.

Flash forward to this month, almost exactly a year from the death of NewTumbl, a fact which is both depressing and ironic.

Maybe “fortuitous” is the better term?

Our account has now been so severely limited there is no use in us being there. We are unable to post anything at all, not on our own feed, not in our own communities, nothing.

We can still repost content already there, but we cannot add anything new at all. Commenting on other posts and sharing them is possible, but that’s all. We cannot even post to the groups we created and moderate.

There has been no policy change that we are aware of. We never received any notification that this was happening. There was no explanation for it at all.

So, we did the expected thing and submitted a ticket asking what was happening. We naively assumed this might just be a bug.

We were impolitely told the following:

You can still click share on posts you like and want to share. But, yes, you can not post your own content. And we still do not verify blogs as your own as they do not post their own original made content. 

Hope this cleared things up.

Team Sharesome Support.

Can you see the problem?

They did verify us. We do in fact post our own “original made content” (not a competent use of English, by the way).

We’re back to the “you’re not a REAL brand because you don’t film pussy!” narrative we had to go through the first time they verified us.

In the minds of Sharesome, you’re only a creator if you’re filming yourself or taking photos. You’re only a brand if your brand is producing photos and videos. Anything else is considered unworthy of being in the clique.

Considering we had already gone through this process and Sharesome had previously agreed that we are a brand and we can post freely, and as there has been no change in policies, we can only come to the conclusion that someone at Sharesome doesn’t like our niche and is acting on their biases and bigotries.

This is a common problem with the structure of social media companies. Despite the establishment of stated policies, operatives within the company often have the freedom to disregard these stated policies in favor of their personal bigotries.

This leads to the unequal application of policy depending on the moral/political/religious/social views and biases of individual employees.

Maybe I’m just an old cynic, but I get the feeling if we’d spent the last year posting pussy our account would still be perfectly fine.

What does this mean for the platform?

Ultimately, Sharesome is not a viable social platform.

While this is just my opinion, I understand enough about online business to be able to see there is no growth potential in this model.

By its own policies it’s antisocial.

If users can only repost what already exists on the platform this pool of content will diminish and eventually dry up.

Social sites need constant social interaction. Adult social sites require constant media to be posted by its users.

You, as a regular user (not a verified brand or “creator”) will soon only be seeing rehashed content. The same posts will keep appearing in your feed, punctuated by advertising from creators and studios who are only posting their own content to convince you to sign up to their OnlyFans or paysite.

Sharesome is not a social site, it’s a circle jerk (but far less fun) of self-promotion by a clique of verified creators. This clique is so heavily restricted it’s hard to comprehend how they think this can work. If you’re limiting content submission to only those who are verified, and your verification process is so tightly defined and restricted that only visual media creators can pass the gates, you’re never going to see growth.

If a regular user can’t post anything themselves, what is the point of the communities and groups? All you can do is like, comment on and reshare content posted by verified creators. Most of this is going to be spammy content intended to draw you off the platform and to a verified creator’s paysite.

We can’t even post text content to our own feed and groups. Where is the sense in that?

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the concern when it comes to allowing the free posting of visual content. Clearly, there are bad actors out there who need to be prevented from sharing illegal material. But then we’re back to the problem of moderating.

You cannot have it both ways. Either you operate a social site with adequate moderation (which inherently comes with risks), or you operate a private club for verified content creators to… do whatever it is you expect they’ll be doing. Presumably Sharesome thinks they’re all buying from each other.

OnlyFans creators are seeking an audience to promote their content to, what could Sharesome possibly offer them if 99% of their users are other verified creators all trying to do the same thing?

I’ve thought long and hard about an analogy and this is the best I can come up with:

Sharesome is like an adult performer trade show. Inside the conference hall there are thousands of OnlyFans performers and studio owners desperately flashing each other trying to convince them into becoming a customer. You are the average citizen walking past this convention hall, peering through the windows and occasionally tapping on the glass to give someone a thumbs-up, or show a sign with “Hot!” scribbled on it.

How long will it be before the attendees at this trade show realise no one is buying, because their customers are outside and no one can get in?

As for what we’re planning to do next, I think we’ll just go back to using Reblogme, Reddit, and perhaps look for other social sites that are actually social. We’ll probably go through all this again in another year with another platform.

I’m contemplating deleting the content we have already posted to Sharesome, and almost certainly will delete the community groups we have been moderating but now can’t even post to ourselves.

Let me know below if you’ve attempted to use Sharesome. What are your thoughts on the platform?

UPDATE: July 2nd 2024

We have received a reply from “Team Sharesome Support”.

To avoid boring you I’ll select the pertinent points.

Sharesome claims they released a policy update two weeks ago, but this was only on their Sharesome account. They send email alerts every week telling me they have “Upgraded” my account and I’m in the “top 0.7%”, but if it’s a policy update you have to hunt it down.

I’ve checked all email communications, including spam folders. Nothing was sent by Sharesome regarding policy updates.

Sharesome claims we were “never verified” and that there is no communication with their staff to show this. This is just false but I;ll give them the benefit of doubt and assume the employee I communicated with deleted the discussion.

The process is quite literally labeled “Verification”. That’s the header of the popup that displays when you try to post anything, it’s on the button you have to click to go through the process. Sharesome claims that there is a distinction between being a Verified account, a brand account and a star account (performer) but each one of these three options is all under the heading of “Verification” and you cannot continue beyond this point without being verified.

We would not have been able to publish content to our feed for the last several months if we had not gone through this process.

We communicated with their staff last year in order to be able to publish. I have the confirmation txt file we were required to download and upload to our server in order to verify our website as a brand. Unfortunately I deleted the discussion I had with their employee, otherwise I would also publish that for full transparency.

The only conclusion I can come to is that they have redefined their definition of “verified” internally without actually telling anyone, or changing the language of their own processes.

Finally, I’ll add a direct quote from their communication as it highlights the crux of the issue:

And if you’re a star or a blog, we do ask that yes, that content you post, is your own original content on your profile. And not random photos you found online.

And with this statement Sharesome admits that it is not a functional social media platform. The posting of “random photos you found online” is quite literally what most social media is built on, especially adult social media.

Can you imagine what the social media landscape would look like today if no one could post a screenshot from a movie, a gif from a TV show, a snippet from a music video?

Bye bye Twitter. Chao Facebook. Sayonara Tumblr. Go fuck yourself Reddit.

They claim in one part of the communication that verified accounts (not brand accounts or star accounts) can post fair use content, but that you have to also post identifiable media that matches your submitted photo for verification.

And we do not ask that verified profiles post only their own content. We do allow fair use content. But we do ask that you have at least a picture we can match to the verification photo, if you are simply a verified user. Please be aware that there is a clear distinction between a verified user, a brand account and a star account.

So it gets worse.

They require even basic “verified” users to post them a photo of themselves, and publicly post an image to be able to verify that the photo they sent is them, before being able to post anything.

So, “Anonymity is ensured so go ahead” (taken from their own mission statement) is only true if you never want to post anything. You can be a simp, you can like and comment, but you can never post anything yourself.

To have a “star account” you have to submit your information and be verified as a performer.

To have a “brand account” means you can only post content that you have the legal rights to share and nothing else.

To be a “verified account” you have to send them a photo and then publicly publish another photo they can match against the one you sent them.

Otherwise you’re only able to comment, like and repost content – content that is only ever going to originate from one of these three groups.

And as brand accounts can only post their own content, and star accounts are only posting their own content, you’ll only be sharing the content of “verified” accounts, and there are few of these willing to surrender their anonymity just to post.

Again, what is the point of Sharesome?

Make it make sense.

As I stated above, this makes Sharesome nothing more than a marketing platform through which creators are trying to sell to each other, because there is little reason for the average user to be there.

Sharesome seems to have become yet another site that wants all the benefits of being a social media site without half of the functionality and with no responsibilities. If you’re going to get into adult media you have to accept some risks. You have to understand that people will share things they don’t own, and if the copyright holder wants it gone you have to have the staff to respond to those takedown requests.

You can’t run an adult social site without moderation, but Sharesome seems to want to do that. It seems they don’t want to invest in moderation or accept the responsibility of removing problematic content, so they’re trying to prevent the content from ever appearing by gatekeeping to such a degree that it nullifies the core purpose of a social site.

While it was nice while it lasted, Sharesome just isn’t a functional social site, and with convoluted and restrictive policies like these it never can be.

It does seem as though Sharesome is trying to dodge the notion of an oncoming bus by throwing itself under the nearest train.

Ultimately, there is no reason for us to be there at all.

We would have just left the account and content there with a disclaimer in the bio that the account is now dead, but there was no option to remove ourselves from being moderators of groups or closing down topics/groups we had created. We are not prepared to be listed as moderators of groups that we cannot even post to.

As such, we have deleted our account and would not recommend Sharesome to our community.

Xstumbl, Reddit, Reblogme, and a dozen other sites, are all functional and offer far more than you will ever find in an industry community like Sharesome.

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