It is also worth adding Twitter has built a reasonable ad business and they are full of just as much porn as Tumblr. Google actually shows ads for porn and other adult services on their platform. If any of the higher ups at Verizon are reading this:
- Fire everyone involved in the NSFW filtering. Clearly this wasn't even tested.
- Fire everyone who thought NSFW material had to be purged from your platform.
There is a short window where you can reverse the decision and benefit from all of the people who were reminded Tumblr existed. After that window closes, your business is dead.
I mean, can't they see that a lot of traffic flows through tumblr via those interests? Do they not know how much of a loss of usage that this will cause? I legitimately have zero other reason to use tumblr.
Furthermore, my impression of Tumblr was that it had quite a bit of artists. Most artist-oriented platforms have policies that aim at banning the more overt commercial pornography, while allowing artistic nudity or erotica with appropriate tags (see DeviantArt, Vimeo, etc.) I was actually quite surprised that Tumblr didn't try this route at first to be honest. From what I can tell the "adult content ban" Tumblr implemented is way overly broad-based, not to mention very US-moral attitude centric (eg "female presenting nipples" is less of a big deal in many countries).
This is why I described it as a galaxy of niches. It provides a sort of discoverable obscurity that makes connecting to signal rather than noise rather easy.
It's also what makes it hard to see beyond your own niche if you don't actually own the servers.
The adult content that showed up was pretty annoying, especially on some tags that were seemingly less censored. Like, most LGBT tags were clean, but some would have a lot for whatever reason. I'd welcome the change back then (which was around acquisition time). But even then it was apparent Tumblr's odds of becoming anything other than another diary/blog graveyard weren't great.
Tumblr occasionally banning thinspo blogs was probably much more of an "attack" on the core user base. Not by numbers but in spirit.
edit: and for the record I'm not especially talking about parent's comment, not sure why i picked this one, mostly agree with it
That kind of content is usually banned/censored on most mainstream services, just letting it be will get you a non-insignificant number. I've seen people claim 3% for twitter, no clue if true or not, but few would say that about Twitter here. Too many people in tech are in the core user-base to fall for this.
[0] unless shut down this will be a loooong slow death no matter what happens. I still have a semi popular account on one of the dead sites of the era. Everybody knows it's dead but these communities are a bit like families, hard to completely ghost them.
They should have been running this filter for months tagging content but not revealing the decision. Auditing the results and looking at the statistics.
If the filter is being overzealous then shouldn’t the stats show that a lot of NSFW material is on the site and that it gets traffic?
So then why pull the trigger anyway? Empire building? Bureaucracy?
Hit the nail on the head with that one. Digg and Tumblr should get together and write a blog "How to lose your entire user base in 1 day."
They already did that (the goodwill portion anyway) in 2016 before selling to Verizon.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/07/18/yahoo-r...
This is the part I really don't understand. Wouldn't you do a test run through their site and do some checking? You cannot claim you don't have examples available.
I hope whoever is in charge of quality just had a coup instead of being blamed for this.
OK, but where is the problem with NSFW content (which is quite different from porn) for this?
I know, I am German, where there is quite a different mentality with this respect (in my hometown I have even seen openly posted bills for a big porn exhibition in Berlin in the past and nobody (except for the churches) was upset).
I can understand that many brands do not want their ads placed next to porn. But where is the problem with other NSFW content?
Sounds like porn to me. ;-)
This isn't a new issue. Media like to be edgy, contraversy provacative. Corporate sensibilities is allergic to scandal or contraversy, especially of the "public morals" type.
(IMO they paid billions of dollars for the privilege of being the email provider for my parents.)
I think they know exactly what they bought. They are going to see if they can change Tumblr. If that succeeds, great! If not, shut it down.
I bet the price of Yahoo including Tumblr and the price of Yahoo excluding Tumblr was more or less the same number.
Does it actually cost 100s of millions to run? They don't seem to be actively developing it or really doing anything with it other than banning all its content.
When a third-party developer can make a more user-friendly and less crash-prone app than your official one, it might be worth considering that maybe your official app sucks.