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?
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.