What's interesting is that the content doesn't seem purged. All the accounts with porn just have their blogs hidden, but like 90% of the images and such are still hosted and can be directly accessed. Someone could easily reverse this and slap on monetization features, because even today there doesn't seem to be any decent tumblr replacement, not reddit, not twitter. That seems unlikely to happen though.

That is in fact exactly what happened. The implementation was rushed and/or inept to the point it's near-impossible for me to believe this was something they were already working on:

* Tumblrs that weren't marked adult got marked as such by their new algorithm. This included the text-only official announcement post itself.

* The actual block was done by turning on safe mode for all users, and removing the toggle from the settings page. For a short time, some people were supposedly able to turn in back off by adding that setting back to the POST manually.

* The setting doesn't affect your dashboard, so you can still see new posts by those you follow, even though there's no way to browse to their page directly.

That gets us back to Tumblr being a money losing enterprise. The question is what is a working strategy to monetize a massive user content driven platform where advertisers view on that content is somewhere between the gigantic landfill on fire and a nuclear waste.

Seems Pornhub is one solution after all, it sure solves the advertising problem... they just put up their own advertisements.

> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/pornh...

As I understand it (as a light Tumblr user, in areas adjacent to but almost entirely outside of the NSFW sections), a significant number of the porn blogs have, in fact, been deleted, as well as a significant number of blogs or posts on blogs that were flagged as porn by their egregiously terrible porn-finding algorithm, but were in fact nothing of the kind.

However, the porn spambots still keep popping up periodically, and there are still loads of Nazi/alt-right blogs that Tumblr doesn't seem to have any intention of doing anything about.

It is numbers: if the cost of servicing those users in a non-safe content is X, they are worth it only if the revenue received from them in a non-safe content Y is either ~X or > X.

Unprofitable eyeballs leaving decreases the losses, making a business more valuable.

Not if there is an ecosystem effect, and you need those people to ensure that all the safe content has enough producers, consumers, commenters, etc to make it a living, community and ecosystem.

Those effects did not work for Tumblr. Tumblr always lost money. That's exactly how it ended up in this situation.