This always seems like a really bad idea.
FWIW, the algorithms that big tech companies use are often trained to recognize women’s underwear. So non-sexual photos of trans men wearing women’s underwear are often flagged, even when similar photos of women wearing boxers are not.
I’m not saying it’s right, just giving the actual reason this happens. (Albeit I don’t have Tumblr-specific knowledge.)
This is by far the most mind-blowing thing about OnlyFans to me. I’m a very open minded person and I would have been so sure that a site like OnlyFans would absolutely require discovery. Like, so sure that if I was making it, I wouldn’t even question including it. The fact they just offloaded this to every other site, and then took all the monetization is amazing to me. Twitter, Reddit and Instagram can barely get money from these users, but they’re super popular, and they just link to their OnlyFans on their profile.
I seriously wonder what other opportunities like that are out in the wild.
In a way, OF is valuable to platforms like Twitter and Instagram, because it has monopolized a lot of the riskiest cash flow that those companies would prefer to avoid / explicitly disallow in their ToS for a “subscribe to this influencer” service.
If OF had their own discovery platform, they’d have to deal with the thorny editorial problem of ranking. In the current setup, they can totally sidestep it. It would probably cost them more to operate discovery than it’s worth.
it surprises me how instagram and twitter can get away with it but tumblr cant
It's a huge problem on Instagram too.
Twitter is different because it doesn't prohibit sexual content in the first place, unlike Facebook and Tumblr.
The path where they just left everything untouched is a path to certain failure.
The puritanical attitudes toward adult content at Apple are disgusting. It shouldn’t be my mobile phone manufacturer’s choice if I want to use apps that display things they don’t like (but I do).
Twitter, Threads, Instagram, Chrome, and countless other App Store apps are perfectly comfortable serving up racey content.
500px is another example of a site full of nudity that has to arbitrarily censor for iOS, all because Apple is protecting their 10x-market-rate credit card processing business (30% instead of 3%) by preventing sideloading. It’s bullshit that Apple decides for me what I am allowed to view. How convenient that it also protects their revenue stream.
Blaming the App Store was always an excuse.
Tumblr just didn’t want to put the effort in to keep CSAM off their site.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/tumblr-to-ban-pornography-startin...
Some would say it is disappointing that Apple draws the line at child sexual abuse, but I guess that is a matter of opinion.
Why confidently state these things when you seriously have no idea whatsoever what actually happened here? GP's statements were much closer to the situation in reality.
I think you can also look at the various discussions of this issue online. The user perception was that it was inordinately difficult to report abusive content.
The second comment on this thread reports that even the moderation that was taken was ineffective. https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/a2r4h4/whats_...
I also recall an instance finding problematic content and now knowing how to report it. I think it didn’t occur to me think “I think this person might be underage, better hit the share button”. TikTok for example makes it incredibly easy to report offensive, unsafe, or illegal content.
Whether or not Tumblr management _intended_ to have very poor controls against CSAM doesn’t change the fact that they did in practice. And when push came to shove, instead of protecting user expression on their platform, they banned a whole category of content rather than building the tools and policies needed to make it work.
Worst case, they could have, instead of deleting all adult content, removed the toggle for iOS users and made them go to the browser for filtered content.
Even if you hate Apple for censoring their platform, it was Tumblr’s choice to apply that policy to Android and web users.
This response and earlier comments also fail to address the fact that the iOS app had a toggle to block NSFW content. It was allowed in 2017, and it was allowed in 2022. So I’m not sure why they had to purge non-CSAM content and remove the toggle in 2018. Source: https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/11/tumblr-sensitive-content-t...
Is there insider info that challenges any of that?
It's pretty messed up for you to say "Tumblr just didn’t want to put the effort" when you have no idea who or what was actually responsible for any of the things you're describing. I don't feel you are addressing this topic in good faith, so I'm not going to continue discussing this with you.
You’re saying that from the perspective of the Tumblr people, having been purchased by Yahoo/Verizon, there were limited options. And maybe negotiations with Apple came into play once the CSAM problem was already so bad the app was delisted.
What I’m saying is that from the consumer perspective, it doesn’t really matter who in the company made the choice (Tumblr people or Verizon people), a business choice was made to remove a significant part of the users and use case for the platform.
Similarly by the time Apple banned the app for CSAM, maybe it truly was too late to keep NSFW content on the platform for Apple users, and maybe it was seen by ownership as too expensive to implement a partial solution. Regardless of ownership, failing to invest in effective moderation and flagging tools at every point in Tumblr’s journey was a business choice.
Maybe it was too expensive to keep CSAM off the platform. I don’t see evidence that Tumblr made those investments. An easy reporting option for users is the bare minimum. Maybe Tumblr would have bankrupted themselves policing that content - but choosing to not go down that road is still a business decision and still not something that can realistically be pinned on Apple.
In other words there are two versions of the story:
- Excuse: we had to take down NSFW content platform wide because Apple hates adult content
- Explanation: we didn’t have the resources to police an NSFW platform effectively, so we made a business decision to drop that segment of our business
the bad idea was buying tumblr. but i think automattic knew that when they bought it, and just thought it would be fun to set some money on fire for a while.
No, they did that years ago (getting on for literally 10 years ago), and that's what ultimately resulted in selling it to its current owners for like 1/1000th of what Yahoo paid for it.
"Don't remove porn when the userbase is left-leaning and embraces it."
Reddit and Twitter do it the right way: hiding adult-rated content behind the curtains.
Tumblr wasn't making money with or without porn. It was just shifting between owners who thought they'd be better at squeezing money out of it.
Trying to monetize user generated content is hard because both the users and creators believe that it's their content (which it is that's how community works) and so locking it away and taking a non-trivial cut is going to be met with insane vitriol and there's not much value to add over the base experience. Tumblr's patron thing you should of think like Hashicorp re-licensing Terraform.
> You mention Blaze and Ad-free doing well, but their adoption is so small relative to the use of Tumblr their revenue couldn't support a fraction of the ~1,000 servers it takes to run Tumblr, much less any salaries.
That's without getting into video content.
1000 servers actually sounds surprisingly small. It was a fair bit higher than that a decade ago, and that was on bare metal then, vs (afaik) cloud VMs now. Then again, their traffic is a lot lower now, but still nothing to sneeze at.
Like Bored Crabs NFTs or restaurant supplier or health insurance or...?
Tumblr has an army of content creator that work for free. It is a site that host text and images. How they even spend 30 million per year? Maybe on organizing "stuff convention", SF real estate and so on... Cut the bloat!
I don't think they'd generate peanuts so as to not even cover hardware costs.
That is my point. I do not understand how they total costs can be over 30M. It is mostly static content that begs for CDN cache. It is also not mission critical.
It's fine to do what they want, but it's become a slightly naughtier pg-13 - I guess nc-17. So those who want naughtier are going elsewhere, and no one knows for sure what is okay and what could be okay today and get your account removed tomorrow - so why put any content into it?