I am posting this as a follow up to a story that Level1Techs did in December.
TLDR: They banned NSFW and LGBT categories plus a number of gifs involving various parts of female anatomy, and then lost over 20% of their total site visits in January.
Honestly, I am shocked it wasn’t more. I only knew about tumbr because of the dumb NSFW gifs.
Not all surprising.
But kicking your userbase in the face seems to be common practice nowadays.
I’m just surprised it’s only 20%.
Wait till next months figures. I am sure some of the people were out of the loop on this and are only noticing the porn is missing now.
Amazing self-control. What are they, monks?
Or, if we run a death watch, we might comment that the figure (according to similarweb) is now down to 369.60M, and falling steadily…
Oh people have noticed and they’re leaving in droves. The ban wasn’t just sweeping content, it straight up deleted posts, and entire accounts without warning. If you rolled even one NSFW post you might be subject to total account deletion.
I mean, Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo, where brands go to die.
When I worked at Sun Microsystems way back in the day (I saw Java’s debut, met Larry Cable (Java beans), and Scott “Scooter” McNealy was CEO) when the company reinvented itself from a workstation company to a server/network firm with “The network is the computer”. But a dirty little secret was a large part of server revenue was from the porn industry. Router and switch vendors had the same little revenue secret. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink. We figured the money was legal and we did not judge a free market. Human nature never changes. All the censorship in the world cannot change human desires and wants.
Bring Back The Traps. Make Tumblr Great Again.
Seriously though, I think only like three pages I followed are still active. I don’t know how, cuz they still post all sorts of NSFW stuff, but I’m sure they’ll get disappeared soon enough.
Glad Tumblr did this and I hope they find a way to get more traffic without having to go back to allowing it.
The Porn wasn’t the problem you cold avoid it.
The porn bots were the real problem and they haven’t done shit to fix that. 1/4 of all my followers are porn bots and i get at least a new one each week.
Don’t mind them, they is anti sex in all forms. No porn, no sexy clothes, no showing ankle…
What, not even a hint of delicate ankle? Are they monks, or super human?
This is a misconception created by the user base. The reason for the ban was Apple’s removal from the app store as a result of the massive amount of child porn found on the site from users. Apparently that’s where Apple draws the line. Not standard porn, or the crazy communities of meth heads labeled “tweakers” and such, but cp. lol. The porn bot problem has been on for years since the yahoo acquisition, they just didn’t care cause it still drove traffic to the site. But with CP, you get that ‘legally questionable’ traffic that isn’t good, or at least, you can’t get away with.
Anyway what I’m getting at is Yahoo is a terrible company.
Yes they are, but so are Facebook and Google for breaches of privacy and trust. I think it all boils down to the revenue model and not any ethical superiority one firm has over another. Google and Facebook have been blessed to have strong revenue streams without engaging with the ugly underbelly of human nature though they repeatedly commit unethical data collection and sales and lie about it. Tumblr and now Yahoo struggled to find revenue and so stooped lower in the name of profits. But for the grace of revenues models, there goeth Facebook.
Facebook and Google are much more competently run, if categorically more evil. Yahoo is a bunch of clown shoes.
For the those who used the platform the real problem was the porn bots. Porn is/was fairly isolated from most of tumblr , if you didn’t want to see the porn accounts or the tweaker accounts you most likely wouldn’t see it. Apple was fair to draw the line at Child Porn and I personally reported an account run by a teenaged female(who was in one of my smaller fandoms) who was selling lewd/nude pictures to people that wanted it.
Tweakers are doing something illegal but self-damaging.
Allowing CP is illegal and exploits children.
The users care that child porn is removed but also that spammmy porn bots advertising that continue to thrive on the platform also gets removed.
I also ditto what @Ruffalo and @TrashPanda