Is this the joke social network that lost 99.7% of its value?
It’s literally a case study of how to drive a social network into the ground. It was sold for 1 billion in 2013 and for 3 million in 2019
They banned most of their artists and content creators when the new owners started their neo-puritan war on porn. Thousands of artists used it to get commissions of fan-art. They suddenly found their income disappear and didnt know why - they were getting shadow banned, often in error.
In this announcement I see no indication that they’ve learned anything
Once the creators leave, they are not coming back. Quality content is gone. The social network only lives so long as they can re-market someone else’s work. It’s a predatory business.
Well that was depressing. About sums up how the modern internet feels
> If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you’d need to be web-only on iOS and side load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don’t dox your users
The verification part makes sense¹, but the rest of it... this is why I try to be conscious of what kind of payment methods and app stores I use and incentivize... (that is, no paypal/creditcard if avoidable; f-droid or install directly from developer's own site if they publish it)
¹ though I don't see why you couldn't rm -rf verification data upon setting verified=1 on the account, with a SFW picture in case you need to later check that the person being shown is the one on the material; or keep a provably random 1% of each year in an offline vault to prove that guidelines were followed; or... there are options here
I don't know that there is porn on twitter, but notice how reddit is pulling back on that as well. I thought they were going to block third party apps from viewing that, but no: you can't view it on the official site either! You need to install their custom software on your device first. Color me unsurprised if reddit does a tumblr in two years, with the difference that afaik >50% of people on tumblr were (also) there for the porn(-equivalents) and on reddit that's not the case, so they can much more safely ban all of it
It’s very interesting how this never affected Twitter despite how they have existed concurrently for most of their histories. I wonder if maybe this argument is bullshit or something…
I think Twitter's lack of safety and moderation of adult and illegal content is one of the next shoes to drop in the amazing reality show of the Twitter takeover. There is so much hardcore content on Twitter I have no idea how they get away with it. It's an area though where no service that accepts user-generated content is perfect, it's just how fast and well you respond when something goes wrong.
I never encounter it -- so on some level, Twitter is managing it well. If people who don't want it aren't seeing it, and those who do, are, then it's working.
I'm less sympathetic, since (a) Tumblr did the changeover in the most hamfisted and destructive way possible (rape is bad, better delete/ban anything that mentions rape! Rape survivor groups? What are those?) and (b) it's 2023 and Twitter and Reddit still have tons of porn.
some creators never left, some came back. (even before twtr started going downhill.) whatever idea of the state of tumblr that is, it's probably not really reflective of the state of it now. believe it or not, art does not revolve exclusively around porn. bizarrely, tumblr now somehow turns out to be one of more stable platforms for art. well, if your idea of art isn't just that it's porn. (and the sentiments like this, that almost equate those things, kinda make me appreciate them shedding the pornhub audience, in favor of fandom audience and art audience. like, legitimately, if all they lost is people like this, who think of art and creators in terms of what porn they're posting - good riddance.)
> believe it or not, art does not revolve exclusively around porn.
Sorry, but you're missing the point. The problem isn't that all art is porn. It's that all porn is art.
A drawing or a photograph is not magically less of a creative endeavor because there's a dick in it, or two people fucking. It does create some complications for cultural or other human reasons, but it changes squat about the actual creative input. It sparks emotions, and why anyone ever thought appealing to the emotion of lust was any less valid than any other emotion is confusing as hell to me.
Constraints and limitations sometimes breed a level of creativity, but when you just suddenly limit expression to the degree that Tumblr did, it's a smack in the face to artists, even ones that do not necessarily produce pornography at all. I know they had their reasons, but still.
Of course, you can still have an art community with no porn. Obviously. But what they did was cut off a lot of people's existing avenues for expressing things, and that is not something that people tend to take lightly. It feels very personal.
Sure, but "Tumblr is not easy to use" doesn't really instill confidence. Tumblr used to be very easy to user. Perhaps one of the easiest websites out there in terms of usage.
The underlying problem is actually two fold:
1. They didn't understand their own customers need (which was, to be frank, share porn)
2. That they quite simply lost momentum
The first one is addressable. Just say you're going to allow porn again. The second one... Well, that's harder to address.
It's hard to make legitimate money from hosting porn. Most people don't want their ads next to porn, so you either need to have sex-related ads or a subscription fee.
Twitter and Reddit have kind of built legitimate businesses on porn hosting, but they also host a lot of non-porn that makes them seem more legit. Tumblr wouldn't have that.
Tumblr is the only platform that I’m still active on- I’ve had an account since 2009-ish. It’s a really fun community to be active with and the only one that hasn’t attracted a majority of insufferable people.
It’s great to see the Richard Rumelt format of strategy with diagnosis/guiding principles, I’m a fan of this format but it also feels a bit like strategy-by-committee and just a laundry list of things.
Reading though this I get the sense that no one at tumblr has great insights around the pain points of their own product. I think they need to take a step deeper in their diagnosis and ask “how did we end up with a platform that’s so hard to use?” Otherwise they won’t make progress on the actual underlying issues.
As an ex-user who has yet to return, the worst part about using it in 2018 was no post body searching and how bad the home page was. You could be reading a post, it randomly refreshes, and you will never find that post again due to the search being unusable. Considering how much I hear about users searching for old classic posts on the platform, I am doubtful they fixed the search.
>You could be reading a post, it randomly refreshes, and you will never find that post again due to the search being unusable.
I experience this with every platform that utilizes infinite scroll. Infinite scroll seems deliberately unsearchable in favor of slot machine style "who knows what's next" scrolling. Pretty degenerate.
That's weird. Twitter has been the worst offender. If you let a page sit for a seemingly random period and come back, the page will reload and leave you back at the top. Doesn't happen to you?
tumblr was really something in the first several years - all due in part to the great early (design) hires. i was in my teens then but i rememeber my time on the platform pretty fondly
1) Add "calls to account creation" to un-logged in view. Annoying but fine.
2) Use an algorithmic feed and not a chronological one. Bad.
3) Clear up internal replies structure. Good.
4) Show you content from people you aren't following. Bad.
5) Rework push notifications. Depends on execution.
6) Reduce crashes. Good.
I'm on tumblr mostly to keep in touch with a circle of friends from 10 years ago. I don't want to "grow my blog" and I don't want content from people I don't follow.
> Show you content from people you aren't following
If it's clearly delineated, like "You may also be interested in...", it may be fine and actually helpful. If it's mixed into your regular feed, much less so.
Having dropped a 10+ year Reddit account for Lemmy, I'm still very much in the phase of finding new content sources, so I spend much more time in firehose modes than "stuff I've explicitly selected to follow", but the button makes it explicit.
They already have an algorithmic feed, it’s the “For You” tag. As long as they don’t remove the non-algorithmic “Following” tab, I don’t care how they modify the “For You” tab.
Unfortunately, they probably don't want you either. They want the person who is looking to grow their blog and expand their followers. Not surprising that their product principles would reflect that.
That's the problem. Every single large enough commercial social media service devolves into this kind of thing. So where are people who don't want to grow their following or see content from people they don't know supposed to go?
The fediverse would be my answer but I'm curious what others think.
I disagree. They are focusing on empowering creators but are also pointing out their weaknesses with the non-creator experience. Non-creators are arguably more important to the success of a social media brand. I think of Mixr as a great sample of that. They signed the 2 biggest streamers (creators) and it still failed because the viewers (non-creators) didn’t follow.
It's the same pressure though. They want creators to push out more content to wider audiences, and they want non-creators to consume more content. As a random non-creator, you either fall into their trap, or they'll try to push you in through all kinds of psychological trickery, both subtle and blunt - and if that fails, the hope is you'll select yourself out of the user pool. If you can't be milked for profit, you can at least not waste their server resources.
This is the unfortunate consequence of an advertising-based business model. It offers you a shortcut to growth - a panel with a buttons labeled "More". More ads. More obnoxious ads. More sneaky ads. More manipulative ads. More people exposed, and exposed more often. There are many ways to grow that involve actually improving the product and user experience. But pressing one of the "More" buttons on the ad-panel is always easier, and gives you more money faster.
>Tumblr’s competitive advantage lies in its unique content and vibrant communities.
Cool, I wonder if whoever is writing this understands the reason those communities are like that?
>The lack of feedback stems from the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed (“Following”)
...And there it is.
The thing that makes Tumblr unique among social media is the fact that it has a non-algorithmic feed, and is centered on people you like sharing posts they enjoy. By default, you never see a post unless someone you follow either authors it or vouches for it.
If they try and change that, and shove an FYP-style page in front of the user by default, they're going to lose that distinguishing feature.
I personally support adding some algorithmic feed in (tumblr's discoverability does kind of suck), but a vast majority of the active users are very opposed to even the features they've added so far (like "best stuff first"). They need to be very careful about how they proceed here.
Also:
>Creators are essential to the Tumblr community. However, we haven’t always had a consistent and coordinated effort around retaining, nurturing, and growing our creator base.
Yeah, it's almost like you drove half the creators off of your site with one fell swoop.
>Additionally, we need to ensure that when people search for content related to their interests, it is easily accessible without any confusing limitations or unexpected roadblocks in their journey.
Coming from a website that is known for having the second-worst search function in social media (after reddit, which at least is easily parsed by google), this is almost laughable.
> without royally botching the things that appeal to Tumblr users
I feel like some form of active involvement from users and creators as stakeholders would be nice to see, shouldn't be that hard, and for some reason seems forever off the table. The idea that a bunch of people created all the content on your social network, and their continued (often free) labor is part of the reason new people would become engaged and so keeping them happy is important seems foreign to insiders, and I don't understand why. Not as "user group research" but as collaborators who you are already in a de facto partnership with, because they create all the stuff people look at.
The default position should always be that the user does not know how to navigate the application.
I really wish tech companies would stop designing apps for this mythical moron user who's apparently seeing a software application for the first time ever. Everyone knows how to use these apps. Think about it, kids can figure it out.
Modern UIs have become so oversimplified that they're counter-intuitive to average users and useless to power users. When you try too hard to make an app for everyone you just end up with an app the doesn't work for anyone.
I call this "usability nihilism," as an allusion to therapeutic nihilism - the idea, not that the user shouldn't be made to think unnecessarily, but that in fact they are not capable of it. That the user cannot be empowered or trusted to learn by experiment. In short, that usability is impossible.
Yeah, the diagnosis is really weak. Superbly weak actually. "<X> is not easy to use" has zero insight and takes no stand. It's a flimsy, worn-out string to connect the dots; the upside is that any stakeholder can grasp it and no one can strangle you with it.
Also, the pattern of "diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent action" is copy-pasted from the book "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy"[1]. I've seen this internally at companies and even though the article is a great read, the application leaves much to be desired.
I actually agree, "easy to use" is not the right framing. The core stuff needs to work really well, be friction-free. New features don't matter if the app crashes, or if you get spam. It's hard to run a social network, and do it in a public and open source way, but we're trying both.
> Principle 2: Provide high-quality content with every app launch.
This one is a tricky one. I understand the intent, but I think platforms need to shy away from trying to optimize this in particular.
One reason is you can't define "high-quality content". Thinking in terms of Tumblr's userbase, there are users who have very specific things they want to see, and if you try to focus on some measure of "quality" (how? engagement? bad idea!) you may just frustrate and alienate them by making it hard to do this curation. That means it's important to make sure you DON'T force an algorithmic feed, even if you're not doing the Threads thing and making it basically a giant sponsored post section in the timeline.
Another reason is that's not what people actually like about the internet. The internet is fun because it's a mixed bag: you get a lot of everything. Seeing only the best things every day is neat, but after a while you just get numb to it. What you want is something enticing and interesting. A good example here is YouTube in say, 2008 or so. That was crazy. There was not much of an "algorithm" to speak of: your homepage was just surfacing your followers and their interactions with others. This made a natural social graph of content for you to explore, and you could find stuff that people you like thought was interesting. The experience of crawling through this web of content is enticing in a difficult to explain way, but it would certainly be made worse if you just select stuff that an ML algorithm thinks I would like. Case-in-point, YouTube's recommendations for me are horrible, because it more often than not finds superficially relevant content that doesn't actually scratch the same itch as the stuff I do like.
Worse, I think over time having systems like this cause lots of feedback loops. People discover ways to game the algorithm and suddenly everybody is playing the game. Content that is de-prioritized by the algorithm becomes less visible, and makes discoverability of things that people would like to see much harder.
I suspect most people who sign up for Tumblr have a specific entrypoint: another person or account that they came there for. The focus on discoverability should, in my opinion, focus on moving outward from there rather than trying to push a bunch of viral content on the user in hopes that it will appeal to them. Same goes for a lot of other social networks that do literally the same thing.
It will help your metrics in the short term, but you may very well bleed even more dedicated users. Metrics can obscure a lot of important things...
Regarding YouTube, I'm very split. I wish the platform would give control to the users. There is a lot of stuff I want to see, like.. I subscribe to people because I want to see their things, show their videos on my front page.
On the other hand, the algorithm, for all its flaws, has introduced my to a whole world of music I would have never found otherwise. Though then I watch one video about the Ukraine conflict and YouTube suddenly thinks that's all I ever want to watch. Luckily a friend told me about the incognito switch, so now whenever I watch a video I don't want to influence the algorithm, I use that. Not ideal, but better than nothing.
On a social media site, on the other hand, I don't want an algorithm deciding what I see. I follow my friends, I don't follow celebrities. Just show me what I want.
> I wish the platform would give control to the users. There is a lot of stuff I want to see, like.. I subscribe to people because I want to see their things, show their videos on my front page.
Okay it's not the front page, but this view does exist. On the left sidebar, click "Subscriptions" to go to a chronological view of only videos uploaded by who you're subscribed to: https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
> On the other hand, the algorithm, for all its flaws, has introduced my to a whole world of music I would have never found otherwise.
I feel there's a dead-obvious solution to this: split the difference. Give users granular control over parameters of the recommendation algorithm, and then use that to populate half of the feed. The other half, do what is done today. Maybe even make the user-controlled half of the feed a negative input into the platform-controlled recommender. And sure, even mix in all the commercial prioritization into that second half.
This way, each user gets to enjoy both precise control and serendipitous discoveries; they get to suffer both stewing in their own filter bubble and getting exposed to random shit content - but no more than 50% of each. A good balance could be achieved.
It would definitely be better than what we have today, where, unless you're working hard to carefully tune your experience, getting drowned in random shit content mixed with advertising is the good outcome - the bad outcome is ending up stuck in a filter bubble made of... shit content reinforcing your particular inclinations (and still mixed with advertising). I feel it would even be better for platforms, too.
I wonder if anyone has tried to experiment in getting recommendations right as a terminal goal. Not as a way to push what they want, control the experience, or funnel the sheep to slaughter. Just a honest-to-$deity, non-commercial, "hold my beer and watch this" attempt at putting some algorithms in front of content library (perhaps someone else's content library), and giving enough knobs to the users to let each one tune their own feed. Guide the machine.
Of course, any such attempt will stay somewhat obscure - it can't get popular, because in the wider world of users being seen as cattle, the system will get immediately gained and/or bought out and/or sued - but it could work as a proof of concept. Perhaps lead to a bunch of scientific papers, a Wikipedia page, an interesting anecdote - but also a capability demonstrator for a better future. So where is it? I'd expect at least the torrent crowd would have something like it by now. But then maybe it exists, and I'm just not privy to it.
Anyway, with all the research that's been going on ever since Netflix award, and maybe earlier, with all the systems in use, some of which probably not initially designed to be malicious - it feels to me that it should be possible, and the missing ingredient is treating end-user as a partner, not an idiot.
While generally I think that your approach is the best approach to discovery, I think it is prone to privacy complaints. I’ve certainly looked at… things… on social media that I wouldn’t want close friends or family to get recommended to them, even worse if they know they got recommended it because of me. Not everything everyone interacts with on a social media platform is meant to be shared with everyone else.
I think that problem is relatively solvable though: giving people privacy controls and making operations that are public explicit is easy enough. Like, if you are commenting publicly on something, I think it's fair game to default to showing that to people who follow you. OTOH, it doesn't have to be forced to work that way. Heck, Twitter probably did this right a long time ago: if your post started with an @ it would not show up in other people's TLs, making direct replies not show up to your followers; but if you add a dot at the beginning, they would. Now obviously that's unnecessarily arcane, but at least to me the concept of being able to control that would be a good start. Combine that with a good system of identity where users can change their publicly displayed identity and work under multiple aliases fluidly and this should make it possible for people to manage things decently. It's odd how Twitter actually was kind of close to this at a point; it has fluid identities, they added the ability to switch between up to five accounts, etc.
Then they screwed up by surfacing likes and never adding an option to make them private. Very dumb.
Looks cool! I really like your focus on not needing a database and just using a free Vercel account to run your website. I love seeing stuff like this communicated well; gives me hope one day that I can tell some of my less-technical friends they can do that. :)
(I'm working on a project that started as a Tumblr replacement... it's kinda gotten out of control and I'm rapidly trying to get it shippable... ^_^;; https://github.com/smolblog/)
I call bs on this strategy being consumer centric. They couldn't monetize "enough." They're saying they had a product problem, but not for their users. Tumblr was lovely, just didn't have the gross design patterns that drive the level/type of usage that advertisers want. Reddit has the same issue and you see them prying the product out of the hands of their users. Lol, also yes to that comment, let the NSFW fly free.
Honestly, as much as this argument has been beaten to death, they just need to allow explicit NSFW content. This is Twitter's edge right now, and Reddit maybe. Let people post freely, and they'll return.
Considering it’s now owned by WordPress it’s very unlikely. Matt mullenweg seems to be very prude (not that it’s a good or bad thing, it’s just a personality I guess).
They could capitalize on all the weirdness and discontent from twitter and reddit like zuckerberg is doing.
Allowing porn monetizes and aids a probabilistic percentage of revenge porn, child porn, deepfake porn, and human trafficking.
Even if a waiver is signed, there's significant duress in many cases. There's a lot of pain and evil enabled by allowing porn to spread on an algorithmic newsfeed.
And people can beat people with baseball bats instead of playing baseball. Unless you have quantifiable numbers, no real discussion can be had. In the absence of numbers, I’m for allowing the purchase of baseball bats.
From the perspective of advertisers, this analogy is not applicable. It is important to emphasize that I agree with the notion that tumblr should also have NSFW content. However, advertisers exhibit extreme sensitivity towards their brand being associated with anything even remotely detrimental, and they are inclined to swiftly disassociate themselves without hesitation.
well according to the Director of the Dept of Homeland Security (DHS) human trafficking division, the estimated annual global profits are $150B [1]. The total revenue of the MLB is just north of $10B for comparison. Not really applicable given your straw man example but thought it was an interesting fact nonetheless.
I feel like it may be helpful for you to try to understand how poorly constructed this argument is by reflecting on all of the pain and evil that has been enabled by allowing something you enjoy or care about to exist.
How confident do you feel that your religion, or people acting on behalf of it, have not engaged in violent acts of revenge, torture, child abuse, or human trafficking? Does it not cause significant duress in many cases to teach people to feel shame, to tell them normal feelings are sinful, that they will suffer for eternity if they break the rules? No one needs to worship any particular religion—there are plenty of other ones, after all—so perhaps yours should not be allowed because it’s associated with bad things?
Do you eat meat from industrial farms? Use electronics containing conflict minerals? Wear clothes made overseas? Play video games from studios notorious for crunch? All these industries cause significant amounts of suffering and many are exploitative. They fund wars, genocides, slave labour, child labour[0][1], human trafficking, and animal abuse. They cause duress, evil, and pain. Shall we disallow them? We don’t need to eat meat and it would be healthier for most people and the planet if they didn’t. We can go back to buying only domestic clothing, or just make our own. We all lived without smartphones until 15 years ago, so those can go. Games are just like porn—merely diversions—so if we discount all the joy they bring to people, they really have no value to society at all. Should we get rid of these things, too, because they are associated with bad things?
Allowing books aids a probabilistic percentage of people who want to promote violence and hatred toward others, deliberately spread falsehoods, advocate for and explicitly describe abuse, and give instruction on how to cause harm. Even when there are disclaimers, sometimes they cause significant duress to readers. There’s a lot of pain and evil enabled by allowing books to spread… do you get the picture?
All human enterprise has problems, and inductive fallacies like these are no way to judge what should or should not be allowed.
Twitter and Reddit for some reason get a pass from Apple's App Store Guidelines on this. It seems unlikely any other app will be able to have as explicit NSFW content as those two.
Good news! Since November 2022 we rolled back a lot of the restrictions Verizon had put in place, to now allow for artistic representations of the human form and many things people would consider NSFW:
Tumblr's original hockey-stick exponential growth was in 2010-2012, and their traffic peaked in late 2012 - early 2013, quite a few years before the NSFW ban. Even if they won back 100% of the users that exited from the NSFW ban, it would still be less than one-third their peak traffic size.
For a little while, Tumblr was a mainstream social network. This was at a time when Twitter didn't even have built-in photo functionality yet, and both Instagram and Pinterest were still tiny / widely unknown.
Those mainstream users probably aren't coming back. Say what you will about having a ton of "normies" and brands on your platform, but it's not clear if a social network can be profitable (and therefore sustainable) these days without them.
> Say what you will about having a ton of "normies" and brands on your platform, but it's not clear if a social network can be profitable (and therefore sustainable) these days without them.
Not in the current market environment, no. But it's not "normies" that are the problem - it's the "free service, make money on ads" business model that's the root of the issue. It will, by its very nature, always lead to the so-called "enshittification". And, it's also near-impossible to compete with at scale. So paid social networks just can't work, because a "free with ads" service will trivially outcompete it before it starts to visibly rot.
I say current market environment, because there's always that slight hope that some sort of regulatory intervention will kill the "free with ads" model, or at least severely restrict it to level the playing field.
Where does the money come from? I’m assuming it’s more difficult to find ads to run on NSFW content and/or there’s some other reason why monetizing NSFW content is challenging for businesses like Reddit, Tumblr, etc.
Having seen this from the inside, well known platforms get more forgiving treatment from app reviewers even if policies are nominally the same for all apps. If Tumblr launches a new or heavily redesigned app and they have adult content, the review process may block it even if Reddit's app has similarly graphic content.
Oh, I know. But they are correct that the policies state that this is the case, even though Tumblr does still have quite a bit of porn, both compliant and not.
Okay, so they're reducing the role of blogs, moving further away from chronological feeds, and replacing isolated replies from people you follow with... something else.
I remember when Tumblr was the place to find individuals posting passionately about all kinds of super-niche topics. It had more personality than any of the other mainstream social media services. What the hell happened?
Seems like they have the right idea. I signed up after the first twitter meltdown and I had a hard time using it. I couldn't find good communities and when I did I didn't know how to engage.
2010-2012 Tumblr was truly a magical experience. It wasn't a social media for your real life friends or news, it was just a place for fandoms to share tons of gifs. And there was a lot of creativity once people started sharing their own art as well.
It's such a shame that we probably won't have another website like this again. I guess some of that stuff has moved to Discord now or sub-communities within Twitter, Reddit, etc but it's just not the same.
Internally, the mysql database schema was called "tumblr3" as an artifact from that. Or at least that's the explanation I heard when joining the company in 2010.
I don't think anything was ever versioned after v3. So that means if you're saying this is now 4.0, I guess we should expect the biggest change in 16 years :)
The UX is all weird and always has been. Maybe the hardcore users like it, but I personally hate having to "quote tweet" every response. Replies are there now, great, but they are a completely different post type and are unthreaded. You can't have multiple videos in a post. You can't use videos in a reblog. There are so many "what the hell why would it be like this" moments.
But the user base is pretty cool.
Besides: What happened to the ActivityPub plans?
I think it's great that y'all are thinking about this. If you succeed (hopefully without angering the current user base too much), Tumblr could house a lot of Twitter/Reddit refugees.
I had to move my blog off Tumblr shortly after moving on when I realized I couldn't access the archive when logged out. There's no way to turn this off. And as far as I can tell, there's no way to convince it you're logged in when viewing under a domain. I was logged in, but it still showed a logged out view. Something to do with cookies, I'm sure, but this was with default security settings. I'm sure I could fix it for me, but I can't expect everyone who visits to do that.
I moved (or will be) it to wordpress.com, so it's not like I don't trust you to host my blog. It's mainly about the change itself. The locking down of archives was an announced change on the Tumblr blog, so not a bug, and that would have been a deal breaker even if it worked for me.
Wasn't there a great exodus when Tumblr was bought out and they banned anything with a hint of NSFW? I doubt they will be winning back those users again...
This is the exact verbiage from the community guidelines:
Sexually Explicit Material. Visual depictions of sexually explicit acts (or content with an overt focus on genitalia) are not allowed on Tumblr. That includes pictures, videos, GIFs, drawings, CGI, or anything similar. Historically significant art that you may find in a mainstream museum and which depicts sex acts—such as from India’s Śuṅga Empire—are now allowed on Tumblr with proper labeling.
Nudity and other kinds of adult material are generally welcome. We’re not here to judge your art, we just ask that you add a Community Label to your mature content so that people can choose to filter it out of their Dashboard if they prefer.
You have the option to add a community label when making a new post, reblogging a post, or editing an existing post. Depending on your content, you can label it as generally mature or choose a specific category such as “Sexual Themes” if your post contains sexually suggestive subject matter.
Blogs which have a focus on mature content may not be eligible for certain Tumblr features, including monetization options. We need to consider the policies of our partners in the payments space, so the rules there are a bit different.
For more information about this guideline, and how to appeal decisions about sexually explicit material, check out our Help Center article.
Policy is what is said, and that’s often a huge gap between what actually happens.
Tumblr had a huge content moderation issue where (based on my personal experience) I’m guessing there are incentives in place around flagging explicit content. I’ve never posted or reblogged anything that would break this policy, but every single post I make on my main blog is automatically flagged as explicit/adult content (eg a photo of my cat) and going though a content appeal I’d say 50% the human-reviewed content appeal fails and my post gets hidden.
I ended up creating a separate blog that I now post content to, and then reblog to my main account.
It’s impossible to get a hold of any support to try and resolve.
Despite non-existent support and increasingly buggy apps, it’s still the best online community I’ve found and I love it :)
We'll try to get better about support, bugginess, and account switching should be a lot nicer so you can actually use Tumblr as different personas when you want to.
I hope they improve the platform. Tumblr is such a nice place with a cool atmosphere, but I hardly can justify using it (working in a tech news outlet) when there are so many rival platforms with way more people to talk to.
Everybody website is trying to pivot to doing what tiktok is good at, instead of what they were good at. Most websites are probably not going to eat tiktok's userbase.
I guess we can't have nice things because what those websites are traditionally good at isn't profitable. I can't really be surprised that monetizing tumblr proves challenging, when it seems to consist of like half starving artists, half anti-capitalist shitposters, and half young adults talking about fanfic. I remember monetizing blogging being a running joke on the site over a decade ago, and I can't imagine it's gotten easier with, you know, the economic situation impacting those demographics.
Tumblr was extremely comfy. It had a different feel from any other social site, everyone was a lot nicer and friendly and supportive. In a very genuine way. Twitter on the other hand feels like endless sociopaths trying to sell you something.
It’s gone though. I know it isn’t Automattics fault, but the high-water mark was almost a decade ago now. Then it was taken behind the shed and put down by Verizon lol
It’s literally a case study of how to drive a social network into the ground. It was sold for 1 billion in 2013 and for 3 million in 2019
They banned most of their artists and content creators when the new owners started their neo-puritan war on porn. Thousands of artists used it to get commissions of fan-art. They suddenly found their income disappear and didnt know why - they were getting shadow banned, often in error.
In this announcement I see no indication that they’ve learned anything
Once the creators leave, they are not coming back. Quality content is gone. The social network only lives so long as they can re-market someone else’s work. It’s a predatory business.