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This is clearly Tumblr's Digg moment. They are going to have a 100% write down on this one. It is also worth adding Twitter has built a reasonable ad business

by AJ007 8y ago

This is clearly Tumblr's Digg moment. They are going to have a 100% write down on this one. It is also worth adding Twitter has built a reasonable ad business and they are full of just as much porn as Tumblr. Google actually shows ads for porn and other adult services on their platform. If any of the higher ups at Verizon are reading this: - Fire everyone involved in the NSFW filtering. Clearly this wasn't even tested. - Fire everyone who thought NSFW material had to be purged from your platform. There is a short window where you can reverse the decision and benefit from all of the people who were reminded Tumblr existed. After that window closes, your business is dead.

jsjohnst 8y ago
> They are going to have a 100% write down on this one. They already did that (the goodwill portion anyway) in 2016 before selling to Verizon. Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/07/18/yahoo-reports-earnings-as-auction-comes-to-close/#579d338c6e09 https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/07/18/yahoo-r...
jaxtellerSoA 8y ago
>This is clearly Tumblr's Digg moment. Hit the nail on the head with that one. Digg and Tumblr should get together and write a blog "How to lose your entire user base in 1 day."
jamesholden 8y ago
- Fire everyone who thought NSFW material had to be purged from your platform. 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.
- JulianMorrison 8y ago
  On the contrary, it's probably a small part of their service. The nature of Tumblr is to make it easy to find like minded people, and construct a subset of the site that's full of what you're into. So it's very easy to feel "Tumblr is all left-wing teens" or "Tumblr is all porn" depending on what you go looking for. But Tumblr is a galaxy of niches and I doubt porn was their mainstay. This fact probably caused them to underestimate the disruptive effect of banning it.
  - soundwave106 8y ago
    Actually, I more tend to agree with this article (https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/18/tumblr-is-not-what-you-think/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/18/tumblr-is-not-what-you-thi...) that a big part of the appeal of Tumblr was a bit more the opposite of this: Tumblr could act as a personal microblog of sorts, where you could put up a page that wasn't very easily discoverable, and share with a few friends interests and memes that you didn't want to necessarily broadcast to the world in full Facebook fashion. That includes people's porn stashes, as well as NSFW kinks and other quirks. Other stuff too (memes etc.), but the NSFW was a significant part of Tumblr. 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).
    - JulianMorrison 8y ago
      The way you find content in Tumblr is (1) you somehow find one example of the type, perhaps from an outside link or a search, (2) you click the content and find who liked it, (3) you go to each of their blogs and if it has content you're into, you follow it. Iterate until you've connected to the entire like-minded community. 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.
    - thetricia 8y ago
      I'm not a big fan of this meme of porn being bigger than what it is. Tumblr was never about that and Snapchat wasn't and isn't a sexting app. 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
protomyth 8y ago
Fire everyone involved in the NSFW filtering. Clearly this wasn't even tested. This is the part I really don't understand. Wouldn't you do a test run through their site and do some checking? You cannot claim you don't have examples available.
- hinkley 8y ago
  Image analysis takes time. You’d have X servers to deal with new images and either a whole lot more to catch up on the back catalog or more simply just soft launch weeks or months ahead of time. I hope whoever is in charge of quality just had a coup instead of being blamed for this.
  - protomyth 8y ago
    Sure it takes time, but before the public ever sees anything, I just have a tough time believing they didn't test it on the inventory of images (or at least a large subset) before inflicting it on the public. Improper testing is a PR embarrassment and has real consequences.

by AJ007 8y ago

jsjohnst 8y ago

> They are going to have a 100% write down on this one. They already did that (the goodwill portion anyway) in 2016 before selling to Verizon. Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/07/18/yahoo-reports-earnings-as-auction-comes-to-close/#579d338c6e09 https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/07/18/yahoo-r...

jaxtellerSoA 8y ago

>This is clearly Tumblr's Digg moment. Hit the nail on the head with that one. Digg and Tumblr should get together and write a blog "How to lose your entire user base in 1 day."

jamesholden 8y ago

- Fire everyone who thought NSFW material had to be purged from your platform. 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.

JulianMorrison 8y ago
On the contrary, it's probably a small part of their service. The nature of Tumblr is to make it easy to find like minded people, and construct a subset of the site that's full of what you're into. So it's very easy to feel "Tumblr is all left-wing teens" or "Tumblr is all porn" depending on what you go looking for. But Tumblr is a galaxy of niches and I doubt porn was their mainstay. This fact probably caused them to underestimate the disruptive effect of banning it.
- soundwave106 8y ago
  Actually, I more tend to agree with this article (https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/18/tumblr-is-not-what-you-think/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/18/tumblr-is-not-what-you-thi...) that a big part of the appeal of Tumblr was a bit more the opposite of this: Tumblr could act as a personal microblog of sorts, where you could put up a page that wasn't very easily discoverable, and share with a few friends interests and memes that you didn't want to necessarily broadcast to the world in full Facebook fashion. That includes people's porn stashes, as well as NSFW kinks and other quirks. Other stuff too (memes etc.), but the NSFW was a significant part of Tumblr. 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).
  - JulianMorrison 8y ago
    The way you find content in Tumblr is (1) you somehow find one example of the type, perhaps from an outside link or a search, (2) you click the content and find who liked it, (3) you go to each of their blogs and if it has content you're into, you follow it. Iterate until you've connected to the entire like-minded community. 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.
  - thetricia 8y ago
    I'm not a big fan of this meme of porn being bigger than what it is. Tumblr was never about that and Snapchat wasn't and isn't a sexting app. 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

protomyth 8y ago

Fire everyone involved in the NSFW filtering. Clearly this wasn't even tested. This is the part I really don't understand. Wouldn't you do a test run through their site and do some checking? You cannot claim you don't have examples available.

hinkley 8y ago
Image analysis takes time. You’d have X servers to deal with new images and either a whole lot more to catch up on the back catalog or more simply just soft launch weeks or months ahead of time. I hope whoever is in charge of quality just had a coup instead of being blamed for this.
- protomyth 8y ago
  Sure it takes time, but before the public ever sees anything, I just have a tough time believing they didn't test it on the inventory of images (or at least a large subset) before inflicting it on the public. Improper testing is a PR embarrassment and has real consequences.