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>I seriously doubt that. It might have made it not "safe" for some small circles, but hardly "not cool" to the coolness-seeking people. Teenagers for example an

by 5040 8y ago

>I seriously doubt that. It might have made it not "safe" for some small circles, but hardly "not cool" to the coolness-seeking people. Teenagers for example and younger people could hardly care about that. Sites can get a negative reputation for being the place where certain strange and distasteful fanbases gather. In time, outsiders might come to identify the site with these groups inside of it making the place undesirable. Compare Tumblr.

coldtea 8y ago
I think Tumblr lost most of its mojo and following in the exactly inverse scenario: when they (recently) said "no more porn". The backslash was big...
- evanelias 8y ago
  Numerically, that's incorrect. Tumblr includes posts-per-day stats on their /about page, and banning adult content was a drop of about 20-25% of posting volume. While that's a big drop for something that was an overnight change, it's still dwarfed by the drop comparing current stats vs heyday stats of years back. At peak, going by public posts/day stats, Tumblr was about 5x larger than at present. It was more of a slow bleed than a sudden drop-off though.
evanelias 8y ago
This is absolutely spot on. Although Tumblr was always slightly off-kilter, it was significantly more mainstream during its hockey-stick growth period of 2010-2012. Many people just used it for posting photos, or used reblogs for visual scrapbooking. Numerous book deals were spawned through successful Tumblr blogs. Tons of large corporations had a social branding presence on Tumblr. And some people just used it as a CMS / free site builder, including (of all people) Mark Zuckerberg's father for his dental office. Eventually the more mainstream userbase left for other platforms (primarily Instagram and Pinterest) which were better-suited for the specific use-case that these users wanted... especially on mobile, which Tumblr was slow to adapt to. The remaining userbase was/is a lot more fanbase-focused and niche, and that can certainly be off-putting to more mainstream-leaning users. This had a profound effect inside the company. Over the course of a few years, it went from a company where almost every employee was an obsessive daily user/poster, to one where many of the more backend-leaning engineers didn't use the product at all. (Disclosure: I was an early Tumblr employee, but above opinions are my own.)

by 5040 8y ago

coldtea 8y ago

I think Tumblr lost most of its mojo and following in the exactly inverse scenario: when they (recently) said "no more porn". The backslash was big...

evanelias 8y ago
Numerically, that's incorrect. Tumblr includes posts-per-day stats on their /about page, and banning adult content was a drop of about 20-25% of posting volume. While that's a big drop for something that was an overnight change, it's still dwarfed by the drop comparing current stats vs heyday stats of years back. At peak, going by public posts/day stats, Tumblr was about 5x larger than at present. It was more of a slow bleed than a sudden drop-off though.

evanelias 8y ago

This is absolutely spot on. Although Tumblr was always slightly off-kilter, it was significantly more mainstream during its hockey-stick growth period of 2010-2012. Many people just used it for posting photos, or used reblogs for visual scrapbooking. Numerous book deals were spawned through successful Tumblr blogs. Tons of large corporations had a social branding presence on Tumblr. And some people just used it as a CMS / free site builder, including (of all people) Mark Zuckerberg's father for his dental office. Eventually the more mainstream userbase left for other platforms (primarily Instagram and Pinterest) which were better-suited for the specific use-case that these users wanted... especially on mobile, which Tumblr was slow to adapt to. The remaining userbase was/is a lot more fanbase-focused and niche, and that can certainly be off-putting to more mainstream-leaning users. This had a profound effect inside the company. Over the course of a few years, it went from a company where almost every employee was an obsessive daily user/poster, to one where many of the more backend-leaning engineers didn't use the product at all. (Disclosure: I was an early Tumblr employee, but above opinions are my own.)