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Tumblr has lost 30 percent of web traffic since December
- tonymet 8y agoI'd wager that more than 30% of content consumed , and probably 60+% on insta, is adult content. The difference here is that tumblr didn't have the resources to mitigate the issue, so they chose a blunt cut-off.
- totoglazer 8y agoI’m not big into insta, but I don’t get that impression at all. Tumblr, sure.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- vernie 8y agoI find that Instagram is incredibly puritanical. Art posts featuring nudity are routinely taken down.
- tsomctl 8y agoDoes Instagram put much effort into mitigating adult content? I can think of a shit ton of risque stuff on Instagram. If you're not logged in, you have to click a button saying you want to see adult content.
- jug 8y agoFrom what I've seen by following photographers and artists sometimes with "risque content", Instagram is successfully strict about it. Sometimes people get away with female nipples minimally censored but anytime that's involved you run a very high risk your photograph will be taken down or the whole account banned if you keep being "into" that in your feed. I think a lot depends on how many complaints Instagram is receiving. They're also OK with butts. Blood/gore/violence is pretty tabooo, even in comic book form. @sirjoancornella has for example had trouble with Instagram. That's how adult Instagram let themselves become from what I can tell over the years.
- wyoh 8y agoNo shit! Like plenty of users I don't visit this place anymore as my blog is now empty of content (NSFW nude art blog). But even before the ban, content creators (photographers in my case) were posting less and less, focusing instead on Instagr.am networking and Patreon.
- HenryBemis 8y agoTumblr has a fantastic community of cartoonists, I have actually asked some cartoonists to put their designs on other platforms just so I can buy a t-shirt with some of their cartoons. Of course it is just a platform to showcase the free stuff and then pull people to their patreon, which makes perfect sense. Free blog hosting with X million teenagers.
- HenryBemis 8y agoTumblr is just lazy nowadays. There are many fandoms being active though. The spark is long gone since Yahoo got their old shaggy greedy fingers on it. Pornography aside, it is a great place to host a blog. Nice template, can support many types of media. The disgusting part is the 3-4 pages of other filthy fingers (ads-trackers) that welcome you every time you go to <insert-name>.tumblr.com
- Hoasi 8y ago> The disgusting part is the 3-4 pages of other filthy fingers (ads-trackers) that welcome you every time you go to <insert-name>.tumblr.com I moved 1500+ posts (drawings, own content) from Tumblr to Jekyll just to avoid that page. It seems designed to repel visitors permanently. People cannot reasonably opt out of 300+ ads-trackers each time they check a single blog. Another great missed opportunity as a competitor to WordPress, and other blogging platforms, Tumblr will follow the path of Posterous.
- HenryBemis 8y agoI've seen many people keep their blog to git.. I'll have a look at Jekyll, thank you for the recommendation!
- Hoasi 8y agoJekyll is great. This gist is a good starting point (once you are familiar with Jekyll) to migrate from tumblr: https://gist.github.com/ndarville/5f8a7fb93191801de460c5ebe21cc9d4 https://gist.github.com/ndarville/5f8a7fb93191801de460c5ebe2...
- JBReefer 8y agoI wonder what the dollar value of that is. I know that even fairly recently Tumblr was valued at $0
- HenryBemis 8y agoThe problem with Tumblr is that they could never figure out how to make profit from it. Yahoo just made things worse by giving full access to so many advertisers and trackers. Think Cambridge Analytica x50, but at least they have do documented it.
- fouc 8y agoJust a month ago there was a HN thread about sex censorship killing off safe spaces for LGBTQ folks and more. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19061135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19061135 Tumbler really didn't do anyone justice. They're clearly reaping what they sowed. Unfortunately it's a lose/lose/lose situation for all.
- hashberry 8y agoThis "sex censorship" includes child pornography, since the availability of it caused Tumblr's app to be banned from iOS.[0] [0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104366/tumblr-ios-app-child-pornography-removed-from-app-store https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104366/tumblr-ios-app-...
- At1C 8y agoBullshit
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y agoYou're not wrong, but you need to substantiate or fill out your claim.
- dang 8y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
- nemothekid 8y agoI really find that the child pornography angle was a convenient lie to push through the banning of porn on tumblr. It's my view that Verizon didn't want it, so it had to go away. Child pornography online isn't a new problem and Tumblr must have been negligent in policing it.
- dgzl 8y agoOr maybe they don't want to subject their employees to having to police child pornography.
- etaerc 8y agoHm, they must have gained a shit load of new content creators. Porn and <shitload_of_letters>+ was not just 30% of tumblr, it was like 80% of it.
- Raphmedia 8y agoJust write "LGBT+". It's 4 letters and a symbol. Not that hard to remember.
- Pfhreak 8y ago> <shitload_of_letters>+ ... really? You can use LGBT+ that's four letters. Or GSM (Gender/Sexual Minorities), that's three letters and it doesn't require you to stay current on what the letters represent. Going out of your way to type more letters to take a shot at a minority community is not a great look.
- 2038AD 8y agoTo be fair I think it was more a joke about the acronym being overloaded. LGBT on its own is already longer than it needs to be with 2/3 ways of saying 'attracted to people of the same gender or sex' but it then gets extended with two Qs (queer and questioning), 2 As (asexual and allies), a P for pansexual (which then causes arguments over whether bisexual people can be attracted to trans people) and more. To add to that there are more distinctions which should arguably be included (such as being homoromantic vs homosexual or genderfluidity/genderqueerness as distinct from being trans or even being transgender vs transexual(?)). In short, I think GSM is a great suggestion with the only possible problem being at some point GSM people not being a minority so the term becomes a misnomer.
- CydeWeys 8y agoVerizon is just a terrible company all around, and they certainly don't know how to run a big social network. Everyone was predicting this when the acquisition happened, and it's come to pass exactly as the critics said it would. Verizon may well be OK with killing Tumblr. It's far outside their core competency, and unlike their core competency, it's hard to monetize.
- HaloZero 8y agoI don't see how Verizon had another option? With SESTA/FOSTA they could be held liable for anything too sexual. I imagine Tumblr even as an independent agency would do the same.
- perfmode 8y agoThe affected Tumblr communities weren’t enabling sex trafficking. This is just puritanical American values being imposed.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- chimeracoder 8y ago> The affected Tumblr communities weren’t enabling sex trafficking Of course they weren't, but SESTA outlawed a whole lot more than that. "Sex trafficking" was just the excuse SESTA's authors gave.
- darkpuma 8y ago> The affected Tumblr communities weren’t enabling sex trafficking. How is tumblr meant to economically filter those that do from those that don't? Algorithmic detection of pornography of any sort is a much easier (cheaper) problem to solve.
- perfmode 8y agoThrowing out the baby with the bath water.
- ddebernardy 8y agoI'm surprised it was only 30%... Per Wikipedia: > As of March 1, 2019, Tumblr hosts over 459 million blogs. As of January 2016, the website had 555 million monthly visitors. The numbers quoted in the article are barely more charitable. Basically it's about one monthly visitor per blog... which one would assume means the blog owners periodically check what their sites look like. Was anyone actually using Tumblr for anything but porn nowadays?
- schwarzmx 8y agoPresumably, someone has found 459 million other uses for it.
- MrEldritch 8y agoKeep in mind that most of those 459 million blogs were either inactive, or spambots. The number of monthly visitors per active, non-spam blog was, and remains, probably much greater. Funnily enough, the Great Tiddy Ban of 2018 doesn't seem to have actually cut the flood of pornbots by much.
- ddebernardy 8y ago> The number of monthly visitors per active, non-spam blog was, and remains, probably much greater. For sure, but it doesn't seem to be stopping Tumblr from boasting that it has 461M blogs [0]. Even if we charitably assume that as many as .1% of those are run by real, actual humans, that figure makes Tumblr look like a small platform with not many users -- particularly if, as you've noted, there are still tons of porn bots on it. [0]: http://www.tumblr.com/about http://www.tumblr.com/about
- MrEldritch 8y agoI mean, .1% seems drastically too small to me. I'd guess maybe 1, maybe even as many as 10%, represent actual at-least-somewhat-active users?
- 8y ago
- iooi 8y agoThe problem with hosting adult content is that it's pretty hard to monetize it. Advertisers want to be excluded from placements next to adult content, to the point that there's entirely separate ad networks and payment processors that are exclusive to adult content. I'm guessing that this is the first step of a monetization overhaul for Tumblr, this traffic was only costing them money and they don't see it as a loss of users, more of a good riddance.
- abel212 8y agoThis actually makes a lot of sense. I think there are a lot of concerns about this being an assault on free speech when ultimately it comes down to it just not being profitable to maintain.
- gizmo686 8y agoThe two aren't exclusive. If major platforms of speech are privately owned by profit seeking entities, then the fact that certain kinds of speech are not profitable to host is a threat to free speech.
- krupan 8y agoI think you are confusing gratis with freedom.
- Dylan16807 8y agoYou can't get back into the network by paying, so it boils down to a freedom issue.
- whywhywhywhy 8y ago> Advertisers want to be excluded from placements next to adult content I feel that this is maybe Tumblr's ad teams failing and they could have argued around this. When using the Dashboard the UI design of the system felt very much like every post on that screen was there because your chose it to be there so even if you injected ads into it there was never the feeling that ads were next to pornography posts because your feed was only ever full of pornography if you actively followed people who post it. It was all manually curated by you not an algorithm system like Twitter, Gyphy, Imgur etc.
- colorincorrect 8y agoIs there a reason why advertisers don't like ads next to adult content? Is there an actual study that shows ads in this form are less valuable?
- Hemospectrum 8y agoThere's data on fraud and chargeback rates for adult-content-related credit card payments. They're much higher than for other goods and services. Major payment processors have blanket bans on such transactions, and will often refuse to do business with companies that don't have such bans. And you can't buy ads if you can't pay for them.
- Mirioron 8y agoWhich is why we need more competition in the payment processor space. Alternatives to Visa and MasterCard are a must.
- dgzl 8y agoIt's not hard to see how a business might not want their paid advertisement sitting next to pornography hosted on the platform they're paying.
- p49k 8y agoI think they are acting on a reasonable fear that the reputation of the brand could be tarnished by their placing of ads on the page, which could be seen as a tacit endorsement of the content. Let’s not forget that this is not about whether to spend money or not - it’s about where to spend money. Advertisers have countless options for where and how to advertise, so it makes sense to shift money to more boring, safe platforms where the ROI is almost identical anyway.
- Joe-Z 8y agoThat‘s so absurd though. It went from „hey let‘s put a banner in this popular place, so people will know us“ to „let‘s police this place so people will only associate us with nice things“ This whole ad-based internet needs to die.
- At1C 8y agoFeckn yes you mushroom heads are waking up!
- Izkata 8y agoOn top of it, they weren't entirely truthful about how the block would be implemented. A couple text-only tumblrs I followed had long been voluntarily marked adult, and the announcement made it sound like they'd be in the clear. Not only were they not, the implementation was to simply turn on the safe-mode filter and remove the setting to turn it off, while still allowing the adult content on subscribers' dashboards. So they had no idea they were blocked from the public until someone told them, since subscribers could still interact from that one page. I expect it to continue to drop as more realize this.
- gtsteve 8y agoI've seen a post showing that you can change the value of the checkbox behind the UI element using "inspect element" and posting the form back. The server-side doesn't validate and you can disable the flag. This is probably patched now but if not it might show you how much they care about this.
- alleyshack 8y agoThis doesn't surprise me at all. I run a reasonably popular non-porn, submissions-based blog and immediately after the ban was implemented, our numbers tanked. Submissions dropped from 25-35 per day to around 10-20, while the number of notes (likes+reblogs+replies) per post has dropped from 600-800 to 200-400. Unfortunately, we still see about the same total number of spambots and fake blogs in our notes. So at least from my own anecdotal experience, the ban did nothing except drive away human users. A lot of our followers asked if/when we would move to another platform, but unfortunately for them (and us), Tumblr is the only major blog platform we know of which supports a curated, moderated submissions-based blog. Reddit is the closest runner-up in that it allows submissions and can be moderated, but isn't curatable for all intents and purposes. I suspect if (when) Tumblr goes under, it's going to take my blog with it, which is disappointing.
- aussieguy1234 8y agoI run a popular tech blog on Tumblr and I've noticed the same thing. Their faulty AI censor bot also flagged 20+ of my non porn tech posts as porn, including a photo of Mars. Sent them all in for manual review months ago, no response yet. Conversely I'm also still seeing some actual porn on Tumblr. Its apparently not difficult to fool the AI censor with carefully crafted images.
- alleyshack 8y agoI had several text posts flagged by their algorithm. I still don't know how it managed to do that.
- tzfld 8y agoYou are not the only one: https://66.media.tumblr.com/47f87b2a4dab47d52adb9e343b57b517/tumblr_pk2pbvhjDl1rasnq9o1_r1_1280.pnj https://66.media.tumblr.com/47f87b2a4dab47d52adb9e343b57b517... Seems they unleashed a totally untrained ai.
- ihuman 8y agoJust add a #sfw tag to your posts. Supposedly that bypasses the scanner.
- aussieguy1234 8y agoThey banned alot more than just porn. Alot of content normal people would not consider to be porn was also banned, like fandom art and other content. In response to this nonsense I've built Libr (https://librapp.com https://librapp.com). I'm in the process of launching it to production now, first to the early access people that signed up and then to the wider public. It's a progressive web app built on serverless tech and could handle all of that lost Tumblr traffic, if it all came overnight (unlikely but who knows)
- hackpert 8y agoLoved your firm take on hate speech and the anti harassment mechanisms! Is the entire project open source? I would love to contribute
- aussieguy1234 8y agoThe PWA app and api backend are open source. https://github.com/cipher-code/libr https://github.com/cipher-code/libr https://github.com/cipher-code/libr-api https://github.com/cipher-code/libr-api It's all in TypeScript. Production infrastructure stack and the elasticsearch setup isn't for security reasons (WordPress.com works the same way). Chat/messaging isn't being launched initially but almost everything else is.
- tuesdayrain 8y agoI'm confused why the "Safety for women" section doesn't contain anything that specifically targets women. I believe male safety is a concern of equal importance.
- krapp 8y agoEvery one of those bullet points is an issue which predominantly affects women versus men. Implying that an equal amount of men are stalked and harassed online and sent unsolicited nude pictures is simply incorrect. Male safety in this regard is not of equal importance because male risk is so low in proportion as to be practically nonexistent. IIRC, Tumblr users tend more often to be women, so it makes sense to advertise features towards women for a site whose intent is to draw in former Tumblr users. But... the site doesn't say those features are only available for women, so given that they're available for men as well, I don't see what the concern is.
- anigbrowl 8y agoThis thread is notable for the absence of 'free speech defenders'.
- valar_m 8y agoWhat are you talking about? A private entity controlling the content they permit on their network has nothing to do with Congress restricting freedom of expression.
- moron4hire 8y agoProbably because it's not about actual CP or harassment, so no faux-libertarians here.
- krapp 8y agoThose "free speech defenders" invariably defend right-wing, white supremacist, fringe science or conspiracy content they feel is being purged by some leftist agenda secretly controlling all social media. Unsurprisingly, they're not going to defend a site which has become synonymous with SJWs, liberals and feminists.
- antt 8y agoGiven that hn has a policy of banning alts and people have been at the receiving end of Twitter storms for defending freedom of speech when it's unpopular people doing the speaking are you surprised?
- aaron695 8y agoSuccess. Nice use of the 80 - 20 rule. Get rid of the 20% that causes 80% of the work. 4HWW FTW (Or is the HN narrative we are supposed to be happy now we have 'proof' they are failing?)
- eruci 8y agoTumbling down
- ChildOfChaos 8y agoThat's not that much to be honest. Most people were expecting Tumblr to be dead. I am sure they are pretty happy with these numbers.
- irrational 8y agoHuh, that is nowhere near the percentage drop I would've expected. I guess people actually use Tumblr for more than NSFW stuff.
- gabbygab 8y ago30% is a significant drop. It's really unheard of. MySpace and Digg didn't have such ridiculous drops. And keep in mind that this could be the start of an overall downward trend. If 30% leave, then activity on the platform crumbles. Some of the remaining users notice the decline in activity and so they leave. Rinse, repeat. Once it reaches a critical mass, you can't stop the decline and tumblr is finished. Or it could be a temperory decline and a new plateau is reached where tumblr can survive at.
- irrational 8y agoI guess. But, I was expecting an 80+% drop by now. I'm astonished it is only 30%
- charliebrownau 8y agoWhats the point of using Tumblr now its got no porn ?
- bazzargh 8y agoThe data linked in the article suggests a different, less headline-grabbing cause: perhaps Oath's obnoxious cookie banner? The statista figures showed the downturn starting well before december: https://www.statista.com/statistics/261925/unique-visitors-to-tumblrcom/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/261925/unique-visitors-t... That points back to July 2018. It's not quite a smoking gun, as their GDPR banner went up in late May, ahead of the 25th May deadline; even back then people were complaining that their tumblr stats were tumbling. https://twirpz.wordpress.com/2018/05/20/has-oath-killed-tumblr/ https://twirpz.wordpress.com/2018/05/20/has-oath-killed-tumb...
- classicsnoot 8y agoMore than a few comments here lay the blame on "puritanical Americanism" and, as an American, I'm wondering where these so-called Puritans are when it comes to gay wedding cakes, homeschooling, residence based cotton industry, Christian expression, and gun rights. America is neo-Protestant, not puritanical.
- wheelerwj 8y agohonestly, 30% isn't terrible for a major shift. I imagine they will save a considerable amount of money on moderation and dealing with legal issues.
- scrollaway 8y ago30 percent in three months is huge for a site this large. It's well beyond critical mass needed to cause a permanent downward trend. The effect of the loss of one third of the community will have an impact on the rest, causing others to leave, and so on.
- jug 8y agoSo now we have a number for the porn traffic. The filter isn't perfect and porn is still there. I wouldn't be surprised if the real number approaches 40%. But apparently Tumblr is fine with it, because surely they knew how much traffic it was driving? Or else someone did a truly shitty job with their website statistics. I can only assume they expect the brand value to rise proportionally to the level that better advertising profits will offset the loss of porn. I guess that's the harder number to estimate, and I have a feeling they're S.O.L. because all blogging platforms are struggling in the days of the big services like Instagram and Facebook, and those don't even have to try reverse a brand associated with porn... They can speak of staying out of these big social networks and win privacy and not selling your private life, but the problem is that literally billions are on these services. They're giving you the unparalleled reach.
- 2038AD 8y agoI had already stopped using Tumblr but after the ridiculous advertiser opt-out with GDPR and the introduction of the infamously inaccurate censorship AI, I deleted my account
- marsrover 8y agoI have a non-porn tumblr with over 100k followers and following the ban traffic has plummeted.