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I very much doubt this is due to Apple. Automattic bought tumblr to make money. They can't make the money they want unless they make tumblr more advertising fr

by markx2 5y ago

I very much doubt this is due to Apple. Automattic bought tumblr to make money. They can't make the money they want unless they make tumblr more advertising friendly, and that means slowly but surely eliminating - basically non-Google friendly - content. Eliminate tags, sites using those tags their traffic goes down, they move elsewhere. tumblr looks pure and wholesome. That's the plan.

noahtallen 5y ago
One thing I’ve never been sure of is how Reddit has been so successful with NSFW content. It’s certainly not banned from the platform, so how is it able to get away with it compared to the other services? It’s also mostly an ad business, right? Whereas other as businesses like YouTube have historically been very prudish (swearing can demonetize a video and nsfw content isn’t allowed)
- markx2 5y ago
  I have no knowledge of how Reddit handles NSFW content. I have some knowledge of how Automattic does. From what I have seen as an active reddit user of 10yrs+, the ads I see on - for example - /r/culinaryskills, /r/gamedeals, /r/dogs - are quite different. They are targeted in some way. All WordPress.com sites - and I assume tumblr sites - could have ads shown. One way to stop ads being shown on those sites is to apply a tag. Call that tag "mature" A site tagged as "mature" will - not appear to other sites - will therefore experience a drop-off in traffic - but will still appear in Google but because of the lack of linking will be much much lower in results. Reddit cannot add those tags as fast and (maybe) as accurately as a blogging service can so it gets away with it. That said, they do have the ability to quarantine sites and I have no idea at all if they hide NSFW content from crawlers.
  - riantogo 5y ago
    So you are saying there appears to be a way (likely nontrivial) that Tumblr could adopt (maybe same as reddit) to keep both advertisers and community happy?
    - markx2 5y ago
      No. A subreddit could, depending on it's (unpaid) mods have a wide variety of content. For example /r/WTF content could be funny or shocking. An advertiser on that sub would have to be okay with their content being alongside either content. Let's say a tumblr site gets tagged as "mature". That site does not get the expected ads normally seen on a site That site is effectively invisible to other sites Why would you buy ads on a site that no-one will see? Why would you stay publishing on a site where your traffic falls of a cliff? What makes a site get that 'mature' tag? It could be one post, it could be a series of posts. But that tag stays until it manually removed. When you are running a site that has user generated content there are two alternatives: - Being clean - Being seen to be clean Tag filtering helps the latter.
      - riantogo 5y ago
        I think we are saying the same thing. Tumblr could operate the same way as reddit and enjoy similar ad revenue.
  - evanelias 5y ago
    The vast majority of Tumblr traffic is via logged-in users hitting the dashboard (activity stream of posts from followed users), global tag pages, etc. It's a social network, and most pages with ads are displaying content from a bunch of different blogs at once. It's just like the Twitter timeline. Tumblr has already long had a notion of NSFW blogs and content, which are already treated differently than "safe" content. But since the blog network (individual "sites" as you're saying) is a minority of traffic, and not a major source of revenue in the first place, it's not really comparable to isolating mature content on WordPress or Reddit.
- jelling 5y ago
  Reddits revenue per user is terrible compared to Facebook ($0.30 vs $7): https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-least-valuable-of-any-social-network.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-least-v...
- forgotmyoldname 5y ago
  I really don’t get why big companies buying ads are apparently morally trapped in 1950. Nobody who was actually going to buy your product is going to care if it appears alongside someone saying “oh shit! Cool!” But we consistently get policies that punish people just for saying simple words, like YouTube apparently demonetizing anything with “foul language” in the titles/first minute or so of the video. Most people also won’t care if a portion of the website has boobs or something. 99.999% of people won’t decide to never again purchase your soda because it advertised on a site that had a bare nipple on a certain subsection of that site. But policies are enforced like this is true, and it ends up killing platforms once they reach a size mainstream enough to sell fast food and soda ads.
  - klondike_ 5y ago
    It's about appealing to the largest demographic possible. The company might not care about such antiquated morals, but a large percentage of the population does. An example is the YouTube "adpocalypse" from a few years ago. When major national brands have ads showing up to Nazi videos and conspiracies, it's not a good look for the company and journalists ripped them a new one. People don't care that the ads are "algorithmically" placed.
    - thebean11 5y ago
      There’s a huge difference between “shows up beside” and “shows up on the same website” though. I don’t think GP was talking about showing ads next to porn, but rather whether unmonetized porn on a NSFW sub poisons the well for advertiser friendly subs. My understanding is that advertisers had an issue with Nazi videos being monetized with their ads, not Nazi videos being on the platform at all. Obviously nobody wants to pay money to have their brand associated with that.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - quartesixte 5y ago
      I said “fuck” like, twice in a 3 hour hangout with a group of “friends”, all something around their mid-20s. At the end of the night, I was pulled aside by one of them and was told “we like having you hang with us, but you can’t be swearing like that around us.” These people exist. In much larger numbers than you think. And they are much more demographically spread out than you’d think. Edit: I don’t really hang with them anymore.
- d3nj4l 5y ago
  Fun fact: Reddit doesn’t allow porn on /r/all and /r/popular. It used to be blocked only on /r/popular, but they blocked it on /r/all too relatively recently.
hexis 5y ago
I don't know much about the company, but don't they run Wordpress.com? I think I've seen some wild stuff on subdomains there, do they do similar filtering on ios for those sites?
- markx2 5y ago
  iOS? No idea. "mature" tag? Yes.
smoldesu 5y ago
If that's the case then why is this exclusively on the iOS app?
nightpool 5y ago
This is specifically only for the iOS app. They already have "safe for ads" standards on the web, but Apple is requiring them to have stricter standards for the app store.
Lazare 5y ago
Hard disagree. 1) They only made changes on the iOS app. 2) The last time they made sweeping changes to content policies it was at the behest of Apple (https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/13/18139940/tumblr-back-apple-app-store-adult-content-porn-ban https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/13/18139940/tumblr-back-app...). 3) The changes they made seem utterly unrelated to a generic push to be more advertiser friendly. Tags they have blocked include: "about", "about me", "arms", "beard", "donate", "hot", "long post", "me", "mine", "misc", "my face", "my gif", "my life", "queue", "queued", "repost", "self", "self reblog", "selfie", "snap", "stim toy", "submission", "suicide prevention", "tagged", "TMI", "Tony the Tiger", and a huge number of tags starting with the word user such as "userdave" or "userjane". (And then, yes, a ton of words with sex or drug connotations too, yes.) Notice that a ton of these are actually meta tags relating to how people use Tumblr; "submission" is automatically added (by Tumblr!) for items submitted to a blog; "queued" is added (again, by Tumblr!) for posts queued to be automatically posted in the future; people often tag especially long posts with "long post", and so on. Then you get just weird things like "Tony the Tiger". I'm not sure what exactly they're trying to do, but it seems very clear to me it's a half-baked attempt to stop getting kicked off the app store again. They've as much as said that this is an emergency fix and they will be rolling out something less broken when they can, but a general "let's be more advertiser friendly" push wouldn't be an emergency.

by markx2 5y ago

noahtallen 5y ago

One thing I’ve never been sure of is how Reddit has been so successful with NSFW content. It’s certainly not banned from the platform, so how is it able to get away with it compared to the other services? It’s also mostly an ad business, right? Whereas other as businesses like YouTube have historically been very prudish (swearing can demonetize a video and nsfw content isn’t allowed)

markx2 5y ago
I have no knowledge of how Reddit handles NSFW content. I have some knowledge of how Automattic does. From what I have seen as an active reddit user of 10yrs+, the ads I see on - for example - /r/culinaryskills, /r/gamedeals, /r/dogs - are quite different. They are targeted in some way. All WordPress.com sites - and I assume tumblr sites - could have ads shown. One way to stop ads being shown on those sites is to apply a tag. Call that tag "mature" A site tagged as "mature" will - not appear to other sites - will therefore experience a drop-off in traffic - but will still appear in Google but because of the lack of linking will be much much lower in results. Reddit cannot add those tags as fast and (maybe) as accurately as a blogging service can so it gets away with it. That said, they do have the ability to quarantine sites and I have no idea at all if they hide NSFW content from crawlers.
- riantogo 5y ago
  So you are saying there appears to be a way (likely nontrivial) that Tumblr could adopt (maybe same as reddit) to keep both advertisers and community happy?
  - markx2 5y ago
    No. A subreddit could, depending on it's (unpaid) mods have a wide variety of content. For example /r/WTF content could be funny or shocking. An advertiser on that sub would have to be okay with their content being alongside either content. Let's say a tumblr site gets tagged as "mature". That site does not get the expected ads normally seen on a site That site is effectively invisible to other sites Why would you buy ads on a site that no-one will see? Why would you stay publishing on a site where your traffic falls of a cliff? What makes a site get that 'mature' tag? It could be one post, it could be a series of posts. But that tag stays until it manually removed. When you are running a site that has user generated content there are two alternatives: - Being clean - Being seen to be clean Tag filtering helps the latter.
    - riantogo 5y ago
      I think we are saying the same thing. Tumblr could operate the same way as reddit and enjoy similar ad revenue.
- evanelias 5y ago
  The vast majority of Tumblr traffic is via logged-in users hitting the dashboard (activity stream of posts from followed users), global tag pages, etc. It's a social network, and most pages with ads are displaying content from a bunch of different blogs at once. It's just like the Twitter timeline. Tumblr has already long had a notion of NSFW blogs and content, which are already treated differently than "safe" content. But since the blog network (individual "sites" as you're saying) is a minority of traffic, and not a major source of revenue in the first place, it's not really comparable to isolating mature content on WordPress or Reddit.
jelling 5y ago
Reddits revenue per user is terrible compared to Facebook ($0.30 vs $7): https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-least-valuable-of-any-social-network.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-least-v...
forgotmyoldname 5y ago
I really don’t get why big companies buying ads are apparently morally trapped in 1950. Nobody who was actually going to buy your product is going to care if it appears alongside someone saying “oh shit! Cool!” But we consistently get policies that punish people just for saying simple words, like YouTube apparently demonetizing anything with “foul language” in the titles/first minute or so of the video. Most people also won’t care if a portion of the website has boobs or something. 99.999% of people won’t decide to never again purchase your soda because it advertised on a site that had a bare nipple on a certain subsection of that site. But policies are enforced like this is true, and it ends up killing platforms once they reach a size mainstream enough to sell fast food and soda ads.
- klondike_ 5y ago
  It's about appealing to the largest demographic possible. The company might not care about such antiquated morals, but a large percentage of the population does. An example is the YouTube "adpocalypse" from a few years ago. When major national brands have ads showing up to Nazi videos and conspiracies, it's not a good look for the company and journalists ripped them a new one. People don't care that the ads are "algorithmically" placed.
  - thebean11 5y ago
    There’s a huge difference between “shows up beside” and “shows up on the same website” though. I don’t think GP was talking about showing ads next to porn, but rather whether unmonetized porn on a NSFW sub poisons the well for advertiser friendly subs. My understanding is that advertisers had an issue with Nazi videos being monetized with their ads, not Nazi videos being on the platform at all. Obviously nobody wants to pay money to have their brand associated with that.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - quartesixte 5y ago
    I said “fuck” like, twice in a 3 hour hangout with a group of “friends”, all something around their mid-20s. At the end of the night, I was pulled aside by one of them and was told “we like having you hang with us, but you can’t be swearing like that around us.” These people exist. In much larger numbers than you think. And they are much more demographically spread out than you’d think. Edit: I don’t really hang with them anymore.
d3nj4l 5y ago
Fun fact: Reddit doesn’t allow porn on /r/all and /r/popular. It used to be blocked only on /r/popular, but they blocked it on /r/all too relatively recently.

hexis 5y ago

I don't know much about the company, but don't they run Wordpress.com? I think I've seen some wild stuff on subdomains there, do they do similar filtering on ios for those sites?

markx2 5y ago
iOS? No idea. "mature" tag? Yes.

smoldesu 5y ago

If that's the case then why is this exclusively on the iOS app?

nightpool 5y ago

This is specifically only for the iOS app. They already have "safe for ads" standards on the web, but Apple is requiring them to have stricter standards for the app store.

Lazare 5y ago

Hard disagree. 1) They only made changes on the iOS app. 2) The last time they made sweeping changes to content policies it was at the behest of Apple (https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/13/18139940/tumblr-back-apple-app-store-adult-content-porn-ban https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/13/18139940/tumblr-back-app...). 3) The changes they made seem utterly unrelated to a generic push to be more advertiser friendly. Tags they have blocked include: "about", "about me", "arms", "beard", "donate", "hot", "long post", "me", "mine", "misc", "my face", "my gif", "my life", "queue", "queued", "repost", "self", "self reblog", "selfie", "snap", "stim toy", "submission", "suicide prevention", "tagged", "TMI", "Tony the Tiger", and a huge number of tags starting with the word user such as "userdave" or "userjane". (And then, yes, a ton of words with sex or drug connotations too, yes.) Notice that a ton of these are actually meta tags relating to how people use Tumblr; "submission" is automatically added (by Tumblr!) for items submitted to a blog; "queued" is added (again, by Tumblr!) for posts queued to be automatically posted in the future; people often tag especially long posts with "long post", and so on. Then you get just weird things like "Tony the Tiger". I'm not sure what exactly they're trying to do, but it seems very clear to me it's a half-baked attempt to stop getting kicked off the app store again. They've as much as said that this is an emergency fix and they will be rolling out something less broken when they can, but a general "let's be more advertiser friendly" push wouldn't be an emergency.