6 ms·

Tumblr brings mature content back, after 4 years

72 points by Giorgi 4y ago

valdiorn 4y ago
Tumblr who? Never heard of them. Seriously, do they think they can revive the platform 4 years after killing it?
- rx_tx 4y ago
  A lot of adult creators moved to Twitter when Tumblr closed. Given what's happening there right now, it may not be the worst timing for Tumblr to again offer their platform as an option.
  - givemeethekeys 4y ago
    > Given what's happening there right now Isn't Twitter moving towards allowing more things?
    - FactolSarin 4y ago
      There's a tension between allowing more things and being a welcoming platform that people enjoy participating in. I don't think anyone really knows how things at Twitter will land yet.
      - lemoncookiechip 4y ago
        > being a welcoming platform that people enjoy participating in. Not to sound rude or anything, but that ship sailed a very long time ago. No one thinks of Twitter as anything but a toxic cesspool filled with bots, bad takes, and the odd chance of getting cancelled. People still engage in it, but they do so despite knowing what the platform is. As for what Elon will do to it, well, no one knows, but its future isn't looking great as of right now with all his recent Tweets.
        delecti 4y ago
        > No one thinks of Twitter as anything but a toxic cesspool I do. I keep my timeline on "latest" and it's a perfectly pleasant experience filled with only tweets from the people I've followed (and their retweets, which I also have mostly off). Keeping the Twitter timeline on their algorithmic "home" feed is mentally/emotionally as risky, reckless, and self-destructive as drunk driving is physically, but keeping it on latest is a totally reasonable experience. I see more obnoxiously bad takes here than I do there.
        mindcrime 4y ago
        No one thinks of Twitter as anything but a toxic cesspool filled with bots, bad takes, and the odd chance of getting cancelled. That's complete bollocks IMO. Twitter has it's issues, to be sure. But honestly, if one puts any care at all into managing their experience by being selective about who they follow, and using the "mute" and "block" features frequently, Twitter can be fine. I use it mainly to follow AI/ML news and to interact with other Dolphins fans during football season. In no regard do I look at it as nothing but "a toxic cesspool...". Now if I chose to follow a lot of people who engage in political discourse, and chose to tweet a lot about politics, I'd probably feel the same way you do. But again... "mute" and "block" are your friends.
        Giorgi 4y ago
        It is only toxic cesspool if you are far-left following that type of media, anything out of ordinary radical-left content triggers such user. I follow many very interesting SEO authors. It's never toxic.
      - willis936 4y ago
        I would say "in the trash bin" but the general mood is that's where it's been for a long time.
  - odessacubbage 4y ago
    >visual depictions of sexually explicit acts remain off-limits on Tumblr looking at the new terms, tumblr still is not an option.
  - willio58 4y ago
    Ironically twitter (musk) is bringing back Vine, another neglected would-be giant social media app.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      This is both good news and good positioning while US nationalists are doing an anti-China jihad. Vine should have been tiktok. edit: it does create the seed of a suspicion that Musk and the Biden Administration are haggling behind the scenes about how much "private" censorship is going to happen. If Vine reopens and tiktok gets banned, it'll be a lot more than a seed.
      - ramesh31 4y ago
        >Vine should have been tiktok. This fact alone should serve as cause to fire the entire executive suite responsible for the decision. I never understood this. It made zero sense. Vine was exploding. It had completely captured the zeitgeist. Hundreds of millions of MAUs. And Twitter canned it for absolutely no reason. Pure incompetence.
- pelagicAustral 4y ago
  Just went in there and the first recommended trending post is a Twitter screencap...
  - eatonphil 4y ago
    Often popular posts on LinkedIn are Twitter screencaps. And often popular posts on Twitter are just TikTok captures. Not a huge surprise.
    - lost_tourist 4y ago
      Same with instagram reels, a lot are just tiktoks, even still have the logos.
    - LordDragonfang 4y ago
      "I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four."[1] I think I first saw this posted on reddit, which was of course a screenshot of a tumblr post, which itself was a screenshot of the original twitter post. The only thing that changes is the apps that provide screen grabs. [1]https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040 https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040
- molotovh 4y ago
  Joke's on y'all, following the link from the hackernews blog on Tumblr is how I get to this site every day.
mrzool 4y ago
Afraid literally nobody cares anymore. Too late.
- notacoward 4y ago
  Who are you calling nobody? Like any social-media site, you have to choose who/what to follow or block, and there are some odd local norms, but it's entirely possible to have a rewarding experience there. Better than a certain other site where every other comment is a low-effort shallow dismissal or continuation of a flame war. There are more people having more fun there than all but a handful of other sites, and there's nothing wrong with that.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bastawhiz 4y ago
I think if there was ever a time to make this change, it's right now. I went through much of my teenage years with Tumblr and welcome it's potential return. Hopefully Automattic can be a better custodian than Yahoo/Verizon/Oath/whatever.
digianarchist 4y ago
> "visual depictions of sexually explicit acts remain off-limits on Tumblr" This is not the porn site you are looking for...
Overtonwindow 4y ago
I'm very amused. After $1 billion dollars blown on this platform, blocking mature content caused everyone to run away.
- loceng 4y ago
  It was sold to Automattic by Verizon for only $3 million.. Deal of the century.
  - metadat 4y ago
    How would you convert the $3m Tumblr investment into a profit? Just ads? At this point the brand has been trashed and tarnished.
    - nl 4y ago
      There's a lot of love for the Tumblr brand out there and people love a redemption story.
      - metadat 4y ago
        No doubt, but my question remains: How would you help Tumblr lives it's best and most profitable life, to recoup the investment cost?
        lethoso 4y ago
        Roll back the restrictions & add some light advertising & premium junk like reddit's. They bought it for 3 million, they don't have to turn it into a giant for it to be a happy profitable business.
        nl 4y ago
        It still gets a huge amount of traffic. It's not really a mystery how to make that work: Ads, premium memberships. No need to be particularly innovative on that front. Maybe do the NFT Avatar thing that Reddit is killing it with.
puppable 4y ago
I've personally taken to using Tumblr again after the last few months, and I've been hearing increasing talk of moving back to it with how things have been looking on Twitter, especially with the Musk takeover. This move couldn't have been better timed, and I honestly hope it serves them well.
seydor 4y ago
They should allow porn too. Time to compete with twitter.
- notacoward 4y ago
  TFA links to a detailed explanation of why they can't afford to do that. They even address the issue of Twitter and Reddit getting a free pass not available to others.
bborud 4y ago
From wikipedia: "As of July 2021, Tumblr hosts more than 529 million blogs." That's a lot bigger than I had imagined. I wonder how many of those blogs are active and how many are dead.
throwawaydad12 4y ago
Aside, perhaps amusing: A while ago, I used Tumblr as a modest blog of my tech adventures. Put a link to that on my LinkedIn page. A year or two passed, and while applying for jobs, it occurred to me to check that link. Without telling me, Tumblr had given my URL away to someone who enjoyed posting naked pictures of herself. Lesson learned. (In truth, given the quality of most tech resumes, I'd be quite happy to click on one and be shown that.)
- Kye 4y ago
  Tumblr occasionally deletes blogs that don't have active owners. You should have gotten a series of increasingly urgent emails, but I'm sure deliverability is inconsistent.
favorited 4y ago
I wonder what their strategy is to avoid what made them ban NSFW content in the first place–the significant amount of CSAM that had been posted to their platform.
- LordDragonfang 4y ago
  Currently it's "keep most NSFW content banned", since the only thing this change allows are essentially just tasteful nudes.
ducharmdev 4y ago
In a weird way, I feel like Tumblr touches on something like the early internet; Tumblr has a distinct culture of curation that I've not seen in other platforms.
climb_stealth 4y ago
Meh, possibly a bit late. I miss soup.io though. I always thought it was a much better execution than tumblr as the layout wasn't as chaotic. Looks like nowadays it's just a news-site though. It had similar NSFW niches which had interesting content to follow. Just people doing their thing and what they are passionate about. For context: > Soup.io was originally an Austrian social networking and microblogging website. It was launched in 2007, attracting 6 million users per month by the year 2020. > As the network grew over time, maintaining the website and server cost had gone over their budget. Since the site was not generating any revenue, the owners of Soup.io had decided to sell the website with its content. > While the asking price was high with its content, the owners decided to sell just the domain to an Australian entrepreneur named Haider Ali in the year 2020.
pentagrama 4y ago
Out of curiosity I logged in to my old Tumblr and seems that this are the new Community labels settings https://imgur.com/a/LI1zrsn https://imgur.com/a/LI1zrsn (all where turned off).
bkuehl 4y ago
It's unfortunate Tumblr made the move to ban explicit content in the first place, but it's definitely not dead. It may not be what it used to be 10 years ago but it's still what I'd rather browse through than what Twitter has become. A lot of the porn/fetish/niche blogs that left may not come back and I don't blame them but at least they have the option.

72 points by Giorgi 4y ago

valdiorn 4y ago

Tumblr who? Never heard of them. Seriously, do they think they can revive the platform 4 years after killing it?

rx_tx 4y ago
A lot of adult creators moved to Twitter when Tumblr closed. Given what's happening there right now, it may not be the worst timing for Tumblr to again offer their platform as an option.
- givemeethekeys 4y ago
  > Given what's happening there right now Isn't Twitter moving towards allowing more things?
  - FactolSarin 4y ago
    There's a tension between allowing more things and being a welcoming platform that people enjoy participating in. I don't think anyone really knows how things at Twitter will land yet.
    - lemoncookiechip 4y ago
      > being a welcoming platform that people enjoy participating in. Not to sound rude or anything, but that ship sailed a very long time ago. No one thinks of Twitter as anything but a toxic cesspool filled with bots, bad takes, and the odd chance of getting cancelled. People still engage in it, but they do so despite knowing what the platform is. As for what Elon will do to it, well, no one knows, but its future isn't looking great as of right now with all his recent Tweets.
      - delecti 4y ago
        > No one thinks of Twitter as anything but a toxic cesspool I do. I keep my timeline on "latest" and it's a perfectly pleasant experience filled with only tweets from the people I've followed (and their retweets, which I also have mostly off). Keeping the Twitter timeline on their algorithmic "home" feed is mentally/emotionally as risky, reckless, and self-destructive as drunk driving is physically, but keeping it on latest is a totally reasonable experience. I see more obnoxiously bad takes here than I do there.
      - mindcrime 4y ago
        No one thinks of Twitter as anything but a toxic cesspool filled with bots, bad takes, and the odd chance of getting cancelled. That's complete bollocks IMO. Twitter has it's issues, to be sure. But honestly, if one puts any care at all into managing their experience by being selective about who they follow, and using the "mute" and "block" features frequently, Twitter can be fine. I use it mainly to follow AI/ML news and to interact with other Dolphins fans during football season. In no regard do I look at it as nothing but "a toxic cesspool...". Now if I chose to follow a lot of people who engage in political discourse, and chose to tweet a lot about politics, I'd probably feel the same way you do. But again... "mute" and "block" are your friends.
      - Giorgi 4y ago
        It is only toxic cesspool if you are far-left following that type of media, anything out of ordinary radical-left content triggers such user. I follow many very interesting SEO authors. It's never toxic.
    - willis936 4y ago
      I would say "in the trash bin" but the general mood is that's where it's been for a long time.
- odessacubbage 4y ago
  >visual depictions of sexually explicit acts remain off-limits on Tumblr looking at the new terms, tumblr still is not an option.
- willio58 4y ago
  Ironically twitter (musk) is bringing back Vine, another neglected would-be giant social media app.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    This is both good news and good positioning while US nationalists are doing an anti-China jihad. Vine should have been tiktok. edit: it does create the seed of a suspicion that Musk and the Biden Administration are haggling behind the scenes about how much "private" censorship is going to happen. If Vine reopens and tiktok gets banned, it'll be a lot more than a seed.
    - ramesh31 4y ago
      >Vine should have been tiktok. This fact alone should serve as cause to fire the entire executive suite responsible for the decision. I never understood this. It made zero sense. Vine was exploding. It had completely captured the zeitgeist. Hundreds of millions of MAUs. And Twitter canned it for absolutely no reason. Pure incompetence.
pelagicAustral 4y ago
Just went in there and the first recommended trending post is a Twitter screencap...
- eatonphil 4y ago
  Often popular posts on LinkedIn are Twitter screencaps. And often popular posts on Twitter are just TikTok captures. Not a huge surprise.
  - lost_tourist 4y ago
    Same with instagram reels, a lot are just tiktoks, even still have the logos.
  - LordDragonfang 4y ago
    "I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four."[1] I think I first saw this posted on reddit, which was of course a screenshot of a tumblr post, which itself was a screenshot of the original twitter post. The only thing that changes is the apps that provide screen grabs. [1]https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040 https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040
molotovh 4y ago
Joke's on y'all, following the link from the hackernews blog on Tumblr is how I get to this site every day.

mrzool 4y ago

Afraid literally nobody cares anymore. Too late.

notacoward 4y ago
Who are you calling nobody? Like any social-media site, you have to choose who/what to follow or block, and there are some odd local norms, but it's entirely possible to have a rewarding experience there. Better than a certain other site where every other comment is a low-effort shallow dismissal or continuation of a flame war. There are more people having more fun there than all but a handful of other sites, and there's nothing wrong with that.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bastawhiz 4y ago

I think if there was ever a time to make this change, it's right now. I went through much of my teenage years with Tumblr and welcome it's potential return. Hopefully Automattic can be a better custodian than Yahoo/Verizon/Oath/whatever.

digianarchist 4y ago

> "visual depictions of sexually explicit acts remain off-limits on Tumblr" This is not the porn site you are looking for...

Overtonwindow 4y ago

I'm very amused. After $1 billion dollars blown on this platform, blocking mature content caused everyone to run away.

loceng 4y ago
It was sold to Automattic by Verizon for only $3 million.. Deal of the century.
- metadat 4y ago
  How would you convert the $3m Tumblr investment into a profit? Just ads? At this point the brand has been trashed and tarnished.
  - nl 4y ago
    There's a lot of love for the Tumblr brand out there and people love a redemption story.
    - metadat 4y ago
      No doubt, but my question remains: How would you help Tumblr lives it's best and most profitable life, to recoup the investment cost?
      - lethoso 4y ago
        Roll back the restrictions & add some light advertising & premium junk like reddit's. They bought it for 3 million, they don't have to turn it into a giant for it to be a happy profitable business.
      - nl 4y ago
        It still gets a huge amount of traffic. It's not really a mystery how to make that work: Ads, premium memberships. No need to be particularly innovative on that front. Maybe do the NFT Avatar thing that Reddit is killing it with.

puppable 4y ago

I've personally taken to using Tumblr again after the last few months, and I've been hearing increasing talk of moving back to it with how things have been looking on Twitter, especially with the Musk takeover. This move couldn't have been better timed, and I honestly hope it serves them well.

seydor 4y ago

They should allow porn too. Time to compete with twitter.

notacoward 4y ago
TFA links to a detailed explanation of why they can't afford to do that. They even address the issue of Twitter and Reddit getting a free pass not available to others.

bborud 4y ago

From wikipedia: "As of July 2021, Tumblr hosts more than 529 million blogs." That's a lot bigger than I had imagined. I wonder how many of those blogs are active and how many are dead.

throwawaydad12 4y ago

Aside, perhaps amusing: A while ago, I used Tumblr as a modest blog of my tech adventures. Put a link to that on my LinkedIn page. A year or two passed, and while applying for jobs, it occurred to me to check that link. Without telling me, Tumblr had given my URL away to someone who enjoyed posting naked pictures of herself. Lesson learned. (In truth, given the quality of most tech resumes, I'd be quite happy to click on one and be shown that.)

Kye 4y ago
Tumblr occasionally deletes blogs that don't have active owners. You should have gotten a series of increasingly urgent emails, but I'm sure deliverability is inconsistent.

favorited 4y ago

I wonder what their strategy is to avoid what made them ban NSFW content in the first place–the significant amount of CSAM that had been posted to their platform.

LordDragonfang 4y ago
Currently it's "keep most NSFW content banned", since the only thing this change allows are essentially just tasteful nudes.

ducharmdev 4y ago

In a weird way, I feel like Tumblr touches on something like the early internet; Tumblr has a distinct culture of curation that I've not seen in other platforms.

climb_stealth 4y ago

Meh, possibly a bit late. I miss soup.io though. I always thought it was a much better execution than tumblr as the layout wasn't as chaotic. Looks like nowadays it's just a news-site though. It had similar NSFW niches which had interesting content to follow. Just people doing their thing and what they are passionate about. For context: > Soup.io was originally an Austrian social networking and microblogging website. It was launched in 2007, attracting 6 million users per month by the year 2020. > As the network grew over time, maintaining the website and server cost had gone over their budget. Since the site was not generating any revenue, the owners of Soup.io had decided to sell the website with its content. > While the asking price was high with its content, the owners decided to sell just the domain to an Australian entrepreneur named Haider Ali in the year 2020.

pentagrama 4y ago

Out of curiosity I logged in to my old Tumblr and seems that this are the new Community labels settings https://imgur.com/a/LI1zrsn https://imgur.com/a/LI1zrsn (all where turned off).

bkuehl 4y ago

It's unfortunate Tumblr made the move to ban explicit content in the first place, but it's definitely not dead. It may not be what it used to be 10 years ago but it's still what I'd rather browse through than what Twitter has become. A lot of the porn/fetish/niche blogs that left may not come back and I don't blame them but at least they have the option.