Tumblr’s First Year Without Porn

As a user of tumblr since something like 2008 (oh no has it been that long) it wasn’t the removal of porn that ruined it for me, it was the collateral damage that came with it. For the month before it happened my feed was a list of all the interesting people announcing that they were leaving for alternative platforms. It was the impetus to just abandon the place, not helped by the fact it seemingly hadn’t changed at all under yahoo’s neglect and the spam was omnipresent.

I had used it as a scrap book, there was genuinely interesting art and design content on the site, from illustrators portfolios to photographers work to architecture blogs.

Maybe it’s found it’s place with hyper specific fandoms around tv shows as seems to be what’s suggested logging in again but part of me is sad that something that was genuinely great was squandered.

>While porn creators belonged to tightly connected subgroups, they were linked to the rest of Tumblr’s network “with a very high number of ties,” and their productions “spread widely across the whole social graph.” In other words, they weren’t quarantined off in some illicit corner of the site—they were woven into its basic fabric: The average Tumblr user in the sample followed 51 blogs, two or three of which tended to be specifically porn, and another two of which tended to be “bridge” blogs, run by users who were particularly likely to reblog porn.

Pron not seen as an "other" in a medium that didn't go out of it's way to make it othered?

This is exactly the kind of insight that only takes a study when a society is simultaneously marinated in censorship and unwilling to admit any instance of it deserves the label "censorship." It's not like censorship is anything new, or that the mechanisms and ramifications are poorly understood.

Has Automattic made any changes to Tumblr since that acquisition? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20679387)

Are we pretending there is no longer porn on Tumblr?

Yeah, nice marketing spin and an attempt to downplay the wasteland nature of Tumblr as of today.

As others mentioned, it wasn't the ban of porn that made Tumblr lose a lot of users. It was the heavy-handed nature of the ban plus the fact that the flagging algorithm was -- and still is -- extremely buggy and unreliable. The amount of injustice that many honest content creators suffered there lost Tumblr a user goodwill that spanned back a decade. Tumblr will never regain that.

And I seriously doubt the "20% lost users" number is realistic. I enjoyed the erotic and pornographic content of Tumblr but didn't leave after the hammer hit; however, my engagement with it heavily dropped.

I doubt they included that in their imaginary 20% lost users. Sure, technically maybe only 20% left but I am pretty sure that many like myself just didn't bother uninstalling the app or deleting their account. How convenient that user activity wasn't mentioned in detail in this post.

They can say whatever they like. Of course they will downplay any negatives, it's their job. But Tumblr is pretty much dead in the water (read: irrelevant).

Which is a shame because Twitter and Reddit definitely don't deserve the extra active users they gained from the exodus.

It's sad when social networks and messaging platforms die. Every major one I've gotten invested in has gone belly up: AIM, Xanga, Yahoo Messanger, MSN, Myspace, and now Facebook is hemmoraging users. And Whatsapp isn't too far behind with a lot of its functionality duplicated by RCS or iMessage. The point is, don't get too invested in a messaging platform or social network because they don't last forever.