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Comment by whateveracct | Hacker News Reader

porn wasn't what made tumblr likeable though..

Yea, but it was a huge amount of their traffic [1] and they never have recovered [2]. Even during the pandemic, while people were spending more time online, tumblrs usage has been lackluster, while other sites like fb have had consistent growth [3].

So, to say porn might not have been what made it likeable might be true, but porn certainly was one of the big drivers of traffic.

[1] - https://www.statista.com/chart/17378/tumblr-traffic/

[2] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/261925/unique-visitors-t...

[3] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-d...

the site is better without that traffic tbh

i'm discussing the site as a product. it's a better product now, and that sentiment is pretty widespread by its engaged users. Sending the porn to other, more growth-obsessed platforms was worth it.

How long tumblr will last - i don't know. Its users are not very monetizable. But as a social media website, it is comically superior to twitter and facebook. And my argument is the exact things that cause you to say it is bad are why it is superior.

I disagree. If a social media website is a business and it killing its main attraction harms its business prospects , it’s products have not improved. How much a product is worth is a major factor into what makes a product better or worse. By removing porn and thus it’s traffic , Tumblr has become a third grade social media site to advertisers.

But it's a better product for the users. The social network being used to enable people to talk & share is very good and improved by the nsfw ban by many accounts.

Explain to me why anything you had to say there has to do with a user's experience? The amount of content for non-nsfw didn't take a hit.

You sound like an investor trying to profit from tumblr. Not a user trying to leverage it to have a good time.

Is it though?

If you have 7 users Monday, make a big change on Tuesday and now on Wednesday have 4 users, which then stays the same count for years. Is that really better for your community? To stay static and not grow, as every other social media company has been doing?

Tumblr is a great example of having the right end goal (making the community safer to advertise on, thus have more revenue), but doing it in a really dumb way. Instead of killing off their well established albeit NSFW userbase, they should have been incentivizing them to post more SFW content that could have been monetized.

Instead the perception of tumblr is they were the porn social media site that banned porn and became irrelevant.

> If you have 7 users Monday, make a big change on Tuesday and now on Wednesday have 4 users, which then stays the same count for years. Is that really better for your community?

Does this argument hold up for literally anything else advertisers might not like? For example (no moral equivalency implied), if you banned X (pick one: pedophiles, nazis, kkk, racists, snuff, animal abuse, warez) because advertisers perceived your website as having an X problem, are you sure you're not a little too intensely focused on the "line goes up"?

Does the reverse hold up? If tumblr tomorrow decided they would allow X content, and they estimated 30% traffic increase, would that be good? If course not, the pool of advertisers would shrink in quality and quantity.

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