Tumblr has added more strict tag filtering for their iOS app
twitter.com
twitter.com
Yahoo was truly a poorly run business with an incompetent executive team.
The whole thing was apparently unloaded to a private equity group for $5 Billion recently [2] and has been renamed back to Yahoo... so yes, they still exist and now "Yahoo!" includes AOL too.
[1] https://mashable.com/article/yahoo-verizon-acquired-bought
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/01/apollo-completes-its-5b-ac...
Yaolhoo. Pronounced y’all who.
Comparing Meyer to Holmes is like comparing David Marcus to Bernie Madoff. It just doesn’t make sense unless you’re seeing someone primarily through their gender.
If they had the same kind of media coverage they probably would. When I hear Tumblr I think of Meyer because we had dozens of articles covering that. I couldn't tell you what Marcus runs (Goldman Sachs' consumer-lending division?)
Company, single. But yes, it would also be nonsensical to say Steve Ballmer excelled at failing upwards. That's not what that phrase means.
Contrast this with Epic v. Apple: Epic has the arguable upper hand there (and Apple's flinched a few times already) because Fortnite is a massively popular game with a huge fanbase.
it's a plenty vibrant platform - all of the other social media websites are way worse, content-wise. Create a tumblr account & follow tags/accounts related to your interests. You'll get a lot of quality content!
For example, there's a reason the witcher season 2's media campaign included an AMA on tumblr with one of the stars. That's where the fandom thrives.
it just isn't an especially monetizable bunch of communities. Fandom in general is hard to monetize (look at the donation-driven AO3 for another community-hub more vibrant than the ones twitter and facebook can manage.)
It looks like Tumblr has a lot of traffic, but isn't growing and is far behind reddit and twitter. None appear to be growing in the last several months; I don't know what that means.
https://www.similarweb.com/website/tumblr.com/?competitors=r... https://www.similarweb.com/website/tumblr.com/?competitors=t...
Tumblr is about equal to wordpress.com hosted blog traffic, interestingly. Wordpress.com is a collection of hosted blogs with very light in-network social features. https://www.similarweb.com/website/tumblr.com/?competitors=w...
People don't congregate around websites. They congregate around subject matter. Tumblr is THE place to congregate around a long tail of niche subject matter.
It's not full of Tumblr loyalists. They mostly have lukewarm opinions of the iOS app. They're on the platform for the fandom, not the company.
The fact that you refer to Tumblr as a singular community shows that you should probably not comment authoritatively on the website :)
Twitter certainly has plenty of porn.
That is a distraction.
It is all about advertising.
source? not sure why tumblr is the only app doing this then since reddit and twitter have a plethora of porn and other "unsavory" content available on their official iOS clients.
This is the trouble with online censorship. It gets totally out of control very fast.
Wtf tumblr?
Edit: Ahh. "Consensual Non-Consent", I guess people that like to play act rape.
It gets totally out of control very fast
There is a way to censor internet correctly in a controlled way, it is human-oriented moderation. HN is a good example of it (in a good sense). We have near zero “bad” content or discussion here, but you’d never encounter the famous “sorry, your post contains a word from our stop-list”. Because words aren’t a cause, they are an effect. Appeal directly to the cause: human personal sense of the appreciated culture and the reasons to have it. Those who get it will try to moderate themselves out of respect, those who do not will find themselves in a vacuum or quickly flagged. When site owners believe in automated moderation by a whip, they are doomed and rightly so.
Which, in reality, becomes an army of low-wage workers with ban hammers. That leads to those stories "I was banned from BIGPLATFORM and I didn't do anything wrong". Then you have to embarrass BIGPLATFORM on Twitter or in the mainstream press to get back in.
The App Store desperately needs transparency if it wants to avoid regulatory ire. Stories like this are just getting ridiculous.
If you're only ever viewing Tumblr "pages" from the public blog network and without an account, you have never really interacted with the majority of the product. It would be like if your only experience with Facebook was viewing businesses' public Pages without an account, and then wondering what their business model is because there's no ads on FB Pages.
Your point of confusion is a common one though, which really speaks to Tumblr's biggest marketing failure. Sadly, it also indicates that those login walls/nags on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, etc are actually somehow necessary for people to grok a social product that has a public-facing component.
Apple is not attempting to create an adult content free device (not that it'd be a good idea if they were; it's just that is clearly not a thing they are attempting to do).
On the web, Apple has a lot less control over content, and so it would be difficult for them to censor it effectively (and customers perceive it as open, so if Apple introduced mandatory filtering in Safari, it likely would cause a lot of backlash). But in the App Store, where they have more control, creating a device free of adult content absolutely seems to be their goal.
Do you have any data supporting that claim?
> Who are we to force it upon them?
This is a red herring that makes "us" the subject instead of 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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-least-v...
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s all about Christmas bonuses or quarterly bonuses. High level executives are notoriously conservative and DO NOT rock the boat. All it takes is enough moralizing hypocrites seeing an ad in the wrong place or emailing the company or whipping up a Twitter cancellation and suddenly their career aspirations are at risk. And they are incredibly replaceable.
"mature" tag? Yes.
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-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.