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.
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.
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.