Hacker News Reader

Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a reasonable take but I do have one comment:

> Adult content was definitely present, but it was a single-digit percentage of posts at the time of Tumblr's peak historical traffic levels.

Single-digit percentage is a lot for adult content. I have to imagine that's a larger share of percentage than Twitter has ever had for adult content.

View on HN

That's expected given Twitter leans more towards text content. The proportion of Tumblr posts that are images or video has always been much higher than Twitter's.

Twitter didn't even have built-in photo posts until mid 2011, and even then it was through a third-party integration with Photobucket for the first year. Images weren't shown inline in the Twitter timeline feed until late 2013! Meanwhile direct video upload was added even later than that.

What I'm trying to say is, to me, that just generally sounds like a pretty large share of adult content no matter how you shake it. I could be over-estimating, but I'd assume it outpaces all of the other major social media platforms and most websites of similar magnitude in general that do allow pornographic content but are not explicitly porn sites.

OK, but I'm not understanding your point. I mean it's all relative. Go back 10-15 years earlier and a very large percentage of uuencoded files uploaded to Usenet were adult content. That doesn't mean NNTP or uuencode were primarily for porn.

On the web, similar situation for DeviantArt and a lot of other sites.

Exactly. I always assumed porn's role in Tumblr was a bit exaggerated, but actually it seems like it really was pretty big, especially considering that we're talking about something that was far, far, far more mainstream than Usenet. (and thus at least in my mind, you'd expect it to be smaller by percentage.)

> DeviantArt

Of course it's complicated. DeviantArt never really allowed pornographic content, but obviously it wound up with a lot of fetish content that blurred the lines regardless. DeviantArt is basically a case study all on its own.

There's different ways to count it, but I'd estimate it was maybe a low % of posts but it was 30-40% of the user interest and traffic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com