Tumblr banning adult content on December 17th

Cherrim said:

Nah, LJ is owned by Russians now. Can't put all our gay fandom stuff there.

I want everyone to go back to Dreamwidth which was originally gonna be the new LJ before tumblr became king. :P

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Oh I definitely forgot LJ's Russian territory now.

I remember Dreamwidth!!! Oh lord it hasn't changed at all.

I didn't have a blog on there myself, but if it's basically doomed itself I'll just roll my own blog software and call it a day. The only rules I have to adhere to are my own (and that of the hosting company).

If Tumblr had dealt with the issue of unbridled porn blogs years ago, instead of allowing the spam to become what it is because of the profit they got from it, they likely wouldn't have fallen into such a dire situation in the first place. But it's only the tip of the iceberg, really. The lack of interest (or inability due to the limits of their algorithm) to deal with the child porn situation, something that's been an issue ever since I left many a moon ago, was always gonna do them over. The lack of interest (not an inability, this was within their power) to deal with Neo-Nazi propaganda floating around the place is a similar reason why Tumblr doomed itself ages ago.

It's not a good thing to outright remove NSFW content - it's a repetition of the foolish practice of corporations to understand content production and how delivery of said content works.

• Site grows.
• Site gets bought out by large corporation.
• Large corporation finds elements of site that are unfriendly to advertisers.
• Large corporation begins purge of said element under the belief that new users will replace the ones that were lost, with all the same ideals that made said site worth buying, just not with undesirable content.
• Said tactic fails not only due to user pushback, but due to large corporation fundamentally misunderstanding what users want.
• Site begins decline as users that were essential for the site's success begin exodus of varying speeds.
• Site folds or is sold off for the process to begin anew.

In this case, Yahoo has decided that in order to regain faith with advertisers, it has to go through with what it had always wanted to do, as puritan behaviour always finds its way to the top of these businesses - purging NSFW content. But it needed a reason, as purging such content out of the blue would doom the site. But simultaneously, NSFW material was all that kept the site on its feet, due to the profit involved in hosting the legion of porn bots and encouraging NSFW material. Kind of an odd situation. But it's all come to a head with Apple and co forcing Tumblr to act - however, nothing it will do will ever be satisfactory, because not only has it murdered its sole remaining point of relevance, advertisers still wont touch the place with a pole due to 'Tumblr' and 'child porn' now being in mainstream headlines instead of the long-stirring complaints by users. Combined with a long history of site mismanagement and outright neglect for the tech aspect of things, along with allowing users to be preyed on in all manners (physical, moral, sexual) for profit, Tumblr's eventual fall was transparently obvious.

The hellsite doomed itself.

It's about time now! I hope with this ban of NSFW content, my country will let me access tumblr again, because I find it inaccessible for long to the point that any signatures in here that comes from tumblr got blocked too. Still, I'm wondering why it needs to wait until the App Store ban to take action, when my country already blocked access to it for long... But oh well. At least I might possibly be able to visit tumblr again, and that's what matters.

It doesn't really affect me because I only ever use tumblr to look for art, and it's where I find a lot of my avatars - I didn't even realize it had an adult content problem, just thought it had a bad reputation for being a SJW haven, but honestly if you don't look for that shit you don't really come across it that often. In my experience at least, since I look specifically for fan art.

I don't mind the adult content thing as much as I find it kind of strange. If I want to look at porn, I'll just... go look at porn, I wouldn't think to go to tumblr for that.

My roommate mentioned earlier today that Tumblr's NSFW content filter is so simplistic that it can be tricked by putting a SFW image in the corner of an NSFW image and it's fine. Pornbots have also begun marking their posts with #sfw which prevents the filter from removing it.

So, pretty much what I expected from Tumblr. They REALLY need to find better programmers. Glad I got out when I did.

It seems most advertisers don't want their ads placed beside porn, except porn advertisers I guess :laugh-squinted: so the adult content ban was always going to happen, the app store issue merely speeded it up a little.