Yahoo brought Tumblr for $1.1B in 2013. A few days ago it was sold for (allegedly) $3M. In between those times they managed to destroy a huge number of communities and alienate a major chunk of their users by banning adult content. Now I’m sure that enormous loss wasn’t purely due to the adult content ban – Yahoo were already writing the acquisition value down long before that – but you have to admit that it’s an impressive sequence of decision making. Less talented people might have settled for just losing money, or just pissing off their users, but it takes major skills to do both. For anyone worried about the impact on the executives involved in all this, fear not, they’re all still immensely wealthy multi-millionaires with well paid jobs. I’m sure that’ll be comforting for anyone whose site was trashed by the Tumblr rules changes.
I’ve no idea what image would best accompany this mini-rant, so I’ll pick something very hot and sexy from a Twitter user who is still advertising his Tumblr link. This is from a tweet by The Smutty Rogue. Apparently Nina is doing to Issac what Yahoo did to Tumblr.
First, while I applaud the move, people should realize that WordPress/Auttomatic had their own adult blog purge about 5 years ago. Adult content is the third rail of online marketing/content: it draws traffic, but nobody likes to admit it.
Second, Tumblr’s own content screening is out of whack. I started a blog that I thought would be work-safe captioned pictures, in part to save some content that I liked from what I could see was going to be a mass shuttering of blogs. Tumblr decided that even those were too risque, and “adulted” that blog. So, I started yet another blog (http://mrs-edge-says.tumblr.com), and kept a very close eye on the pictures, and started creating my own captioned picture content. Within a few days, Tumblr was hiding some of those posts, none of which even had a hint of nipple, let alone nudity. I appealled, them, and about 3/4 of them were subsequently approved. The others, to me, did not seem materially different.
Even though I’ve started accounts at bdsmlr.com and newtumble.com, I’m still putting up content at Tumblr because, to be fair, that’s still where most of the traffic is. I don’t see anything changing under the WordPress ownership.
Oh, I never thought for a minute that the new owners would restore the adult content. In fact they’d even come out and said they wouldn’t before I wrote this. WordPress (the hosting site rather than software) seems very puritanical.
Automated content moderation is incredibly tricky to get right, so I’m not surprised you’ve seen lots of issues. Google and FB screw it up all the time, and they’ve got way more people, experience and richer data to work with than tumblr. Even if you trained a huge army of human content moderators they’d be inconsistent and disagree with each other, so getting machines to do it consistently is impossible. There still seems to be lots of adult content on tumblr whenever I look, so they’re blocking the wrong stuff and letting the genuinely explicit stuff slip through. Truly a cluster fuck. Migrating all the adult stuff to a new tumblr domain (and automatically redirecting existing sites) would have been a much better plan. It would have kept their porn users but allowed them to draw a bright line between that and the mainstream site. But that’s obviously a non-option now.
-paltego