
Tumblr’s First Year Without Porn - jseliger
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/12/tumblr-year-review-2019-nsfw-ban-memes/602911
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iNerdier
As a user of tumblr since something like 2008 (oh no has it been that long) it
wasn’t the removal of porn that ruined it for me, it was the collateral damage
that came with it. For the month before it happened my feed was a list of all
the interesting people announcing that they were leaving for alternative
platforms. It was the impetus to just abandon the place, not helped by the
fact it seemingly hadn’t changed at all under yahoo’s neglect and the spam was
omnipresent.

I had used it as a scrap book, there was genuinely interesting art and design
content on the site, from illustrators portfolios to photographers work to
architecture blogs.

Maybe it’s found it’s place with hyper specific fandoms around tv shows as
seems to be what’s suggested logging in again but part of me is sad that
something that was genuinely great was squandered.

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forgottenpass
>While porn creators belonged to tightly connected subgroups, they were linked
to the rest of Tumblr’s network “with a very high number of ties,” and their
productions “spread widely across the whole social graph.” In other words,
they weren’t quarantined off in some illicit corner of the site—they were
woven into its basic fabric: The average Tumblr user in the sample followed 51
blogs, two or three of which tended to be specifically porn, and another two
of which tended to be “bridge” blogs, run by users who were particularly
likely to reblog porn.

Pron not seen as an "other" in a medium that didn't go out of it's way to make
it othered?

This is exactly the kind of insight that only takes a study when a society is
simultaneously marinated in censorship and unwilling to admit any instance of
it deserves the label "censorship." It's not like censorship is anything new,
or that the mechanisms and ramifications are poorly understood.

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minimaxir
Has Automattic made any changes to Tumblr since that acquisition?
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20679387](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20679387))

~~~
Grue3
There are mysterious Group Chats (only available on mobile apparently so I
never used them) that is a play against Discord and its ilk.

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_-_T_-_
Are we pretending there is no longer porn on Tumblr?

~~~
notyourday
It is pretty funny because what Tumblr is now missing is high quality edgy
stuff, including content curated by photographers while bot-
generated/resposted porn shows up again as fast as Tumblr's systems kill it.

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pdimitar
Yeah, nice marketing spin and an attempt to downplay the wasteland nature of
Tumblr as of today.

As others mentioned, it wasn't the ban of porn that made Tumblr lose a lot of
users. It was the heavy-handed nature of the ban plus the fact that the
flagging algorithm was -- and still is -- extremely buggy and unreliable. The
amount of injustice that many honest content creators suffered there lost
Tumblr a user goodwill that spanned back a decade. Tumblr will _never_ regain
that.

And I seriously doubt the "20% lost users" number is realistic. I enjoyed the
erotic and pornographic content of Tumblr but didn't leave after the hammer
hit; however, my engagement with it heavily dropped.

I doubt they included that in their imaginary 20% lost users. Sure,
_technically_ maybe only 20% left but I am pretty sure that many like myself
just didn't bother uninstalling the app or deleting their account. How
convenient that user activity wasn't mentioned in detail in this post.

They can say whatever they like. Of course they will downplay any negatives,
it's their job. But Tumblr is pretty much dead in the water (read:
irrelevant).

Which is a shame because Twitter and Reddit definitely don't deserve the extra
active users they gained from the exodus.

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jdlyga
It's sad when social networks and messaging platforms die. Every major one
I've gotten invested in has gone belly up: AIM, Xanga, Yahoo Messanger, MSN,
Myspace, and now Facebook is hemmoraging users. And Whatsapp isn't too far
behind with a lot of its functionality duplicated by RCS or iMessage. The
point is, don't get too invested in a messaging platform or social network
because they don't last forever.

~~~
justboxing
> Facebook is hemmoraging users.

Source?

Last I checked, they were serving 2.37 BILLION M.A.U.s.

...That's literally like 30% of the world population. If you exclude babies
and under 5, the number is probably more like 40 to 45% of world population.

> Facebook now serves 2.37 billion monthly active users, an increase of 55
> million on the previous quarter.

Source: Q1 2019 Earnings Report
[https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2019/Q1...](https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2019/Q1/Q1-2019-Earnings-
Presentation.pdf)

~~~
Lammy
From the "Limitations of Key Metrics and Other Data" page of the linked PDF:

"Duplicate and false accounts are very difficult to measure at our scale, and
it is possible that the actual number of duplicate and false accounts may vary
significantly from our estimates."

