Default Title @hundred-spam-posts - Tumblr Blog

Why “Go Nuts, Show Nuts” Doesn’t Work in 2022

For those who don’t know or remember, Tumblr used to have a policy around porn that was literally “Go nuts, show nuts. Whatever.” That was memorable and hilarious, and for many people, Tumblr both hosted and helped with the discovery of a unique type of adult content.

In 2018, when Tumblr was owned by Verizon, they swung in the other direction and instituted an adult content ban that took out not only porn but also a ton of art and artists – including a ban on what must have been fun for a lawyer to write, female presenting nipples. This policy is currently still in place, though the Tumblr and Automattic teams are working to make it more open and common-sense, and the community labels launch is a first step toward that.

That said, no modern internet service in 2022 can have the rules that Tumblr did in 2007. I am personally extremely libertarian in terms of what consenting adults should be able to share, and I agree with “go nuts, show nuts” in principle, but the casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible. Here’s why:

Credit card companies are anti-porn. You’ve probably heard how Pornhub can’t accept credit cards anymore. Or seen the new rules from Mastercard. Whatever crypto-utopia might come in the coming decades, today if you are blocked from banks, credit card processing, and financial services, you’re blocked from the modern economy. The vast majority of Automattic’s revenue comes from people buying our services and auto-renewing on credit cards, including the ads-free browsing upgrade that Tumblr recently launched. If we lost the ability to process credit cards, it wouldn’t just threaten Tumblr, but also the 2,000+ people in 97 countries that work at Automattic across all our products.

App stores, particularly Apple’s, are anti-porn. Tumblr started in 2007, the same year the iPhone was released. Originally, the iPhone didn’t have an App Store, and the speed of connectivity and quality of the screen meant that people didn’t use their smartphone very much and mostly interacted with Tumblr on the web, using desktop and laptop computers (really). Today 40% of our signups and 85% of our page views come from people on mobile apps, not on the web. Apple has its own rules for what’s allowed in their App Store, and the interpretation of those rules can vary depending on who is reviewing your app on any given day. Previous decisions on what’s allowed can be reversed any time you submit an app update, which we do several times a month. If Apple permanently banned Tumblr from the App Store, we’d probably have to shut the service down. If you want apps to allow more adult content, please lobby Apple. No one in the App Store has any effective power, even multi-hundred-billion companies like Facebook/Meta can be devastated when Apple changes its policies. Aside: Why do Twitter and Reddit get away with tons of super hardcore content? Ask Apple, because I don’t know. My guess is that Twitter and Reddit are too big for Apple to block so they decided to make an example out of Tumblr, which has “only” 102 million monthly visitors. Maybe Twitter gets blocked by Apple sometimes too but can’t talk about it because they’re a public company and it would scare investors.

There are lots of new rules around verifying consent and age in adult content. The rise of smartphones also means that everyone has a camera that can capture pictures and video at any time. Non-consensual sharing has grown exponentially and has been a huge problem on dedicated porn sites like Pornhub – and governments have rightly been expanding laws and regulations to make sure everyone being shown in online adult content is of legal age and has consented to the material being shared. Tumblr has no way to go back and identify the featured persons or the legality of every piece of adult content that was shared on the platform and taken down in 2018, nor does it have the resources or expertise to do that for new uploads.

Porn requires different service providers up and down the stack. In addition to a company primarily serving adult content not having access to normal financial services and being blocked by app stores, they also need specialized service providers – for example, for their bandwidth and network connections. Most traditional investors won’t fund primarily adult businesses, and may not even be allowed to by their LP agreements. (When Starbucks started selling alcohol at select stores, some investors were forced to sell their stock.)

If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you’d need to be web-only on iOS and side load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don’t dox your users, and make a ton of money. I estimate you’d need at least $7 million a year for every 1 million daily active users to support server storage and bandwidth (the GIFs and videos shared on Tumblr use a ton of both) in addition to hosting, moderation, compliance, and developer costs.

I do hope that a dedicated service or company is started that will replace what people used to get from porn on Tumblr. It may already exist and I don’t know about it. They’ll have an uphill battle under current regimes, and if you think that’s a bad thing please try to change the regimes. Don’t attack companies following legal and business realities as they exist.

valentinedagger

hey quick PSA:

there have been no changes to the community guidelines yet; nsfw is still prohibited

this is one part of a wider rollout

we don’t know what the official guidelines are going to be after the full rollout and what exactly is allowed; they could only allow erotic art, for example, and still ban photographed/video porn

please do not post a ton of porn and get your account banned until the actual full rollout has taken place and the guidelines are updated, it will be very sad for you

8pxl

my pixel art in 2020 vs 2022

echo

street crossiants

pippenpaddlopsicopolisthethird

Watching the new @staff and @changes on tumblr who actually listen and respond to their userbase is so bizarre to see, because I feel like I've come full circle on the site.

I joined 10ish years ago (shortly post-Reichenbach, if that dates me) and that time was still solidly in the era of David Karp. Staff communicated but were overall seen as lovingly incompetent. Everyone used Missing E to fix all the problems, and then Xkit when Missing E stopped working, but nobody thought twice about it. We mostly just joked about how often they fiddled with the shade of background blue.

I remember the sale to Yahoo, and how it took a while to notice, but the site kind of just got worse. We got ads, which everyone hated. Changes were passed down from above with little to no fanfare. But staff was still there and making some effort to reach out to users; we got some of the best April Fools jokes in that era, like Coppy and Decision 2016 that showed that someone in there knew what users liked. Features like direct messaging and rebloggable asks and stacked posts were still coming through, even if the communication with users was opaque. Bots invaded every inch of the site. And then we got the porn ban, which snapped the site like a twig.

After Verizon bought tumblr, there were a few years where staff almost seemed to vanish, or did their best to hide what they were doing. I can't even remember the last few years of April Fools jokes, if they happened at all. Ads got bigger. Changes just happened and there was no way to tell if it was intentional or glitches. If they were intentional, they seemed almost malicious. Users started talking about shadowbans and tags getting wiped out and some posts not showing up in tags or searches and user deletions happening behind the scenes. Bots got worse and worse and less was done about them. If anything went wrong, there was no confidence that reaching out to support would do a thing. Staff was spoken about in posts with the same tone as Bezos or Google, just another tech giant slowly making our lives worse for the sake of squeezing another buck out of us and then selling us to the highest bidder. If nothing else, we could be proud of squeezing the resale value out of the site for them.

I don't know exactly what happened over the last year, if it was because of the sale to Automattic or other internal changes. But all of a sudden, staff started talking to us again. And we didn't fuckin trust em an inch, and rightly so. Changes got rolled out again, and we started complaining again, because we may have no power to make any web experience better so the least we can do is go down complaining.

But the things they started changing were... stuff we wanted? We got tag viewers, timestamps, dash customization, filtering that actually worked. Most new features get toggles so you can turn it off if you don't want it. Huh, we thought, that doesn't seem right. Ideas flopped like Post+, and god did we complain. But after we did... the features... changed? Staff started testing out the ideas that the users endorsed? Like tipping posts on a per-post basis to avoid copyright issues with fanworks and an ad-free subscription model? Huh, we said.

And the final nail in the coffin was that new iOS tag-copying "feature" that we all complained about to no end... that was actually a glitch. Not some coder's whim that got passed down and we just had to deal with it forever. Sorry, staff said, we'll get that fixed right away.

Huh, we said. Huh.

Aside from being an unexpected change for tumblr, it's making me realize how weird it feels in the internet as a whole to have some transparency and communication between site developers and the userbase. When I joined tumblr, forum culture and the heyday of the early creator-run internet were fresh memories. Staff who posted like users were common, and popular demand was the actual goal of web design. But now there is no social media where the developers speak directly to the users and incorporate real feedback into the changes they make. Algorithms drive everything, moderation happens silently, and it's impossible to tell what a human has laid eyes on. Decisions are made based on what can get the most eyes on sponsored ads and drive clicks. Social media is now Big Tech, driven by Big Money Decisions and ad space.

Having a staff who talks and listens to the userbase is a direct return to tumblr's roots and also the most jarring and noticeable jump back to Classic Internet that the rest of social media has long since abandoned.