Tumblr (2007-2018) will be banning porn as of December 17th. After that date there will still be a website called Tumblr, but it will not be the same Tumblr. Not even close. It will in effect become a poor man’s Instagram, a ghost town, a den of neo-Nazis, a place where social justice warriors once roamed. The lack of heavy-handed censorship was part of what made it great. It was very much a Millennial New Yorker project. But it was already starting to go downhill.
For much of 2018 Tumblr has been fighting off porn bots, fake accounts spewing porn. Tumblr’s filtering algorithms were no match.
By the end of November it got so bad that Apple dropped Tumblr from its App Store because Tumblr was unable to keep out child porn.
Yesterday, December 3rd, Tumblr said it would ban all porn starting on the 17th. But its filtering algorithms are so bad that they cannot tell the difference between Beyonce with clothes on and a woman with clothes off. Or between the Scourging of Jesus and BDSM porn. By the time they right their ship, if they ever do, it seems that most of their users will be gone. With Judgement Day still two weeks off, people are already leaving in droves.
Tumblr’s definition of porn is any photograph or photo-realistic picture that shows sex acts, human genitals or “female-presenting nipples”. Users have been begging them to kick off neo-Nazis, but Tumblr drew the line instead at nipples.
It is pretty much the same definition of “adult content” that US television uses, but unlike television, Tumblr content is produced at such a rapid rate that human censors cannot possibly keep up – so most of it falls to inept computer algorithms.
What surprises me is that the crackdown took as long as it did. In 2013 Tumblr was bought by Yahoo! (whose ads were jarringly out of place). In 2017 Yahoo! in turn was bought by Verizon, fka Bell Atlantic.
Requiescat in pace.
See also:
- Tumblr: yet more Internet crack
- The women I most reblogged on Tumblr in 2013
- My adventures in porn
- Yahoo!
- Millennials
- In memoriam: The Village Voice (1955-2018)
I must be old. I always thought Tumblr was pretty much Pintrest with more words and less photos of how to make deviled eggs look like cats. Then, I read in “The Hate U Give” what made it seem like the main character using Tumblr like a Twitter or Instagram.
All I know is that when any of those come up in my search results for products or current events, they’ve been useless to me. So, I’m 100% certain I won’t miss it’s absence any more than MySpace (or Facebook for that matter, that platform just made me hate my friends.)
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I don’t blame them for wanting to avoid child porn, but you’d think they’d want to avoid neo-Nazis too.
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“its filtering algorithms are so bad that they cannot tell the difference between Beyonce with clothes on and a woman with clothes off.”
In all honesty, I easily see how this could happen considering some of her outfits 😂
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I don’t care about porn
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I neve used tumbler. Many sites there have malware that when you click on their site it opens up a back door into your computer for hackers.
So if you do online banking, have your Fidelity portfolio there or pay your credit card line with an account then you become a target. Emails can containe a lot of financial information.
Bit torrent is sketchy too.
I am a free speech advocate. I don’t wamt speech to be forbidden or regulated by a governing authority. Giving the state the power to determine what speech is impermissible is a slippery Owrellian slope.
I don’t have a problem with people and communities protesting speech they dont like because that is free speech too.
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If I had known there was pictures of naked men I would have perused them daily instead of rarely.
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Why does Yahoo destroy everything it buys? I still miss Geocities
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My account was terminated today about ten days before this deadline. I don’t post pr0n of which I am aware.
I don’t have an email informing me about a problem making my account at risk. Nor do I have one saying it was terminated. I just get at login a message saying my account was terminated.
Waiting on a reply to my inquiry through the contact for as to why.
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Hmm… not the biggest fan of pr0ns or social media. That being said, if the owners don’t want nekkid folks plastered on their timelines then that’s their choice. Pr0nhub is always an alternative…
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It’s their choice to take their money and burn it. They could have sold tumblr. Instead, they chose to destroy it
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I care nothing for porn but censorship is going to kill Tumblr.
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@ Patrick Thomas
That is like telling a man who just got divorced that prostitutes are always an alternative.
Pornhub porn and Tumblr porn are not the same thing. Pornhub porn is corporate-driven, a product designed for sale. Tumblr porn is user (and lately bot) driven. Tumblr porn was partly a matter of self-expression and validation. And where that mattered most was in the queer community. Tumblr was one of the few places where they were free to express themselves without the censors coming down on them and policing them. Even if Tumblr gets its algorithms right, it will still be censorship by and for straight people. Just as US mainstream culture (as seen on TV and in public schools) is by and for straight (non-Hispanic White) people.
Tumblr gave loads of niche cultures niches. December 17th is bound to put a chill on that, probably a fatal one.
It is like throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
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There are other things that i enjoy on Tumblr like book reviews, art, black culture related things, music and different music artist etc., I would hate to see that go.
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Wow, Tumblr is getting rid of porn? That’s pretty much all they had going for themselves. Poor website. Yeah they’re gone.
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