Tumblr refugees trying to save its NSFW content (opens in new tab)

It's interesting to see Tumblr described in many articles/forums as primarily for pornography. Tumblr has been the biggest user acquisition channel (and a free one, at that) for my startup, which has nothing to do with pornography.

We've gained tens of thousands of users in a few days from a single user post, and several user posts have accumulated 50,000+ notes. This is all thanks to the strong accessibility groups around ADHD and dyslexia that exist on Tumblr.

I've spent (wasted) time and money on FB ads, and I wish that I could have advertised on Tumblr. Unfortunately, every time I tried, they only wanted big brands with $25k minimum spend.

Awful site. Won't even load if cookies are blocked. Summary, after stripping all markup:

The internet is for porn, goes the song from musical Avenue Q. Since Tumblr announced this week that it will no longer be part of that internet, many users are mounting an exodus to existing networks like still-freewheeling Twitter, as well as efforts to build a new kind of Tumblr, the kind of Tumblr that Tumblr had been until now. There were people sharing their discovery of their sexuality. There were people sharing the journey of themselves going through hard times, says LolaBohemia, a professional dominatrix from Florida. ...

The platform's ban on visuals of adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions), which officially begins on December 17, has already flooded bloggers inboxes with automated alerts about suspect images, videos, and GIFs. ... In addition to flagging visuals, Tumblr seems to have filtered its searches. Hashtags like BDSM now return no results at all. No erotica or other text appears either, despite Tumblr's assurance that the new content rules don't apply to text posts.

There is an appeals process for flagged items, and its unclear how much content will ultimately be blocked although straight-up porn certainly will be. Many adult bloggers get the sense that they are no longer wanted. There are [sic] no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content, wrote Tumblr's CEO.

Tribe and Experience Project also went sex-free. They're both gone now.

This decade feels like the Victorian era all over again. How long did the last one last?

As a trans person, Tumblr was the best place to find other trans people, having shared experiences talked about, negativity processed, and where I was able to post pics of myself as I shifted seeing myself from ugly (as reinforced in me in movies) to worth loving. It was one of the only places where I didn't have to be bombarded with the hateful remarks of transphobes, as I got to pick who I followed.

I had some of my content censored following the acquisition by Yahoo. It happened to other folk too. I really wish there wouldn't be this shame around bodies, sexuality and gender identity that companies enforce with their censorship algorithms.

The issue they are going to run into is that they are automatically going to be labeled a porn site. As such they will automatically lose the top tier of advertisers and payment processors. In addition, because they are new and probably won’t have the filtering systems in place, very offensive content including cp will likely get posted. This will further make them a pariah to the main stream internet with app stores and internet infrastructure players not wanting to do business with them. For example see the example of Apple banning the Tumblr app. And that was with a well established service. With this new NSFW service it won’t even be a close call.

I saw a lot of tumblr 'refugees' on mastodon this week.

They should name the new platform Relbmut (inverse of Tumbler).

No mention of reddit?

That's cute. The Tumblr Refugees don't think that Twitter is censored.