Tumblr/Paige Leskin
- Tumblr banned the posting of "adult content," including nudity and pornography, one year ago on December 17, 2018.
- In the year since the "porn ban," traffic to Tumblr and app downloads have dropped drastically. To top it all off, Tumblr was bought this year for less than $3 million, compared with its once-$1.1 billion price tag.
- For many, Tumblr was once considered a home for NSFW content not allowed on other social platforms, and a place for non-judgmental exploration of sexuality. In its wake, users are still struggling to find alternatives with the same sense of community.
- Further, Tumblr's algorithm for identifying NSFW content is having issues, and has flagged everything from Pokémon, to dinosaur art, to TV show screengrabs.
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Earlier this year, a freelance artist named Vitrove took to the blogging website Tumblr to try out an experiment. He posted a photo of a spool of thread to Tumblr. Later, he posted it again. Then again.
All four of Vitrove's posts were flagged by Tumblr as "sensitive" content, meaning the platform's algorithm had decided his posts were in violation of its "porn ban" enacted one year ago, on December 17, 2018, days after the app was removed from the App Store after child porn was discovered.
Under Tumblr's new policy, users are not allowed to post any not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content: that includes nudity, pornography, and media showing "real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples." In each subsequent re-post of the photo, Vitrove included the notification from Tumblr alerting him to the NSFW policy violation.
The flagging of Vitrove's posts is only one of the many examples that demonstrate the state of Tumblr's controversial porn ban a year after its implementation. Pictures of breakfast, anime, and memes have been flagged under the new policy. Even Tumblr's announcement about the porn ban was marked as NSFW.
Vintrove
This post from Tumblr shows how the "porn ban" policy has a long way to go.
But Tumblr's imperfect machine-learning algorithm only poses a problem for those still active on the platform. Since the ban, Tumblr has been bleeding users. According to data provided to The Atlantic, Tumblr's number of unique monthly visitors decreased by more than 20% in 2019. The number of users visiting the site, and the amount of time they spend on it, also declined from 2018 to 2019.
Several users who were active in some of Tumblr's largest communities told Business Insider their once-beloved platform has since become irrelevant, and has faded from their lives in the last year. Freelance artist Robin Harper, once a frequent Tumblr user, said the porn ban led to Tumblr's "almost immediate fade into obscurity."
"I'd spent so much time and energy accumulating my own fun little community of a few thousand people. I was frustrated and sad," Harper told Business Insider. "The only time you ever hear about Tumblr anymore is when people talk about the day it 'died' due to the NSFW ban. Very few people I know still use it the way we all used to."
It's no coincidence that Tumblr acted as a haven to marginalized group whose content wasn't accepted in the mainstream sections of the internet: sex workers needing to make a sustainable income; erotica writers and artists looking for their work to be appreciated; LGBTQ+ people searching for others like them; people into BDSM and kink wanting an open place to talk about their desires. Tumblr was one of the few mainstream social networks where porn and NSFW content was allowed, and so those communities found shelter there.
"This sharing was so desperately vital for women and other marginalized people whose sexualities are often overlooked or infantilised in media about sex in preference for the tastes of the traditional porn consumer - the straight white guy," porn actress Vex Ashley wrote in a blog post on Medium last year. "[Tumblr] allowed you to become a collector of your own desires, displaying them and celebrating them proudly, rather than having them spoon fed by a tube site algorithm."
But because Tumblr doesn't exist on separate private servers on Discord, these communities intersect and interconnect. Even Tumblr users not part of these NSFW-centric communities, like those participating in fandoms or selling their art and graphics, told Business Insider their own sects of Tumblr were heavily impacted by the porn ban.
When the porn disappeared, so did Tumblr's sense of community, a German student named Sophia told Business Insider. The art community she found on Tumblr has packed up fully and left for greener pastures: sites like DeviantArt, where there are still strict limits on NSFW art, and Twitter, where NSFW content is still allowed (for now).
Michael Seto/Business Insider
However, that's not to say that the "porn ban" was the only impetus for Tumblr's fall from grace. Yahoo purchased Tumblr back in 2013 for $1.1 billion when the blogging site's userbase was already starting to shrink. Yet Yahoo's attempt to revitalize the platform failed spectacularly, with the addition of ads and a lack on innovation driving away even more users. In 2017, Verizon acquired Yahoo - including Tumblr - and Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp left the company.
"Tumblr had many problems with being considered a 'broken website' for years, and for months had been in the ownership of a company that I think everyone knew we couldn't trust," Harper, the freelance artist, said.
Following the 2018 porn ban, Tumblr fielded offers from those ardent to keep NSFW content alive there, including PornHub and the singer Halsey.
But nothing represented just how hard Tumblr had fallen than the announcement in August 2019 that Verizon had sold Tumblr to Automattic, the parent company of website builder WordPress, for a price reported to be under $3 million. That's less than an empty lot in San Francisco, and many celebrity engagement rings.
While some Tumblr users hoped that perhaps the site's new owner would bring back NSFW content, Automattic's CEO quickly dispelled those rumors.
"Adult content is not our forte either, and it creates a huge number of potential issues with app stores, payment providers, trust and safety," CEO Matt Mullenweg wrote online shortly after the purchase. "It's a problem area best suited for companies fully dedicated to creating a great experience there."
What Mullenweg is hinting at are the tricky policies around what content Apple and Android allow on apps in their app stores. Right around the time the porn ban was enacted, Tumblr briefly disappeared from the iOS App Store because of a failure to police child porn on its site. The porn ban was likely a direct response to that incident.
But not only is Tumblr having issues retaining users, but it's also having trouble getting new people to its site. The Atlantic's data showed that traffic to Tumblr's login page page in the US has been cut nearly in half sine 2018. In the year since the porn ban, first-time downloads of the Tumblr app declined 32%, according to data provided to mobile analytics service Sensor Tower to Business Insider.
Nevertheless, Tumblr published its annual year-in-review in December, highlighting the most popular fandoms and trending topics in categories ranging from K-pop, to Pokémon, to the best "ships" (fictionalized relationships that Tumblr users love to speculate about).
"Nowadays, I see only a handful of people I used to follow post on Tumblr, and it's just funny or political reblogs," Tumblr user Matthew Marquez told Business Insider. "Many of my friends and followers have completely abandoned it."
