The IT Nerd

Tumblr the blogging platform that was once part of Yahoo, but is now part of OATH which is in turn owned by the Verizon empire has had a tough go as of late. They were nailed by Apple for allegedly having child porn on the platform and as a result got the iOS version of their app pulled from the App Store. Strangely, the Android version wasn’t pulled. Read into that what you will. But in any case, that was two weeks ago and I am guessing that as a result of that, Tumblr is deciding to pull all porn from their platform. And from people in the know, Tumblr is full of porn. They’re doing this via a change in their Community Guidelines that goes live on the 17th of December. And they’ve been nice enough to tell you what is good and bad going forward:

Don’t upload images, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples —this includes content that is so photorealistic that it could be mistaken for featuring real-life humans (nice try, though). Certain types of artistic, educational, newsworthy, or political content featuring nudity are fine. Don’t upload any content, including images, videos, GIFs, or illustrations, that depicts sex acts.

As you can imagine, this isn’t going over well with users of the Tumblr platform who want their porn. This Reddit thread is an example of what people think of this.

Now for my $0.02 worth.

I personally don’t care if anyone wants to surf for porn as long as it doesn’t involve something illegal, or it’s illegal in whatever part of the world you happen to be surfing for porn from. That’s why I think that this is a gross overreaction by Tumblr and their corporate masters. A better route to address the concerns of Apple would have been to go after the child porn that they found, which to be fair they are doing, without going after everything. But they chose not to do that and here we are talking about it. I think that Tumblr is going to get a massive drop in usage as a significant number of the accounts that are on there are porn related. That means less ad revenue, which in turn means less revenue for OATH and Verizon, which means that Tumblr is basically dead, and you can engrave the tombstone now.

This entry was posted on December 3, 2018 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Oath, verizon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.