I’m sorry to report that recent news of “mature subject matter” returning to Tumblr is pretty much totally a scam. I mean, you can post it, but nobody can see it. Search invisibility is near total, even for logged-in Tumblr users. So you’re posting into a black hole of non-discoverability. What’s the point?
Let’s get into it. There’s a lot of ground to cover.
September: Rumors Of The Tumblr Un-Pornocalypse
In late September Tumblr issued a sort-of-sideways announcement about their intention to relax the anti-porn rules by introducing new community labels for mature content. However, the announcement was at pains to explain that the actual content policies were not changing at that time. Specifically: “We haven’t updated the official content policies yet.”
I didn’t blog about it, although I did Tweet. As far as I was concerned, it was a nothing-burger. Wake me up when you can show me the fine print about what’s allowed. I also wanted to wait and see if any new adult-content flexibility extends to search discovery both internally and externally. I’ve seen parts of this movie before…
Tumblr Speaks A Truth: Social Media Porn Is A Hard Problem
At roughly the same time as the nothingburger announcement, Tumblr’s Matt Mullenweg posted, to his eternal credit, the single most-honest explanation from a social media platform perspective about why porn-friendly social media is essentially impossible in 2022. In Why “Go Nuts, Show Nuts” Doesn’t Work in 2022 Mullenweg said all the quiet parts out loud and with his full chest:
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.
He went on to list, in detail, the barriers imposed by credit card companies, app stores, age and consent verification, and the pornocalyptic reluctance of other companies to provide the necessary service stacks modern websites rely upon. Matt’s essay is a good essay. You go read. I’ll just share part of his conclusion:
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 [to cover costs].
November: “Bruh! Tumblr Allows Noods Again!”
Nah. Not really. Allow me to explain.
Yesterday was the big day. Tumblr’s new nudity-friendlier community guidelines dropped. They… aren’t completely terrible, if your expectations were as low as mine:
Hardcore porn (“sexually explicit acts”) is still off limits, but the dreaded and mysterious “female-presenting nipple” is back on the menu, everybody!
But… what’s a “sexually explicit act”, you may well wonder? Ha! That’s not defined. Who wants to bet that “gay sexually explicit” and “straight sexually explicit” turn out to be two different things? Or, what about sex education? Demonstrating how to roll condoms onto a banana with your mouth, say? Or… wait! Breaking news from our field reporter on Twitter: sucking a dildo has already been flagged under the new rules, and the appeal apparently rejected. I guess “sextoyly explicit” is the same as “sexually explicit” now?
But wait! There’s more… and it’s worse. The above is Mullenweg’s summary of the new community guidelines. The actual text of the guidelines is rather more crabbed. Specifically, the forbidden “sexually explicit acts” are joined in the naughty booth by “content with an overt focus on genitalia.” What does “overt” mean, do you suppose? Guess! See if you get lucky! Would you have guessed that it included sucking on a sex toy?
So, have I got this right? Nudity is allowed, but if it shows too much pussy and cock, it’s not allowed. Or maybe — we’re guessing here — it’s not too much pussy and cock that gets you in trouble. Perhaps it’s a question of how closely the camera zooms in, or how brashly the genitals in question are displayed. “Overt focus” leaves a lot of room for interpretation, doesn’t it?
Search Invisibility And Your Tumblr Nudes
So, nope. I wasn’t too excited by the nothingburger news in September. But you want to know the real reason for my skepticism? It’s search invisibility. I wanted to see whether the newly-allowable adult content would be searchable, taggable, findable. Because if you can’t search for a thing, or link to it, it might as well not exist.
You all know this routine by now. We’ve written about search invisibility before. The way this scam works is that you can post stuff, but nobody can find it. Your tags don’t work; tag search results don’t have your stuff in it. Your keyword searches don’t work; the results don’t have your stuff. I’ve called this totalitarian in the past, because it’s creepy: people who don’t understand the game just assume your stuff doesn’t exist. “I just don’t understand why nothing comes back when I search for Jenna Jameson nude!” (See next link for answer.)
I first wrote about this happening to Google search suggestions back in 2008. In 2015 or before, Instagram started banning hashtags, sometimes silently and sometimes not. Likewise Pinterest and, yes, Tumblr, although Tumblr in those days had an easter egg pixel-hunt you could do to turn banned searches back on. In 2019, I caught Twitter putting adult stars in search invisibility; their names wouldn’t pop up in the @-name autocomplete function, and the one I tested back then still won’t. These are far from the only examples. I would hazard the proposition that search invisibility is the preferred treatment for grudgingly-allowed adult content on most social media platforms these days.
So what about Tumblr? Yeah, you know it.
To test, I set up an ErosBlog-themed outpost on the new more-lenient Tumblr. (Look for an update when my outpost Tumblr-blog gets inevitably banned, perhaps because of the general porn-hostile social media principle that “if you have an off-platform porn destination/brand they will ban you no matter what content you post.”)
So, yeah, it’s here: tumblr.com/erosblogbacchus. I started with one post, which is a link back to this recent comic/vintage/upskirt post on ErosBlog. Here’s what the Tumblr post looks like to me, logged into Tumblr:
Note the Community Label: Mature flag at the top, which I dutifully set per the new rules because I am such a good social media citizen, and even though this image is not even nude, it is mildly racy and shows a fringe of petticoats.
So, who will find and see that post? Presumably, logged-in Tumblr Users who have their mature content filters set properly in the non-default position, if they also know about my Tumblr blog and have chosen to follow it. That’s gonna be “zero” if nobody can see my posts to ever find out my new blog exists, though. No problem, I’ll just grab the URL and share it elsewhere, because that’s totally how well-functioning social media is supposed to work. Here, look at my post!
Again, if you’re logged into Tumblr and your settings are right, perhaps you see that. But if you’re just a random person coming in from the web (right here!) without an adult-verified settings-optimized Tumbler account, this is what you’ll see:
Woo, exciting! “Mature subject matter” is totally back, boyz! Still, I shouldn’t be too negative. Just click that big easy “Show Post” button, right?
If you listen carefully, you can hear the sepulchral laughter echoing from the crypt underneath Tumblr headquarters. Because guess what? Cock-blocked! Yes, my “Community Label: Mature” post is not visible from the open web. Members only:
Tut-tut! “Ah, now, you need clearance for that.”
But wait a minute! Back up. What about all those hashtags? What about keyword searches? Surely…
If you’re on Tumblr, try the exercise. Type “Balloon Crash” into the “Search Tumblr” box. You will find a lot of posts, but not mine. Or search the #petticoats hashtag. You’ll get lots of petticoats, some of them pretty sexy, but you won’t find my “Mature”-flagged post. It is thoroughly invisible on this social media platform, for any reasonable definition of “social”. The “mature subject matter returns to Tumblr” storyline is at least 85% pure scam, because of search invisibility.
I had to poke at all of this, so I posted one more post. This one has an actual nude — a vintage nude — in it. Female-presenting nipple! Hashtag: “Vintage Nude”. When I typed in that tag, a little “popular tag” badge popped into view. Awesome! Then I clicked the tag. Not much there. Not my post, for sure! Half a dozen old posts, carefully chosen to avoid the dreaded female nipples. Popular tag? Sure! But only among friends. Only in the dark.
In Conclusion: Tumblr Can Suck My “Overt Focus” Dick
So yeah. That’s where we are. Maybe you can post some stuff on Tumblr today that you couldn’t post last week. But nobody can find it by accident. Nobody can find it by looking for it. Nobody can find it socially. You can’t show it to your off-platform friends. Time will tell if Google can see it, but I’m betting against, and what good would a Google Search result even do you?
Within Tumblr, if people already know you, are following you, have given Tumblr their date-of-birth info, and managed to set the right settings correctly, then sure, those people can now see your mature-subject-matter posts. That’s… not really very much. It’s not social media. At best, it’s in-your-bubble media. Fuck that. Just fuck it. I’m not impressed. Bacchus verdict: Tumblr is NOT back.
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