Man, Apple's review process is getting to pretty incomprehensible heights. Certain people will have their apps rejected carte-blanche, while other developers get to... collaborate with the reviewers to blacklist objectionable content in their app? I really don't follow how a dialogue like this even starts in the first place, much less how nobody has stepped forwards and just acknowledged that this is a double-standard yet.
The App Store desperately needs transparency if it wants to avoid regulatory ire. Stories like this are just getting ridiculous.
If you look at it from a cynical standpoint, what's happening is completely obvious. Apple is applying the full force of their developer policy -- and the pressure is mounting -- because Tumblr has absolutely zero social capital. It's a dead platform, and other than a few zealots, just about everyone's moved on.
Contrast this with Epic v. Apple: Epic has the arguable upper hand there (and Apple's flinched a few times already) because Fortnite is a massively popular game with a huge fanbase.
casting tumblr users of 2021 as zealots is hilariously out of touch
it's a plenty vibrant platform - all of the other social media websites are way worse, content-wise. Create a tumblr account & follow tags/accounts related to your interests. You'll get a lot of quality content!
For example, there's a reason the witcher season 2's media campaign included an AMA on tumblr with one of the stars. That's where the fandom thrives.
it just isn't an especially monetizable bunch of communities. Fandom in general is hard to monetize (look at the donation-driven AO3 for another community-hub more vibrant than the ones twitter and facebook can manage.)
This is a bit of an "Are Y'all with the Cult?" moment. Tumblr is a niche community at this point and the people who are still there are largely unusually dedicated fans.
Twitter and Reddit constantly get progressively worse every update. You guys pretend like tumblr is dead all you want. The numbers show tumblr growing.
I'm not the same user but I checked SimilarWeb (better sources may exist.)
It looks like Tumblr has a lot of traffic, but isn't growing and is far behind reddit and twitter. None appear to be growing in the last several months; I don't know what that means.
This shows a huge misunderstanding of how the internet works.
People don't congregate around websites. They congregate around subject matter. Tumblr is THE place to congregate around a long tail of niche subject matter.
It's not full of Tumblr loyalists. They mostly have lukewarm opinions of the iOS app. They're on the platform for the fandom, not the company.
The fact that you refer to Tumblr as a singular community shows that you should probably not comment authoritatively on the website :)
I mean tumblr is a dead platform because of Apple applying the full force of its developer policies. It lost Three quarters of its active users in the span of a few months after the 2018 porn ban fiasco (which majorly affected sfw artists as well because the rollout was so botched) which the OP explains Apple's hand in.
Yeah, my understanding was that apple cracking down was merely the excuse Verizon, which owned tumblr at the time, used to justify banning porn, but it was about ad revenue.
> Apple is applying the full force of their developer policy
source? not sure why tumblr is the only app doing this then since reddit and twitter have a plethora of porn and other "unsavory" content available on their official iOS clients.
I figure a lot of people tagging do the shotgun blast of tags: just add a bunch of relevant tags to increase visibility. They probably don't consider people actually searching this phrase in particular.
Automattic bought tumblr to make money. They can't make the money they want unless they make tumblr more advertising friendly, and that means slowly but surely eliminating - basically non-Google friendly - content.
Eliminate tags, sites using those tags their traffic goes down, they move elsewhere.
One thing I’ve never been sure of is how Reddit has been so successful with NSFW content. It’s certainly not banned from the platform, so how is it able to get away with it compared to the other services? It’s also mostly an ad business, right? Whereas other as businesses like YouTube have historically been very prudish (swearing can demonetize a video and nsfw content isn’t allowed)
I have no knowledge of how Reddit handles NSFW content. I have some knowledge of how Automattic does.
From what I have seen as an active reddit user of 10yrs+, the ads I see on - for example - /r/culinaryskills, /r/gamedeals, /r/dogs - are quite different. They are targeted in some way.
All WordPress.com sites - and I assume tumblr sites - could have ads shown. One way to stop ads being shown on those sites is to apply a tag.
Call that tag "mature"
A site tagged as "mature" will
- not appear to other sites
- will therefore experience a drop-off in traffic
- but will still appear in Google but because of the lack of linking will be much much lower in results.
Reddit cannot add those tags as fast and (maybe) as accurately as a blogging service can so it gets away with it. That said, they do have the ability to quarantine sites and I have no idea at all if they hide NSFW content from crawlers.
So you are saying there appears to be a way (likely nontrivial) that Tumblr could adopt (maybe same as reddit) to keep both advertisers and community happy?
A subreddit could, depending on it's (unpaid) mods have a wide variety of content. For example /r/WTF content could be funny or shocking. An advertiser on that sub would have to be okay with their content being alongside either content.
Let's say a tumblr site gets tagged as "mature".
That site does not get the expected ads normally seen on a site
That site is effectively invisible to other sites
Why would you buy ads on a site that no-one will see?
Why would you stay publishing on a site where your traffic falls of a cliff?
What makes a site get that 'mature' tag? It could be one post, it could be a series of posts. But that tag stays until it manually removed.
When you are running a site that has user generated content there are two alternatives:
The vast majority of Tumblr traffic is via logged-in users hitting the dashboard (activity stream of posts from followed users), global tag pages, etc. It's a social network, and most pages with ads are displaying content from a bunch of different blogs at once. It's just like the Twitter timeline.
Tumblr has already long had a notion of NSFW blogs and content, which are already treated differently than "safe" content. But since the blog network (individual "sites" as you're saying) is a minority of traffic, and not a major source of revenue in the first place, it's not really comparable to isolating mature content on WordPress or Reddit.
I really don’t get why big companies buying ads are apparently morally trapped in 1950.
Nobody who was actually going to buy your product is going to care if it appears alongside someone saying “oh shit! Cool!” But we consistently get policies that punish people just for saying simple words, like YouTube apparently demonetizing anything with “foul language” in the titles/first minute or so of the video.
Most people also won’t care if a portion of the website has boobs or something. 99.999% of people won’t decide to never again purchase your soda because it advertised on a site that had a bare nipple on a certain subsection of that site. But policies are enforced like this is true, and it ends up killing platforms once they reach a size mainstream enough to sell fast food and soda ads.
It's about appealing to the largest demographic possible. The company might not care about such antiquated morals, but a large percentage of the population does.
An example is the YouTube "adpocalypse" from a few years ago. When major national brands have ads showing up to Nazi videos and conspiracies, it's not a good look for the company and journalists ripped them a new one. People don't care that the ads are "algorithmically" placed.
There’s a huge difference between “shows up beside” and “shows up on the same website” though. I don’t think GP was talking about showing ads next to porn, but rather whether unmonetized porn on a NSFW sub poisons the well for advertiser friendly subs.
My understanding is that advertisers had an issue with Nazi videos being monetized with their ads, not Nazi videos being on the platform at all. Obviously nobody wants to pay money to have their brand associated with that.
I said “fuck” like, twice in a 3 hour hangout with a group of “friends”, all something around their mid-20s.
At the end of the night, I was pulled aside by one of them and was told “we like having you hang with us, but you can’t be swearing like that around us.”
These people exist. In much larger numbers than you think. And they are much more demographically spread out than you’d think.
It’s very rare that I’d curse in a business or formal setting. Take me to meet your parents and I can be the picture of civility. If we’re out having casual drinks, well, I’m a Navy veteran and the language may get a bit more colorful. I’m not going to turn the air blue, but if we’re out for 3 hours, you’re likely to hear an f-bomb or two. If that bothers someone, we’re probably not going to hang out together for a number of other reasons.
I used to buy millions of dollars of ads for major brands including Verizon and NBC Universal. You’re right and wrong at the same time. If Clorox accidentally bought $1MM of ads on Pornhub would it hurt their bottom line? No. It might be help it with clever creative.
It’s all about Christmas bonuses or quarterly bonuses. High level executives are notoriously conservative and DO NOT rock the boat. All it takes is enough moralizing hypocrites seeing an ad in the wrong place or emailing the company or whipping up a Twitter cancellation and suddenly their career aspirations are at risk. And they are incredibly replaceable.
Fun fact: Reddit doesn’t allow porn on /r/all and /r/popular. It used to be blocked only on /r/popular, but they blocked it on /r/all too relatively recently.
I don't know much about the company, but don't they run Wordpress.com? I think I've seen some wild stuff on subdomains there, do they do similar filtering on ios for those sites?
This is specifically only for the iOS app. They already have "safe for ads" standards on the web, but Apple is requiring them to have stricter standards for the app store.
3) The changes they made seem utterly unrelated to a generic push to be more advertiser friendly.
Tags they have blocked include: "about", "about me", "arms", "beard", "donate", "hot", "long post", "me", "mine", "misc", "my face", "my gif", "my life", "queue", "queued", "repost", "self", "self reblog", "selfie", "snap", "stim toy", "submission", "suicide prevention", "tagged", "TMI", "Tony the Tiger", and a huge number of tags starting with the word user such as "userdave" or "userjane". (And then, yes, a ton of words with sex or drug connotations too, yes.)
Notice that a ton of these are actually meta tags relating to how people use Tumblr; "submission" is automatically added (by Tumblr!) for items submitted to a blog; "queued" is added (again, by Tumblr!) for posts queued to be automatically posted in the future; people often tag especially long posts with "long post", and so on. Then you get just weird things like "Tony the Tiger".
I'm not sure what exactly they're trying to do, but it seems very clear to me it's a half-baked attempt to stop getting kicked off the app store again. They've as much as said that this is an emergency fix and they will be rolling out something less broken when they can, but a general "let's be more advertiser friendly" push wouldn't be an emergency.
"CNC" is even bolded. And that's probably one of the more lucrative topics for ads...that is things like CNC routers. I have no idea what the naughty version of CNC is.
Edit: Ahh. "Consensual Non-Consent", I guess people that like to play act rape.
It’s just pointless, because people find a way. If you ban e.g. “sh#t” aggressively, the auditory will eventually invent series of local euphemisms and one morning you find yourself banning “skittles” and “slip” somehow. Sad thing is, these guys never learn the history of internet forums and put the same snakeoil compresses again and again.
It gets totally out of control very fast
There is a way to censor internet correctly in a controlled way, it is human-oriented moderation. HN is a good example of it (in a good sense). We have near zero “bad” content or discussion here, but you’d never encounter the famous “sorry, your post contains a word from our stop-list”. Because words aren’t a cause, they are an effect. Appeal directly to the cause: human personal sense of the appreciated culture and the reasons to have it. Those who get it will try to moderate themselves out of respect, those who do not will find themselves in a vacuum or quickly flagged. When site owners believe in automated moderation by a whip, they are doomed and rightly so.
Which, in reality, becomes an army of low-wage workers with ban hammers. That leads to those stories "I was banned from BIGPLATFORM and I didn't do anything wrong". Then you have to embarrass BIGPLATFORM on Twitter or in the mainstream press to get back in.
One of Tumblr's former iOS devs thinks that this astonishingly clumsy move is the result of Tumblr (and all other iOS apps) needing to appease Apple's randomly-selected reviewers - each with their own interpretation of the content guidelines - rather than needing to meet the guidelines per se. https://sreegs.tumblr.com/post/671649355334336512/alright-le...
I find the censorship of iOS apps to be dystopian, because Apple doesn't allow them to say that some other results exist but are unavailable in the app.
I didn't realize Tumblr was sold to Automattic for $3 million. Yahoo bought it for $1.1 Billion just a few years prior (which made zero sense at the time).
Yahoo was truly a poorly run business with an incompetent executive team.
Yahoo was sold to Verizon for $4.8 billion in 2016 [1]. VZ then merged it with their AOL acquisition under the brand Oath, which was then rebranded to Verizon Media Group.
The whole thing was apparently unloaded to a private equity group for $5 Billion recently [2] and has been renamed back to Yahoo... so yes, they still exist and now "Yahoo!" includes AOL too.
Not sure if this was an attempt at wit or just a reflexive generic tech forum comment, but being successful at Google, becoming the CEO of a failing company that then fails, then founding a company no one has heard of isn't a good example of failing upwards.
She is famous because she joined the right startup in the early days. She has never demonstrated that she can repeat her success after driving numerous companies' valuation into the ground post-google. The media loves her because she share the same qualities as Theranos' Elizabeth Holmes. I doubt the other former senior execs at Alphabet would get the same kid glove treatment. It is the same story as Meg Whitman as they both fit the same narrative favored by the media. It is easy to be a generic exec at already successful company, especially if your first job propels you to C level. Fixing a failing company or building a new company from scratch is what distinguishes the truly excellent business people. There is a reason Jobs, Bezos, Gates, and Nadella are looked up to. They either built from scratch a successfully company, brought a failing corporation to success, or both in the case of Jobs. We don't shower praise upon Ballmer precisely because he did a bad job. It would be hypocritical to advocate gender equality by not holding the likes of Mayer and Whitman to the same standards. Just being a good manager and executive is nothing exceptional, you can find plenty to fill these sort of roles from MBA programs. (I will however admit that Yahoo's APM program is a true innovation)
There are plenty of male tech executives with equally poor track records as Mayer (David Marcus comes to mind), yet they don’t get this kind of treatment on message forums.
Comparing Meyer to Holmes is like comparing David Marcus to Bernie Madoff. It just doesn’t make sense unless you’re seeing someone primarily through their gender.
> There are plenty of male tech executives with equally poor track records as Mayer (David Marcus comes to mind), yet they don’t get this kind of treatment on message forums.
If they had the same kind of media coverage they probably would. When I hear Tumblr I think of Meyer because we had dozens of articles covering that. I couldn't tell you what Marcus runs (Goldman Sachs' consumer-lending division?)
I think it's great that users have a choice of mobile platforms. Many people would rather not have any adult content on their phones and they choose iOS. Who are we to force it upon them? If they wanted a an uncensored experience they would have bought a different phone.
No one here is forcing it upon anyone; the easy solution here is to have the app filter NSFW content by default and then force the user to manually enable it if they do want to engage with the content, which appeases both users. Trying to argue that having your hands tied isn't so bad because your feet are still free is a very slippery slope though, and it's not an argument that ends with anyone's platforms being better. It's especially not an argument when the platform owners have practically infinite resources and bigger fish to fry than "how hard is it to access porn on my iPhone". What we really need to do is take a long, hard look at the devices we have, and decide whether we are the ones who should control them, or third parties. Pretty much every other argument is a strawman.
You could even make it a system-wide setting that you can control through parental controls, giving you an extra selling point for the "think of the children" crowd.
Please. iPhones have a browser; you can open google image search, type "sex" and get some adult content.
Apple is not attempting to create an adult content free device (not that it'd be a good idea if they were; it's just that is clearly not a thing they are attempting to do).
On the web, Apple has a lot less control over content, and so it would be difficult for them to censor it effectively (and customers perceive it as open, so if Apple introduced mandatory filtering in Safari, it likely would cause a lot of backlash). But in the App Store, where they have more control, creating a device free of adult content absolutely seems to be their goal.
Discord hides all NSFW servers on iOS now by default. They're just gone - you need to open it on a PC and enable a setting to get them to show up. At least they give you the choice.
It's a social network. Logged-in users see ads on their dashboard (activity feed), which makes up most of Tumblr's traffic.
If you're only ever viewing Tumblr "pages" from the public blog network and without an account, you have never really interacted with the majority of the product. It would be like if your only experience with Facebook was viewing businesses' public Pages without an account, and then wondering what their business model is because there's no ads on FB Pages.
Your point of confusion is a common one though, which really speaks to Tumblr's biggest marketing failure. Sadly, it also indicates that those login walls/nags on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, etc are actually somehow necessary for people to grok a social product that has a public-facing component.
The App Store desperately needs transparency if it wants to avoid regulatory ire. Stories like this are just getting ridiculous.
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