FTFY

A better bungled, more positive puritan Tumblr    

Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. But we don’t know how to make money off of that. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired baffled by a generation of erotic artists, erotica writers, nsfw creators, porn curators, and lgbtqia+ crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality. We never meant to do that. It was just a terrible, terrible mistake that we hoped to make money off of.

Over the past several months Since we were bought by Yahoo, and inspired by our storied past Apple’s walled garden, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community how to get rid of the porn without losing our entire user base moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation excuses for a better less provocative tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our corporate promise to make our old, white, straight shareholders happy and rich and place in culture, especially as it evolves Yahoo refuses to evolve, we must change become the same as every other site. Some of that change capitulation began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. But we never intended to stop there, or enforce those rules. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity, and anything our bots, Apple, and your mom tell us they don’t like (with some exceptions accidentally including wlw and any mention of trans people, probably, but not child porn, which will just be hidden a little better).  

Let’s first be unequivocal equivocate about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change because they have nothing to do with each other: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community something we’ve tolerated because moderating this much content is kinda hard, but it is a convenient excuse for a total nsfw ban. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content that we have no idea how to enforce. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement expansion of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring to accommodate filter bots that don’t know what they’re looking at, a growing team of human moderators censors, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse content creators. We also closely partner with the well known FOSTA supporter, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the notorious Wikipedia censor, Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable technologically illiterate organizations at the forefront of protecting our children middle class from seeing abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy a few random users who might be pedophiles or like anime to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all tell the difference between bad actors and artists from attempting to abuse use our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible keep our app on i-phone, our advertisers happy, with as little effort as possible.

So what is changing?

Posts that contain adult any problematic content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change our unconditional surrender. We recognize Tumblr is also was a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster kill off this type of diversity of expression in the community as quietly as possible, so our new policy strives to strike a balance between the demands of advertisers, the militant puritanical horde, and keeping at least some of our user base.

Why are we doing this?

It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves. We dearly hope it will make some money. We really, really need to figure out how to make lots and lots of money. We have no idea how to walk the increasingly thin like between nsfw content and ad revenue, and we’re out of ideas.

Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content, but nothing like tumblr (except maybe pillowfort.io, but that’s down for a couple days, fingers crossed) so maybe most of you will stay on our site anyway. We will leave it more than half of what you like about tumblr to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming unobjectionable environment possible for our community whoever’s left.

So what’s next?

Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy the greatest purge since Pinterest became part of the catholic church. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance (It’s this. This is the head’s up. Download your content now.) and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. But honestly, we’ll be really busy, so only two of those appeals will be read by a human, and all of them will be denied. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time because that would cause another outrage flashpoint .

Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. So we’re just going to censor everything randomly. We’re relying on automated tools impartial, impersonal, wildly-inaccurate filter bots to identify adult content and humans you will never see to help train bots and keep our systems in check profitable. We know there will be mistakes this will be an unmitigated disaster, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community protects us as completely as possible.

Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent patronizing as possible with you about the decisions mistakes we’re making and the lack of useable resources available to you, including more rules detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators public relations employees to interface fuck directly with the community and content.

Like you, we love wish Tumblr worked and, barely understand what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love basic corporate greed and hope for our community a lack of actual guiding principals. We won’t always get have never really gotten this right, especially except in the beginning since we got bought by Yahoo and owned by Apple, but we are determined to make your experience a positive publicly acceptable one.

Jeff D’Onofrio Tim Cook
CEO