Tumblr seems to be in an odd spot these days. I don’t really understand what its plan or target market is.
It was originally famous for hosting a large amount of erotic imagery. That was a business model that pushed their worth over 1 billion dollars. Then there was the purge of adult content which predictably destroyed their user base and left them a cultural irrelevance. Now a lot of porn seems to have sneaked back but it doesn’t seem welcome and sites get randomly blown up. Some will post erotic content for years without issue. Others, with similar content, are wiped after a few weeks.
Are they actually trying to block porn and just really suck at it? Or are they trying to use it to attract users and just randomly blowing sites up to maintain the fiction they don’t want it? Or do they tolerate it until the bandwidth of a particular site becomes too high? It’s really hard to fathom their plan.
This image is from the purebeautyandstyle tumblr – last updated 10 years ago!