.png "back to home page")
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/70323956/acastro_191203_177_tumblr_0001.0.jpg)
Wait lmao if this is correct, the entire reason for Tumblr nuked their site and fell 99.7% in value was because Apple demanded it to keep their iOS app in the App Store. Lmfao just walk away my dudes, tell Apple to shove it and keep your core biz intact. https://t.co/Ifh2UGYjUa pic.twitter.com/o62XwvTms5
— Quantian (@quantian1) December 28, 2021
the horrible thing is that they say that the tumblr porn ban started bc of a user report of CSEM and in the current state of fandom, i can’t be sure if it was legit or just fanart of an “anime minor”
— ?笑み? (@elloitts) December 27, 2021
Bc God know giant companies don’t care, they just want to save their asses https://t.co/IN25YxVSP8
FUN FACT:
— foone (@Foone) December 26, 2021
so tumblr has added more strict tag filtering for their iOS app, and now won't let you see posts with certain tags in the app. They of course keep this blacklist secret, but tumblr users have been figuring out the list.
Here's the funny part:
I know from my own past reporting that Apple has been hurting Tumblr for going on a decade. Everyone blamed Yahoo for the pr0n shit, but it always goes back to the App Store. https://t.co/uZekv9f3WV
— Christina Warren (@film_girl) December 28, 2021
Capricious and opaque App Store policies destabilize and threaten lots of sites and communities. Building for the open web makes for more resiliency over time. https://t.co/dvsXIe7F3q
— Anil Dash (@anildash) December 28, 2021
this was not tumblr's decision. I doubt any humans at any point were involved in making this decision. apple said "hide the nsfw content or we'll take the app down" and tumblr staff, who are incompetent, said "you got it" and hid a whole bunch of normal common tags
— jan Misali (@hbmmaster) December 26, 2021
if you're wondering how tumblr is doing they just blocked all posts tagged with "girl" on the ios version of the app
— jan Misali (@hbmmaster) December 26, 2021
my guess is that they just looked at a bunch of nsfw accounts and checked what tags those accounts use a lot, without bothering to check what those tags actually are. they'll probably unblock most of them soon-ish, but it's tumblr staff. they don't know what they're doing
— jan Misali (@hbmmaster) December 26, 2021
i agree with this, the 2018 purge didnt last either. same content was right back on the platform after a few week adjustment period pic.twitter.com/xDIswcURPr
— 4liza (@punished3liza) December 26, 2021
Tumblr will now filter posts based on innocuous tags like ‘beard,’ ‘cream,’ ‘me,’ ‘mine,’ ‘girl’ & ‘self’ and others from their iOS app.
— Dare Obasanjo (@Carnage4Life) December 27, 2021
A former Tumblr engineer shares the Kafkaesque app review process that led to this and you can see why devs hate Applehttps://t.co/0TqctjafVI
It’s also infuriating because content moderation is a solved problem: You hire people to moderate content. But payroll is expensive and there’s investors to worry about.
— OS_MOTE (@OS_MOTE) December 26, 2021
in parasitology/evolutionary science this is called the Red Queen Hypothesis: directly competitive organisms evolve in sync so that one never actually catches up to or overcomes the other, creating a semi-stable detante (and sometimes eventually symbiosis).
— 4liza (@punished3liza) December 26, 2021
Web apps usually has an app because of push notifications since Apple has not supported them in Safari.
— Dare Obasanjo (@Carnage4Life) December 27, 2021
The widely held assumption among devs being this incentivized creating iOS apps.
but the other thing is TUMBLR WILL AUTOMATICALLY ADD THAT TAG FOR YOU
— foone (@Foone) December 26, 2021
Replace "porn" by "crypto" and you have a faithful equivalent of what crypto developers who build for mobile apps live regularly
— Ouriel Ohayon (@OurielOhayon) December 28, 2021
If you build for crypto (web) and not for mobile (native mobile apps), you have no idea what pains you are saving. https://t.co/3BT9dmXdNm
explanation of what's probably going on with Tumblr iOS tag bans, from a former Tumblr developer: https://t.co/DO6A3RWmP7
— 4liza (@punished3liza) December 26, 2021
archive: https://t.co/iQnKu3D4oG
okay there's a lot of posts going around about the tumblr situation so for people who aren't still using tumblr i will clarify that tumblr is only hiding posts with certain tags for users of the ios app because of apple's insane content policies
— Bobby Schroeder (@ponettplus) December 27, 2021
They've banned the word "satin"
— foone (@Foone) December 26, 2021
It's like the satanic panic but by implemented by people who can't spell
ive been online longer than most of you, and people tend to make false dichotomies out of this stuff. these two things are both extremely true:
— 4liza (@punished3liza) December 26, 2021
1. platforms make it increasingly difficult to post anything except anodyne puns and cat pictures
2. no one can actually stop porn
the wild uncertainty around the app store review process is one of the main headaches for properly testing our app at work and we don't even serve any user-generated or explicit content. iOS needs sideloading which needs regulatory pressure from the US/EU & co https://t.co/AY44Sjnlbb
— Rayo Verweij (@rayoverweij) December 26, 2021
the word "girl" is not banned. girls are not banned. it's only if a post contains "girl" (or one of the other blocked tags) as a tag. the post still exists and your account isn't blocked, it's just not visible on the ios app, unless you're linked to it directly
— jan Misali (@hbmmaster) December 26, 2021
i’m happy this person mentioned 1. apple’s app store tyranny 2. that a lot of ongoing censorship rn is sourced from payment processors trying to distance themselves from porn https://t.co/uSAutUPBHT
— ? (@tendership) December 26, 2021
Apple products: it just works! https://t.co/n9SbrAbUBb
— Benjanun Sriduangkaew (@benjanun_s) December 27, 2021
Hi @tumblr and @Tumblrsupport! How y'all doing. I'm going through the list of banned tags that was just recently compiled for your site... and I see that Alec Lightwood is on there. Which got me thinking...
— Matthew Daddario (@MatthewDaddario) December 27, 2021
i can add some additional vouching to this: was also with tumblr during the 2018 War On Porn. i was policy-side rather than development side as that person was, but the struggle was the same. apple makes arbitrary demands, rejects appeals to reason, and the dance begins https://t.co/5iua3ZwDkS
— darling shade (@miyoung) December 26, 2021
The mystifying new banned words list on Tumblr is a great example why “I’ll know it when I see it” is a terrible heuristic for determining whether something is pornography. https://t.co/BdhSwD5RKf
— 好啦 你當我的小翁仔標冠軍算了 來抱抱 (@verticalblank) December 26, 2021
Was this list created by a machine process, where you gathered the words most often associated with content that shouldn't be on your site, or was it put together by a team sitting around a desk? Depending on the answer to that, I have further questions. https://t.co/awPXaUf0sQ
— Matthew Daddario (@MatthewDaddario) December 27, 2021
this thread is wild. it seems like every time i check back on tumblr, it’s found a new way to crash and burn. it’s a shame because nothing has really filled that void yet.
— anna maría (@onlyannamaria) December 28, 2021
in 2022, i’m anticipating the launch of a new platform–something that is to tumblr what tiktok was to vine. https://t.co/o3QBtk7EVb
anyway apple's app store remains an absolute blight on the industry
— the roughest toughest frail (@em_aytch) December 26, 2021
There seems to have been a failure of communication here, because Tumblr's management thought they were running Pinterest the whole time when in fact they were running Hustler right up until they suddenly had no business
— Quantian (@quantian1) December 28, 2021
yuppppppp and what is insane about making ios apps is that because its up to apple what apps get approved and what ones don't, folks could spend a year making an ios app and then apple can do shit like this to make them do what they want or they don't get their app on the store https://t.co/lnLLuAZKjp
— EXPENSIVEHOE.COM (@EXPENSIVE_HOE) December 26, 2021
The takeaway from the Tumblr ban isn't necessarily Tumblr failing, but rather the fact that Apple has such severe, prudish restrictions on human communication online and can impose it on a mass scale
— Freyja ? (@FreyjaErlings) December 27, 2021
if you're unaware, apparently tumblr is going thru another massive purge due to apple's ios policies https://t.co/uPqOjCkiWC
— the roughest toughest frail (@em_aytch) December 26, 2021
they blacklist the tag "submission", presumably because there's a bunch of BDSM posts with it
— foone (@Foone) December 26, 2021
Reddit is swarming with porn and seems to have no issue with the App Store - did Apple just apply this selectively to Tumblr? Or is something else going on? https://t.co/hFyFIy154B
— Tom Gara (@tomgara) December 28, 2021
For sites like tumblr, do they really need an app? I use Safari to read twitter and other sites that also have apps.
— wiredog (@KitCase3) December 27, 2021
tumblr would be a great website if it wasn't such a bad website
— jan Misali (@hbmmaster) December 26, 2021
users are trying to reverse engineer which tags are specifically being target, one of the more ridiculous of which is apparently "girls" https://t.co/NX00XoptNi
— the roughest toughest frail (@em_aytch) December 26, 2021
in the end its the consumer that ends up losing out bcuz yer spending yer money on a device you don't rilly own yer just borrowing it up from them
— EXPENSIVEHOE.COM (@EXPENSIVE_HOE) December 26, 2021
following iOS rules is genuinely so easy and some apps just refuse to do it well
— ❄️Hutch2Much?️? - 2% (@Hutch2MuchOwO) December 26, 2021
definitely not solved. human moderators make bad decisions and, more importantly, they get ptsd from looking at horrible shit all day
— 4liza (@punished3liza) December 26, 2021
based on info from a former tumblr engineer it sounds like what's happening is someone at apple is just checking random tags now and if they find porn in it they're like "we can't allow this on the app store. hide this" so tumblr is just hiding entire tags from ios app users
— Bobby Schroeder (@ponettplus) December 27, 2021
Love that you’re addressing this but you should probably be addressing Apple instead of Tumblr. The ban is coming specifically from the Apple app store that holds the Tumblr app and not Tumblr itself. (On Android and desktop those words aren’t banned. It is specifically Apple!)
— Ine (@finduilasclln) December 27, 2021
the reason is that it's so the app can stay on the app store. tumblr staff is just comically bad at everything so this is what it looks like when they try to follow content rules. all other versions of tumblr are unaffected by this
— jan Misali (@hbmmaster) December 26, 2021
i can still see all these tags on android, im plugging in my iphone to check the ios app now lol merry christmas im having so much fun this is awful
— 4liza (@punished3liza) December 26, 2021
Anyway the fun thing is that Tumblr users are going to weaponize this nonsense immediately.
— foone (@Foone) December 26, 2021
Remember back when they used a username glitch to stop android users from reading their blogs?
Well, now you can hide your posts from iPhone users... Just tag everything #girl
you post a picture of your knee that activates an algorithm that mistakes it for a boob and your account gets locked, meanwhile some machine is just unloading hourly brazzers gifs and tagging them all SEX HOT FUCK PORN BABES HARDCORE CUM untouched
— Colin Spacetwinks (@spacetwinks) December 26, 2021
Google should capitalize on this. Android: the mobile operating system for #girls
— foone (@Foone) December 26, 2021
still a better experience than twitter though 100%
— jan Misali (@hbmmaster) December 26, 2021
i think the funniest thing to me is that in all these incidents the thing that most avoid punishment are not people actively trying to swerve around algorithms but just porn bots looking damn near like they're trying to get in trouble on purpose
— Colin Spacetwinks (@spacetwinks) December 26, 2021
Tumblr will now filter posts based on innocuous tags like ‘beard,’ ‘cream,’ ‘me,’ ‘mine,’ ‘girl’ & ‘self’ and others from their iOS app.
— Dare Obasanjo (@Carnage4Life) December 27, 2021
A former Tumblr engineer shares the Kafkaesque app review process that led to this and you can see why devs hate Applehttps://t.co/0TqctjafVI
This is a good post on why Tumblr may be doing this, from someone who worked for Tumblr on the ios team in the past.https://t.co/Q1HLxJJ4VX
— foone (@Foone) December 26, 2021
Replace "porn" by "crypto" and you have a faithful equivalent of what crypto developers who build for mobile apps live regularly
— Ouriel Ohayon (@OurielOhayon) December 28, 2021
If you build for crypto (web) and not for mobile (native mobile apps), you have no idea what pains you are saving. https://t.co/3BT9dmXdNm
And the list of tags now banned on Tumblr's iOS ap include "beard," "girl," "insomnia," "mine," "self," "tagged," and possibly most bizarrely of all, "#AlecLightwood". ?
— ?????? ????????????? (@globalshadows2) December 28, 2021
Tumblr Has Banned a Long List of Harmless Tags, but Why? https://t.co/fL9w7zptt5