There’s a lot of different social media platforms out there, but Tumblr is special. Tumblr is the place where no one can really monetise their blogs, where high follower counts are basically meaningless, and you can stay in your corner of the site and have a radically different experience from other users. Sometimes you just want a bubble without “ya boi” being paid to sell you random stuff.
For example, I come to Tumblr for the Supergirl and Carmilla webseries GIFs, and stay for the biting political commentary and personal anecdotes of strangers that certainly never happened, but are funny nonetheless. Looking at my dash you’d never know that there were thriving porn and Nazi communities on the site, or that there were people who exist who don’t think Supergirl and Lena Luthor totally belong together.
Tumblr’s potential has been squandered by Yahoo and Verizon.
On Twitter and Facebook the trending topics show you what’s happening in the rest of the world. On Tumblr, no one can hear you scream. Plus, none of the posts have dates, so no one knows when anything happened, either.
But the poor social media Hagrid (half-giant) has had a rough few years thanks to incompetent management.
So, could Pornhub save Tumblr from itself? And how did we get to the point where that is a legitimate sentence?
It all started when Yahoo bought Tumblr and promised not to screw it up, and then went on to screw it up. In 2016, Mashable wrote about the trouble Yahoo had with integrating the Yahoo ads team with the Tumblr team, installing executives who didn’t know the platform, and who didn’t get along with Tumblr employees.
It was also weird of Yahoo to buy Tumblr for $US1.1 billion and say that the site would make $US100 million a year, considering Tumblr wasn’t bringing in a lot of money, and didn’t have much scope to do so in the future without drastically changing the site.
In 2017, US telco Verizon bought Yahoo and got Tumblr in the deal. Around this time, Tumblr management went from being extremely vocal in the fight for net neutrality in the US to being quite quiet. Tumblr users took that as a bad sign that things were about to get more corporate.
Then things got more corporate, but still not competent. The biggest scandal came when Apple removed Tumblr from the App Store because of all the child porn content and porn bots. Tumblr responded by banning “female presenting nipples” and flagging most innocent LGBTQ content.
Months later, there’s still plenty of innocent LGBTQ content getting flagged, and useful sex education resources are no longer available, but the porn bots and Nazis are still running free.
Tumblr has, however, made the background a darker blue that has users complaining that it hurts their eyes, so at least Tumblr is staying on-brand
Tumblr still hasn’t hit that $US100 million a year number.
When the banning of female nipples and the removal of porn was announced, PornHub was the surprising saviour, offering their SFW and NSFW forums to Tumblr refugees. It was an odd fit, and a move most people didn’t feel comfortable making (no one wants to say they spend all their free time on PornHub, even if it is on the SFW forums), but a few users found happy homes and audiences there.
So it makes sense that, now that Verizon is looking to offload Tumblr, PornHub would be showing an interest in buying it.
At first I was extremely sceptical about the move. MindGeek, the company that owns Pornhub, also owns roughly half the porn industry including sites like RedTube and YouPorn and a whole stable of content producers and distributors. It has a history of revealing sex workers' real names, and a worrying relationship with piracy.
But Pornhub also means well. It's going to great lengths to curb the spread of revenge porn, it gives money to college sex education schemes, it paid for snow ploughs a couple of times, it fights against racism and racist stereotypes, has a good terms of service (that it follows through on as best it can), it's vigilant about underage porn, and it's understandably sex positive, which fits with a lot of what Tumblr preaches.
The only problem is that the terms of service say MindGeek owns anything that gets uploaded to its sites, which would obviously be a major problem for a social network with a huge artist community. Hopefully, it won’t extend that portion to Tumblr.
Would it handle Tumblr competently and not screw it up? Who knows, but how much worse can it be than the last two owners?
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