[soundwave106]

Actually, I more tend to agree with this article (https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/18/tumblr-is-not-what-you-thi...) that a big part of the appeal of Tumblr was a bit more the opposite of this: Tumblr could act as a personal microblog of sorts, where you could put up a page that wasn't very easily discoverable, and share with a few friends interests and memes that you didn't want to necessarily broadcast to the world in full Facebook fashion. That includes people's porn stashes, as well as NSFW kinks and other quirks. Other stuff too (memes etc.), but the NSFW was a significant part of Tumblr.

Furthermore, my impression of Tumblr was that it had quite a bit of artists. Most artist-oriented platforms have policies that aim at banning the more overt commercial pornography, while allowing artistic nudity or erotica with appropriate tags (see DeviantArt, Vimeo, etc.) I was actually quite surprised that Tumblr didn't try this route at first to be honest. From what I can tell the "adult content ban" Tumblr implemented is way overly broad-based, not to mention very US-moral attitude centric (eg "female presenting nipples" is less of a big deal in many countries).

[JulianMorrison]

The way you find content in Tumblr is (1) you somehow find one example of the type, perhaps from an outside link or a search, (2) you click the content and find who liked it, (3) you go to each of their blogs and if it has content you're into, you follow it. Iterate until you've connected to the entire like-minded community.

This is why I described it as a galaxy of niches. It provides a sort of discoverable obscurity that makes connecting to signal rather than noise rather easy.

It's also what makes it hard to see beyond your own niche if you don't actually own the servers.

[thetricia]

I'm not a big fan of this meme of porn being bigger than what it is. Tumblr was never about that and Snapchat wasn't and isn't a sexting app.

The adult content that showed up was pretty annoying, especially on some tags that were seemingly less censored. Like, most LGBT tags were clean, but some would have a lot for whatever reason. I'd welcome the change back then (which was around acquisition time). But even then it was apparent Tumblr's odds of becoming anything other than another diary/blog graveyard weren't great.

Tumblr occasionally banning thinspo blogs was probably much more of an "attack" on the core user base. Not by numbers but in spirit.

edit: and for the record I'm not especially talking about parent's comment, not sure why i picked this one, mostly agree with it

[gmmeyer]

Last time Tumblr broke out the numbers porn was 11% of the biggest blogs. More than 1 out of 10 blogs is a porn blog. That's a huge portion of their user base and will likely cause it to totally crash.

[thetricia]

As long as the overlap with regular users is small there's no reason for why that would cascade [0].

That kind of content is usually banned/censored on most mainstream services, just letting it be will get you a non-insignificant number. I've seen people claim 3% for twitter, no clue if true or not, but few would say that about Twitter here. Too many people in tech are in the core user-base to fall for this.

[0] unless shut down this will be a loooong slow death no matter what happens. I still have a semi popular account on one of the dead sites of the era. Everybody knows it's dead but these communities are a bit like families, hard to completely ghost them.