[citruscomputing]

They did, but that was a while ago. Things are still pretty bad -- if your blog gets flagged for racy content, you lose the ability to have a custom avatar, for example. (Even more, and you get banned.) They've also had quite transphobic moderation policies (really strange considering their userbase!) -- normal, non-sexual photos of trans people are "nsfw" now, which'll get your account flagged or banned. They've been making the app actively worse, redesigned the website to look like twitter, and attempted to cram "Tumblr live" down everyone's throats (only having a "hide for one week" button). Generally doing things nobody asked for, nobody wants, and continuing to break existing functionality while not listening to their users. This is an own-goal.

[Alex3917]

> normal, non-sexual photos of trans people are "nsfw" now

FWIW, the algorithms that big tech companies use are often trained to recognize women’s underwear. So non-sexual photos of trans men wearing women’s underwear are often flagged, even when similar photos of women wearing boxers are not.

I’m not saying it’s right, just giving the actual reason this happens. (Albeit I don’t have Tumblr-specific knowledge.)

[citruscomputing]

Cool. Now why does it consistently happen for images where no underwear is visible, and why doesn't it happen for cis women? Why are appeals not granted? And why didn't staff even acknowledge there's a problem?

[Alex3917]

No idea. I’ve never worked at any of these companies, I just learned this in an academic conference presentation on ethnographic research into OnlyFans users. OnlyFans doesn’t have its on recommendation system, so users need to find their customers on instagram, Twitter, tumblr, etc.

[travisjungroth]

> OnlyFans doesn’t have its on recommendation system

This is by far the most mind-blowing thing about OnlyFans to me. I’m a very open minded person and I would have been so sure that a site like OnlyFans would absolutely require discovery. Like, so sure that if I was making it, I wouldn’t even question including it. The fact they just offloaded this to every other site, and then took all the monetization is amazing to me. Twitter, Reddit and Instagram can barely get money from these users, but they’re super popular, and they just link to their OnlyFans on their profile.

I seriously wonder what other opportunities like that are out in the wild.

[gen220]

They also centralize all the risk. Operating a “pay me $X/month” service is really complicated legally, ethically, etc.

In a way, OF is valuable to platforms like Twitter and Instagram, because it has monopolized a lot of the riskiest cash flow that those companies would prefer to avoid / explicitly disallow in their ToS for a “subscribe to this influencer” service.

If OF had their own discovery platform, they’d have to deal with the thorny editorial problem of ranking. In the current setup, they can totally sidestep it. It would probably cost them more to operate discovery than it’s worth.

[sn41]

Hi, just to sate my own curiosity: can you please provide me a link to this presentation, if it's available online? Thanks...

[Alex3917]

Not online, sorry!

[userinanother]

How sensitive/stupid are these? Can the behavior be exploited to force innocent images get flagged as explicit? Asking for a friend… also would make an excellent shirt design if properly tweaked

[93po]

Yes, there are some examples I’ve seen in the past year of images specifically generated to make image detection think it’s X when it’s really just a mess of shapes and pixels

[joshxyz]

thats fucking hilarious.

it surprises me how instagram and twitter can get away with it but tumblr cant

[chimeracoder]

> it surprises me how instagram and twitter can get away with it but tumblr cant

It's a huge problem on Instagram too.

Twitter is different because it doesn't prohibit sexual content in the first place, unlike Facebook and Tumblr.

[underwater]

How is it an own goal? They were bleeding money, so tried to find a way to succeed through growth of users or revenue.

The path where they just left everything untouched is a path to certain failure.

[RangerScience]

My guess would be that they wouldn’t have to be bleeding money if they weren’t aiming for growth.

[skupig]

Tumblr users are rabidly against all the user-hostile stuff other large free sites do. I think they probably could have put the site behind a $1/mo paywall two years ago and people would have gone for it, if they changed nothing else. There's a general "we're fucked" atmosphere on the site because we all know they're trying to wring money out of their users and the enshittification has begun. It doesn't seem like anyone in charge understands their users.