Member-only story
Hate to admit it but the Tumblr porn ban has been good to me
Any Tumblr fan will tell you that porn is at least half of the reason they go on the site. When the Yahoo takeover was finalized, they promised that things wouldn’t change. And for the most part, they were right. Unfortunately, their hand was forced by Apple’s app store due to their policy on pornography.
I don’t blame Yahoo, although I do love the memes blaming them.
My Tumblr dashboard at the start of the year was disappointing. So many of my go-to accounts stopped uploading and reblogging content that I had to consider if I should follow suit. And it wasn’t just that not safe for work (NSFW) stuff was missing, safe for work (SFW) stuff was as well because users simply left the platform.
Lots of people have their own low-key porn blog that they curate with their specific tastes but now your avatar is blurred out and no one can access your blog page anymore, not even you. Overall, the functionality is very limited now.
Having said that, it’s been a revelation for me.
Before Tumblr, I never had a complicated relationship with porn; never been addicted, never had a problem. The reason is that when I first got into porn, dial-up was too slow and ultimately frustrating. Then when DSL came out, that too was a revelation, but it was an overload.
