Suicide by Moderation

Tumblr was never going to survive as a corporation. The economics didn’t work, the user base was too strange to monetize cleanly, and Yahoo paid over a billion dollars for it in 2013 and spent the next five years demonstrating they had no idea what they’d bought. But it was still alive—chaotic, sprawling, home to every conceivable subculture and more than a few that defied convenient description. Whatever its many flaws, it was alive.

Then the iOS app got pulled from the App Store in late November 2018 after child sexual abuse material was discovered on the platform. A serious problem that required a serious response. What Tumblr chose instead was the most cowardly option available: blanket prohibition of all adult content. No nudity. No explicit imagery. Not even, famously, a "female-presenting nipple." The new rules took effect December 17th, and they were going to gut the thing.

The frustrating part isn’t that they tried to address the CSAM problem. Of course they should have. The frustrating part is the false equivalence built into the solution—treating all adult content as a homogenous mass to be excised, when the criminal material was a tiny, identifiable fraction of what the platform hosted. What got caught in the net was catastrophic in scope: art photography, queer community spaces, sex worker networks, erotic fiction archives, illustrators, painters, entire NSFW ecosystems built over years by people who had found in Tumblr the only platform that would have them.

Dethjunkie, one of the platform’s larger art blogs, announced its departure with the line: Our art is being destroyed, ripped out like pages from a book. CEO Jeff D’Onofrio, in an official post, acknowledged they’d make mistakes while insisting the new policy would recognize the diversity of expression in our community. A policy that bans the nipple does not recognize the diversity of expression in a community built around bodies, desire, and the full range of human strangeness. It recognizes the App Store’s terms of service. Those are not the same thing.

Verizon sold Tumblr to Automattic in 2019 for a reported three million dollars—a 99.7% writedown on what Yahoo had paid. The users had already left. The platform still technically exists, lobotomized and largely empty, a monument to what happens when you decide the community is the problem you need to solve.