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> BONUS: Guess who else is spamming their post feed: Tumblr. Tumblr didn't allow any adult content or keyword search; since Marissa Mayer took over she seems to have loosened that policy to fluff the numbers. Tumblr today is drowning in porn.

...what?

Tumblr was known for porn long before it sold to Yahoo. If anything, Tumblr started cracking down on blogs with adult content afterwards (for example, requiring users to log in before visiting them). There was a huge backlash from artists and bloggers with non-pornographic gay-themed content, because many of them were caught in the ripple effects from these changes.

I had friends who worked at Tumblr before 2012, and the running joke was that Tumblr was 50% porn and 30% pictures of cats. (Don't take those figures too seriously, but clearly porn was a large part of Tumblr long before the acquisition).

Also, Tumblr definitely did allow adult keywords in searches. I know this because of a rather unfortunate incident at a student hackathon my company sponsored, in which a student thought it would be a "funny" idea to search for a risque phrase when demonstrating his weekend hack (an aggregator of Tumblr posts).



The porn bots have only gotten worse, though. In 2012 it was at least mostly human-run porn blogs, and they didn't start following you if you were just a regular blog.


That's true and it needs to be dealt with, but OP definitely is speaking outside of their domain of knowledge because Tumblr was always drowning in porn. OP didn't specifically mention bots which leads me to believe they are speaking of porn in general.

At boarding school many moons ago, we all used Tumblr to get our rocks off because most porn sites were blocked.


One of Tumblr's differentiators is allowing adult content. It's very hard to find places friendly to that when you're looking to distribute your artwork and get a following going.

Thankfully more and more websites are based out of other countries now and don't need to swim in the puritan current of the US.


Try hosting such artwork out of India.




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