Tumblr, buddy, listen to me. This is an unprecedented opportunity. You can snap up all of the pie here, and become defacto internet goodguy easy. All you gotta do is… drop the nsfw ban. Unambiguously. Announce that dicks are back on the menu. You want people subscribed the blogs? You want people to actually use your Post+ function? Porn. Let us use it for porn. The youngins aren’t joining this site anyway, you’re not competing with tiktok. The vaguely horny 20-40 demographic though? You can have that. You can have all of that. Think about it.
Do you know how many pinup artists alone are itching to come back to tumblr, but dont because of the unclear, seemingly arbitrary application of your nsfw policy? These are insanely talented people who are practically begging to give you content. For free. But you gotta change the policy. We can’t keep dancing around this. Just think of publicity. The drama. A complete 180. You’d kill it tumblr. You could make it happen. Please.
Hate to always be the one saying this, but:
No, they literally can’t.
FOSTA/SESTA hasn’t gone away. Credit card companies are still reluctant or completely unwilling to do business with adult content providers. The app store is still a bitch. Ads are still a necessary part of the website’s revenue stream.
People don’t seem to understand that Twitter being able to semi-openly host explicit porn, despite being so huge, is an act of fucking wizardry. It’s unclear why Twitter gets such wildly preferential treatment from these entities (especially now) but the fact remains that it is preferential treatment. Not just any website can do that.
If Tumblr’s ownership (not @staff mind you, the actual owners) was confident this website could be fully financially supported on subscriptions/post+ there might be a shred of a chance that we could get porn back, but people are EXTREMELY hostile to Tumblr’s efforts to ‘be a profitable business,’ so why would they expect that to work?
Yes, the NSFW policy could be hugely improved. It needs to be more clear and consistent. But, for the record, it’s fairly obvious that the inconsistency and vagueness are at least partially because A. the moderation is almost entirely automated and B. staff genuinely wants to give us wiggle room to post lewd shit while giving themselves plausible deniability
If you want porn back, stop talking to staff and start talking to your congressmen.