Hide your Tony the Tiger / Eugene Levy fanfiction – those phrases along with hundreds of others are now banned from Tumblr’s iOS app.
Now, no personal blog marking itself “mature” is accessible in the iOS app – users will see a pop-up explaining that the content has been hidden due to “potentially suggestive or explicit content”. Tumblr also said it hides certain posts in the search function and on users’ dashboards – which shows recommended posts as well as content from the users they are following.
“In order to stay on Apple’s App Store and our Tumblr iOS app to be available, we had to make changes that would help us better comply with their sensitive content guidelines,” Tumblr wrote in a blog post.
Credit: Tumblr
Tumblr users developed one unofficial crowdsourcing list of tags that the Tumblr app for iOS has banned to comply with these guidelines. Some of the forbidden tags are useful for a platform that tries to rid itself of sensitive content – for example, “porn”, “drugs” and “sex” are forbidden. Others are incomprehensible (or worrying if you think about it too long), like the aforementioned “Tony the Tiger” and “Eugene Levy”. Even tags with the numbers 69 and 420 are forbidden.
Lots of Tumblr users flock to the site to speak anonymously about their experience, but some of these tag bans effectively censor those conversations. Multiple tags related to voices, a common coping practice for autistic people, are prohibited along with tags such as “depression”, “PTSD” and “bipolar”.
“We know these adjustments will affect how users can access potentially sensitive content while using our iOS app, and that can be frustrating,” a Tumblr spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We are working on more sophisticated solutions that will be rolled out in the near future and will keep the community informed of further work.”
A former Tumblr iOS engineer who blogs on the site as Sreegs explained what could be causing this problem and its ineffective, bandaid-like solutions.
“If a reviewer [at Apple] will run your app and find porn, your app will be rejected and you will be asked to fix it wrote in a blog post. The engineer said that this would happen “every five updates,” but as soon as the offensive post – the Tumblr screen was made available – was removed, the app would be ready to go.
“Every now and then, Tumblr got a really persistent reviewer. It would take a handful of porn scrubs and re-submissions before they finally gave the green light for an update, ”Sreegs wrote. The engineer believes this is similar to what is now happening on Tumblr’s iOS app.
Tumblr struggled for years to get approval in the iOS App Store. 2018 was the iOS app from Tumblr tore off from the App Store after Child Sexual Abuse (CSAM) material got through the app’s filtering technology. The platform responded a month later forbid all porn and other sexually explicit content that is almost instantaneous 29% monthly traffic decrease. Since then, the platform’s web traffic has stagnated relatively.
Credit: SimilarWeb
Of course, it is a Sisyphean task to clean up a platform for user-generated content from adult content. But Apple’s standards for Tumblr seem particularly strict.
“A small part of me would also like to be cynical and say that Instagram and Twitter are so big that they can get away with more than Tumblr can,” the former Tumblr iOS engineer theorized. “Combine that with Tumblr’s history of keeping porn open until the end of 2018. I can’t prove it, of course, but if Tumblr has a good reputation with Apple, it can’t be a good one.”
In the meantime, Tumblr content is banned day in and day out, from #Rule 34 to #Long Post.
Tumblr wrote about his Change blog yesterday that it is reviewing the list of tags that are inaccessible in the iOS app and expects this review process to begin in January.
“We’re working on a web-based switcher that will allow people to allow sensitive content on the iOS app,” she added.
Tumblr users often refer to the platform as the wasteland of the internet. The app itself once had its iOS app with “Hell side (loving)“In the app store. So why do people keep using it?
“We are broken enough for people to assume the site is dead, so there are super easy workarounds for this sort of thing, ”a dedicated Tumblrite told TechCrunch. These workarounds aren’t hard to find if you’re looking for “tag ban” on the website, but commonplace users know that the search functionality is very buggy anyway. “I bet the broken search function actually comes into play here. Shit just doesn’t show up half the time, which means we can’t find it, but neither can Apple. “
But what Tumblr lacks in working iOS apps and search capabilities it makes up for in its algorithm … or lack thereof. As platforms such as TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram face the Senate To talk about the mysterious way they deliver content, Tumblr makes it work the old-fashioned way (define “work”). It displays content from users you follow in reverse chronological order.
“I I honestly believe being a dumpster fire at this point worked wholeheartedly in Tumblr’s favor, ”said the avid Tumblr user. “WWe don’t have an algorithm, so we can still put our experience together exactly how we want it. “
