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Yahoo Censors Tumblr Porn
coolnumbr12 writes "When Yahoo purchased Tumblr in May, Tumblr founder David Karp said Tumblr wouldn't be changing, and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said, 'Part of our strategy here is to let Tumblr be Tumblr.' But a new search policy went into effect Thursday that excludes all adult blogs from Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines by disabling indexing of anything it tags as 'adult.' The policy effectively makes the content and 10 percent of Tumblr users completely invisible."
I think the point is that they're not allowing spiders to crawl pornographic tumblrs. That affects everyone who uses a search engine that respects robots.txt.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It's not just blogs that feature posts tagged as "adult," it's the entirety of any blog tumblr has already flagged as NSFW or adult (the overall blog flag, not just posts). My personal photography blog has been branded as NSFW, as I sometimes post risque work. Basically, there will be no new discovery of my blog, since Tumblr's also blocked internal tag searches for such blogs as well (unless one is already following said blog). My rate of addition of new followers dropped precipitously after that. Bastards...like the occasional nipple is going to end the world.
That? That was a pigeon.
And, they are stipping the tags from those sites as well so that in internal search will not show those sites either. You have to either see their content through a reblog or if you're following them.
I got here through a series of tubes
David Karp insisted they weren't going to try and censor the adult blogs, while appearing on the Colbert Report just three days ago.
.: Semper Absurda
No, there isn't a limit to "side blogs" as they're called (I run another one for information on my band's tour schedule). Replying to messages and following other blogs is limited to your primary blog, however.
As far as self-censoring the occasional photograph I take that might have boobs, the horse is already out of the barn. Someone at Tumblr made the call some time ago that my blog was NSFW (luckily, they recognized the difference between art and porn, and did not flag it as "adult." This NSFW flag can apparently never be changed (Tumblr has no mechanism for review or protestation of their classifications). I'd have to start completely over, and somehow convince my several thousand followers to go follow the new blog. At this point, I've got too much invested in "my brand" to deal with any of that.
That? That was a pigeon.
For a good discussion of this, see the following post at Eros blog:
http://www.erosblog.com/2013/07/19/tumblr-admits-then-denies-hiding-porn/
Eros reported on this back in May, and here has a good discussion of the evasions and falsehoods from Yahoo!