July 23, 2013 | Online

Tumblr flip-flops on porn

It was just last week that David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, promised users of the popular microblogging site that its new owner Yahoo! had no plans to ban pornographic content.  Yet late last Thursday, millions of sexy tumblr pages suddenly because much less accessible. Consumer and blog editor reaction was so swift and negative that Yahoo! had to beat a hasty retreat. 

Tumblr had two flags for blogs with sexual content: "NSFW" (Not Safe For Work) for blogs containing occasional nudity; and "Adult" for blogs which are mostly porn.  According to Tumblr’s new policy, blogs flagged NSFW:

- would no longer appear in Tumblr’s search and discovery features for logged-out users or for logged-in users browsing in "Safe" Mode
- would only appear appear in Tumblr’s mobile search and discovery features for users already following a particular tumblr page

Blogs tagged as adult stopped showing up on the Dashboards of logged-out users, in Tumblr search results and even in external search engines like Google or Bing. 

Within 24 hours the backlash was so severe that tumblr put things back the way they were - almost. "Adult" blogs have been folded in the "NSFW" category so users that wish to search in "Safe" mode can avoid them. But who the hell want to do that?