Along with the fact that if your blog is flagged adult they set robots.txt to noindex on your whole subdomain, so you're nuked from google (and there is nothing you can do about it). Now you're out their internal search engine too - They're doing their best to hide away the porn as much as possible without actually removing it.

As my friend said: "I love watching Yahoo spend nine figures on things only to offhandedly gut them like a child playing with sharp knives."

As a guy with a larger reach on Tumblr, I've been asking my readers about this, about how they would suggest handling this situation:

http://shortformblog.com/tagged/nsfw-tumblr-feedback

I've only posted a sampling of the responses I've gotten. I have more than 60 sitting in my ask box right now. People are REALLY upset about this.

The market seems to be voluntarily making a massive hole for an adult-content-friendly blogging platform to fill, I wonder why the startup scene here isn't jumping on that?

(I'd do it myself if I knew of any appropriate payment system; but my only payment systems experience is with paypal, who hate adult content more than the blog hosts do, and bitcoin, which is unheard of outside of geek and finance niches...)

I wonder why this is blowing up today? It's not a brand new policy: it's been largely the same since at least April 29 of this year, i.e., before Yahoo bought Tumblr: http://web.archive.org/web/20130426023137/http://www.tumblr....

What seems to be new is a) the addition of the "Adult" category, which is blocked from safe search tag pages even for people who follow a particular blog and b) a slight relaxation to the third-party indexing policy, where NSFW (but not Adult) blogs are now indexed by external search engines.

I can see why: given Tumblr's focus on images, porn or at least NSFW material seems like a logical use pattern. For text, at least, I prefer Wordpress.

DailyDot doesn't cover this, but I wonder: what is the logical NSFW-friendly alternative to Tumblr?

Didn't David Karp say jus the other day on Colbert he wasn't going to censor Tumblr? What happened?

From the article:

"Adult and NSFW content will be visible to anyone who has opted-in via their Settings page."

Seems reasonable...

Looks like a good opportunity for someone to build something tumblr-like strictly for NSFW content that encourages people to build connections like tumblr does (or did)

No big loss, since Tumblr search is TERRIBLE. As are most features - the service feels like a creaky pile of hacks for viewers and publishers alike.

A Tumblr directory/web crawler would be really great.

Pretty funny. Buy the new cool thing all the young people love, then start isolating and hiding the sex appeal that got it where it was.

If you are surprised that Yahoo is ruining Tumblr you're either so optimistic that I envy you, or have no knowledge of the history of Yahoo or acquisitions in general.

Crazy. Why would they prevent Adult-flagged Tumblrs from being indexed by 3rd-party search engines?

http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw

There is a option in the settings:

   Browse tag pages in Safe Mode
   Hide content from NSFW blogs.

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I don't see a problem here - given that NSFW/porn traffic is worth much less than other traffic and even less to a generalized blogging platform like Tumblr, what's going on is that they are presently subsidized. This is an attempt at reducing the subsidy and making the platform less attractive for pornographers or even casual NSFW bloggers. For instance, if a porn pay site wants to create a blog to promote their site, why should Tumblr make it easy for them to do this on their platform? It doesn't really help them in any realistic way.

UPDATE: Tumblr says this was all a combination of poor design, anti-spam measures, App Store censorship, and plain old misunderstandings. http://staff.tumblr.com/post/55906556378/all-weve-heard-from...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6073519

Thefreepornguide.com has a list of all nsfw tumblrs.

This is really sad. I am unable to understand why the mainstream web companies like Yahoo! Google has such disdain for pornographic content.

I can fully understand that they do not want their family traffic to go there, but then why cant charge us a small amount and give a better access to all those adult blogs in much more efficient way ?

theworstdrug.com scrapes a lot of NSFW animated gods from Tumblr.

TechCrunch article here: http://m.techcrunch.com/2013/05/22/what-is-it-about-porn-an-...

It seems that as long as Yahoo has resources at its disposal, it will buy and destroy everything it can. Even worse, their addiction to failure transcends management shakeups. I used to simply not care about Yahoo; now I actively want to see it fail.

i want a search for porn tumblr sites only please! you guys can have the rest :)

Doesn't the opt-in setting make this a non-issue?

(not a tumblr user, so I might be missing something)

A sad day for attention whores and basement wankers indeed.

Much of the value of Tumblr was its huge stash of amateur porn (and Yahoo overpaid for even that). And the first thing they do is gut it? Oh wow, Marissa could not have failed harder on this decision.

I don't think nsfw porn gif indexing is gone. It's just going to be streamlined, I've been using http://theworstdrug.com/ to sate my dirty gif hunger.

They have videos link up to some of the gifs too.

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Safer web always wins.