That move cut off what we can safely say were a lot of blogs from just for mentioning one of the banned tags at some point in time. Strangely enough, other sex-related tags like “asshole” and “necrophilia” stayed visible.
Last week, Tumblr quietly imposed a sort of blackout on “adult content” tags, from the obvious “sex,” “porn” and “BDSM,” to the arbitrary seeming “gay,” “lesbian,” and “depression.” In practice, that meant that any and all blogs that mentioned one of these terms were rendered invisible to anyone looking for them via search engines or Tumblr’s own “explore” function. But Tumblr itself dodged a bullet at the same time. Yahoo’s plans to make Tumblr more family friendly hit a snag this weekend, after a user uprising forced CEO David Karp to backtrack on the platform’s unpopular new adult content quarantine.
