The Tumblr Porn Crackdown Is Here

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In the middle of Yahoo's Tumblr takeover, the blogging service's dedicated users were terrified that the corporate stiffs would insert ads into their dashboard and place restrictions on the massive amounts of porn posted every day. Well, all inevitable things will come to pass, and today is porn's day. 

Oh, did the users screech and holler when Marissa Mayer's purple people-eater bought Tumblr for $1 billion about how she was going to take away their nudie pictures forever. Ads were swiftly thrown into the Tumblr dashboard and now, a few months later, the crackdown on Tumblr porn has begun. "Tumblr welcomes free expression, but we have to be sensitive to the millions of readers and bloggers from different locations, cultures, and backgrounds with different points of view concerning mature/adult-oriented NSFW content," the Tumblr team says on a page explaining the new guidelines that appeared today. "There are a lot of people in our community who would rather not see adult-oriented stuff and could even get in trouble if they did!"

There are now two different classifications for blogs containing boobs and butts: 

• NSFW blogs contain occasional nudity or mature/adult-oriented content.
• Adult blogs contain substantial nudity or mature/adult-oriented content.

The new system is easy enough to understand. If your blog is the all-butts-all-the-time type, then you fall under the "adult" label. If you post some penis every once in a while in between your steady diet of One Direction GIFS, then you fall under the "NSFW" label. 

But nudie pictures will be almost impossible to find unless you already have a well-curated RSS feed or bookmark folder of Tumblr porn from now on. NSFW and adult content won't appear in search engine results (like Google or Yahoo or Bing) or Tumblr's tracked-tag searches. These are the new, very strict guidelines for naked picture posts: 

Adult blogs are almost entirely walled-in, while NSFW-ers get a little more time in the yard. 

Tumblr CEO David Karp was asked about the potential porn restrictions on The Colbert Report just last night. "We've taken a pretty hard line on freedom of speech, supporting our users, creation, whatever that looks like, it's just not something we want to police," he told Colbert. "When you have somebody like Terry Richardson, or any number of talented photographers, posting tasteful photography, I don't want to have to go in there and draw the line between this photo and this behind the scenes photo of Lady Gaga and her, uh, her nip." And while he's technically honest here: Tumblr is not necessarily policing what gets posted; they are certainly restricting users' ability to blog butts. 

This is like when your parents ground you and won't let you leave the house for dressing a certain way. These blogs aren't allowed to play with the rest of the Internet until, in this case, they put on some damn pants. 

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.