As adult Tumblr alternatives pop-up, the company’s porn ban isn’t going so well

Since Tumblr’s NSFW blogs came under fire back in December 2018, some 11 years after first striking an adult-friendly tone, alternative platforms have attempted to fill the void left by its new content policy banning porn.

One of the platforms hoping to take advantage of the change is Plinner, a network that promises to provide users with “the exact same experience as they could before the ban took place”. To tempt users over in high numbers, Plinner has set up a one-click transfer process.

Plinner is by no means alone, however. Timbr, Partiko, and TumblrX have all sprung up since the porn ban on Tumblr, which isn’t really very surprising given that by some estimates at least 16.5% of the 459 millions blogs contained pornographic material. And that was just the blogs exclusively containing adult content.

While these sites might be taking aim at Tumblr’s role in the adult community, none have hit the mark aesthetically.

What went wrong with Tumblr?

Tumblr’s parent company, Verizon, originally came under scrutiny after the micro-blogging service was banned from the Apple Store after it was found that users were uploading and viewing images of child sexual abuse.

This – and other issues associated with hosting adult imagery – is a problem that every large-scale social network has faced at some stage, but Tumblr’s relationship with porn has been in question since at least 2013, when it was first acquired by Verizon.

Though there are human moderators and community users who flag ‘inappropriate’ posts, and distinguish between pornographic nudity and nudity for the purpose of art and politics, it is important to note that the Tumblr image-recognition software designed to flag and hide “real-life human genital or female-presenting nipples” still has a lot to learn.

In the two months since the ‘ban’, Tumblr doesn’t appear to have fine-tuned its detection systems yet – there have been many reports of mis-flagged content. False positives, whereby random inanimate objects have been deemed inappropriate, as have false negatives, where porn has been allowed through onto the site.

Plinner isn’t quite ready for business just yet – it’s set for launch in Beta on March 20 – but if you’re jonesing to replace Tumblr once and for all, Timbr, Partiko and TumblrX are all ready for you.

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