toymakers-workshop:

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/4/18126112/tumblr-porn-ban-verizon-ad-goals-sex-work-fandom

In November came the Tumblr app’s removal from the Apple Store. Speculation both inside and outside the platform’s community assumed this was the cause of the explicit content ban — a fear of being locked out of Apple’s precious walled garden, and an unwillingness to dedicate engineering resources to the task of creating a product that could adequately distinguish child pornography from other types of explicit content.

But a former staff engineer, who recently left Tumblr and asked to remain anonymous for professional reasons, tells Vox that the NSFW ban was “in the works for about six months as an official project,” adding that it was given additional resources and named “Project X” in September, shortly before it was announced to the rest of the company at an all-hands meeting. “[The NSFW ban] was going to happen anyway,” the former engineer told me. “Verizon pushed it out the door after the child pornography thing and made the deadline sooner,” but the real problem was always that Verizon couldn’t sell ads next to porn.

(Reached for comment on this timeline, an Oath representative pointed me to the phrase, “Over the past several months and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be our community moving forward,” from D’Onofrio’s blog post.)

…

THEY’VE BEEN PLANNING THIS FOR SIX MONTHS GUYS

IT’S NOT ABOUT THE APP STORE

IT’S NOT ABOUT CHILD PORN OR PORN BOTS

THIS WAS ALWAYS GOING TO HAPPEN