Is it really just because of the porn? Or were there more fundamental issues with the product...Anyone here want to defend Tumblr's relevance?
Lack of porn
It could drive engagement but never revenue. It was a problem before Yahoo bought them and never got much better after the acquisition. Porn gets the headlines (and comments) but the real issue was money. They couldn’t make any.
It was ahead of its time
Define "relevance" though. Not to get deep, but what's anything's relevance beyond its mission statement? Did Tumblr lose users by banning porn? Definitely. Was porn Tumblr's purpose? Not even close. Being a platform where users are free to express themselves, mature content now withheld, is and always has been their purpose. It's, in my opinion, less of a social media platform and more of a, well, blogging platform. Sure it's one of many, but the communities that Tumblr strives to build and bring together is what's worth it in the long run. Does the internet really need more places that host porn? Does a website need to bring in billions annually to be considered relevant? Have you actually used Tumblr?
Take the porn out, and you're just left with a bunch of SJWs trying to push their agenda on you. *shrug*
Because it tumbles. Lol
Porn, that’s why I was on it
They lost most of the traffic from non-sjw men when they banned porn. They also make you sign up for an account before you can view any content now which limits the amount of content shows up on Google searches. It still gets a lot of traffic but it’s mostly sjw content and people looking for that don’t draw a lot of the interest from advertisers. All that being said, adding it as a Wordpress feature will probably make it relevant again as a broader audience will be directed to it from other websites.
It's not the porn. Tumblr lost the momentum on realizing where and how to innovate. They had an advantage over, say, Instagram and could easily become one. In addition, it was first acquired by Yahoo, which killed everything it touched (stating a fact)
It would never be like Instagram. The entire platform was about porn with a small amount of blogging. You could argue it would be equivalent to medium. Personally it was never worth 1 billion
Not with the direction they took, but they had the foundations to be what Instagram is today
Whatever timespan it survived was because of porn.