Matt Mullenweg, the chief executive of Tumblr parent company Automattic said that the “casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible” as he looked to explain why Tumblr and other sites will never go back to freely available adult content.

After widespread and inaccurate speculation that Tumblr would lift its ban on adult content, Mullenweg posted a long explanation of why Tumblr will never go back to the old days. The internet has fundamentally change its stance on pornography, the head of Tumblr has said.

Tumblr was once known for lax attitudes towards pornography that helped make it one of the most popular sites on the internet. But in 2018, new owner Verizon banned such content, introducing restrictive rules that kept it off the platform.

Why is returning to that era impossible?
For now, it’s largely because of intermediaries that play a massive role in how people access the web. Payment processors have long been leery of adult content, and they’ve stepped up enforcement in recent years, in part because of concerns about child abuse and non-consensual pornography. Apple’s iOS App Store has been staunchly opposed to it since launch. And without those two pieces of infrastructure, running a for-profit site is incredibly difficult. “If Apple permanently banned Tumblr from the App Store, we’d probably have to shut the service down,” Mullenweg noted. Some non-profit sites that do allow things like explicit artwork have remained persistently web-only despite years of requests for apps.

Meanwhile, porn companies have their own stack of payment processing services, but they’re typically far more expensive — something that nearly got adult performers banned from the subscription platform OnlyFans last year.

The issue is compounded by new rules about age verification and anti-sex work laws like FOSTA-SESTA. Some of these laws are meant to combat unambiguously harmful phenomena like non-consensual pornography, but they also add substantial legal oversight.
Why can both Reddit and Twitter, fairly unusually for modern social networks, allow a lot of porn?
“Ask Apple, because I don’t know,” says Mullenweg. He speculates that Twitter and Reddit are both too big to ban, although Apple has forced moderation changes even for giant services like Facebook.

The overall upshot:
“If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you’d need to be web-only on iOS and side-load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don’t dox your users, and make a ton of money.”

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