Observations and experiences around Tumblr's new adult content guidelines...
Quick note: This is a tad long, but if you want some idea of how you might be able to post content and white kind of content you can post in the NSFW sphere, you might want to read more.
So now that Tumblr's gone through a few changes, I figured it'd be worth running through what I've noticed so far and my experiences trying to post NSFW content under the new rules.
First, the new community labels for mature, violence, sex, etc. which were rolled out a little while ago, allowing people to label posts that can then be hidden by people's settings.
It's all hidden by default, so be sure to go into your settings and change them:
HOWEVER, there are some weird caveats to using this system which I'll get into at the end of the post.
Tumblr's allowing nipples again, "female-presenting" or otherwise, as long as they're under a community mature label. I've already seen tons of posts with nipples since this started, so it would seem to work, and from what I've seen, if an image has nipples (but not genitals etc), it seems it'll usually still show up on people's dashboards, but it's unclear on my end if this is always the case.
Tumblr's terms are always frustratingly inexact, so it can be difficult to tell what the fuck is allowed. My understanding is this:
Nipples of all kinds are allowed.
Nudes are allowed again, including full nudes that include genitals, but this is VERY IFFY because it seems to vary a lot on what may or may not be acceptable.
Images that feature genitals as the main subject (ie close-up dick pics and pussy pics) are a no-go, but images with genitals in them generally are, in theory, fine.
Explicitly sexual content is still banned. Sex acts, solo or between people, and other such things. Probably includes anything involving masturbation and sex toys. So if it's artsy and at least not too overly sexual and in-your face, it's fine, IN THEORY.
The biggest caveat is that while genitals seem to be more or less allowed, genitals in a photo will mean nobody will see your post on their dash, at least UNDER CERTAIN CIRUMSTANCES. Those posts will still be up, people will still be able to see them when going to your blog, BUT those posts will NOT be visible on the dashboard.
You can reblog said posts to bring them back to the front of your blog, but you still won't see them on your dash, nobody will, regardless of their community label settings. If their settings allow mature labels, they won't see images with genitals on their dash. If you post a full nude image without a community label, it'll still get silently flagged by the algorithm and hidden from the dash, but it'll still be on your blog for blog visitors to see. People can still also like and reblog those posts. It'll be visible when people go to their blog as well, it just won't appear on the dash when it's reblogged.
The algorithm that hides genitals is, of course, imperfect. If I post an image with full-on dick, it's visible on the blog only. If I put a censor box over the whole dick, it'll appear on people's dashboards. If I put a censor box around only the head with the shaft visible, it won't get flagged. If I post with the shaft censored but the head visible, it won't get flagged. If I post an image where the dick is somehow partly obscured in other ways or just not a noticeable part of the picture, it may not get flagged, whereas other times it might. It's very finicky.
But I did say "under certain circumstances" because sometimes these posts will become visible on dashes, but in a specific way...
Surprise! This is confusing as you'd expect. But here's my experience so far...
If you post mature content without a community label, it'll eventually get flagged with said label.
If you post a full nude image with genitals, the "mature" community label isn't enough, you have to select MATURE - AND - SEXUAL THEMES as well, like so:
If you don't select sexual themes in addition to mature, you'll eventually get this:
Changing that flagged post's settings to include the label and sub-label will cause it to be un-flagged, at least for a time. As of writing this, the posts haven't been re-flagged yet. It's currently unclear if this flagging happens because of the genitals, the missing extra label, because of the algorithm, or because of a report or reviewer. This seems like it needs to be done regardless of if the image is actually sexual or not.
Either way, even posts with both mature and sexual labels, if they have genitals, will still be hidden from dashboards while visible on blogs. UNLESS...
Some posts (probably mainly if they feature genitals), if they have a mature label without a sexual label, will get this:
Implying the post was reviewed by a real person. If a post is flagged in this way, in the context of nudes, it means a "sexual themes" sub-label was added in addition to the mature label.
This a post is flagged in this way, you will not be able to change the community labels post yourself again, the options will be greyed out.
However, a post being flagged and reviewed in this way has an odd effect: It becomes visible on the dashboard.
I had several test posts, full nudes with genitals, some partly obscured, some with my dick just hanging out right there. They were all labeled with "mature" but not "sexual themes". Pretty much all of them were not visible on the dash. BUT after several of these posts were flagged with the "we reviewed your post..." message with the community labels made permanent, these posts suddenly became visible on the dash. I can reblog them now and see them, others can see them now.
However, this does not work when you select the labels yourself. If you select "mature" AND "sexual themes" when making the post or change it after the fact, the post still won't be visible on the dash, only your blog. It may be possible that you can force the manual review to happen and make the post visible on-dash by doing an appeal on an orange-flagged post, but I haven't tried it.
As has been pointed out by others, it seems like posting links to OnlyFans, Fansly and other such sites might put people at risk of getting nuked. This is unclear because it's all unclear, but that's what the terms seem to suggest:
I've heard linktree as a suggestion, I'll probably make one since I've never done that before. Something to watch out for.
I don't know. Have we learned anything? If so, I guess it's that this is all sort of weird in how it works or doesn't work, and I'm still learning. It wasn't until I was writing this post several hours after making my test posts that I suddenly got a bunch of flags and learned half the stuff I wrote about here.
So, if we can conclude anything right now:
Community labels are a must, but they'll prevent people without the right settings from seeing your posts BUT also won't guarantee that those with the right settings will see them on their dash.
We can do nudes again, but exactly how far that can go towards the sexual is uncertain and very fuzzy (like me).
Genitals will cause your post to be hidden from the dash, visible on blog only, at least initially.
Nudes posted without BOTH the mature AND sexual themes labels (or no labels) may get orange-flagged or flagged and manually reviewed.
A manually reviewed post with nudes/genitals will have its labels made permanent and will also become visible on dashboards.
Be careful with links to adult sites because we live in a hell world that hates sex work.
Hopefully this helps navigate these strange new waters.
