just discovered a weird thing on tumblr.
so however long ago i followed some person who posted good aesthetic shit, as you do. then after a while i noticed that, in addition to the aesthetic shit, they also hornypost quite a bit, and reblog a lot of the stuff that's as close to porn as tumblr allows, and also porn that the algorithm doesn't catch. this is fine for them but was unexpected for me, i am not myself much of a hornyposter and tend to try to keep explicit stuff off my timelines due to how much i dither on my phone in public. it happens a couple times, whatever, you bring me good pictures of sunsets and flowers and artfully arranged skulls too, this'll be fine i guess.
but here's the thing: somehow this person only seemed to hornypost when i was browsing my dash in public, on my phone, and i'm talking about just huge streaks of nudes and whatnot. and after a while i notice that none of this stuff is showing up on my browser feed.
at this point i start checking my settings and see that my app has basically fully open floodgates, not hiding anything behind blurs or toggles, and realizing these are even options (which surely i must have, at some point, opted out of?) sort of solves the browsing the phone in public problem. but what the fuck is going on with my browser?
so i pop over there, and of course the menu is not 100% consistent so i have to go through and figure out where these analogous content settings are. and i see a message saying that, because tumblr does not know my birth date (???) i am not allowed to tell it to let me see stuff with community labels, ie, things with boobs or dicks or people holding guns and smoking drugs or whatever. like, at all. now it should be obvious: i followed the account that kicked this all off via my browser, where i saw none of their hornyposts. yes we're keeping things wholly g-rated over on tumblr in-browser: "Since we don't know your age, posts with a Community Label are removed from your view across Tumblr."
the key part there is "across Tumblr" which is... just demonstrably untrue? while waiting for my oil change my phone showed me several cumshots, dudes. moreover, i do not think tumblr has ever asked me for my birthday, i am not terribly inclined to give it at this stage or ever, and anyway, the message i just quoted does not in fact tell me how to set my age for the browser experience and there's no apparent place for this information to go??? i looked, out of curiosity.
but i guess the app somehow... does know my age? and cannot communicate this to the browser? OR, alternatively, the app somehow just doesn't give a shit, despite app store availability being one of the reasons for the tumblr porn ban to begin with? at any rate, perfect design, wonderful platform.
