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Don’t get me wrong, I like tumblr. I have been on this site since 2011 or 2012. I like the art community and the chronological dash and being able to show or hide my likes and following lists. Your experience is fully what/who you follow and what you search. That said, the tagging system that used to make the site so good has been screwed over yet again in the most recent update. Tumblr has added more banned words and suppressed more content supposedly in the name of following Apple’s guidelines. This ruins the search function and will prevent people from tagging things appropriately and will defeat the entire purpose of tagging and personal filters. They want to hide “unsafe” or “explicit” content and yet everything they do with the tags does the exact opposite. Why would anyone use the correct tags if it will immediately be suppressed? Also the old system of giving a warning on explicit blogs worked fine. Now on iOS you don’t even get the choice of continuing with that search or not. You get booted back to the search function. I don’t know the exact age demographics of tumblr but especially these days it seems to be a site for adults who grew up with it so the fact that they treat their user base like children needing to be censored is frustrating and useless. If they keep going down this path of censorship and incompetent search functions I might be forced to abandon it all together rather than continue trying to make it work.

Listen, i love tumblr. However, the new iOS update changed the way and number of banned tags that users on the mobile app were using to help make the site a safe and fun place for everyone. The fact that this is only for users on Apple products makes me more than a little annoyed, and I no longer want to use the app if it means that the content I used to engage with isn’t there on iOS. A lot of my mutuals and I are into horror, and so blocking tags like ‘scopophobia’ and ‘body horror’ means that I can’t see ANY of the fan art when I’m on the iOS app. I’ve looked through the list of newly-banned tags and I’ve gotta say, I’m disappointed. None of them actually will work to ban the harmful or hateful content that might be uploaded, because they were being used in a way that I don’t think Apple understands. When someone is being transphobic, they do not end their posts with ‘transphobia tw’. Those tags are used by ACTUAL TRANS PEOPLE, who are talking about their life experiences or calling someone else’s transphobia out. Blocking that tag and removing the content means that we no longer get to share those stories anymore, and it does nothing to the actual transphobic content one might come across. The same thing can be said for racist and antisemitic posts. Additionally, some of the banned words are flat out ridiculous. Why is #girls banned? Or #long post? It doesn’t make sense, and it makes me not want to use the iOS app anymore. :(

This app has so many issues that have yet to be solved after at least a year or two of them existing. Despite the messaging system, which I’m sure has been critiqued plenty, inconsistently and unreliably updating or not updating while you’re using the app- you also can’t click on asks or even keep track of your asks in any way through the app. If you want to go look at one of your apps, you had better be keeping constant track of whoever asked it because all you’re going to get is a notification, and clicking on the notification (if it was answered) only takes you to the person’s profile. The app will randomly crash for seemingly no reason, even while under little to no stress. The double-click-to-like feature doesn’t work unless you tap a large body of text or an image and even then, it may not register properly (maybe user error but still inconvenient). You also can’t keep track of submissions in any way unless you just miraculously remember- I think you get notified but I don’t even think you get that much. Aside from all this, there’s a myriad of other functionalities and nuances that are almost entirely unimportant (like how if you click on a person’s name that’s attached to a post, it’ll take you to a dedicated page with nothing but that post and a couple other posts from that person’s profile below it). This was a poorly-thought-through review but I think it covers most bases. Otherwise, it works enough.