controversial but in my many years as a minor on tumblr i’ve never seen a single sex worker. they always block minors, mark their blogs as nsfw, and don’t spam the popular sfw tags. even if you, as a minor, actually look for them, as long as you listed your age truthfully in the registration, you won’t be able to find them.
what i, instead, saw as a minor was:
porn bots (which could be stopped by: captcha, double confirmation for accounts, not allowing url shorteners, not allowing rebloggers to delete captions, i would even be ok with hyperlinks not being allowed in reblogs)
fetishes and kinksters (which could be stopped by: adding more tags to the nsfw filter, including fetishes/kinks that appear as sfw)
people who forget tag their shit (which could be stopped by: an auto-tagging system for sensitive tags that would work similarly to the current block for apparently nsfw posts, but can give the op the option to delete incorrect tags)
pro-ana, pro-mia, romanticization of self-harm (which could be stopped by: banning the whole tag, as it just happened)
nazi, terfs (just kick them out for hate speech like twitter does)
pro-map thankfully only appeared once i was already past 18 but of course you could just ban the whole community + tag as it just happened.
prevent usernames with words that hate and pedophilic groups use to flag from being chosen at blog creation.
while i know that tumblr is a 13+ website, nsfw content was hidden from minors last year. most cp was deleted + outlawed (both irl and drawn) for good not even last month. and while those are recent changes they did make tumblr, overall, 13+ appropriate.
i do not care much for porn, i just feel like they are solving the problem the wrong way and punishing a group of people who did nothing to harm minors. there were smarter solutions to this problem that were ignored in the favor of a very sloppy solution that doesn’t even cover stuff like sfw kink blogs, porn bots who don’t post pictures (most of them), people who just won’t tag their nsfw, hate groups and other non-sex related communities who are extremely dangerous for minors.
A former staff engineer, who recently left Tumblr and asked to remain
anonymous for professional reasons, tells Vox that the NSFW ban was “in
the works for about six months as an official project,” adding that it
was given additional resources and named “Project X” in September,
shortly before it was announced to the rest of the company at an
all-hands meeting. “[The NSFW ban] was going to happen anyway,” the
former engineer told me. “Verizon pushed it out the door after the child
pornography thing and made the deadline sooner,” but the real problem
was always that Verizon couldn’t sell ads next to porn.
Porn on Tumblr is something Verizon needs to wipe out if it’s going to
make any money off what it thinks is actually valuable about the
platform — enormous fandom and social justice communities that, just
before the Verizon acquisition, Khalaf was insisting the staff figure
out how to better monetize.
On that note-
Two former Tumblr employees said they were alarmed when Khalaf chose
Black Lives Matter as an example of a community that the company should
focus on converting into Yahoo media consumers. One told The Verge,
“Simon explicitly said that Black Lives Matter was an opportunity to
[make] a ton of money.”