So, could PornHub save Tumblr from itself? And how did we get to the point where that is a legitimate sentence?

It all started when Yahoo bought Tumblr and promised not to screw it up, and then went on to screw it up. In 2016 Mashable wrote about the trouble Yahoo had integrating the Yahoo ads team with the Tumblr team, installing executives who didn’t know the platform, and who didn’t get along with Tumblr employees.

It was also weird of Yahoo to buy Tumblr for $US1.1 billion and say the site would make $US100 million ($143 million) a year, considering Tumblr wasn’t bringing in a lot of money and didn’t have much scope to do so in the future without drastically changing the site.

In 2017 US telco Verizon bought Yahoo and got Tumblr in the deal. About this time, Tumblr management went from being extremely vocal in the fight for net neutrality in the US to being quite quiet. Tumblr users took that as a bad sign that things were about to get more corporate.

Then things got more corporate, but still not competent. The biggest scandal came when Apple removed Tumblr from the App Store because of all the child porn content and porn bots. Tumblr responded by banning “female presenting nipples” and flagging most innocent LGBTQ content.

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Months later, there’s still plenty of innocent LGBTQ content getting flagged, and useful sex education resources are no longer available, but the porn bots and Nazis are still running free.

Tumblr has, however, made the background a darker blue that has users complaining it hurts their eyes, so at least Tumblr is staying on brand

Tumblr still hasn’t hit that $US100 million a year number.

When the banning of female nipples and the removal of porn was announced, PornHub was the surprising saviour, offering its SFW and NSFW forums to Tumblr refugees. It was an odd fit, and a move most people didn’t feel comfortable making (no one wants to say they spend all their free time on PornHub, even if it is on the SFW forums), but a few users found happy homes and audiences there.

So it makes sense that, now Verizon is looking to offload Tumblr, PornHub would be showing an interest in buying it.

At first I was extremely sceptical about the move. MindGeek, the company that owns PornHub, also owns roughly half the porn industry, including sites such as RedTube and YouPorn and a whole stable of content producers and distributors. It has a history of revealing sex workers' real names, and a worrying relationship with piracy.

But PornHub also means well. It is going to great lengths to curb the spread of revenge porn, it gives money to college sex education schemes, it paid for snow ploughs a couple of times, it fights against racism and racist stereotypes, has good terms of service (that it follows through on as best it can), it is vigilant about underage porn, and it is understandably sex positive, which fits with a lot of what Tumblr preaches.

The only problem is the terms of service say MindGeek owns anything that gets uploaded to its sites, which would obviously be a major problem for a social network with a huge artist community. Hopefully, it won’t extend that portion to Tumblr.

Would it handle Tumblr competently and not screw it up? Who knows, but how much worse can it be than the past two owners?