I don’t understand why he presents this as a mystery. They both adhere to this App Store rule:
“If your app includes user-generated content from a web-based service, it may display incidental mature “NSFW” content, provided that the content is hidden by default and only displayed when the user turns it on via your website.“
I'm curious too. Can you not view NSFW subreddits on the iPhone reddit app? Quarantined subs? (I don't know, I don't use the Reddit app and I don't have an iPhone).
You can view all NSFW content on the iOS app, but you have to log into an account and click a button to say you're old enough. I think they're trying to make it effectively opt-in.
Another guess is that this is easy for Reddit to do (and not Tumblr) because Reddit has the concept of an NSFW subreddit, where all content under that sub is age-restricted. And content on other subs would be heavily moderated most of the time. Whereas on Tumblr, posts don't go directly to "pre-categorized feeds" in that same way, since you're just an individual making a post on your own page more or less. So moderation (I'd guess) would be a lot harder.
This is the "race to the bottom" that occurs here. Because someone trying to make a buck bought it and decided that it could probably make more money this way. That's all this is.
