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Tumblr’s anti-porn algorithm is flagging basically everything as NSFW
- bryanrasmussen 8y agowell, looks like my old automated tumblr works fine http://apologiseinsincerely.tumblr.com/ http://apologiseinsincerely.tumblr.com/ - I was worried some of the robots carrying women would look bad, or some image manipulations might resemble something they weren't.
- furicane 8y agoI wouldn't label the algorithm as anti-porn. I'd label it "how to lose user base and drive the company to a hole" algorithm. It's not likely that it detects actual porn, it's basically failing miserably and the result is abandonment. That's what you get when you want to be PC and yet another "me too, I do cool stuff too" company. There are lessons to be learned here, and for that - thank you Tumblr :)
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago> That's what you get when you want to be PC I don't understand this statement. Tumblr's user base, at least the portion who disagree with the site operators on this, are usually the ones accused of being “politically correct”?
- TeMPOraL 8y agoI think the statement meant the company is trying to enforce PC, starting with porn, to the detriment of the existing userbase. It's as dumb a move as you can possibly make; I don't know what the decisionmakers behind were smoking, but it must have been something strong.
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y agoI know what they meant, I'm confused at the accusation of it being politically correct.
- furicane 8y agoYou're not confused, and you felt the irony in my post. I wrote it's trying to be PC, and I didn't touch base upon what PC actually means - it's a broad term, different in everyone's eyes. Yes, Tumblr is bowing down to someone's standards, I called that PC, you are bothered by that statement - let's agree we disagree but you got the big picture and that's what matters.
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y agoThat's fair, tumblr is very much being politically correct in that sense. I'm just so used to it being a right-wing insult against basically anything leftist.
- fjsolwmv 8y agoPolitics wakes strange bedfellows. There is no single coherent definition of acceptable behavior. All corners raise hell for what they consider unnacceptable. PC isn't exclusively left-wing.
- DavidVoid 8y ago> That's what you get when you want to be PC I'd hardly consider this "trying to be PC". https://i.imgur.com/cgGx4JR.png https://i.imgur.com/cgGx4JR.png This is more about bowing down to America's backwards views on sex and nudity, most likely in order to appease advertisers and/or Apple.
- KozmoNau7 8y agoI can't imagine the advertisers being too hot on literal nazism and white supremacism, though. At least I hope not.
- danaris 8y agoWell, you wouldn’t think so, but a lot of the anger on Tumblr the past few days has been that they’re destroying major communities (more than just NSFW; they deleted everything tagged with “chronic pain”, for goodness sake, and how is that relevant?), but leaving all the Nazis alone.
- watwut 8y agoIt seems to me that boards are way more sensitive on female breasts then on white supremacism.
- zimpenfish 8y ago> and/or Apple Apple has nothing to do with this. Tumblr was removed from the app store specifically because of child porn; plus, if the anonymous sources are to be believed, Tumblr have been working on this for >6 months, predating the app store snafu.
- rsynnott 8y ago... Wait, what do you think PC _means_?
- mcv 8y agoI'm not sure anyone knows what PC means anymore.
- josefresco 8y agoThe origins are pretty clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness However lately, those on one side of the political spectrum in America have co-opted it to paint the other side as overly sensitive/weak etc. muddying it's original intent, often using "concern trolling" to rile up debate. Examples: Sexual harassment, blackface
- Piskvorrr 8y agoIt's beige, got a Turbo button in front, and keyboard connector in the back. Wait...wrong decade?
- mkane848 8y agoI mean, it's been pretty much the same if you ignore all of the people going "LMAO IM AN ATTACK HELICOPTER" and the like whenever anyone even mentions a social issue
- justtopost 8y agoThat is a weak strawman. There is absolutely legit debate on the subject.
- jonathanstrange 8y agoTumblr is dead. I give it three months before it's forgotten by the majority of its former user base.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoSo the question is where will that userbase go, now might be the time to position yourself to accept them if you're a similar site .. I probably wouldn't be here [on HN] if Slashdot/Digg/etc. hadn't screwed up in the past.
- LaikaF 8y agoIt seems that most people are going: - Twitter - Pillowfort - Wordpress - Mastodon depends a lot on what the user was into posting. I'm also seeing quite a few more people operating on multiple sites at once now, even SFW blogs. So they'll post Tumblr, Pillowfort, and Wordpress at the same time so their former users can still see them.
- shiburizu 8y agoI want to believe Newgrounds can recapture a large amount of illustrators who have Patreon accounts and large amounts of work, because they have excellent categorization features and hosts both SFW/NSFW stuff.
- fphhotchips 8y agoThere's only going to be one blog left, and it's going to be called "Bring back the porn".
- tonysdg 8y agoScrubs?
- fphhotchips 8y agoSure is.
- keypusher 8y agoOath is desperate to put more ads on Tumblr, because they massively overpaid for it ($1 billion) and have been throwing money at it ever since (100s of millions). I guess because of the way the content is displayed they can't just segregate nsfw stuff into a demonetized stream, but if they think they can turn Tumblr into a mainstream site that shows family-centric ads, they clearly don't understand what they bought.
- netcan 8y agoCorporate sensibilities and media... This isn't a new issue. Media like to be edgy, contraversy provacative. Corporate sensibilities is allergic to scandal or contraversy, especially of the "public morals" type.
- JulianMorrison 8y agoTo me it feels like a "management removed the free snacks" moment. Doesn't affect me directly, but what it says about how things are changing makes me think "doomed in very short order".
- AJ007 8y agoThis is clearly Tumblr's Digg moment. They are going to have a 100% write down on this one. It is also worth adding Twitter has built a reasonable ad business and they are full of just as much porn as Tumblr. Google actually shows ads for porn and other adult services on their platform. If any of the higher ups at Verizon are reading this: - Fire everyone involved in the NSFW filtering. Clearly this wasn't even tested. - Fire everyone who thought NSFW material had to be purged from your platform. There is a short window where you can reverse the decision and benefit from all of the people who were reminded Tumblr existed. After that window closes, your business is dead.
- jsjohnst 8y ago> They are going to have a 100% write down on this one. They already did that (the goodwill portion anyway) in 2016 before selling to Verizon. Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/07/18/yahoo-reports-earnings-as-auction-comes-to-close/#579d338c6e09 https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/07/18/yahoo-r...
- ryanlol 8y agoWhy does the author seem to suggest that the nazis are less affected by this than pictures of furniture?
- ChrisSD 8y agoPerhaps nazis are less affected by this than pictures of furniture?
- DavidVoid 8y agoI'd argue that they are since searches for some "adult" terms are now censored but searches for nazi terms are not. For example: https://www.tumblr.com/search/breast/recent https://www.tumblr.com/search/breast/recent https://www.tumblr.com/search/nsfw/recent https://www.tumblr.com/search/nsfw/recent vs. https://www.tumblr.com/search/1488/recent https://www.tumblr.com/search/1488/recent https://www.tumblr.com/search/heil+hitler/recent https://www.tumblr.com/search/heil+hitler/recent https://www.tumblr.com/search/sieg+heil/recent https://www.tumblr.com/search/sieg+heil/recent edit: Image of other examples in case you don't want to actually go to tumblr's website. https://i.imgur.com/cgGx4JR.png https://i.imgur.com/cgGx4JR.png
- ryanlol 8y agoTumblr also allows me to search for raygold and PTHC does that mean they approve of child pornography now? I don't believe that the fact that they've restricted a pretty small set of porn-related keywords suggests that furniture is more likely to be caught by tumblrs filters than nazi content, which is the claim the article appears to make.
- cabalamat 8y agoWhile Tumblr have every right to have whatever terms of service they like, this feels like a bait-and-switch to me. People and communities have become accustomed to allowing NSFW stuff on Tumblr, and if Tumblr had forbidden this from the get go these people who have set up somewhere else and not on Tumblr. What we need[1] is for social networks to be interoperable, with open data and protocols, so that a user can up sticks, move to a different site, and take their existing data (posts, images etc) with them and keep their followers. 1. As I have argued before, see https://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2018/08/30/dont-nationalise-facebook-mandate-open-data-and-protocols/ https://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2018/08/30/dont-nationalise-...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Waterluvian 8y agoI think you're pretty much describing Solid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_project) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_pr... Though I could be wrong. I never fully grokked Solid last time I read about it.
- cabalamat 8y agoThat and Mastodon, ActivityPub and IPFS are examples of the sort of thing I have in mind. Also the decentralised flood-fill model of Usenet.
- jazzyjackson 8y agoCan you tell me what you mean by flood-fill ? I'm looking at different strategies for sync'ing activity between domains, and ActivityPub / IPFS seem like a lot of conceptual overhead. I'd rather just rsync directories on my friends' servers.
- cabalamat 8y ago> Can you tell me what you mean by flood-fill? OK, imagine a load of servers. Each is connected to some (not all) of the others, and they all peer messages to each other. A -- B -- C -- D | | E -- F -- H | G -- I A message M is sent to one (say A). B asks A "have you got any new messages?" (or it might be A pushes them onto B) and A replies with M. From B, M is sent to C and E. From E it is sent to F and G. Eventually it gets to all the servers on the network. I envisage that each message would have a unique ID consisting of a cryptographic hash of its contents and timestamp.
- cabalamat 8y agoI'm sure the upload filters the EU wants to mandate will be every bit as successful as this, in terms of the number of false positives.
- xte 8y agoI do never used Tumblr but AFAICT porn is the most common contents, so i bet the major source of revenue... BTW the neovittorian movement against sex in general (disguised in many form to health things, anti-pornography for pedagogic things, anti-prostitution because of racket, ...) it's a clear sign of our degradation as society.
- newen 8y agoWhy? It's not exactly a stretch to day that pornography and prostitution are clear signs of the degradation of a society.
- xte 8y agoMaybe, but we know well that prohibitionist does not work, instead generate worst things. We also know that "sexual abstinence" as "pushed" in some USA are result in a certainly RISE of STM and unwanted juvenile pregnancy then other area and especially other country in witch sexuality is normal part of school's programs... The point is that sexuality is a natural part of our life so IMO we have to free is as much as we can instead of trying the classic Victorian style. The same is for alcohol, drugs (both legal and illegal), ... Only switching from a somewhat sexual repressed country like Italy to more free countries like Sweden before, French now I see a big improvement in mean people satisfactions and awareness, Italian's watch far more porn and goes far more with prostitutes than Frenches or Swedish, just as an example. I see child being different in more free countries than in others, for instance in Italy and UK I see children that are in medium like earthquakes, in Sweden and French they are far more calm again in medium but in Italy and UK parent's "watch and supervise" far more their children than Sweden or France. long story short, use education, culture, not stick nor carrots to build a better world.
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoWhat? That's a huge stretch. Prostitution, for one, has been common in pretty much every culture throughout history, so I don't know what you think we're "degrading" from.
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- benmmurphy 8y agoI'm not sure how this proves the algorithm is doing a poor job. Any NSFW classifier is going to have a non-trivial error rate. Tumblr hosts LOTS of images. So if you have a non-trivial error rate and multiply it by LOTS of images you are going to get LOTS of images being misclassified incorrectly. It's not surprising someone was able to write a story about a bunch of images being misclassified. This doesn't seem to tell us anything about whether the algorithm has a high error rate or not.
- dandare 8y agoYou have my upvote, but at the same time, Tumblr doesn't know this? What is their communication strategy for taking the wind off of people and articles making fun of them?
- netcan 8y agoIf you want to take a fatalistic view of it... go a certain step further. multiply it by LOTS of images you are going to get LOTS of images being misclassified and lots of complaints/mockery. Also context, Tumblr users are being censored in ways they weren't previously and the censor is an error prone machine. This isn't the same thing as implementing nsfw filters to Google search.
- int_19h 8y agoIn this case, the ultimate arbiters are the users of the service. Judging by their feedback so far, it is doing a poor job (and it doesn't matter if it's state of the art etc - that just means that our state of the art algorithms are that bad).
- kkarakk 8y agotumblr's announcemnt about removing nsfw content got flagged,i'd say the algo is trash
- BlackLotus89 8y agoSince we don't have any real stats we can't classify how well the algorithm is doing, one important thought though is how the algorithm is designed. If you got a good filtering method you can either optimize for a false positive rate or a false negative rate. Let's compare it to a simple spam filter (because if you look at it objectively that's all it is) would you rather have spam in your inbox or loose mails to your spam filter? Spam filter (normally) prioritize a high false negative so you have less spam, but don't loose content. Having a filter that obviously has a high false positive rate is just bad for the content creators (on which tumblr depends)
- intralizee 8y agoWhy not just make ads show on SFW content and have some sort agreement with advertisers. It's not like google has to block everything or maybe they have privilege.
- hanselot 8y agoThe problem is identifying the content as SFW in the first place...
- izzydata 8y agoWhy are or why can advertisers be so inflexible with the concept of the internet containing nsfw content?
- forgottenpass 8y agoBecause society hasn't wised up to the fact bloggers and news are doing to social media the equivalent of what parent- and religous groups did to box TV and movies into well-defined bounds for allowed content.
- JulianMorrison 8y agoMy feeling is that this may be the breakthrough moment for Mastodon.
- Kye 8y agoI don't think there will be one single moment. Every stumble from a big silo leads to a huge burst of growth and a return to a slightly higher norm. It's more likely this slow transfer of users will continue until the narrative is more "Mastodon finishes off [x]" for each one and less "users are fleeing [x] for Mastodon". Tumblr/Twitter/Facebook/etc are going to die the same way malls do. One decade they're a big deal, the next people's slow shift in preferences make them irrelevant. At least they won't leave rotting husks this time.
- criddell 8y agoIs there an example where a centralized commercial service was successfully replaced by a more open, federated service?
- Kye 8y agoThe web replaced AOL and other dial-up portals.
- JulianMorrison 8y agoAnd Microsoft repeatedly tried to stuff the genie back in the bottle in the early years by centralizing the portal, and then the technologies, unsuccessfully.
- JulianMorrison 8y agoThe electronic mail that came before SMTP would be a good example.
- criddell 8y agoEmail is a good example and somebody else mentioned the web in general. I think the big difference there is that there are game changing advantages to end users being able to send email anywhere and to access all of the web rather than what was essentially one web site. Federating Tumblr (and Twitter with Mastodon) seems like a lateral move at best. The worst case is that it makes it harder to use and so it might even be a step backwards.
- loudmax 8y agoI read a lot of posts on Reddit bemoaning Tumblr's decision to stop carrying adult content. A lot of people there and here feel that this decision spells the end of the company. That may be the case, but I never understood how Tumblr was profiting from hosting all that adult content to begin with. I presume they're selling ads, in which case disassociating themselves from anything that could be considered pornographic seems like reasonable business logic. I'm not questioning whether Tumblr's decision is fair, or morally right or wrong. I just don't see how Tumblr was generating enough revenue to cover their costs to begin with. Is image hosting really that cheap?
- xfitm3 8y agoStatic content is extremely cheap to host. I would compare it to S3 costs.
- radiowave 8y agoNot sure how Tumblr is doing things these days, but for a long time it literally was S3 costs, as that's where all the media was being served from.
- whatshisface 8y agoAT&T carries way more of it than any individual website serves, but nobody complains because they're generally thought of as a pipe that is at worst absent. If a social platform can get the coveted "at worst absent," perception in place, nobody will blame them, and by extension nobody will blame the advertisers. That's why it was against the rules (so to speak) for the media to hop on YouTube for the "Nazi" videos: the only reason any of these platforms can get by at all is because we agree not to blame them for what they host. If we stopped doing that we would end up with three or four sanitised news websites, and at most eight mainstream entertainment websites. jokes.com would make a killing.
- tech2 8y ago"Amusingly" this is almost exactly what EU Article 11 & 13 are likely to result in (for slightly different reasons). One can but hope sense is seen soon.
- coldtea 8y agoTumblr is truly dead without NSFW stuff. Nobody cares for anything else in it (except you and 10 others, outlier, to pre-empt your reaction).
- coldtea 8y agoNot sure what's the controversy here. Here's a Medium post on the same idea: https://medium.com/futuresin/tumblrs-porn-ban-could-kill-it-85b31c76a470 https://medium.com/futuresin/tumblrs-porn-ban-could-kill-it-...
- Kye 8y agoThere was another post here a week or two ago about an image processing algorithm that turned everything into blurry genitalia. Could it be related? edit: Found it. I'm not the only one who wondered if this was the case! New comment in that thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18601287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18601287
- jillesvangurp 8y agoArtificial stupidity combined with corporate stupidity, it's predictably not going to end well.
- dpwm 8y agoIt would be quite humorous, and also quite telling of the experience of those implementing this, if it turned out to be classic class imbalance during training. If 90% of the training dataset is nsfw, and you train a classifier naively on that dataset, and your test and validation data is 90% nsfw, then 90% accuracy is very easy.
- newen 8y agoOh god...I remember my first project I just ran an ML algorithm against the dataset, got high accuracy, boasted to colleagues, and then explored the dataset only to realize it was highly unbalanced. So embarrassing.
- AJ007 8y agoI would really, really like to know what they are doing. Was it an in-house solution, something from a startup, or something from an established enterprise tech company? One of the things I’ve been saying repeatedly is that companies are going to implement machine learning incorrectly, and there will be obvious failures and blow ups, but the most dangerous and catastrophic failures will be a cascade of things that look like they work correctly. In this case, Tumblr implemented something that was blatantly obviously broken. That’s just pathetically poor management. In the next 10 years, I would give high odds of least 1 company in the s&p 500 will fail due to bad machine learning implementation(s.)
- lmkg 8y ago> from an established enterprise tech company My first guess, based on basically nothing at all, was that this was an IBM Watson project. 0.3 seconds of Googling found that IBM has already published a case study on their website about Verizon using Watson. So, I'm going to go with that. https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/verizon https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/verizon
- pram 8y agoThey previously implemented a flag feature that users could use to mark NSFW content. That was in 2017. I doubt there’s any ML, it’s probably just people flagging everything for the fun of it.
- netcan 8y ago"it’s often hard to see why LGBTQ content gets flagged as NSFW – although the underlying reason is, of course, homophobia and transphobia.* I think you need to start with the impossible, define porn/nsfw. Why is lingerie provacative and bikinis aren't? Why is nudity even a problem? Why nipples and not elbows... Ultimately, this stuff is the very definition of subjective... something that is entirely determined by perception. What is and isn't "safe for work" is constantly changing. Taboos allow dishonesty to continue. Call it homophobia if you like, but I call the whole thing conservatism. Personally, I think our rapidly changed attitudes about homophobia and transgenderism is closely related to sexual liberalism generally. Without online porn, gay culture could easily have stayed closeted.
- Waterluvian 8y agoWhen I was a teen my favourite joke was, "people with foot fetishes are lucky. To them, every beach is a nude beach." Really does apply here. It's increasingly absurd to define what's sexually explicit as our society becomes increasingly liberal about our sexuality. It was easier back when there was a very narrow definition of heterosexuality, leaving everything else to be homosexuality and/or some form of "perversion". We're basically dealing with the propagation of those attitudes forwards through time.
- kkarakk 8y agoviewing lgbtq stuff would definitely get you fired(and probably worse) in the middle east,russia and most of south east asia. tumblr is a global site remember?
- shiburizu 8y agoI feel like the discourse might be missing the point, starting at why we are here: Tumblr was removed from the App Store. Tumblr is a website but without a doubt it thrives on being a mobile app on iPhones and iPads. This ended up happening because of course the NSFW content on Tumblr is notable, even if we don't know the actual scale. Lots of pornbots and what not. What concerns is this: Well and good that Apple says "we don't host pornographic communities on our app store" and Oath immediately sacrificed the lamb to appease Apple. How is this a problem after so long? What if I told an Apple executive the exact same content manifests in Twitter and Reddit? Evidently the app stores have no interest in hosting NSFW artists and the open web should step up.
- pndy 8y agoThis "article" was clearly done only to gain page views using the ongoing tumblr topic regarding adult content removal. The implication that company decision was done to oppress the LGBT community by algorithm automated actions is ridiculously sad but again, helps pumping the hype and virtual anger. Author didn't take the effort of thinking about possible reasons why algorithm works around NSFW content in such way but instead already judged that tumblr is going after LGBT (+ whatever else comes in that string of characters; I couldn't care less - it's enough that I'm somehow a part of that community but it's like with least liked family member - you really don't wanna see it or interact with) community and we should all care because this is an "problematic" issue. The victim card is being placed on the table. After seeing around what topics the author revolves the overall tone of this "journalism" example is not surprising. I did back-up my tumblr, I'm waiting for reliable platform to emerge where I could post cat pictures, funny and not always politically correct images and whatever else.
- aussieguy1234 8y agoMy Tumblr blog of 2 years (future-tech) with 20K followers was summarily terminated today. There is no NSFW content on it. The termination happened shortly after I started protesting Tumblrs new policy. I did notice, however that some benign posts were incorrectly flagged as NSFW.
- rataata_jr 8y agoThank heavens. Tumblr will be gone now.
- joshstrange 8y agoI'm glad Tumblr existed (not just for porn) but I hope this kills them. What a huge stab in the back to their community, it should not go unpunished.