7 ms·

That choice boggles the mind. If you're worried about cross-links between non-adult and adult content tarnishing the platform, add better features for user fla

by ethbro 7y ago

That choice boggles the mind. If you're worried about cross-links between non-adult and adult content tarnishing the platform, add better features for user flagging. They (before the Yahoo and Verizon cluster&#-1s) were essentially sitting on a gold mine of training data, and ongoing training data generation, for an industry-leading porn detection engine. A subscription filtering product that would be worth $$$. Throwing that away because of some overly prudish concept of brand identity is hilarious.

chatmasta 7y ago
I'm sure there is plenty of training data available elsewhere on the internet...
- ethbro 7y ago
  Continually tagged by ~100M unique monthly visitors? (the rough drop in traffic, post-ban)
mevile 7y ago
> That choice boggles the mind. Serving ads is hard when there's porn on the site.
- IshKebab 7y ago
  Use a different domain then?
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    This does seem like a stupid simple solution. tumblr.com can continue being SFW, and then there'd be nsfwtumblr.com (or whatever) that contains "the good stuff". Retain account name uniqueness across both domains.
    - Zanni 7y ago
      tumblx.com, surely.
      - ethbro 7y ago
        tumblrer
    - nullc 7y ago
      My very limited experience with tumblr (pre-rule change) is that it was essentially impossible to use without being frequently exposed to sexually explicit photographs. ... in contrast to reddit, which is full of outright porn but there I seldom see anything more risque than a bikini shot unless I navigate to a relevant subreddit. Maybe the critical difference is that if your account would have anything remotely adult at all, including text, or would repost anything from account that was flagged adult then your account would need to be flagged adult. And as a result a lot of accounts were adult flagged and a lot of users felt they had to log in and enable view-adult in order to not get left out. And then even if you have no particular interest in browsing the explicit content on tumblr you can't have many contacts before you start getting occasional reposts of it. Regardless, being able to have a site which users can fully engage with without a steady stream of surprise crotch shots that they aren't interested in seems like a pretty reasonable goal. Banning the content outright seems like a really blunt way to get there, but maybe that was less damaging to the monetization strategy than making a lot of images click to load?
- blobster 7y ago
  How about Imgur? And Reddit?
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    Reddit runs its own ad network. And has famously had issues monetizing itself.
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      Partially. Reddit also has the usual DoubleClick/Adsense ads too.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- stcredzero 7y ago
  If you've got porn on a domain, it doesn't matter if you show ads on porn or not, it doesn't matter if you require age verification, nothing you do will likely matter. What if there was a way to "ban" something by changing it's domain? What if there were two web apps with a linked backend? Let's say: tumblargh.com tumblarghR.com When something is "banned" from tumblargh.com, it remains on tumblarghR.com, which is otherwise a mirror of tumblargh.com.
  - TremendousJudge 7y ago
    isn't this what 4chan did with 4channel.org?
    - Anon1096 7y ago
      4chan split into two sites because PayPal stopped working on the main domain, but similar idea.
- coldtea 7y ago
  That boggles the mind as well. The purpose of an ad is to be seen. Whether it's seen next to porn should be irrelevant. I guess, because prudery.
  - mbreese 7y ago
    A great deal of advertising revolves around "brand awareness". You may not be selling a particular product to the consumer, but keeping your brand in the mind of the consumer. Understandably so, not all advertisers want their brand associated with adult content. Where an ad is seen can be just as (if not more) important to the advertiser as the ad itself. So, if your site serves up adult content -- you can guarantee that companies with large ad budgets won't be buying ad space.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      >A great deal of advertising revolves around "brand awareness". You may not be selling a particular product to the consumer, but keeping your brand in the mind of the consumer. Understandably so, not all advertisers want their brand associated with adult content. If all brands allowed their ads to appear next to adult content, then it wouldn't be any special association for any particular brand, just another outlet. So I guess it has more to do with the historical prudery of some countries, when an ad appearing next to adult content would trigger angry letters to the editor, editorials, and so on from "concerned citizens". That said, advertisers didn't seem to have much issue advertising all kinds of stuff on Playboy back in the day, or FHM and the like today...
      - k_sze 7y ago
        > That said, advertisers didn't seem to have much issue advertising all kinds of stuff on Playboy back in the day, or FHM and the like today... I guess it’s because Playboy and FHM are somehow considered tasteful and for connoisseurs?
        ethbro 7y ago
        I suppose that was Hugh Hefner's brilliance. That if Playboy was seen as "tasteful porn", then advertising space instantly became more valuable.
- 8ytecoder 7y ago
  As long as content is flagged and companies can block their ads from content they find objectionable it would’ve been fine.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  That doesn't seem to stop Twitter.
dsabanin 7y ago
Are you worried that there's not enough porn on the internet already?
- ethbro 7y ago
  With very few exceptions, I'm in favor of the internet having more of anything that anyone is trying to make it have less of.
  - Simon_says 7y ago
    Ads? Spam?
    - ethbro 7y ago
      Sure. Caveat Utilitor. I'd rather have an internet full of dark and danger than a safe theme park moderated by corporate entities and governments.
    - okmokmz 7y ago
      >With very few exceptions
  - 420codebro 7y ago
    Hate to be that guy, but you left a mile-wide hole open in your argument: What about child porno?
- detaro 7y ago
  You shouldn't equal what tumblr considers to be "adult content" to "porn".
  - wbl 7y ago
    They flagged several classic paintings as porn on my account. Justice Stewart they are not.
    - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jdcro 7y ago
What qualifies as "better"? Twitter has pretty great user flagging, but I still get uncensored porn from people who are not followed by anyone I know in my 'Your Highlights' email, and I have safe settings enabled. I'd say even one exposure to that is enough to put off users. Or the parents of users.
- thiagomgd 7y ago
  Twitter is terrible for flagging NSFW content. Either everything you post is NSFW, not nothing you post is NSFW. You can't flag a single post as NSFW
djsumdog 7y ago
Well remember what actually happened. Apple removed their app! That's a bigger problem in general (I think at some point, legislators will need to force Apple to allow 3rd party installs without jailbreaking a phone). Tumblr had issues with jailbait and childporn. Even with a lot of moderation and policing, it was difficult to keep under control. As an interesting consequence, people who use scripts to rip entire blogs, may have underage selfies and other pics they're not even aware of. It's a strict liability crime in the US, so even having huge Tumblr dumps can be risky! There were a lot of factors involved in the censorship, and it makes me thing the future of the open web needs to be more federated/distributed. Sites like Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook need to lose relevance.
- gbear605 7y ago
  Apple specifically removed it for child porn, and once Tumblr took care of that (before removing adult content in general), Apple added them back to the store.
  - Andrex 7y ago
    Taking care of it on an ongoing basis might have been too great a burden for the (assumedly-understaffed) team, or they had too few tools to deal with it and no incentive or manpower to create new ones that worked with the existing adult content system. Simply banning adult content en masse allows them to use heuristics to identify nudtiy and genitalia in images. Previously, they would have had to make a judgment call on whether those depicted were of adult age. By banning all of it, they no longer have the responsibility to make that choice.
    - jsjohnst 7y ago
      > or they had too few tools to deal with it That wasn’t the case. They had the industry standard tools (PhotoDNA + partnership with NCMEC), but I can’t say how well they were being maintained at the time of the situation with Apple.
      - 7y ago
geargrinder 7y ago
#Epstein is trending and you have to ask why a company might be wary of advertising on a site with unmoderated adult content?
- chrischen 7y ago
  I don't think Epstein was interested in adult content.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

by ethbro 7y ago

chatmasta 7y ago

I'm sure there is plenty of training data available elsewhere on the internet...

ethbro 7y ago
Continually tagged by ~100M unique monthly visitors? (the rough drop in traffic, post-ban)

mevile 7y ago

> That choice boggles the mind. Serving ads is hard when there's porn on the site.

IshKebab 7y ago
Use a different domain then?
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  This does seem like a stupid simple solution. tumblr.com can continue being SFW, and then there'd be nsfwtumblr.com (or whatever) that contains "the good stuff". Retain account name uniqueness across both domains.
  - Zanni 7y ago
    tumblx.com, surely.
    - ethbro 7y ago
      tumblrer
  - nullc 7y ago
    My very limited experience with tumblr (pre-rule change) is that it was essentially impossible to use without being frequently exposed to sexually explicit photographs. ... in contrast to reddit, which is full of outright porn but there I seldom see anything more risque than a bikini shot unless I navigate to a relevant subreddit. Maybe the critical difference is that if your account would have anything remotely adult at all, including text, or would repost anything from account that was flagged adult then your account would need to be flagged adult. And as a result a lot of accounts were adult flagged and a lot of users felt they had to log in and enable view-adult in order to not get left out. And then even if you have no particular interest in browsing the explicit content on tumblr you can't have many contacts before you start getting occasional reposts of it. Regardless, being able to have a site which users can fully engage with without a steady stream of surprise crotch shots that they aren't interested in seems like a pretty reasonable goal. Banning the content outright seems like a really blunt way to get there, but maybe that was less damaging to the monetization strategy than making a lot of images click to load?
blobster 7y ago
How about Imgur? And Reddit?
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Reddit runs its own ad network. And has famously had issues monetizing itself.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    Partially. Reddit also has the usual DoubleClick/Adsense ads too.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
stcredzero 7y ago
If you've got porn on a domain, it doesn't matter if you show ads on porn or not, it doesn't matter if you require age verification, nothing you do will likely matter. What if there was a way to "ban" something by changing it's domain? What if there were two web apps with a linked backend? Let's say: tumblargh.com tumblarghR.com When something is "banned" from tumblargh.com, it remains on tumblarghR.com, which is otherwise a mirror of tumblargh.com.
- TremendousJudge 7y ago
  isn't this what 4chan did with 4channel.org?
  - Anon1096 7y ago
    4chan split into two sites because PayPal stopped working on the main domain, but similar idea.
coldtea 7y ago
That boggles the mind as well. The purpose of an ad is to be seen. Whether it's seen next to porn should be irrelevant. I guess, because prudery.
- mbreese 7y ago
  A great deal of advertising revolves around "brand awareness". You may not be selling a particular product to the consumer, but keeping your brand in the mind of the consumer. Understandably so, not all advertisers want their brand associated with adult content. Where an ad is seen can be just as (if not more) important to the advertiser as the ad itself. So, if your site serves up adult content -- you can guarantee that companies with large ad budgets won't be buying ad space.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >A great deal of advertising revolves around "brand awareness". You may not be selling a particular product to the consumer, but keeping your brand in the mind of the consumer. Understandably so, not all advertisers want their brand associated with adult content. If all brands allowed their ads to appear next to adult content, then it wouldn't be any special association for any particular brand, just another outlet. So I guess it has more to do with the historical prudery of some countries, when an ad appearing next to adult content would trigger angry letters to the editor, editorials, and so on from "concerned citizens". That said, advertisers didn't seem to have much issue advertising all kinds of stuff on Playboy back in the day, or FHM and the like today...
    - k_sze 7y ago
      > That said, advertisers didn't seem to have much issue advertising all kinds of stuff on Playboy back in the day, or FHM and the like today... I guess it’s because Playboy and FHM are somehow considered tasteful and for connoisseurs?
      - ethbro 7y ago
        I suppose that was Hugh Hefner's brilliance. That if Playboy was seen as "tasteful porn", then advertising space instantly became more valuable.
8ytecoder 7y ago
As long as content is flagged and companies can block their ads from content they find objectionable it would’ve been fine.
jjeaff 7y ago
That doesn't seem to stop Twitter.

dsabanin 7y ago

Are you worried that there's not enough porn on the internet already?

ethbro 7y ago
With very few exceptions, I'm in favor of the internet having more of anything that anyone is trying to make it have less of.
- Simon_says 7y ago
  Ads? Spam?
  - ethbro 7y ago
    Sure. Caveat Utilitor. I'd rather have an internet full of dark and danger than a safe theme park moderated by corporate entities and governments.
  - okmokmz 7y ago
    >With very few exceptions
- 420codebro 7y ago
  Hate to be that guy, but you left a mile-wide hole open in your argument: What about child porno?
detaro 7y ago
You shouldn't equal what tumblr considers to be "adult content" to "porn".
- wbl 7y ago
  They flagged several classic paintings as porn on my account. Justice Stewart they are not.
  - 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jdcro 7y ago

What qualifies as "better"? Twitter has pretty great user flagging, but I still get uncensored porn from people who are not followed by anyone I know in my 'Your Highlights' email, and I have safe settings enabled. I'd say even one exposure to that is enough to put off users. Or the parents of users.

thiagomgd 7y ago
Twitter is terrible for flagging NSFW content. Either everything you post is NSFW, not nothing you post is NSFW. You can't flag a single post as NSFW

djsumdog 7y ago

Well remember what actually happened. Apple removed their app! That's a bigger problem in general (I think at some point, legislators will need to force Apple to allow 3rd party installs without jailbreaking a phone). Tumblr had issues with jailbait and childporn. Even with a lot of moderation and policing, it was difficult to keep under control. As an interesting consequence, people who use scripts to rip entire blogs, may have underage selfies and other pics they're not even aware of. It's a strict liability crime in the US, so even having huge Tumblr dumps can be risky! There were a lot of factors involved in the censorship, and it makes me thing the future of the open web needs to be more federated/distributed. Sites like Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook need to lose relevance.

gbear605 7y ago
Apple specifically removed it for child porn, and once Tumblr took care of that (before removing adult content in general), Apple added them back to the store.
- Andrex 7y ago
  Taking care of it on an ongoing basis might have been too great a burden for the (assumedly-understaffed) team, or they had too few tools to deal with it and no incentive or manpower to create new ones that worked with the existing adult content system. Simply banning adult content en masse allows them to use heuristics to identify nudtiy and genitalia in images. Previously, they would have had to make a judgment call on whether those depicted were of adult age. By banning all of it, they no longer have the responsibility to make that choice.
  - jsjohnst 7y ago
    > or they had too few tools to deal with it That wasn’t the case. They had the industry standard tools (PhotoDNA + partnership with NCMEC), but I can’t say how well they were being maintained at the time of the situation with Apple.
    - 7y ago

geargrinder 7y ago

#Epstein is trending and you have to ask why a company might be wary of advertising on a site with unmoderated adult content?

chrischen 7y ago
I don't think Epstein was interested in adult content.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]