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Why “go nuts, show nuts” doesn’t work in 2022

• rejectfinite 4y ago
  Reddit is kinda the only thing like that left...
• colordrops 4y ago
  > Credit card companies are anti-porn Why?
  • colechristensen 4y ago
    “Porn” has done a historically awful job of filtering out exploitation and abuse, and made a lot of money from it.
    • dllthomas 4y ago
      On the one hand, yes. But on the other that's also been true of The Gap and Nike. Fruit companies have toppled governments, and people have been shot suppressing unionization in a host of industries. I am not convinced that the morality is enough to convince the credit card companies to forgo their cut of that "lot of money." I suspect that the bigger concern is the higher levels of fraud when many participants in a market are unusually uncomfortable turning to public courts to address disputes.
      • lupire 4y ago
        GAP and Nike abuse poor foreigners in poor countries. No risk there.
    • pessimizer 4y ago
      > “Porn” has done a historically awful job of filtering out exploitation and abuse, Has it? Does it have an actual record of abuse* that is better than, for example, the meat packing industry, or janitorial services? ----- [*] (I don't know what you mean by exploitation, I'm assuming it's just an expression of disapproval)
      • Goronmon 4y ago
        Is there a equivalent to something like https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/06/21/girlsdoporn-sentencing-porn-hub-sex-trafficking-victims/7727760002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/06/21/girlsdopor... when it comes to the meat packing or janitorial industries?
        • DoItToMe81 4y ago
          The big European porn companies in the 70s and 80s were involved in trafficking children to countries where CP was not illegal. There's really no comparison, porn companies are run by the scum of the earth.
  • Jolter 4y ago
    My guess is the risk of legal liability. There are laws in many countries that forbid them from (knowingly or unknowingly) financing child pornography or trafficking. The due diligence of verifying every transaction just seems immense and perhaps not worth the risk to them.
  • jfengel 4y ago
    They're not exactly anti-porn, but they're anti-chargeback, and they know that sex work of all kinds has a high chargeback rate. People do things, regret it (or get caught), and insist that the charge is false and must be reversed. They're also really, really against getting caught having anything to do with anything illegal, and there's a lot of illegal stuff associated with porn. It may be only a small percentage, but the last thing they want is to be sued or criminally charged. So, they are very, very wary of anything to do with porn. I'm sure they'd be happy to have their cut of that very lucrative industry, but they'd rather forego it than having their entire business destroyed over it.
    • blintz 4y ago
      I guess I don’t quite understand why using something like a debit card doesn’t work. The marijuana companies seem to have effectively figured how to take payments with almost no help from the traditional players (credit card companies, banks).
      • jfengel 4y ago
        I don't know, and it's a good question. I wonder if it has something to do with it being (for now) a local business. I am extremely wary of using my debit card online. The credit card comes with a lot of protection if the information is stolen. A debit card lets them empty my bank account. In theory, I can get it back -- eventually. If somebody who has stolen a debit card tries to use it in person, they're running a much higher risk. So the marijuana sellers may have an easier time getting access to that network. That's purely speculation, however. I know effectively nothing about the business.
        • blintz 4y ago
          That’s a fair point, although you can use a debit card for cannabis delivery services too. Maybe a good mitigation for the fraud concern is just using ‘virtual’ or physical prepaid debit cards that have a fixed balance.
        • simoncion 4y ago
  • antonymy 4y ago
    It's not that they're "anti-porn" it's that they're anti-risk. Porn sites have been getting in increasingly hot water for years for a variety of legal reasons, and all it takes is one major lawsuit against them trickling up to the payment process for enabling harm to set legal precedent and then they're getting sued for anything and everything on the basis they are enabling almost all kinds of web content. It's an understandable fear. It's just a sad fact that they are an effective global duopoly so if they chicken out there's no alternative for people to turn to. More competition would help with this, but the threat of the lawsuit floodgates opening would still be there and create a chilling effect on payment processing. That has to be handled by legislation, but that's going down a whole other thorny road with many possible bad outcomes. The legislation we get may introduce new problems even worse than the ones it attempted to solve. But I think it's still worth trying. The present situation is very bad for the future of an open internet.
  • NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
    They aren't. Pretty sure if you're a vendor selling mail-order "adult" DVDs/BDs from major publishing houses, that's a business that you'll have no difficulty running with credit card sales. Where you'll run into a problem is if you're a website that wants to charge subscriptions for access to loosely-sourced, user-generated content.
• Jgrubb 4y ago
  It took me a minute to remember why the founder of Wordpress was posting on tumblr.
  • wmf 4y ago
    For those who are a little slower, Automattic (the Wordpress company) owns Tumblr now.
  • bambax 4y ago
    It took me a minute to remember Tumblr existed.
    • intrasight 4y ago
      True :) Is becoming a pretty distant memory now. Still sad when such good things go away.
• Ambolia 4y ago
  The real story here is how we let mobile phones become completely closed and privative environments, and how credit card companies got into politics for some reason. Seems like hackers of today have really let down the public. Even bitcoin is 13 years old and I know nobody getting into it for utilitarian reasons unless they are already into it for investing.
  • numpad0 4y ago
    This is closest what I was trying to say - it started with Apple App Store's no-sideload and zero-porn policy, from which it snowballed.
  • ska 4y ago
    It's not obvious to me that CC companies are acting out of political leaning, it could conceivably be mostly risk based.
    • _dain_ 4y ago
      trust me it's political.
      • cecilpl2 4y ago
        I'm sure you're a nice person but I don't just trust unsubstantiated claims I read on the internet.
    • aetherson 4y ago
      Someone asserted to me that porn purchases have a really horrific chargeback rate, and that's the main reason credit card companies are against them. It sounds at least superficially plausible.
      • notyourday 4y ago
        That's not really true. I consulted for two companies that provided payment processing services for... non family friendly websites. They were making out like bandits charging ~30% fees. The blended charge back rate for this side of business was about 5%. The blended charge back rate for the family friendly side of business was around 3%
• colechristensen 4y ago
  There probably needs to be a “show nuts” compliance platform for standard practices, auditing, etc. for nudity and porn on social networks. Payment processors, app stores, and the platforms themselves could point to these things to prove and practice good faith so we can exit this prudish phase where in many cases less is allowed now than was broadcast on the air tv decades ago.
• lakomen 4y ago
  We had the sexual revolution in the 60s 70s. Where are we now? I can't watch porn on Android or IOS, because the apps won't get listed on the app stores. So companies censor themselves or ask that you buy a dedicated and crippled set top box. We need a revolution.
  • BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    > I can't watch porn on Android or IOS Mobile browsers exist
    • PTcartelsLOL 4y ago
      Sweet summer children everywhere!
  • pessimizer 4y ago
    Judging by who is armed, organized, and has shared values that they're willing to go to war to protect, any revolution in the US would be more likely to result in women wearing veils than porn everywhere.
• giantrobot 4y ago
  • daniel-cussen 4y ago
• nostromo 4y ago
  It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet. The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. And virtually in lockstep, they are becoming increasingly prudish. I'm curious if this could be addressed with laws that force companies to either be utilities or publishers. If you're a publisher, you take liability for your content and can edit it at will. If you're a utility, you do not take liability for your services, but you cannot pick and choose which customers you service so long as it's legal.
  • BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    The majority of the net is easily accessible porn. If there is anything here showing how easy it is to decentralize and stay alive, it is probably porn. The big boys make it harder and squash the heads sticking out, but people are acting like you won't find ungodly things the moment you turn off the safety filters and pick your words a little recklessly. Including Google.
    • lupire 4y ago
      Most of the commerical porn on the net is run by very few companies with many many brands. It's hard to run your own porn business if you don't rely on a major company.
      • bambax 4y ago
        If you search for porn images on Google you get much more porn without ever leaving Google, than you could have dreamed on all of the specialized forums in 1997.
        • AgentOrange1234 4y ago
          I’ve long wondered about their liability here with respect to age verification, consent, etc.
      • 4y ago
• henriquecm8 4y ago
  He raised an interesting question, why Twitter and Reddit get away with it, but Tumblr doesn't?
  • ratio11 4y ago
    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.“
  • jrm4 4y ago
    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.
  • partdavid 4y ago
    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).
    • noahtallen 4y ago
      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.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
• tpmx 4y ago
  So US-centric. Meanwhile XVideos etc exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XVideos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XVideos > XVideos, stylized as XVIDEOS, is a pornographic video sharing and viewing website. Founded in Paris in 2007, the website is now registered to the Czech company WGCZ Holding. As of September 2022, it is the most visited pornographic website and the tenth most visited website in the world.
• jjulius 4y ago
  I can appreciate the second point about how app stores are anti-porn, particularly in the broader discussion about how difficult it is to operate a site that hosts pornographic content, be a sex worker, etc.. Definitely worth discussing. That said, am I crazy (ignorant, perhaps?) in thinking that it's irrelevant to Tumblr? Tumblr.com still works in all browsers, and surely (here's where that ignorance of mine might come into play) it's possible to have a very similar experience via browser as you would via app. I mean, you can use FB and Instagram on mobile browsers just fine for the most part, and Tumblr, too.
  • wmf 4y ago
    I guess ads in mobile apps are worth dramatically more than Web ads.
• compiler-guy 4y ago
  Anyone bemoaning a lack of porn on the internet must be using a different internet than I am. Porn is ubiquitous in all its forms and varieties. Anything you could possibly want is just a click away. It is, however, very difficult to base a business on internet porn. That might be a problem in some ways, but it is a different problem than lack of access.
  • daniel-cussen 4y ago
    Not just a click away. You also need a little typing. Really the business in internet porn is psychological manipulation and compromat. There's no business otherwise, it's sex, it's bad for sex to be efficient, porn is efficient, too efficient. No business. As a straight model I can tell you the business is in being very close to pornography without ever actually crossing the boundary. Teasing. Very inefficient. I got down to my underwear for my portfolio day 1, no problem. Absolutely no problem. There was a girl [a very young woman model age, like 19, I was 24, her name was Antonia] getting her portfolio done simultaneous, she was naked too, but with lingerie. Our agent was there, telling me just strip, don't go to the bathroom, look at her, está en pelota she's naked. It's a living. Our interest in each other was purely professional. Teasing. Like the Russky pop stars. That's where the money is.
    • softcactus 4y ago
      Why does this read like Chuck Palahniuk
      • teddyh 4y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=daniel-cussen https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=daniel-cussen
        • daniel-cussen 4y ago
          http://fgemm.com http://fgemm.com redirects to the same place.
• elliekelly 4y ago
  When WordPress bought Tumblr I was hopeful the ridiculous “female presenting nipple” nonsense would finally go away so I’m relieved to hear that’s in the works. I understand and appreciate the compliance difficulties associated with “go nuts, show nuts” but I do hope Matt & his team will be willing to push the envelope a little and allow equal (re)presentation of all nipples on Tumblr. Not for pornographic purposes but for equality.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• eduction 4y ago
  I think it’s revealing that the founder and operator of WordPress.com openly admits he makes content decisions based on the values of executives at Apple and at credit card companies. He doesn’t even bother with any hand wavy pretense of having his own core moral values or beliefs on civil liberties. Just pure kneeling before his betters. At least it’s honest, I guess. Really sad though.
  • karaterobot 4y ago
    The post makes it blindingly clear that he disagrees with them, and that it's more a question of feasibility. Because Tumblr needs to work with credit companies and Apple in order to be sustainable, they have to play by their rules or not exist.
  • Goronmon 4y ago
    I think it’s revealing that the founder and operator of WordPress.com openly admits he makes content decisions based on the values of executives at Apple and at credit card companies. Another way to word this is that he is making a business decisions base on the financial viability of the company. I doubt many of their employees would fight for those values enough to consider working unpaid for an extended period of time. Would you?
    • eduction 4y ago
      You haven’t (nor has Matt) established that WordPress would be put out of business allowing what Tumblr previously allowed. Tumblr certainly wasn’t put out of business by Apple or the credit card companies.
• naet 4y ago
  When the author sees that twitter and reddit both have iOS apps, he handwaves it away as a mystery why they are allowed to exist on iOS. Doesn't this go directly against his claim "no modern internet service in 2022 can have the rules that Tumblr did in 2007"? They are literally the direct competitors of Tumblr, and they didn't alienate a huge chunk of their audience with strict content policies. Maybe he wasn't part of the organization at the time, but Tumblr was removed from iOS for a widely publicized child pornography incident. They made an internal decision to axe any and all adult content as a PR response. The app store did not mandate this. (edited for clarity)
  • kurtreed 4y ago
    Yeah Reddit and Twitter are mentioned in the article
  • hoppyhoppy2 4y ago
    These points are addressed in the article.
• shrubble 4y ago
  The domain "gonutshownuts.com" appears to be available, I have no need of this domain, but maybe another HNer can use it?
  • Cyberdog 4y ago
    Should be gonutsshownuts.com, though that seems to be available too. Not really sure what I'd do with that domain, though. A gallery of almonds and cashews would be good for a sensible chuckle, I suppose, but not really worth the effort.
    • booleandilemma 4y ago
      Should be gonutsshownuts.com Should it? I present to you: RAISERROR https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/language-elements/raiserror-transact-sql?view=sql-server-ver16 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/language-element...
      • ajhurliman 4y ago
        For when you want to raise a rror
        • saalweachter 4y ago
          Should be RA_IS_ERROR
• kleiba 4y ago
  One problem that's perhaps underdiscussed is that all of this is coming from an entirely US-centric world view. In Europe, for instance, we are generally less paranoid about nudity, I don't think that the notorious "nipplegate" halftime show incident back in 2004 would have caused any uproar over here, perhaps bemusement. But because the "world wide" web is really a "US-American" web at its heart, we now have to adhere to whatever standards are en vogue there today.
  • zoba 4y ago
    Or, perhaps it is "whatever are most restrictive but still societally acceptable". Europe has impacted the web by forcing us all to accept cookies. Though we reject Chinese style censorship which is more restrictive but unacceptable.
    • nicbou 4y ago
      Europe didn't force anyone to accept cookies. It forced companies to get consent before collecting your data. That's the companies' reaction to it.
  • seandoe 4y ago
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • hinkley 4y ago
    Everybody remembers Justin showing Janet's boob in 2004. Nobody remembers that in 2007, Prince used shadow puppetry to stroke a penis-shaped guitar. Not one peep about that.
    • jeroenhd 4y ago
      This is perhaps the weirdest thing about American moral values. Everything from ads to performances are oversexualised as hell but all hell comes down when someone actually pulls off their clothes. I've seen dresses that are closer to wearable nipple covers than an article of clothing on TV and some music videos contain more grinding than the average porn movie, but show a nip slip and you're in for a world of trouble. There's an absurd focus on the female nipple specifically. Someone should create a service that censors female nipples by replacing them with male nipples so they can be posted on social media and other platforms without any issues.
• dec0dedab0de 4y ago
  If Apple permanently banned Tumblr from the App Store, we’d probably have to shut the service down. I'm not finished reading but this sounds like a bunch of shit to me. If this is true it is only because they force people to use the app by sabotaging their own web page. Tumblr has been dead since Verizon took over, it's legacy is pervasive infinite scroll throughout the internet.
  • Spivak 4y ago
    I mean ~300mil MAU isn't exactly dead. If it were a country it would be as big as the US.
    • dec0dedab0de 4y ago
      Sure. I meant tumblr died in spirit, or tumblr as we knew it died, or tumblr died and a new entity with the same entity took it's place, or the old tumblr died.
• oldpmfan 4y ago
  Nice article. What would Hugh Hefner say about this World (I think it was addressed in his magazine once or twice when it was still published). We are censored and controlled by (US) political correctness World View of * App Stores: Google and Apple * Social media platforms from companies like Meta (no nipples in IG or Facebook). Try visit Playboy IG, it's a pixel joke. * Payment (although Visa and Mastercard are not against porn totally) * Infrastructure. Good luck running a porn site from common known cloud providers (btw. Cloudflare is an exception in this list). Why it is 2022 and we are not allowed to see any nipples on Apple or Google devices (only exception reddit and twitter) unless it's on websites or transferred on my own on devices? I'm clearly old enough but US companies trying to protect me by basically enforcing CENSORSHIP here. It's nothing else. To this day I cannot understand to see easily violence and horror things on all these platforms but beware we see ONE uncovered NIPPLE.
  • antonymy 4y ago
    It's why I despair of smart phones dictating the course of the internet. These are platforms that are locked down to a degree that slowly strangles the rest of the internet. It's censorship not through the heavy hand of the state arresting people and confiscating servers, but creating a climate of fear and uncertainty over ruinous lawsuits and chasing advertising dollars. The censorship effect is obfuscated through so many apparently voluntary and open transactions that the public at large has no idea it is happening. It's extremely hard to talk about this with people in my life without sounding like a paranoid conspiracy theorist.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  This mentality change goes far beyond porn. A decade ago comment sections like Slashdot and Hacker News were almost unanimously in favor of keeping the internet as unregulated and open as possible. Now it seems like every headline about social media companies attracts a lot of comments demanding regulations, restrictions, and laws to crack down on... something. Even here on HN it's common for threads about Meta to devolve into a lot of angry calls for Facebook to be "banned" for kids or for lawmakers to step in and regulate. Meanwhile, journalists and politicians love to amplify stories about tech companies doing harm to kids. Allowing, or even encouraging, something like porn on your platform is an open invitation for these journalists to put you in their sights. No company wants to be the most lax company in the space, so it's a constant game of companies tightening their standards.
  • uncomputation 4y ago
    This is conflating two very different issues around social media regulation in my opinion. I won’t claim to know “HN’s” opinion because it will likely be as varied as its users, but there are two main camps in this area: 1. Regulate data privacy and tracking 2. Regulate porn/liability risks The first camp generally opposes Facebook for its huge collection of personal information and tracking across the web. By “regulation,” they mean make this kind of behavior illegal so I don’t have to run Facebook Container and try to cover my tracks to have privacy online. I don’t really believe these sorts of people have issues with porn online, unless their porn habits/opinions are used to profile them perhaps. The second camp is the likes of Nicholas Kristof and FOSTA-SESTA, who believe that unregulated social media will lead to sex trafficking and prostitution. I’m not gonna get into the validity of these concerns, but generally these people are not concerned about data privacy and in fact want companies to be able to identify people by name and stop any crimes facilitated via their site. You also have another curious mention of regulation for kids which I interpret as a reference to Instagram Kids. The backlash here was, from my memory, much broader than the likes of either the EFF or the porn crusaders alone and had a lot to do with the recent press about Facebook being harmful to teenage girls in particular and children in general. So, a lot of parents were upset at the idea of an entire app dedicated just to Instagram for kids. Of course, I am sure there were also people concerned that Facebook was further cementing a digital “pipeline” from childhood to adulthood where your Facebook account follows you the whole way and makes data collection and surveillance even more powerful. I also disagree with the notion that “no company wants to be the most lax company in the space.” If anything, from this post and also from sites such as OnlyFans, I think many sites “want” to host adult content in the sense of “want” meaning don’t want to turn away potential users. The issue is, as this post touches on, being associated with adult or illicit content can result in payment processors blocking your accounts and advertisers souring. You can see a milder example of this on YouTube with unsavory videos being demonetized because advertisers don’t want their ads played over a video about serial killers or racism. It’s not that YouTube is cowering at some journalist penning them as a public menace, it’s that they want advertisers’ dollars and advertisers don’t like adult content because it’s a threat to their public image. Regardless, this “race to the bottom” theory doesn’t really hold water when you consider that only Tumblr has banned adult content. Twitter and Reddit still allow it and there are even whole sites dedicated to distribution of it (OnlyFans and its clones) which have never existed before on this scale. Then again, you have things like PornHub taking down “unverified” videos after threat from Mastercard, so it’s not really clear either way. This was a very long reply I realize, but I had a lot to say I suppose.
• version_five 4y ago
  Isn't this some variation on the idea that as something gets "successful" it becomes shitty? I'm sure there are private corners of the internet where lots of people are going and showing nuts, that by definition most people don't know about, allowing more people than in 2007 or whatever to share what they want. But the internet is also now completely dominated by the blandness of success, so what we see are the successes that have been forced to sell out to the complainers and pearl clutches (there's an associated name I can't remember). (Incidentally, this is a reason I've argued that the facebook metaverse will suck. It is never going to have some halcyon days as a cool site before success ruins it. It's coming out of the box with people worrying about "groping" and whatnot in a way that will force it to suck by design because everything will be about "safety" and the like, before anything good takes hold. See also the Zune)
• donatj 4y ago
  What I've realized in my 25+ years of using the internet is that letting the normies on here ruined everything.
  • leobg 4y ago
    So where do you go on the internet where Eternal September hasn’t arrived yet? Dark web? 4chan? Gopher...?
  • the_doctah 4y ago
    Eternal September
    • donatj 4y ago
      I was unfamiliar with this term, but this clearly and concisely describes my experiences.
      • caust1c 4y ago
        It's the most relatable term I've encountered to describe the concept of reversion to the mean.
    • caust1c 4y ago
      You surely mean Eternal Sub-tember, right!? Think of the profits to be made! /s
  • 6stringmerc 4y ago
    I distinctly remember reading Kurt Cobain’s journal collection hardcover and there was an observation that bothered him: With success, the crowds at the shows started to change, eventually to the point Kurt lamented “why are these people here? these are the people who beat us up in high school.”
• saurik 4y ago
  CollegeHumor, soon before it was forced to dismantle itself, did a sketch involving the CEO of Tumblr coming to realize just how much porn was really on the site. This article is an amazing sequel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtUuab1Aqg0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtUuab1Aqg0
• anyfactor 4y ago
  I used tumblr as my personal blog in 2022. I have never used Tumblr before, but I felt like the platform was designed for me. I can't put my ideas into a tweet without creating a thread and I despise threads. Twitter promotes a weird impulsive behavior to write everything without thinking. On the other hand, I think blogging platforms like Medium has a "commitment to read feel". You know you see the header then you convince that is something you must read, that would be that "commitment read thing". The content is hidden so you have to micro-commit to click and wait for the page to load, based on a single sentence called title. Not my thing I guess. My personal blog is personal and thus is poorly written. So Tumblr has the perfect design as to me it feels like an uninterrupted twitter thread (twitter if you steal this idea, pay me). Obviously, the better option is to create your own static blog site based on Github pages and Hugo. I am not sure where Tumblr could pivot, as people who could have used Tumblr to give it's second life now has their personal blogs and they post those blogs into other platforms. Blogging as a writing method has shifted to become platform agnostic.
  • QuadmasterXLII 4y ago
    I'd use tumblr for blogging if it had LaTeX. (Although it has plenty of latex)
    • techdragon 4y ago
      It had a lot more latex before the great purge…
• chiefalchemist 4y ago
  Matt is correct. Things have chanced, and not for the better. Having mega-international corporations dictate our morals, among other things, is not something that should be rationalized so easily. Is this something about being a self-proclaimed Libertarian I don't understand?
• Retr0id 4y ago
  > If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you’d need to be web-only on iOS and side load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don’t dox your users, and make a ton of money. It's really quite sad that this is the case. What can we do, collectively, to fix it?
  • intrasight 4y ago
    "Nothing to fix - it ain't broke". That's what the puritans against porn and other vices would say.
  • strathmeyer 4y ago
    Dude is describing Fetlife.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• HomeDeLaPot 4y ago
  If you buy porn with cash, there's no payment processor to stop your payment from going through. But now that we all use credit cards, it is technically feasible to stop your payments from happening depending on what you are trying to purchase. And so credit card companies are under pressure to do so. It's not just limited to porn. If anything is controversial enough, then its payments can be shut down. I was just reading this earlier today: https://world.hey.com/dhh/i-was-wrong-we-need-crypto-587ccb03 https://world.hey.com/dhh/i-was-wrong-we-need-crypto-587ccb0... What should the future be: cash, crypto, or mobile payments à la WeChat?
  • bluedino 4y ago
    Couldn't you buy some third party credits that could be paid for with credit cards and accepted by the unacceptable companies?
• intrasight 4y ago
  > the casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible There are plenty of porn sites. Some are even pretty good. I subscribed to MakeLoveNotPorn after hearing about it on a podcast. Credit cards accepted. I honestly don't get what is the argument or point he's trying to make. I'm sure that he could make a new porn startup if he wanted. There's a lot of competition but it's probably still profitable for those that succeed.
• shadowgovt 4y ago
  I can't tell one way or the other if people have forgotten that SESTA/FOSTA passed in 2018. All of this is consequence of that law working as intended (not as described; it's supposed to stop human trafficking, but those supporting it made no bones about their position that if it chilled all online pornographic content, they didn't care). All of these companies pivoted hard because hosting previously-legal content may now be a federal crime, and nobody wants to get dragged through the mud of that legal case. Until and unless that changes, this is the new status quo in the United States (and therefore, much of the Internet). Matt on Tumblr seems to have missed that even if a company does all the things on his list, their owners could still end up in prison if they are aware that any pornography on their sites was "facilitating sex trafficking," which is an extremely broad category (is someone using racy pictures as advertisement for face-to-face meetups? Oops, go to jail; Section 230 protections were specifically stripped out for that case and if it violates state law in the state you're operating in, the state the poster is in, or the state the viewer is in, you're now liable as the site operator!).
• zaidf 4y ago
  >Credit card companies are anti-porn. False. Credit card companies are simply protecting their business. From what? The laws and court rulings that make them liable for damages from really terrible edge case scenarios.
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• bcrosby95 4y ago
  > do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail This reminds me. A while back, we were researching selling something online that required age verification, and for our system to be legal, we needed to use a 3rd party system to verify ages. Which we were fine with. However, if the 3rd party was wrong, we were legally liable. Which we were not fine with. Going to jail because a legally mandated 3rd party system is wrong was not on our bucket list.
• puglr 4y ago
  It is notable that the first item in their list is objectively false: > You’ve probably heard how Pornhub can’t accept credit cards anymore. That was only temporarily true due to illegal UGC. It lasted less than a month. Once pornhub removed their unverified UGC they were allowed to take credit cards again, or at least Visa. One would think that given the nature of this post, they ought to have their facts straight. Credit cards aren't anti-porn. They are anti-unmoderated UGC porn, for obvious reasons. It's understandable that this does present a problem for sites like Tumblr. But the way it is presented is misleading at best and in part based on a false premise.
  • LordDragonfang 4y ago
    The fact check here is important, but saying that it was just "due to illegal UGC" downplays the fact that there are lots of platforms with oodles of "illegal" UGC, but it's the porn companies that have gotten the brunt of CC companies' ire. The increasing scrutiny specifically on porn (some of which is due to SESTA/FOSTA, as another poster pointed out) has had a chilling effect on sex work across the whole web. Also, while true that CC companies aren't anti-porn in a strict sense, credit cards really do not get along very well with sex work or porn in general. They'll reluctantly take their money, but it's a very strained relationship, with high fees in part due to the high number of chargebacks, and in part because no one is going to go to bat politically for porn sites. It's arguable whether the CC companies are "anti-porn", but they are definitely not "pro-porn".
  • concordDance 4y ago
    > Once pornhub removed their unverified UGC The age of people being able to freely share content with each other is dead I see.
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    • parasubvert 4y ago
      Child porn is the ultimate justification for increasing authoritarianism these days, particularly out of the US.
• controversial97 4y ago
  It appeared to me that at least 99% of the porn on tumblr was not original content, it was commercial porn upload by random people in violation of copyright law. They must have had to deal with a very large number of DMCA takedown requests. Even with automation that takes down every blog entry that is reported through a web form, it seems very likely to me that just the staffing cost of dealing with emails and paper letters would outweigh the meagre advertising revenue from porn blogs.
• _y3es 4y ago
  So, some context for this. Recently a new feature was rolled out to Tumblr, where you can change or add a community label to a post. More details on it here: https://help.tumblr.com/hc/en-us/articles/5436241401239 https://help.tumblr.com/hc/en-us/articles/5436241401239, but the tldr is posts can be flagged based on some possibly troubling or triggering content for some viewers. Once the general Tumblr-sphere caught on, people thought this meant "Go nuts, show nuts" was back; as in, NSFW is generally allowed again. However, that was definitely not the case, as nothing in the TOS or other site details was updated to reflect allowing NSFW. This was just an addition that we're (Tumblr users) suspecting is one part of possibly allowing NSFW content again. Thus the above is why I think photomatt put that post up, perhaps in response to all the inquiries and buzz on the site. Source: daily tumblr user :)
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• throwaway292939 4y ago
  I was following until the mention of Twitter and Reddit. They should face every single challenge that Tumblr does regarding porn. What do they do differently? I feel that Tumblr should be able to overcome these issues.
  • lofatdairy 4y ago
    I was about to say the same thing. Reddit is a huge host for pornography, and Twitter is where most sex-workers share and network currently. Reddit certainly has advertisers and an iOS presences, not to mention people b̶u̶r̶n̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶m̶o̶n̶e̶y̶ ̶o̶n paying for awards. I can't speak to Twitter because I'm not on the site, but my understanding is that neither bother with any formal age verification either. Not sure what's different except maybe the size of their legal team.
  • kbos87 4y ago
    This. Twitter and Reddit in 2022 are every bit as unregulated as Tumblr was in 2007, and I don't see any talk of major challenges or changes desired on their parts.
• bohdank 4y ago
  Web3 Tumblr anyone?
• t_mann 4y ago
  Let me check if I'm getting this right - it sounds like the more fundamental way to address this wouldn't be to make a new Tumblr/OnlyFans/..., but to make a financial services provider that doesn't discriminate against those businesses? I wasn't aware that you basically can't use financial services if you're in that business - is that true? How does OnlyFans handle this?
• mcdermott 4y ago
  I've always been puzzled how in movies on TV in the USA, they'll air brush nipples, cleavage and butt cracks away... in the same scene that someone is being gruesomely murdered with blood spurting and entrails hanging out. It makes no sense that nudity is too dangerous for children to see, but desensitizing them to violence and gore is OK.
  • hoelle 4y ago
    Our culture is biased in ways that helped it survive harder times. The bloodlust is easy to explain. The tribe better at war survives. Veneration of honorable warriors runs deep in our veins. Sales for Top Gun, Marvel movies, action games continue to soar. The puritanical outlook developed to create stable monogamous families. That bit of artifice is dissolving now. More polygamy means the top men hoarding reproductive access, which historically leads to instability. Sexual socialism was an interesting run, but with the demise of religion, I'm not sure how we could save it.
    • make3 4y ago
      I wonder how long it will take for right wing society to internalize that preservatives exist nowadays
  • jacquesc 4y ago
    Maybe it's a glass half full scenario? I'm pretty happy the nanny state allows blood/gore at least. Imagine if they were consistent and movies/tv/video games were also whitewashed of blood too. What a miserable media world we'd be in. I can remember how disappointed I was when I bought home Mortal Kombat for SNES and there was no blood. Truly horrifying.
  • Tade0 4y ago
    My pet theory is that you can't portray a career in military as something attractive if the population is too sensitive to violence. The US armed forces, with close to 1.4mln personnel, is one of the largest employers in the country.
• braingenious 4y ago
  That’s a whole lot of words about a theory that the author admits would only be true if Twitter didn’t exist.
• yuan43 4y ago
  One of the listed reasons: > Credit card companies are anti-porn. You’ve probably heard how Pornhub can’t accept credit cards anymore. Or seen the new rules from Mastercard. Whatever crypto-utopia might come in the coming decades, today if you are blocked from banks, credit card processing, and financial services, you’re blocked from the modern economy. The vast majority of Automattic’s revenue comes from people buying our services and auto-renewing on credit cards, including the ads-free browsing upgrade that Tumblr recently launched. If we lost the ability to process credit cards, it wouldn’t just threaten Tumblr, but also the 2,000+ people in 97 countries that work at Automattic across all our products. There are different ways to be "blocked." You can be blocked because your website can't accept CC payments, or you can be blocked because you are, for example, sanctioned by the US. It's possible to be blocked in the former sense without being blocked in the latter. For example, you own a website that accepts Bitcoin payments and which does not link to your identity. Like it or hate it, this is a use case. I bring this up because a favorite point of contention seems to be that Bitcoin has no use cases. Here's one. If that sounds outlandish, consider how very far the Internet has come along the free speech axis, as many commenters on this thread have pointed out. Now consider how far there remains to go and what the future is likely to hold based on past trends. Granted, one thing Bitcoin hasn't quite managed to do (yet?) is replicate automatic payments without trusted third parties.
• noduerme 4y ago
  During my time running an early Bitcoin casino, I more or less developed a template for each of the issues mentioned in this post's final paragraph (with the exception of age verification for uploaded adult content, which strikes me as nearly impossible these days). It was a ton of work, it was certainly a lot more expensive than running a normal service, and it had operational risk - not the least of which waa that a misstep in KYC could have put me in serious legal trouble. Also, even in 2011, running something like that caused me to become the target of a ddos attack large enough to temporarily clog a major backbone and get kicked off what was supposed to be a bunker/military grade host. That being said, I was doing it literally alone, with only the most indolent and shady of lawyers as erstwhile partners. It can be done. It's definitely an uphill battle at every step, but operating only in crypto and setting up intelligently designed verification systems, and most importantly, spreading your server operations across as many different jurisdictions as possible in a federated way, you could probably still boot it for gambling. This also assumes you're smart and go to great lengths to block jurisdictions where it's illegal. For porn, I'm less sure.
• _8j50 4y ago
  Personally I think this is for the best. Maybe tech and laws can catch up some day but until then it is better to have "bullshit" restrictions than have real people get hurt and at scale too.
  • int_19h 4y ago
    Why draw the line there, though? A CCTV camera in every bedroom would really cut down on sexual abuse, seeing how most of it is perpetrated in-family.
    • _8j50 4y ago
      Because those are not publicly shared where nonconsensual stuff is profitable and uniquely damaging with no inherent need for sharing them. The keyword is share. Less people get hurt and some people get less porn, what am i missing?
• tanelpoder 4y ago
  Does tumblr really hijack the browser back button? I tried to get back to HN from that link by hitting the back button, but I got redirected back to the tumblr article. I could have just closed the browser tab, but a long-press on the back-button allowed me to select this HN page from the recent history. Why does anyone still do this? Do they really think I give in and stay reading/browsing tumblr forever instead of doing what I had planned?
• ParadisoShlee 4y ago
  Absolute cowardice.
• p00000676556 4y ago
• Rayyan_Nafees 4y ago
• qwerty456127 4y ago
  Just move to a proper jurisdiction. America is historically puritan (which has its bad and good parts), continental Europe isn't. Also web-only is great, I would never install the app anyway.
• hot_gril 4y ago
  As someone who's launched small social-ish sites (non-porn), I've thought about this too. There's no way to keep your hands off the users' content, yet that can get you into trouble too, and laws are being proposed to make some forms of moderation illegal. The current easiest path for a small platform is to reserve the right to ban anyone for any opaque reason, and to do that a lot to avoid becoming the hangout place for mischief. The big platforms must find it impossible to satisfy all the regulators with one stance, especially since they're international, so they wear multiple faces instead. You at least dodge some liability by not being on the App Store. Apple will throw you under the bus for unpredictable reasons. They insta-banned several Civil War games for containing Confederate flags in a historical context, seemingly following a trend at the time.
• hknmtt 4y ago
  As said, the main problem are visa and master who monopolized the consumer spending options and keep their firm grip on that parasitic business of theirs. Crypto SHOULD have changed but instead too many greedy people made it into a complete scam and took away any credibility it could have had. So we still have no alternatives and regulations and governments make it so we will not have those alternatives any time soon either. Banks are still living in 1980 and unable to do and settle payments immediately .... OVER THE *** INTERNET ... IN 2022. The entire financial industry is archaic AF. Porn used to be the pioneer with everything because it had the numbers behind it(they also had their hands in bluray vs hd-dvd war). But nowadays, thing have changed and it's not like it used to be. Everything had been monopolized and regulated and gate-kept so moving forward is harder than ever, even though it sounds like it should be the other way round. PS: look at visa and master cutting out russians altogether just because they felt like it. that is the power they hold.
• seydor 4y ago
  > are anti-porn Are anti-nudity. Even nudist communities have to abide by the rules, wanna show nude you must post your passport. Glad the real world ain't that prude. Can't people pay by mail cash? > It may already exist and I don’t know about it. Yes , it's cryptocurrencies, but people can't be bothered. So we are going to need crypto-aggregators, which are not possible to be taken down. Users are probably going to have to host their content on something like ipfs , too
• alangibson 4y ago
  This is good for Bitcoin. JK, sort of. As credit card companies get more prudish, paying for adult content may actually turn out to be the killer app that makes normies comfortable using crypto for payments. You could see an entire economy spring up based around an audited stablecoin, if one ever comes to be.
• wcerfgba 4y ago
  There's something ironic about a centralised entity complaining about other centralised entities... If you look at Matt's conceptual framework, you can find the implicit frame around his argument. It's not really "impossible", but it is "impossible if you are a centralised, for-profit platform". As a counter-example to this post, look at Mastodon. There are iOS and Android apps available, dozens if not hundreds of servers which permit NSFW content, all operating quite happily and covering costs without making a profit. For example, mastodon.lol uses Patreon to accept donations for covering server costs. Mastodon is not perfect, but don't pretend that it's impossible to build a "go nuts, show nuts" platform in 2022. It might be impossible to build a centralised, for-profit platform like that, but that doesn't mean it's impossible outside of the constraints of walled-garden attention-economy capitalism.
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• taylorius 4y ago
  It's odd how online media sites are so prudish, while Netflix et al seemingly can't go 30 seconds without showing (usually good looking) naked people. Perhaps it's the fear of online "DIY nudity" being liable to go a bit far - there are a lot of potential bad taste cliffs to fall off.
• julik 4y ago
  Besides the topic, this is an excellent example what corporate communication should be. We often blame companies for corporate-speak filled with platitudes and BS. This post gives a prime example how to do it right by externalising constraints honestly
• oytis 4y ago
  "Credit card companies are anti X" is an extremely worrying argument. Paying and being paid for legal goods and services should be a basic right.
• egypturnash 4y ago
  It’s so fucking nice to see a post like this coming from the top of an organization for once. Usually CEOs dance around this issue.
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