7 ms·

Tumblr and why ‘the porn-friendly era of the internet is over’

43 points by nigerian1981 4y ago

scotty79 4y ago
> The anonymity offered by 4chan lead, perversely, to a uniformity of tone, as users conform to the zeitgeist of the site, unable to build a name for themselves as an individual. That's a very interesting observation.
- ifqwz 4y ago
  Anonimity and conformity are important features for most boards; even though users can choose not to be anonymous by using what is called a tripcode others will call you a "tripfag" and ignore or deride your posts.
- willis936 4y ago
  Anonymity also lowers the barrier to contrarian attitudes that go against the zeitgeist. There are no downvotes or upvotes and if someone insults you what they're insulting is a mask you put up. 4chan posters are insulated from identity attacks. So if most people want to be sheep they can and will, but it isn't an inherent property of the medium.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  Unmoderated (or minimally moderated) forums inevitably stabilize to the lowest common denominator participants. Sites like 4Chan end up with a uniform tone because trolling, immaturity, and vulgarity will cause anyone with higher standards to quickly self-select away from the site. The content trends toward a sort of stability around content that repels people who don’t want to see it. Bad behavior is essentially rewarded by reinforcing the echo chamber. Similar patterns occur on alternative sites created to escape moderation on popular platforms: Voat was created to escape perceived unfair moderation on Reddit, but quickly became an echo chamber of all the terrible content that Reddit wouldn’t tolerate. A similar story is playing out with the new TheMotte website that left Reddit, which is systematically collecting all of the people with terrible, racist opinions who weren’t welcome on the Reddit equivalent.
  - throw0101c 4y ago
    > Unmoderated (or minimally moderated) forums inevitably stabilize to the lowest common denominator participants. Self-/unmoderated ideals always reminds me of this: > The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong. * https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
hoppyhoppy2 4y ago
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33025477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33025477 15 days ago
digitalsushi 4y ago
This article has the same 'checksum' as people talking about how their artistic college-roommates would clean their dirty artwork up so that they could cultivate a CV that Disney would approve. I'm wary for the day ML de-anonymizes a popular non-de-plum - someone carefully disguising their artwork to release their passion under one name, and their day-job art under another. Written and visual both seem susceptible to this as we follow the arrow of time. What happens to art when you literally cannot hide your name?
- melony 4y ago
  > I'm wary for the day ML de-anonymizes a popular non-de-plum - someone carefully disguising their artwork to release their passion under one name, and their day-job art under another. Written and visual both seem susceptible to this as we follow the arrow of time. Using the correct spelling of words would be a start in defending against such models *Nom de plume. Pen name.
  - Zigurd 4y ago
    Or you just have a bias against the fruity aspects of writing smut
  - junofan 4y ago
    Today’s author identification models usually use some sort of embedding, so uncorrected misspellings are probably a no-op.
sashenka 4y ago
funkyfourier 4y ago
> But the App Store isn’t just a store, it’s also the only way of installing software on the most popular smartphone in the world, and the company’s decisions about what businesses it wants to support have a way of warping the entire culture. In the case of porn this is not much of an issue, but the fact that these companies have that kind if power I find really scary. As stated in the article Apple (and Google too one would think) have the power to shut down many businesses for whatever reason they see fit.
- cm2187 4y ago
  And they are not shy about doing it. App stored and payment processors also. The rest has a decent enough amount of competition.
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  Banning alternative browsers in particular was a huge lead weight around open source on mobile.
  - danielheath 4y ago
    What's banned is marking a data page as executable (which happens to be required if you want to build a competitive javascript engine). The practical upshot of this is that nobody has bothered porting a browser engine to iOS, since it's javascript performance would be unacceptably slow.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  > and Google too one would think Google allows sideloading of apps. Of course if you start on the play store and get kicked off that can kill your business, but if you build your audience elsewhere it can work out just fine. There's a pornhub Android app, and an ecosystem of dating sims, visual novels containing erotic content, etc. Patreon is probably responsible for a couple of million dollars a month in Android app "subscriptions".
  - Zak 4y ago
seydor 4y ago
This can be better explained by demographics. The people who were in their 20s in the 2000s are now in their 40s and 50s and more conservative overall. If GenZ had control of the internet (which the GenXrs had) you wouldn't let your children and your grandma near it (and it would be a Good thing)
- unpopularopp 4y ago
  > If GenZ had control of the internet you wouldn't let your children and your grandma near it What do you mean by this? Zoomers are the new puritans not the previous generation
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    Calling individual generations “the new Puritans” makes this position all the more explicitly ridiculous. Which generation is the new Huguenots?
    - jrm4 4y ago
      Nah, it's a reasonable shorthand and more widely understood than "Huguenots."
      - woodruffw 4y ago
        The point was that there’s no consistent characterization that people have in mind for “new Puritans,” which makes it especially pointless to label an entire generation that way. Just a small case in point: Gen Z is the most openly queer/non-traditional generation in US history. There are entire segments of our population that consider that nature to be sexually deviant and want to control it with social restrictions. So why are Gen Z the “puritans”?
        nemo44x 4y ago
        I think it’s because they have a religious zeal about themselves generally speaking. An inquisition like air that permeates many aspects of culture they are involved in. fundamentalist attitudes abound and an inability to consider alternatives blended with a constant appeal to authority. In essence, an extremely conformist and neurotic generation.
ekianjo 4y ago
Isnt the appstore supposed to allow app sideloading in the near future because of recent push from the EU?
- oneoff786 4y ago
  Digital Markets Act. Let’s see!
ifqwz 4y ago
It's not the porn-friendly era. It's the free speech-friendly era. It's not only pornography that is banned. The wrong thoughts are banned from the app store as well.
- DoctorOW 4y ago
  What evidence is there of this?
  - ifqwz 4y ago
    Platforms such as Telegram have to make it impossible to access certain channels/groups/bots when you use an iphone or they risk getting deleted from the app store. nsfw channels on discord are also inaccessible from iphones. Apps such as gab were banned completely for not complying. This is just a few examples of apps that I know of (I don't use that many) --- there probably are many more examples that I'm not aware of.
    - DoctorOW 4y ago
      Are those Telegram examples also NSFW? I don't see the meaningful distinction between NSFW content and porn.
      - snovv_crash 4y ago
        There are a lot of other NSFW topics, like gore, bondage, gambling, organization of union activity or illegal protests, etc. Apple only specifically bans porn though, because of American puritan morals, I guess.
      - msla 4y ago
        > I don't see the meaningful distinction between NSFW content and porn. Abstract: Pornography is reasonably well-understood by honest adults. "NSFW" is a bullshit term that's expanded based on how criticism-averse the host is, and how effectively the assholes can come out to shit on minorities. Queer content is often marked "NSFW" simply for being queer, even if it isn't pornographic as a rational adult would understand the term.^1 Saying "NSFW" or "inappropriate" content is being removed is a typical content-free claim from companies that don't know, and don't care, how much queer content will be removed and how much will never be created due to the chilling effect. ^1 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444820904362 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444820904362 Of course, add to this the usual tactic of people insisting that the very existence of queer people is "inappropriate" or "NSFW" and the host is opening itself up to a shitstorm it is likely to resolve by increasing its content controls and doing further damage to queer expression on the platform.
Zak 4y ago
I'd really like to see more online sharing migrate to decentralized technologies. ActivityPub, used by Mastodon, PixelFed, Friendica and others provides a similar social networking experience without a small set of gatekeepers controlling what kind of content is allowed or a small set of algorithms dictating what gets popular. The technologies to do this are already adequate (though there's always room for refinement), but the marketing and onboarding to make it mainstream aren't there.
lo_zamoyski 4y ago
What Hegel might have called the cunning of reason at work. Porn has had and is having an extremely destructive and deranging effect on people, especially the young and especially men, especially given its ubiquity and accessibility today on the internet. It corrupts their ability and motivation to seek out and develop healthy relationships with others. I'm sure it plays some role in the demographic crisis. Whereas Gen X and even Gen Y (Millennials) were first exposed to pornography in very limited ways (the odd Playboy magazine), Gen Z has been practically raised on porn having been exposed to indefinite amounts of it on their smartphones. I welcome the withering of "porn culture" and the crippling of this depraved industry of exploitation and corruption. It destroys individuals and rots societies.
- msla 4y ago
  Do you have any evidence whatsoever for pornography having the effects you claim?
- cykros 4y ago
  Arguably, the phone itself as an object of instant gratification seems more the issue here than the porn being accessed on it. Sure, easily available porn may short circuit some normal sexual interaction, but the phone as an alternative to actual social interaction seems surely the more pervasive problem. Humans can do just fine without much in the way of sexual interaction, as evidenced by centuries of communities across a variety of cultures that take oaths of celibacy. I'm not so sure the same can be said of large groups of people sharing resources in common without having social skills.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Porn is a product designed to draw in consumers, and with social media the business is either targeting marketing to the pool of consumers, or getting the consumers to sign up for some kind of paid monthly plan. Generally speaking, everyone agrees that there should be some kind of regulation of products for various reasons. With porn, the main issue is that the only performers should be consenting adults. The fact that some buyers of social media ad services don't want to be affiliated with porn content is a market issue, not a regulatory issue. Note also this is hardly the only controversial class of content. Consider two others: the manufacture of weapons and explosives, and the manufacture of drugs. These also break down on the legal/illegal boundary. For example, with weapons, what's allowed? YT is full of videos on how to reload gun ammunition, for example, but when it comes to home synthesis of gunpowder needed to reload those cartidges, using the well-known historical recipe (charcoal, saltpetre, sulfur), it seems those are all taken down under 'YT community guidelines'. Curiously, automatic weapons or machine guns (including disassembly and repair) are also all over YT, even though owning such weapons without a license is about as illegal as home synthesis of explosives is. Another example: drug chemistry. Aspirin is common household medication and is synthesized by the reaction of salicylic acid (from willow bark) with acetic anhydride (basically, dehydrated vinegar). There are no shortage of detailed walk-through videos on how to do this reaction on YT. However, if we simply replace the willow bark extract with opium extract (i.e. morphine), we are now making heroin, diacetylated morphine. No such hands-on walk-through videos seem to exist on YT, or for say, the conversion of coca leaves to cocaine sulfate paste to cocaine hydrochloride or freebase cocaine (i.e. crack). There are of course, no such restrictions on videos about the fermentation of agricultural products and the distillation of the result into strong liquors (does YT block this in Muslim countries?). Growing cannabis is currently a kind of grey area. It seems that social media companies want their user-uploaded content to be in line with the regulatory norms of their viewer's host government (and perhaps more fuzzy concepts like local social norms), but those norms, globally speaking, are all over the map.
- techdragon 4y ago
  I’m glad I’m not the only one that notices these sorts of odd contrasts… and all I’ve ever been able to work out is that Its exemplary of current social norms in California and the wider USA more generally because things like pot growing becoming a grey area coincides with changes to laws and trends in these places.
Chernobog 4y ago
I think card companies and the related businesses have too much power. I am a board member of a BDSM club operated by a volunteer organization (we are legally a non-profit). We want to implement card payment on our website for membership and event tickets, but when applying for the service that would be the best option in our country, their payment processor rejects the application citing that they don't allow things like strip clubs, sexually oriented massage parlors, escort agencies or "any sexually-related clubs or services". I get that a BDSM club would easily get caught by this wording, but it's a social arena where our members can hook up and play, and we don't sell any sexual services. Adding insult to injury, the company behind the service loudly markets that they support Pride every year. The payment processor has pictures on their Facebook of employees attending the Pride parade... We're not a commercial entity, our activities are legal and we also march under the same (rainbow) flag. Oh, and there is no reasonable appeals process. We initially applied for a different product a while back and got rejected since they had run our web page through Google Translate and determined that we were involved with "public group sex". Asking the service to get is in touch with the payment processor to clear up the misunderstanding was not possible, they just said there was no way to appeal and our best bet would be to contact them ourselves through their website. /rant.
- invalidname 4y ago
  That sucks. I blame Steve Jobs. This was all going in the right direction of freedom of speech == sexual freedom == censorship free internet. Then Steve tried to market the appstore as a walled garden and wanted to keep 30% of the revenue so he branded everything as "safe" including no-porn. I don't think this was his intention but it snowballed into this. I hate crypto with a vengeance but when I hear stories like this I totally get why people are so much into it.

43 points by nigerian1981 4y ago

> The anonymity offered by 4chan lead, perversely, to a uniformity of tone, as users conform to the zeitgeist of the site, unable to build a name for themselves as an individual. That's a very interesting observation.

ifqwz 4y ago
Anonimity and conformity are important features for most boards; even though users can choose not to be anonymous by using what is called a tripcode others will call you a "tripfag" and ignore or deride your posts.
willis936 4y ago
Anonymity also lowers the barrier to contrarian attitudes that go against the zeitgeist. There are no downvotes or upvotes and if someone insults you what they're insulting is a mask you put up. 4chan posters are insulated from identity attacks. So if most people want to be sheep they can and will, but it isn't an inherent property of the medium.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
Unmoderated (or minimally moderated) forums inevitably stabilize to the lowest common denominator participants. Sites like 4Chan end up with a uniform tone because trolling, immaturity, and vulgarity will cause anyone with higher standards to quickly self-select away from the site. The content trends toward a sort of stability around content that repels people who don’t want to see it. Bad behavior is essentially rewarded by reinforcing the echo chamber. Similar patterns occur on alternative sites created to escape moderation on popular platforms: Voat was created to escape perceived unfair moderation on Reddit, but quickly became an echo chamber of all the terrible content that Reddit wouldn’t tolerate. A similar story is playing out with the new TheMotte website that left Reddit, which is systematically collecting all of the people with terrible, racist opinions who weren’t welcome on the Reddit equivalent.
- throw0101c 4y ago
  > Unmoderated (or minimally moderated) forums inevitably stabilize to the lowest common denominator participants. Self-/unmoderated ideals always reminds me of this: > The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong. * https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...

hoppyhoppy2 4y ago

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33025477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33025477 15 days ago

digitalsushi 4y ago

This article has the same 'checksum' as people talking about how their artistic college-roommates would clean their dirty artwork up so that they could cultivate a CV that Disney would approve. I'm wary for the day ML de-anonymizes a popular non-de-plum - someone carefully disguising their artwork to release their passion under one name, and their day-job art under another. Written and visual both seem susceptible to this as we follow the arrow of time. What happens to art when you literally cannot hide your name?

melony 4y ago
> I'm wary for the day ML de-anonymizes a popular non-de-plum - someone carefully disguising their artwork to release their passion under one name, and their day-job art under another. Written and visual both seem susceptible to this as we follow the arrow of time. Using the correct spelling of words would be a start in defending against such models *Nom de plume. Pen name.
- Zigurd 4y ago
  Or you just have a bias against the fruity aspects of writing smut
- junofan 4y ago
  Today’s author identification models usually use some sort of embedding, so uncorrected misspellings are probably a no-op.

sashenka 4y ago

funkyfourier 4y ago

> But the App Store isn’t just a store, it’s also the only way of installing software on the most popular smartphone in the world, and the company’s decisions about what businesses it wants to support have a way of warping the entire culture. In the case of porn this is not much of an issue, but the fact that these companies have that kind if power I find really scary. As stated in the article Apple (and Google too one would think) have the power to shut down many businesses for whatever reason they see fit.

cm2187 4y ago
And they are not shy about doing it. App stored and payment processors also. The rest has a decent enough amount of competition.
adhesive_wombat 4y ago
Banning alternative browsers in particular was a huge lead weight around open source on mobile.
- danielheath 4y ago
  What's banned is marking a data page as executable (which happens to be required if you want to build a competitive javascript engine). The practical upshot of this is that nobody has bothered porting a browser engine to iOS, since it's javascript performance would be unacceptably slow.
wongarsu 4y ago
> and Google too one would think Google allows sideloading of apps. Of course if you start on the play store and get kicked off that can kill your business, but if you build your audience elsewhere it can work out just fine. There's a pornhub Android app, and an ecosystem of dating sims, visual novels containing erotic content, etc. Patreon is probably responsible for a couple of million dollars a month in Android app "subscriptions".
- Zak 4y ago

seydor 4y ago

This can be better explained by demographics. The people who were in their 20s in the 2000s are now in their 40s and 50s and more conservative overall. If GenZ had control of the internet (which the GenXrs had) you wouldn't let your children and your grandma near it (and it would be a Good thing)

unpopularopp 4y ago
> If GenZ had control of the internet you wouldn't let your children and your grandma near it What do you mean by this? Zoomers are the new puritans not the previous generation
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Calling individual generations “the new Puritans” makes this position all the more explicitly ridiculous. Which generation is the new Huguenots?
  - jrm4 4y ago
    Nah, it's a reasonable shorthand and more widely understood than "Huguenots."
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      The point was that there’s no consistent characterization that people have in mind for “new Puritans,” which makes it especially pointless to label an entire generation that way. Just a small case in point: Gen Z is the most openly queer/non-traditional generation in US history. There are entire segments of our population that consider that nature to be sexually deviant and want to control it with social restrictions. So why are Gen Z the “puritans”?
      - nemo44x 4y ago
        I think it’s because they have a religious zeal about themselves generally speaking. An inquisition like air that permeates many aspects of culture they are involved in. fundamentalist attitudes abound and an inability to consider alternatives blended with a constant appeal to authority. In essence, an extremely conformist and neurotic generation.

ekianjo 4y ago

Isnt the appstore supposed to allow app sideloading in the near future because of recent push from the EU?

oneoff786 4y ago
Digital Markets Act. Let’s see!

ifqwz 4y ago

It's not the porn-friendly era. It's the free speech-friendly era. It's not only pornography that is banned. The wrong thoughts are banned from the app store as well.

DoctorOW 4y ago
What evidence is there of this?
- ifqwz 4y ago
  Platforms such as Telegram have to make it impossible to access certain channels/groups/bots when you use an iphone or they risk getting deleted from the app store. nsfw channels on discord are also inaccessible from iphones. Apps such as gab were banned completely for not complying. This is just a few examples of apps that I know of (I don't use that many) --- there probably are many more examples that I'm not aware of.
  - DoctorOW 4y ago
    Are those Telegram examples also NSFW? I don't see the meaningful distinction between NSFW content and porn.
    - snovv_crash 4y ago
      There are a lot of other NSFW topics, like gore, bondage, gambling, organization of union activity or illegal protests, etc. Apple only specifically bans porn though, because of American puritan morals, I guess.
    - msla 4y ago
      > I don't see the meaningful distinction between NSFW content and porn. Abstract: Pornography is reasonably well-understood by honest adults. "NSFW" is a bullshit term that's expanded based on how criticism-averse the host is, and how effectively the assholes can come out to shit on minorities. Queer content is often marked "NSFW" simply for being queer, even if it isn't pornographic as a rational adult would understand the term.^1 Saying "NSFW" or "inappropriate" content is being removed is a typical content-free claim from companies that don't know, and don't care, how much queer content will be removed and how much will never be created due to the chilling effect. ^1 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444820904362 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444820904362 Of course, add to this the usual tactic of people insisting that the very existence of queer people is "inappropriate" or "NSFW" and the host is opening itself up to a shitstorm it is likely to resolve by increasing its content controls and doing further damage to queer expression on the platform.

Zak 4y ago

I'd really like to see more online sharing migrate to decentralized technologies. ActivityPub, used by Mastodon, PixelFed, Friendica and others provides a similar social networking experience without a small set of gatekeepers controlling what kind of content is allowed or a small set of algorithms dictating what gets popular. The technologies to do this are already adequate (though there's always room for refinement), but the marketing and onboarding to make it mainstream aren't there.

lo_zamoyski 4y ago

What Hegel might have called the cunning of reason at work. Porn has had and is having an extremely destructive and deranging effect on people, especially the young and especially men, especially given its ubiquity and accessibility today on the internet. It corrupts their ability and motivation to seek out and develop healthy relationships with others. I'm sure it plays some role in the demographic crisis. Whereas Gen X and even Gen Y (Millennials) were first exposed to pornography in very limited ways (the odd Playboy magazine), Gen Z has been practically raised on porn having been exposed to indefinite amounts of it on their smartphones. I welcome the withering of "porn culture" and the crippling of this depraved industry of exploitation and corruption. It destroys individuals and rots societies.

msla 4y ago
Do you have any evidence whatsoever for pornography having the effects you claim?
cykros 4y ago
Arguably, the phone itself as an object of instant gratification seems more the issue here than the porn being accessed on it. Sure, easily available porn may short circuit some normal sexual interaction, but the phone as an alternative to actual social interaction seems surely the more pervasive problem. Humans can do just fine without much in the way of sexual interaction, as evidenced by centuries of communities across a variety of cultures that take oaths of celibacy. I'm not so sure the same can be said of large groups of people sharing resources in common without having social skills.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Porn is a product designed to draw in consumers, and with social media the business is either targeting marketing to the pool of consumers, or getting the consumers to sign up for some kind of paid monthly plan. Generally speaking, everyone agrees that there should be some kind of regulation of products for various reasons. With porn, the main issue is that the only performers should be consenting adults. The fact that some buyers of social media ad services don't want to be affiliated with porn content is a market issue, not a regulatory issue. Note also this is hardly the only controversial class of content. Consider two others: the manufacture of weapons and explosives, and the manufacture of drugs. These also break down on the legal/illegal boundary. For example, with weapons, what's allowed? YT is full of videos on how to reload gun ammunition, for example, but when it comes to home synthesis of gunpowder needed to reload those cartidges, using the well-known historical recipe (charcoal, saltpetre, sulfur), it seems those are all taken down under 'YT community guidelines'. Curiously, automatic weapons or machine guns (including disassembly and repair) are also all over YT, even though owning such weapons without a license is about as illegal as home synthesis of explosives is. Another example: drug chemistry. Aspirin is common household medication and is synthesized by the reaction of salicylic acid (from willow bark) with acetic anhydride (basically, dehydrated vinegar). There are no shortage of detailed walk-through videos on how to do this reaction on YT. However, if we simply replace the willow bark extract with opium extract (i.e. morphine), we are now making heroin, diacetylated morphine. No such hands-on walk-through videos seem to exist on YT, or for say, the conversion of coca leaves to cocaine sulfate paste to cocaine hydrochloride or freebase cocaine (i.e. crack). There are of course, no such restrictions on videos about the fermentation of agricultural products and the distillation of the result into strong liquors (does YT block this in Muslim countries?). Growing cannabis is currently a kind of grey area. It seems that social media companies want their user-uploaded content to be in line with the regulatory norms of their viewer's host government (and perhaps more fuzzy concepts like local social norms), but those norms, globally speaking, are all over the map.

techdragon 4y ago
I’m glad I’m not the only one that notices these sorts of odd contrasts… and all I’ve ever been able to work out is that Its exemplary of current social norms in California and the wider USA more generally because things like pot growing becoming a grey area coincides with changes to laws and trends in these places.

Chernobog 4y ago

I think card companies and the related businesses have too much power. I am a board member of a BDSM club operated by a volunteer organization (we are legally a non-profit). We want to implement card payment on our website for membership and event tickets, but when applying for the service that would be the best option in our country, their payment processor rejects the application citing that they don't allow things like strip clubs, sexually oriented massage parlors, escort agencies or "any sexually-related clubs or services". I get that a BDSM club would easily get caught by this wording, but it's a social arena where our members can hook up and play, and we don't sell any sexual services. Adding insult to injury, the company behind the service loudly markets that they support Pride every year. The payment processor has pictures on their Facebook of employees attending the Pride parade... We're not a commercial entity, our activities are legal and we also march under the same (rainbow) flag. Oh, and there is no reasonable appeals process. We initially applied for a different product a while back and got rejected since they had run our web page through Google Translate and determined that we were involved with "public group sex". Asking the service to get is in touch with the payment processor to clear up the misunderstanding was not possible, they just said there was no way to appeal and our best bet would be to contact them ourselves through their website. /rant.

invalidname 4y ago
That sucks. I blame Steve Jobs. This was all going in the right direction of freedom of speech == sexual freedom == censorship free internet. Then Steve tried to market the appstore as a walled garden and wanted to keep 30% of the revenue so he branded everything as "safe" including no-porn. I don't think this was his intention but it snowballed into this. I hate crypto with a vengeance but when I hear stories like this I totally get why people are so much into it.