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Apple mandated the changes to Tumblr that pissed everyone off. I'd almost call this a forced error, but Apple's rationale for bringing the hammer down on Tumblr

Apple mandated the changes to Tumblr that pissed everyone off. I'd almost call this a forced error, but Apple's rationale for bringing the hammer down on Tumblr was App Review finding CSAM on the front page. Which is itself a failure of their moderation team. In contrast, DeviantArt saw dollar signs from AI art and rugpulled themselves. Their business model relies on art remaining scarce enough to not exhaust the demand for art. A machine that lets you create unlimited art for the cost of some GPU time completely destroys the economic underpinnings of most artistic endeavor. While not all artists are solely economically motivated, the ones that are economically successful are the ones paying for dA subscriptions - the things that keep the site alive.

noirscape 2y ago
To my understanding, what happened with Tumblr was moreso a compounding situation; the Apple app store reviewer managed to just find NSFW content in general, forcing Tumblr to change the app to remove it. Before, under Yahoo, they'd just put some new hoop in the app to prevent users from accessing adult content, but by the time this particular Apple review rolled around, the sale of Tumblr to Verizon had already been finalized. Which created a situation where an outgoing management pretty much ordered to not bother fixing it and just banning it all, hoping that Verizon's "family friendly" policies meant that it wouldn't jeopardize the sale (which it turns out, the sale wasn't jeopardized). You can still kinda see it in how broken the actual removal was; they just excised the NSFW from the frontend by marking the posts as sensitive on the API and then preventing the frontend from viewing anything sensitive. For years (and maybe even today) you could just scrape the API to find NSFW posts, although that's on the decline since most NSFW Tumblr accounts have been deleted entirely by the actual people behind them.
zimpenfish 2y ago
> Apple mandated the changes to Tumblr that pissed everyone off. That's not true - Tumblr already had their "no adult content" plans in place well before the CSAM problem caused Apple to temporarily suspend them from the app store. That suspension just brought the plans forward by 6 months in a panic rush.
makeitdouble 2y ago
Apple will find the sexual content and push for its removal. Not just the stuff on the front page, but anything that gets surfaced within a reasonable browsing session (that includes popular items, keywords etc.) And it's not just Apple, payment processors also have strong opinions. In general, sexual/erotic stuff has become a really hard thing to keep allowing in mainstream platforms.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  Then how is there a Reddit iOS app?
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    I don't have the app anymore, but I'd assume you don't end up in r/GoneWild with 3 random clicks from opening the app as a new user, nor that porn is prominently in the default subreddits.
  - dialup_sounds 2y ago
    It's harder to accidentally reach porn on Reddit than it was on Tumblr ca. 2018. You could follow tags like #cute and #fox because you liked a cute fox picture and the next day get somebody's Sonic and Tails furry futa fanart on your dash because they used those tags.
    - hinkley 2y ago
      Wait, they don’t have an nsfw search flag like Reddit??
      - qingcharles 2y ago
        Tumblr does have a self-reporting NSFW feature now, IIRC.
ryukoposting 2y ago
When photography first began to proliferate in the 19th century, people feared that it would replace the art of painting [1]. Photography is used for some practical applications where painters were once employed, but we still paint and draw things. Ultimately, the two mediums are distinct in their aesthetics and expressive abilities. Using that situation as a reference point, I'm not totally convinced that AI art will supplant digital art/drawing. AI art can be used to produce some types of drawings, sure, but not all types of drawings can be convincingly produced using AI. AI's stylistic and compositional abilities are constrained to its training set, for example. Another thought: when the DSLR became affordable in the early 2000s, it wiped out an entire segment of low-level professional photographers. Suddenly, any schmuck with a DSLR could take "good enough" photos with ease, and without the friction of film. I'd expect AI art to have a similar effect in the realm of digital illustrators. But, professional photographers still exist, and so will professional illustrators. [1]: https://daily.jstor.org/when-photography-was-not-art/ https://daily.jstor.org/when-photography-was-not-art/

noirscape 2y ago

To my understanding, what happened with Tumblr was moreso a compounding situation; the Apple app store reviewer managed to just find NSFW content in general, forcing Tumblr to change the app to remove it. Before, under Yahoo, they'd just put some new hoop in the app to prevent users from accessing adult content, but by the time this particular Apple review rolled around, the sale of Tumblr to Verizon had already been finalized. Which created a situation where an outgoing management pretty much ordered to not bother fixing it and just banning it all, hoping that Verizon's "family friendly" policies meant that it wouldn't jeopardize the sale (which it turns out, the sale wasn't jeopardized). You can still kinda see it in how broken the actual removal was; they just excised the NSFW from the frontend by marking the posts as sensitive on the API and then preventing the frontend from viewing anything sensitive. For years (and maybe even today) you could just scrape the API to find NSFW posts, although that's on the decline since most NSFW Tumblr accounts have been deleted entirely by the actual people behind them.

zimpenfish 2y ago

> Apple mandated the changes to Tumblr that pissed everyone off. That's not true - Tumblr already had their "no adult content" plans in place well before the CSAM problem caused Apple to temporarily suspend them from the app store. That suspension just brought the plans forward by 6 months in a panic rush.

makeitdouble 2y ago

Apple will find the sexual content and push for its removal. Not just the stuff on the front page, but anything that gets surfaced within a reasonable browsing session (that includes popular items, keywords etc.) And it's not just Apple, payment processors also have strong opinions. In general, sexual/erotic stuff has become a really hard thing to keep allowing in mainstream platforms.

lotsofpulp 2y ago
Then how is there a Reddit iOS app?
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  I don't have the app anymore, but I'd assume you don't end up in r/GoneWild with 3 random clicks from opening the app as a new user, nor that porn is prominently in the default subreddits.
- dialup_sounds 2y ago
  It's harder to accidentally reach porn on Reddit than it was on Tumblr ca. 2018. You could follow tags like #cute and #fox because you liked a cute fox picture and the next day get somebody's Sonic and Tails furry futa fanart on your dash because they used those tags.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    Wait, they don’t have an nsfw search flag like Reddit??
    - qingcharles 2y ago
      Tumblr does have a self-reporting NSFW feature now, IIRC.

ryukoposting 2y ago

When photography first began to proliferate in the 19th century, people feared that it would replace the art of painting [1]. Photography is used for some practical applications where painters were once employed, but we still paint and draw things. Ultimately, the two mediums are distinct in their aesthetics and expressive abilities. Using that situation as a reference point, I'm not totally convinced that AI art will supplant digital art/drawing. AI art can be used to produce some types of drawings, sure, but not all types of drawings can be convincingly produced using AI. AI's stylistic and compositional abilities are constrained to its training set, for example. Another thought: when the DSLR became affordable in the early 2000s, it wiped out an entire segment of low-level professional photographers. Suddenly, any schmuck with a DSLR could take "good enough" photos with ease, and without the friction of film. I'd expect AI art to have a similar effect in the realm of digital illustrators. But, professional photographers still exist, and so will professional illustrators. [1]: https://daily.jstor.org/when-photography-was-not-art/ https://daily.jstor.org/when-photography-was-not-art/