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New NSFW content restrictions enrage Tumblr users
- agscala 13y agoLooks like a good opportunity for someone to build something tumblr-like strictly for NSFW content that encourages people to build connections like tumblr does (or did)
- dspillett 13y agoThe problem with a site explicitly being for NSFW content is users avoiding it in case it accidentally shows in history/logs. With tumblr they can claim to have been looking at/for something else entirely.
- sp332 13y agoThe subdomain would already show up in history and logs. It's hard to explain away e.g. fuckyeahboobies.tumblr.com
- LoganCale 13y agoThe vast majority of Tumblr users browse via the dashboard rather than the subdomains.
- sp332 13y agoIs there a way to follow somebody without visiting the subdomain?
- elliottcarlson 13y agoYes - all via the dashboard/search functionality.
- jseliger 13y agoGreat comment. Strategic ambiguity is important. Most sites, including community sites, built explicitly around NSFW content are, for lack of a better word, gross. I want little to do with them and most women I know want even less to do with them. It's hard or impossible for them to have any taste. One key to the success of NSFW communities on Reddit (like GoneWild) and Tumblr may be their "dual use" purpose; they tend not to be completely gross (though there are obviously exceptions) and consequently they also attract women.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoI think this is basically correct (and I love the term "strategic ambiguity" as much as I like "plausible deniability"), so the market opportunity is to create a new Tumblr. At least initially the code wasn't particularly complicated. The challenges are two fold, one if you put a stake in the sand vis-a-vis porn and nsfw content then you may find yourself without an exit strategy. That is just another way of saying that you will want this new thing to be self supporting (unlike the original Tumblr) which might mean ads earlier rather than later. But it also might mean a membership fee of some sort.
- wiremine 13y agoSeems like a job for reddit.
- px1999 13y agoSounds like a good opportunity for a third-party (robots.txt ignoring) tumblr indexer. That said, yahoo's probably trying to remove NSFW content to fill the ad spots that they're invariably planning on throwing down everywhere, so I'm not sure how well an indexer would do on its own.
- samman 13y agoFrom the article: "Adult and NSFW content will be visible to anyone who has opted-in via their Settings page." Seems reasonable...
- rincebrain 13y agoYes, but the point is that you cannot opt into being able to search for adult blog content.
- samman 13y agoAh, I see...the 'Adult' column is rather sparse... http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw
- pyre 13y agoSo the opt-in setting only controls direct access to the content, but there is no way to opt-in to having it show up in search?
- freyr 13y agoWhat's the difference between NSFW and adult?
- samman 13y agoNSFW = 'Occasional' adult content Adult = 'Substantial' adult content
- voyou 13y agoIt will still show up in tag searches, and Tumblr doesn't have any other kind of search.
- icehawk 13y agoThere is a option in the settings: Browse tag pages in Safe Mode Hide content from NSFW blogs. It works exactly like it says on the tin.
- morley 13y agoThe article makes it seem like they removed the content from search unilaterally. If they merely hid it under a setting, I don't see what the problem is. It's their playground, they can set whatever rules they like.
- samman 13y agoAs I've just learned, the way tumblr categorizes content, there's a difference between 'NSFW' and 'Adult'. 'NSFW' (occasional adult content) still gets indexed and is searchable (provided the profile is opted in), but 'Adult' (substantial adult content) is never indexed and/or searchable, regardless of your profile settings.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mkr-hn 13y agoI can confirm that turning safe mode off still produces decidedly uncensored tag search pages. It is now back on.
- freyr 13y agoBut, but ... censorship! Seriously, I have to wonder who is actually enraged by this. If you want to browse for NSFW content, check the box and get on with it. If you want your NSFW posts to be displayed to unsuspecting people... I guess you're out of luck.
- icebraining 13y agoWhat if I want to browse for Adult content?
- rhokstar 13y agoSafer web always wins.
- jseliger 13y agoI can see why: given Tumblr's focus on images, porn or at least NSFW material seems like a logical use pattern. For text, at least, I prefer Wordpress. DailyDot doesn't cover this, but I wonder: what is the logical NSFW-friendly alternative to Tumblr?
- McPants 13y agoBlogspot is one of them.
- icebraining 13y agoIt's not a real alternative, though. The feature of reposting with backlinks turns Tumblr from a basic imagelog hosting service into a very interconnected community.
- sp332 13y agoYou're not allowed to make money on adult content on Blogger. https://www.blogger.com/content.g https://www.blogger.com/content.g This is a recent change, and feels a bit like a shot across the bow designed to force the biggest adult bloggers off the service.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- nashequilibrium 13y agoI like the way google warns you that there may be NSFW stuff in a blog then you have the option to click through. The issue with tumblr is that a lot of teenagers use it and they may have around 2, 3 NSFW pics and the rest is artists, gifs, sports gifs, quotes etc. The other option is to maybe only block the image and then allow the user to click on the image to reveal it.
- voyou 13y agoYeah - blocking adult stuff from a "safe mode" search doesn't seem like a particularly bad thing, but Tumblr seems to just completely make stuff disappear, rather than making users aware that there is other content available which they could see if they left safe mode. This seems less than ideal - if content is being removed from searches, the user should be informed.
- javis 13y agoDidn't David Karp say jus the other day on Colbert he wasn't going to censor Tumblr? What happened?
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoHe must have gone to school the same place as James Clapper. He didn't "censor" anything by removing the content. He simply removed all search index references.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- pandler 13y agoOh, they aren't censoring it in the strictest sense of the word. They are just making it so they can't be found. Censor carries a lot of negative connotation, and they are trying to distance themselves from that on a technicality.
- proofofconcept 13y agoThis sort of spin is marvelously effective because, even though it leaves a bad taste in the mouth of anyone who recognizes it for what it is, it allows people in Karp's position to dig rhetorical trenches out in front of the substance of their actions and redirect any discussion into one about defining terms. It doesn't matter one whit that making it prohibitively hard for anyone to access content is just as much censorship of that content as disallowing it entirely is; nothing sucks the air out of a discussion faster than an extended yes-it-is/no-it-isn't headbutting contest over the meaning of a word.
- protomyth 13y agoBecause when someone like David Karp speaks, he is talking about a strictly, technical truth and not the practical truth of the situation. We punish are children for being deceptive when the pull this stunt, we reward[1] or ignore politicians and business folks. The practical truth is that these blogs have been censored, because if Google cannot see something, it doesn't exist for 99.9% of the people. 1) You might be saying to yourself, I don't reward or approve this conduct. Did you watch West Wing? Did you like the C. J. Cregg character?
- mindstab 13y agoAs my friend said: "I love watching Yahoo spend nine figures on things only to offhandedly gut them like a child playing with sharp knives."
- SeanDav 13y agoGot to agree here, despite all its talk, it seems this leopard has not changed its spots.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- tokenadult 13y agoA great line. But maybe Yahoo is playing with dull knives, as it seems to achieve maximum pain for minimum gain.
- ihsw 13y agoOne could also argue they're holding their knives backwards, so in addition to being causing damage by using the knife improperly they're also cutting their hands up by bleeding money.
- awj 13y agoI'd characterize it as a knife with no handle.
- Zikes 13y agoDull razor blades?
- floydenstein 13y agoMore like a knife with a blade as a handle.
- saalweachter 13y ago
- lnanek2 13y agoPretty funny. Buy the new cool thing all the young people love, then start isolating and hiding the sex appeal that got it where it was.
- Alexx 13y agoAlong with the fact that if your blog is flagged adult they set robots.txt to noindex on your whole subdomain, so you're nuked from google (and there is nothing you can do about it). Now you're out their internal search engine too - They're doing their best to hide away the porn as much as possible without actually removing it.
- JimWestergren 13y agoA site:tumblr.com now returns 943 million URLs in Google. It would be interesting to see this number in a few weeks time.
- evilmushroom 13y ago581,000,000 for me.
- pessimizer 13y agogooglebubble makes google a bad source for this kind of estimation now, I guess.
- hnriot 13y agosame here.
- cynwoody 13y agoI just tried https://www.google.com/search?q=site:tumblr.com+blowjob https://www.google.com/search?q=site:tumblr.com+blowjob and got 795,000 hits. Adding a 24-hour recency restriction still shows results past the tenth SERP. I'll have to check back later and see if anything changes.
- lukasb 13y agoCrazy. Why would they prevent Adult-flagged Tumblrs from being indexed by 3rd-party search engines? http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw
- protomyth 13y agoAdvertisers don't want controversy. Advertisers are the customers.
- derefr 13y agoRight. More specifically, here's what's actually going on: 10% of Tumblr is porn, right? And it's not amateur porn, or "oh hey I reblogged a butt." No, the vast majority of that 10% is one thing and one thing only: mirrored rips of full galleries from paysites. Illegal, copyright-infringing rips. Basically, if Tumblr had any sort of scalable process to distinguish these from their other content, they'd just shut them down immediately. Using Tumblr just to bulk-rehost copyright-infringing images is 100% against their TOS, that much should be obvious. Basically, Yahoo gave Tumblr some good advice here: if they don't want to fundamentally restrict their users from posting adult content, then it's all Tumblr can do (legally) to sweep these gallery-rip Tumblrs under the rug, so that you can only find them by seeing a reblog from them or by knowing their URL (which also, a lot of the time, means "by following a link from a porn subreddit.") It's not that they're adult; it's that they're in breach of copyright, and giving any public-facing path to them is the same as endorsing them (thus opening Yahoo to being sued for that infringement.) This whole thing isn't about "OH NO A BUTT"; it's more for the same reason Mega's internal search won't show you "Adobe CS6 Master Suite [cw33t].rar", even though you could get that from them with the right URL. Hosting something is one thing; advertising it is another. Tumblr's emphasis on free speech is a mask for one thing here: they want safe harbor provisions to apply to them as far as this content goes, by not giving it any attention/promotion. EDIT: I reposted this to Tumblr, expanded and phrased in a slightly more Tumblr-audience-targeted manner, explaining what safe-harbor provisions are and such. http://leviaul.tumblr.com/post/55886555106/you-guys http://leviaul.tumblr.com/post/55886555106/you-guys
- 13y ago
- shastamcnasty 13y agoThefreepornguide.com has a list of all nsfw tumblrs.
- candybar 13y agoI don't see a problem here - given that NSFW/porn traffic is worth much less than other traffic and even less to a generalized blogging platform like Tumblr, what's going on is that they are presently subsidized. This is an attempt at reducing the subsidy and making the platform less attractive for pornographers or even casual NSFW bloggers. For instance, if a porn pay site wants to create a blog to promote their site, why should Tumblr make it easy for them to do this on their platform? It doesn't really help them in any realistic way.
- shardling 13y agoApparently they consider tags like gay and lesbian to be Adult.
- derefr 13y agoNo; the disappearance of content on these tags was coincidental in time, and mentioned in the same article only as inflammatory speculation. Tumblr hasn't said anything to indicate that this was part of their "adult content" changes. I can guess another, more likely purpose for this particular change... (I'll focus on #gay in particular here, but it applies equally well to #lesbian): Think about how tags are used on Tumblr--it's a lot like Twitter. People tag a post with something to add it to a conversation it wouldn't otherwise be a part of. So, what gets tagged as #gay? You don't tag a picture of two handsome naked homosexual men with "#gay", usually; that tag is too vague to serve any purpose. Usually the people who post porn have their entire blog dedicated to one type of porn anyway, so tagging #gay on your Gay Porn Blog would be fairly useless. Even if you did, the Safe Search mode would hit this tagstream just like any other one, so there'd be no reason to censor it in particular if that's all it was. So, #gay != gay porn, okay. So, maybe #gay is/was for rights/social justice issues related to homosexual men, then? Not in my experience; social justice folks are generally entirely too inclusive to talk specifically about #gay or #lesbian anything. I've never seen a post about gay rights specifically tagged as #gay. Maybe "#gay rights" (that's a separate tag; Tumblr allows spaces in them) but not just #gay. [On the other side of the social-justice fence, notice that #lgbt is still a working tag. http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/lgbt http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/lgbt] So what was getting tagged as #gay? I would guess (I never saw their content streams, but it seems plausible) that Tumblr eliminated these two tags in particular more for their potential for use in hate-speech or in "outing" people. I would bet (real money!) that posts were getting reblogged and tagged #gay and #lesbian for entirely malicious reasons, and Tumblr was often having receiving requests to "de-tag" the reblog so people couldn't find their post through it, somewhat like requesting to get your name taken off someone else's photo of you on Facebook. Imagine if you typed "gay" into Tumblr's search box, and the first result was a picture of your face! [I don't think Tumblr actually had a mechanism for resolving these de-tagging requests, but it was still likely a high-traffic request.] I'd bet (again, real money) that we'll see other high-potential-for-hate-speech tags disappear. In fact, they might already have, and it's just that no one has thought to look. Anyone want to think up some tags to try, and report back any that "should" have posts but are completely blank? Or, on the obverse, anyone with actual knowledge/anecdata of what #gay and #lesbian did contain before Tumblr blocked them out?
- Shish2k 13y agoThe market seems to be voluntarily making a massive hole for an adult-content-friendly blogging platform to fill, I wonder why the startup scene here isn't jumping on that? (I'd do it myself if I knew of any appropriate payment system; but my only payment systems experience is with paypal, who hate adult content more than the blog hosts do, and bitcoin, which is unheard of outside of geek and finance niches...)
- atwebb 13y agoThis is going to sound assholish but that sounds like an excuse. If you can write a blogging platform, you can figure out a payment method.
- jes5199 13y agoPayments are way, way, way harder than blogs. Payments have consequences.
- lectrick 13y agoBitcoin payments, not so much. :)
- jes5199 13y agoYeah, I don't know if I want to make a billing service on top of a system that has no concept of refunds.
- lectrick 13y agoSure it does. They send you back your bitcoins. And any reputable organization that accepts bitcoins as payment, would do so. What it doesn't have is a concept of chargebacks, where you basically Indian-give your money.
- atwebb 13y agoIt was an asshole way to put it and I didn't read the comment correctly. I read it as "I don't feel like looking for a payment provider/method" not "A payment method does not exist." Admittedly, I'm pretty ignorant as to adult site payment methods but it would seem that, for such a massive industry, someone out there is accepting payments, is it really each individual site handling CC info?
- taopao 13y agoNo big loss, since Tumblr search is TERRIBLE. As are most features - the service feels like a creaky pile of hacks for viewers and publishers alike. A Tumblr directory/web crawler would be really great.
- rubbingalcohol 13y agoThis isn't just Tumblr's search. They're cutting blogs off from search engine indexing too. And if you reblog anything from a blogged flagged as adult, it's looking like your blog gets flagged too. A lot of the line between "adult" and "art" is very blurry, but anyone who deals with nudity is at risk here. Tumblr has a huge community of artists, who now have to worry of being censored. "Sure, you can have a blog, but no one on the Internet will find it, ever." Sounds great.
- katiem80 13y agoWould this help? http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/22/what-is-it-about-porn-an-interview-with-the-founders-of-theworstdrug-a-nsfw-gif-site/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/22/what-is-it-about-porn-an-in...
- elliottcarlson 13y agoHave you tried search recently? Curious if this opinion is on the old search features or the recently updated search.
- PencilBoy 13y agoI don't think nsfw porn gif indexing is gone. It's just going to be streamlined, I've been using http://theworstdrug.com/ http://theworstdrug.com/ to sate my dirty gif hunger. They have videos link up to some of the gifs too.
- mrt0mat0 13y agoi want a search for porn tumblr sites only please! you guys can have the rest :)
- voyou 13y agoI wonder why this is blowing up today? It's not a brand new policy: it's been largely the same since at least April 29 of this year, i.e., before Yahoo bought Tumblr: http://web.archive.org/web/20130426023137/http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw http://web.archive.org/web/20130426023137/http://www.tumblr.... What seems to be new is a) the addition of the "Adult" category, which is blocked from safe search tag pages even for people who follow a particular blog and b) a slight relaxation to the third-party indexing policy, where NSFW (but not Adult) blogs are now indexed by external search engines.
- ricardobeat 13y agoI don't use Tumblr, but I think you're underestimating the change. While blogs in the NSFW category had little restrictions, 'Adult' ones are completely hidden from everyone except those who have already subscribed. Characterizing Adult vs NSFW is arbitrary, so your blog might simply disappear without any warning.
- PhasmaFelis 13y agoHow about the part where, for example, the #gay tag returns zero results unless you turn safe search off? It's now impossible to search for gay support/community stuff on Tumblr without making an account and explicitly enabling porn.
- shortformblog 13y agoAs a guy with a larger reach on Tumblr, I've been asking my readers about this, about how they would suggest handling this situation: http://shortformblog.com/tagged/nsfw-tumblr-feedback http://shortformblog.com/tagged/nsfw-tumblr-feedback I've only posted a sampling of the responses I've gotten. I have more than 60 sitting in my ask box right now. People are REALLY upset about this.
- _pmf_ 13y agoA sad day for attention whores and basement wankers indeed.
- ebbv 13y agoIf you are surprised that Yahoo is ruining Tumblr you're either so optimistic that I envy you, or have no knowledge of the history of Yahoo or acquisitions in general.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- eeky 13y agoMuch of the value of Tumblr was its huge stash of amateur porn (and Yahoo overpaid for even that). And the first thing they do is gut it? Oh wow, Marissa could not have failed harder on this decision.
- Brainix 13y agotheworstdrug.com scrapes a lot of NSFW animated gods from Tumblr. TechCrunch article here: http://m.techcrunch.com/2013/05/22/what-is-it-about-porn-an-interview-with-the-founders-of-theworstdrug-a-nsfw-gif-site/ http://m.techcrunch.com/2013/05/22/what-is-it-about-porn-an-...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- tn13 13y agoThis is really sad. I am unable to understand why the mainstream web companies like Yahoo! Google has such disdain for pornographic content. I can fully understand that they do not want their family traffic to go there, but then why cant charge us a small amount and give a better access to all those adult blogs in much more efficient way ?
- rch 13y agoDoesn't the opt-in setting make this a non-issue? (not a tumblr user, so I might be missing something)
- mcrittenden 13y agoYou can opt-in for "NSFW", but not for "Adult". http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw
- rch 13y agoWell that is unfortunate. Thanks for the clarification.
- downandout 13y agoIt seems that as long as Yahoo has resources at its disposal, it will buy and destroy everything it can. Even worse, their addiction to failure transcends management shakeups. I used to simply not care about Yahoo; now I actively want to see it fail.
- alanh 13y agoUPDATE: Tumblr says this was all a combination of poor design, anti-spam measures, App Store censorship, and plain old misunderstandings. http://staff.tumblr.com/post/55906556378/all-weve-heard-from-a-bunch-of-you-who-are http://staff.tumblr.com/post/55906556378/all-weve-heard-from... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6073519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6073519