Tumblr refugees trying to save its NSFW content | Hacker News Reader

Tumblr refugees trying to save its NSFW content

fastcompany.com

88 pointsseancaptain60 comments

Open articleView on HN

It's interesting to see Tumblr described in many articles/forums as primarily for pornography. Tumblr has been the biggest user acquisition channel (and a free one, at that) for my startup, which has nothing to do with pornography.

We've gained tens of thousands of users in a few days from a single user post, and several user posts have accumulated 50,000+ notes. This is all thanks to the strong accessibility groups around ADHD and dyslexia that exist on Tumblr.

I've spent (wasted) time and money on FB ads, and I wish that I could have advertised on Tumblr. Unfortunately, every time I tried, they only wanted big brands with $25k minimum spend.

Yeah , but how do you think these users got into tumblr in the first place?

Tumblr being just for porn is mostly a meme. I have used Tumblr for many years, not for porn, but for art and lifestyle content, and memes. It actually took me a few years to find out that Tumbler had tons of extremly high quality free porn.

Thr hugh amouts of porn give creatives a certain security that their works won‘t be deleted for nudity and such.

Well, as of the last announcement, "gave". The NSFW thing seems to be throwing out the baby with the bathwater, particularly since the way they are flagging content seems to be error-prone.

In terms of content quality, tumblr is sort of what Pinterest has always aspired to be.

I got into Tumblr because I wanted to follow my favorite author.

The content you see on Tumblr is determined by who you follow. If you use Tumblr and only see porn, it's because you're only looking for porn.

Thanks for the share. It's good to hear about successful user adoption strategies like this. Have you tried Mastodon for this topic as well? I'm curious if the same niche topic adoption works on any other alternative social media platforms? What's the name of your startup? Can you provide a link to the Tumblr page?

I haven't tried Mastodon — what makes you ask about that versus Twitter or anything else? I'd be curious to try it if you think the accessibility community would be strong there!

My startup is BeeLine Reader [1], which launched via an unexpectedly successful Show HN. Our Tumblr page is not very impressive — almost all of the traction there was from organic user posts.

1: http://www.beelinereader.com

Awful site. Won't even load if cookies are blocked. Summary, after stripping all markup:

The internet is for porn, goes the song from musical Avenue Q. Since Tumblr announced this week that it will no longer be part of that internet, many users are mounting an exodus to existing networks like still-freewheeling Twitter, as well as efforts to build a new kind of Tumblr, the kind of Tumblr that Tumblr had been until now. There were people sharing their discovery of their sexuality. There were people sharing the journey of themselves going through hard times, says LolaBohemia, a professional dominatrix from Florida. ...

The platform's ban on visuals of adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions), which officially begins on December 17, has already flooded bloggers inboxes with automated alerts about suspect images, videos, and GIFs. ... In addition to flagging visuals, Tumblr seems to have filtered its searches. Hashtags like BDSM now return no results at all. No erotica or other text appears either, despite Tumblr's assurance that the new content rules don't apply to text posts.

There is an appeals process for flagged items, and its unclear how much content will ultimately be blocked although straight-up porn certainly will be. Many adult bloggers get the sense that they are no longer wanted. There are [sic] no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content, wrote Tumblr's CEO.

Tribe and Experience Project also went sex-free. They're both gone now.

autoplaying video, check. Pop up ad slow loading to make sure it pops up after i start reading, check. Empty, contentless "article", check.

Yup, shit site, don't go folks.

The text loaded fine for me with javascript disabled. No ads or autoplaying videos.

Just use reader view, it's not like you don't have the option.

This decade feels like the Victorian era all over again. How long did the last one last?

Does the ‘V’ stand for “Victorian” or “Verizon”? ;)

It stands for 'Vendetta'

Have you read My Secret Life? Let's just say there was a lot of sex in the Victorian era.

Have you seen all the kids around? Let’s just say there has always been a lot of sex. What changes is the discussion around it.

studies show that kids today have less sex.

As compared to 30 years ago. if you follow the graph on the article that I assume you are referring to that was on the front page a few weeks ago, the number of sexual partners in the 1900s was 2-3. Its predicted that number of sexual partners will be 8 for this generation compared to last generations 9. Not a big jump in my perview.

the socioeconomic situation and religion was way too different in the 1900s to compare. The shift in attitudes since the 90s on the other hand is remarkably large

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex...

Thank you a lot for the read, very interesting.

The Victorian discussion of sexuality was paired with a great deal of licentious behavior.

Here is one plausible theory: http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-censorious-age

it's mostly observations, not theory. And he doesn't even touch on the Spanish Inquisition that sprang out of silicon valley and anti-Trump media after his election.

Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition!

As a trans person, Tumblr was the best place to find other trans people, having shared experiences talked about, negativity processed, and where I was able to post pics of myself as I shifted seeing myself from ugly (as reinforced in me in movies) to worth loving. It was one of the only places where I didn't have to be bombarded with the hateful remarks of transphobes, as I got to pick who I followed.

I had some of my content censored following the acquisition by Yahoo. It happened to other folk too. I really wish there wouldn't be this shame around bodies, sexuality and gender identity that companies enforce with their censorship algorithms.

The issue they are going to run into is that they are automatically going to be labeled a porn site. As such they will automatically lose the top tier of advertisers and payment processors. In addition, because they are new and probably won’t have the filtering systems in place, very offensive content including cp will likely get posted. This will further make them a pariah to the main stream internet with app stores and internet infrastructure players not wanting to do business with them. For example see the example of Apple banning the Tumblr app. And that was with a well established service. With this new NSFW service it won’t even be a close call.

Tumblr was pretty terrible at handling CP reports. Like, I reported someone who posted sexually explicit photos supposedly of themself whilst admitting they were underage, and it took two months for Tumblr to send a form message saying they were looking into it and might or might not do something.

This is not going to be a popular comment, but it seems like the main problems in that situation are poor parenting and the harsh criminalization of willful adolescent behavior as "child" "pornography".

Either way, it would be a nice feature for an image service to help protect children who might fall into this crack. I think it's one of those things where legally you probably want to run a service like this as a carrier so that you don't get yourself in trouble by making mistakes. But as company that tries to be a good citizen in a society, I think you want to make it as difficult as possible for children to post NSFW images of themselves. I don't necessarily think of Verizon as a good corporate citizen most of the time, but I think it's completely reasonable for people in society to ask them to do so.

That seems to be what's happening - a hard division between no-sex sites and porn sites, with nothing in between. Apple and Google seem to be driving this, with their no-sex policies.

Verizon, having acquired Tumblr, had a problem. Their own "Verizon Smart Family"[1] censoring system would now be blocking their own site.

[1] https://www.verizonwireless.com/support/verizon-smart-family...

What if companies that want to expand globally actually want to be forbidden to show any 'objectionable' content. They don't really want to do it themselves, so they work to get it mandated?

Seems like it could increase the barrier of entry significantly while simultaneously giving access to new, less saturated markets?

Sounds like crazy talk, but why has porn suddenly become such a big deal?

Even before internet, porn has been readily accessible for decades, so why does it suddenly become a problem big enough that companies seems willing to loose their entire business to filter out a specific class of content?

The only reasonable explanation is that they are seizing the opportunity, one possibly created on purpose, to enact realignment to new markets without getting all the flak themselves.

Tumblr's been on the App Store for ages. I think the recent de-listing was about child exploitation, not general porn.

Apple didn't ban Tumblr for NSFW content, they dropped it from the store because they couldn't keep CP from showing up in the app.

I saw a lot of tumblr 'refugees' on mastodon this week.

They should name the new platform Relbmut (inverse of Tumbler).

Actually, I'm kind of surprised Tumbler is trying to get rid of the all content instead of moving it to some separate "Porn Tumbler" instance. Sounds like there could be additional revenue stream coming out of that kind of stuff...

No mention of reddit?

Reddit actively discourages people from posting their own original content, other than a small number of subs intended for it.

How does it do that? I've never seen anything of the sort.

Via subreddit rules. If you link your work and then say “I made this” you get criticized for self promotion. You almost always need a 3rd party to introduce your work.

That depends on the sub, and what you link to. If you link to something commercial immediately, that’s different than sharing product of a hobby or interest, or something commercial that’s popular and you’re asked to link to a sale site. There are some subs explicitly about things you made, though. If this wasn’t discouraged reddit would be people advertising 24/7. It basically is anyway, but it has to be discreet.

Overall people on reddit love seeing ‘a photo I took’ but it’s true that “here’s a photo my boyfriend took and was too shy to post on reddit” is better.

The rules are actually global, not subreddit based. If more than 10% of your posts are OC you can be banned.

>You should submit from a variety of sources (a general rule of thumb is that 10% or less of your posting and conversation should link to your own content), talk to people in the comments (and not just on your own links), and generally be a good member of the community.

That's not the case at all, reddiquette is not the same as rules, they are more just community hopes and dreams.

In fact Reddit now by default asks if content is "OC" (original content) or not on posts.

Perhaps we frequent a different set of subtests, I don't recall seeing anything like this.

Are you sure? Among the reddit snobs not posting "original content" is frowned upon

I think he's talking specifically about NSFW subreddits, where many do say "no self generated content" specifically to avoid tumblr-style underage problems.

I think reddit serves a different purpose. It's not about personal accounts and subscribing to people; instead, everyone has a few collaborative lists (subreddits) and you don't really repost things. Upvotes are similar but again not the same.

It might be used as a substitute but the people that stuck to Tumblr this long probably consciously chose not to move to reddit.

That's cute. The Tumblr Refugees don't think that Twitter is censored.

It’s not. The only caveats are that you have to mark porn as porn, and you’re not allowed to get paid for it.

Source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xwavkq/j

> It’s not. The only caveats are that you have to mark porn as porn, and you’re not allowed to get paid for it.

For now. Twitter is subject to SESTA and FOSTA just like Tumblr and Facebook are, so it's only a matter of time before they follow suit.

Oh, I know that there is porn on Twitter. But I wasn't really referring to porn. It's all of the other stuff that Twitter censors/ shadow bans.

Twitter absolutely shadowbans sex workers from search results.

Twitter is massively censored. I don't know why anyone would claim otherwise. Twitter lies about shaddowbanning people, and is highly selective of enforcement of their policies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com