Tumbler really didn't do anyone justice. They're clearly reaping what they sowed. Unfortunately it's a lose/lose/lose situation for all.
They don't want huge traffic that they can't monetize. Unless they release revenue numbers that have also fallen by a lot, then it's hard to say what they've reaped.
People made similar remarks as yours when Google+ imposed the real name policy. Google+ is now dead.
HN tends to think of all sorts of technical or marketing reasons for why platforms live or die, however the best reasons for why social platforms live or die are always social ones.
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/4/18126112/tumblr-porn...
> But a former staff engineer, who recently left Tumblr and asked to remain anonymous for professional reasons, tells Vox that the NSFW ban was “in the works for about six months as an official project,” adding that it was given additional resources and named “Project X” in September, shortly before it was announced to the rest of the company at an all-hands meeting. “[The NSFW ban] was going to happen anyway,” the former engineer told me. “Verizon pushed it out the door after the child pornography thing and made the deadline sooner,” but the real problem was always that Verizon couldn’t sell ads next to porn.
Apparently the Daily Mail Online is running this morning's NZ murder video on its front page. Right next to the ads.
Ah, so shortly after SESTA was signed into law.
Quite the opposite - it's much easier to allow pornography and ban only child pornography than it is to create an automated system to detect pornography.
PhotoDNA makes it easy to find matches, which can then be used to uncover the networks of people posting child pornography, which are then added back to the database. It doesn't require any computer vision at all.
By contrast, banning all pornography does require computer vision of some sort, and that's much more difficult, as evidenced by how terrible the new Tumblr NSFW content detector is.
edit: I found this quote from an article[1] published last November: "In its updated statement, Tumblr said that while every image uploaded to the platform is “scanned against an industry database of child sexual abuse material” to filter out explicit images, a “routine audit” discovered content that was absent from the database, allowing it to slip through the filter."
So it looks like they might have already been using PhotoDNA.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104366/tumblr-ios-app-...
Of course they were working with NCMEC (and therefore using PhotoDNA, which is owned by NCMEC); it would have been legal suicide for them not to. They were doing this for years, before they were even acquired by Yahoo.
> Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but PhotoDNA seems to be a tool for identifying reposts and edits of already known illegal images -- those that have previously been found and had their hashes entered into the database. So if Tumblr had a problem with original content (which could include underage users posting explicit pictures of themselves, as well as the worse things we think of when we hear the phrase 'child porn'), I don't think that would help.
How many people do you think have Tumblr accounts where they post only new, never-before-seen pornography of underage children, which has never been posted on any other blog before, and never once post a single photo that has been previously identified as child pornography[0]?
Of those, how many do you think are able to ensure that none of their followers ever repost/reblog that photo on any other blog which also happens to contain at least one other photo that's been previously identified as child pornography?
Of those, how many do you think are able to ensure that none of their followers have been previously identified as highly-connected nodes in the underground networks dedicated to sharing child pornography, and therefore pretty much exclusively post child pornography or follow people who they believe are likely to post child pornography?
Of those, how many do you think are able to ensure that nobody who ever sees one of those photos ever decides to download it and upload it as an attachement to an unsent email in their Gmail drafts folder, or put it in a private Dropbox folder (shared with nobody), or sends it on any of the many "cloud" services which also actively monitor for child pornography and do the same sorts of graph analysis to identify people who are using their services to store or share child pornography?
Again, once you understand how these underground networks work, and once you realize that this is mostly a problem of social graph analysis and not image recognition/classification, you realize that it's very easy to solve.
[0] Remember, not just new to Tumblr, but new to everyone who is working with NCMEC/ICMEC (which means every large and not-so-large company in the entire world that hosts user-provided content).
Yes, SESTA was the real reason that they banned pornography. SESTA imposed way too much liability on them to be able to support it.
It had nothing to do with child porn. They are still liable for child porn. They still have to work with NCMEC and go through the same process for identifying, reporting, and removing child porn. None of that has changed.
This is unfortunate.
Unfortunate, and also wholly predictable. This was exactly why advocacy groups of former victims of sex trafficking opposed SESTA in the first place, as did even the DOJ: they both recognized that it would ultimately make it harder to identify and rescue victims of sex trafficking.
I'm not saying it's necessarily the right policy, but it does.make a difference.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104366/tumblr-ios-app-...
Child pornography online isn't a new problem and Tumblr must have been negligent in policing it.
These things exist. Tumblr decided not to bother, which forced them to panic and nuke the site from orbit.
It’s a mess of their own making.
Tumblr had an entire team that did literally all of those things, for years. They did not "decide not to bother".
Saying you have team working on something, but not giving them appropriate resources, not taking the problem seriously, is same as not bothering. It’s same as saying, “We take your concerns seriously”, and then throwing the complaint in the trash. Their actions betray they’re true feelings.
Their employees still need to moderate their platform and ensure there's no child porn. Banning regular, legal porn has zero bearing on this.
Why do people keep repeating this?
No, it's much more difficult to ban all pornography than it is to ban only child porn. One requires analyzing the content of photos and the other doesn't.
Since it's easier to spot pornography in general than differentiate between very disturbing types of pornography, the work load is lessened and overall less stressful. Not to mention the amount of work ai could automate. That's your point, right?
No, detecting child pornography by matching photos to known datasets and then extrapolating rings dedicated to sharing child porn from the social graph is already a solved problem. NCMEC already provides the tools to do this. You don't need to do any image analysis.
There are no effective tools for detecting porn more generally. That's a much harder problem.
Evidently that wasn't sufficient to stop Apple removing them from the App Store, though.
[1] https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3066654/tumblr-pul...
Except that's not what the issue was.
Why is it so hard to believe that there exists a solution to this that's much easier than training an image classifier?
As I've explained elsewhere, multiple times, this is a solved problem. There's no image analysis required.
You missed that part. That requires classification, either by a human or by an algorithm. There is no way around it.
I did not miss anything. "Previously unseen" only matters if your primary means of identifying people who share child porn is based on analyzing the content of images.
I'm very aware of how these systems work, not just at Tumblr but in the industry at large at other, larger companies. I'm not just speculating here; this is literally how NCMEC works and what they expect of companies that host user-generated content.
You may not like it, I can tell you're very upset at tumblr banning pornography, but this is the reality. Throw around as many of your qualifications as you like, it changes nothing.
NCMEC doesn't need those "magical powers" because NCMEC does not care about the latter. That's not their mandate. Hacker News loves to talk about age-of-consent and child pornography in the context of 17 year olds, but that's simply not relevant here. That's not the issue that Tumblr was facing pressure from.
> Throw around as many of your qualifications as you like, it changes nothing.
It sounds like you're so convinced in your own beliefs that even direct, firsthand knowledge of the inside situation won't change your mind, in which case you're right - there's no point in continuing this conversation.
You may not like that I know what actually went on here, and I can tell you're very upset that the actual facts about how NCMEC works and why Tumblr internally chose to make their decision don't support your narrative, but that's the reality. Whether you choose to believe it or not, it changes nothing.
And nor do you it seems, but tumblr now does. They've been forced to. You may not like it, but that's the reality of how tumblr is now operating. Tumblr can no longer turn a blind eye to any form of child pornography, and is no longer turning a blind eye to any form of child pornography.
Tumblr didn't ban all pornography for shits and giggles. They did it because given the current legal and social landscape it was their only economically viable option.
Tumblr may be a company. But it was also a community. Real relationships were made on there. I wasn't big on Tumblr but it meant the whole world to thousands of people growing up.
Verizon could make its decisions in the context of running a company, or in the context of running a community. They chose the former, because as a money machine they have no interest in spending capital to be the bearers of a meaningful online community which facilitates the formation of meaningful connections between people.
Aka cheap. Cheap is key, that's what Verizon cares about. Particularly since they're unable to monetize the legal pornographic content anyway, so ridding the site of it is doubly cheap.
The same thing happened when Yahoo was running the show, the bleed-out was just slower because they were more timid about making sweeping changes to Tumblr's ecosystem.
Instead of Yahoo or Verizon realizing that they weren't fit to run a community and divesting the company to more competent leadership, as money machines they were unable to recognize the human element behind these companies and ripped them to shreds trying to scrounge up pocket change.
Of course they do. It's foolish to ever believe that isn't the case, with any for profit corporation. Who do you expect to run tumblr as a charity?
Tumblr disintegrated because they lost sight of their community, first with the Yahoo acquisition, and again with the Verizon merger. And now it's useless to everyone, both the users and the people who thought they could squeeze it dry for a few bucks. There's nothing to argue with. That's simply the facts. You're arguing a straw man and you don't even have a point, you're just playing a poor devil's advocate.
If you want to genuinely prevent the most abusive and criminal content on the planet, then - as the comment you're replying to suggests - the only sure way to prevent it is to not allow it to be hosted/connected to/shared/etc. anwyhere across the internet but since you can't ensure that, then we default tothe internet being the medium that makes that possible/happen, so...
Twitter has plenty of legal porn without butting heads with this issue. Facebook doesn't allow porn and have to deal with the child pornography issue.
Taking the stance of "we banned all porn because of child porn" is lazy and deflects responsibility and agency of their actions. They banned porn because the suits higher up said they didn't like it, full stop. Trying to save face with the community and blame child porn is dishonest when every platform, from 4chan to Facebook, has to police and report child porn.