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Comment by Mirioron | Hacker News Reader

Why does it happen though? What's the motivation behind the credit card companies? As in, what's the ultimate reason for this?

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I've heard it said that porn tends to have a large amount of chargebacks.

There would also, presumably, be a fear of censorship targeting your entire company for over a subset of content. Back in 2018 Tumblr was blocked from Apple's app store [1] and responded by banning all adult content on the service [2] - and I'm sure there's a similar risk from school/workplace/ISP NSFW blocking services which are of course famous for over-reach.

Obviously, tumblr could have shifted everything NSFW to nsfwtumblr.com but for various reasons, a lot of sites seem to take a deniable 'turn-a-blind-eye' approach rather than visibly embracing NSFW content.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104366/tumblr-ios-app-... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/3/18123752/tumblr-adult-con...

Their response wasn't really correlated with the ban. They were moving in that direction for months, despite the fact that the problem with their platform wasn't the ecosystem of properly marked porn posted by creators, but the avalanche of untagged porn (some illegal) posted by bots which they were unable or unwilling to do anything about (the illegal stuff is why Apple banned their app). When they started the ban, their filter was awful and basically just pushed all the creators off the site (even those who weren't posting porn). As far as I know the porn bots are still there, because the false positive and false negative rate of their filter is atrocious.

How do the Reddit and Imgur apps get away with distributing porn and serving ads against it on the App Store? Maybe it was just a different time in the Tumblr era?

HBO and Cinemax have had apps on the App Store for about a decade, serving up adult content the entire time, sometimes with prominent editorial placements. The answer is, as always, "app review is a crapshoot".

One thing I thought was interesting: Apple sells access to HBO & Cinemax through their TV app, but that access does not appear to include the adult content (or at least it does not display without an active subscription).

> Obviously, tumblr could have shifted everything NSFW to nsfwtumblr.com

Or just kept using their web page?? I'm pretty sure that I can still access NSFW content in Safari.

I never understood what's the point of website-specific apps - like HN app or Reddit app or even Facebook & Twitter app - except of course some middle manager's quest for promotion.

Apps get access to a lot more data than the browser does.

Indeed, it's profitable for the developers (leeching users' data) but not the users.

Agreed. In my experience, the apps usually have a far worse UI than the websites. Often worse performance, too.

much stronger surveillance of the user, thus better surveillance surplus

There is a very large amount of chargebacks and fraud happening on adult sites.

Which sounds like an opportunity, doesn't it? Fraud free adult patreon.

It's not like every other adult site sells fraud as a feature. It's just really difficult and expensive to prevent. A single chargeback can cost the merchant up to $100 in fees.

But how would you go about implementing insurances for the fraud-free part?

That would be the product, right? Honestly, no idea. But IMHO an adult site that's secod purpose is not to spread malware and defraud people, while simultaniously making sure creators have a stable income should be a viable business.

Just use crypto-currency and you don't need to worry about any chargebacks.

You also don't need to worry about customers since there won't be any.

Aside from the credit issue, nobody wants to be associated with a porn site.

Would you launch your new line of e-books on a site that is 95% porn and well known for porn?

No.

If you're a porn site, then you're pretty much going to be just that, it's its own content vertical, fairly distinguished from everything else.

Patreon is relatively safe in that regard: They don't have much focus on discovery, no ad-placement to worry about, ... People interact with it primarily through deep links to invididual creators pages, so the "neighborhood" is less relevant. They've always been far from being a "porn site".

The answer to all 3 responses is 'perception' less so 'what happens on the site' although they are related.

Amazon is not known for porn. I didn't even know you could get porn there. Certainly, it's not 'online porn' which I would imagine would be the primary issue.

Tumblr became a place known for adult content so it was a problem. If Amazon started to do a lot of digital porn, like PornHub, it would be a problem.

If there is no 'search' on Patreon ... maybe they could keep it hidden. But it's a big risk.

There's plenty of adult stuff sold on Amazon yet I still would like to sell my new line of e-books there.

I mean, if Patreon provided a good service and the porn was hidden away under the default filter and not visible from my subsite or the homepage, I don't see at all why I wouldn't launch a product on it if I decided the business model was a good fit.

Operation Chokepoint

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