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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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

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