Why “go nuts, show nuts” doesn’t work in 2022

The big boys make it harder and squash the heads sticking out, but people are acting like you won't find ungodly things the moment you turn off the safety filters and pick your words a little recklessly.

Including Google.

>The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. And virtually in lockstep, they are becoming increasingly prudish.

I mean, yes and no. People have been successful in sanitizing the mainstream internet, the pop culture internet, the one your grandparents like to visit. There's plenty of internet out there beyond what is commonly used.

Not just in a porn way. Looking back at archives of the old internet just seem way more risque. For example, take the hacker magazine phrack. Maybe its a bad example because a hacker mag is always going to be out there, but the early issues included all sorts of stuff around making improvised bombs. Its hard to imagine anything like that on the semi-mainstream internet now a days.

It's far more complicated than that and looking at the complicated details is useful to understand the bigger picture.

Here are some examples...

1. It's now that far more things are on the Internet than there used to be. Some things that used to be huge are now a smaller percentage in an immensely larger space. In some cases they are bigger now than they used to be.

2. Sex slaves and porn are a thing and a problem. There's both more of it and more awareness of it. In many places there are laws about this that companies who process money have to take in to account.

3. Kids and the Internet. About half the 10 year olds I know (which is more than a few) have phones with no filters on them. Kids running wild. If more things were more easily accessible than the culture around screens and handling that with kids will need to change. Kids are ready for different things at different ages and the way they view things during their formative years impacts the way they view and treat others.

I use these to just illustrate that it's more than money, power, and control by the wealthy. Sometimes (like in the case of #2) it's about the most vulnerable.

Why do you say this?

The whole point of the internet was for distant parties to be able to communicate. That's it. Parts of it were implemented in a decentralized fashion because neither the nodes, nor the links between nodes were considered reliable.

You can still do all that communication in a decentralized fashion, you're just unhappy that all the value-add services built on top of that substrate don't share the initial design constraints of the network.

Unless you have an ironclad way to verify the identity of every poster, you'll get a bunch of illegal stuff anyway. And if you're a "utility", then who is responsible for removing that from your service?

What you're really suggesting is "common carrier", but the difference is most common carriers carry the content in a point to point way, not publicly (FedEx, UPS, your telephone provider). For the common carriers that do have public broadcast (radio, TV, cable) they either have to moderate all their content and are responsible for it (TV, radio) or they have to provide an unmoderated but public access section where they know exactly who the content provider is (cable TV, who gets to choose which channels to carry as long as they have a public access channel).

Conditioning liability limitation on being hands-off will only go so far. For one thing, most platforms are basically unusable if you try to turn them into the verbal equivalent of 2b2t[0]. You need to do spam filtering at the least, and that implies making editorial judgments as to what users to take on. It is also possible to use free speech as a censorship tool - say, by harassing or doxing users as reprisal for speech.

Even if we walked this back to "utilities must have consistent rules and users can sue for unfair application of them", this is still historically lenient in terms of intermediary liability. The law does not chase pointers: with literally any other field of endeavor, we don't accept the idea that someone can facilitate a crime without being liable for it. That would be a massive loophole. But we accept it for defamation and copyright law because we convinced Congress to accept the propaganda of the Internet[1].

Under current law, Visa and Mastercard cannot disclaim liability that Apple or Google can. This is why the anti-porn campaigns have been so successful at killing amateurs in that space. Apple might be prudish about not having porn in their app, but they can at least accept filters on the app[2]. And, as we've seen with cryptocurrency, letting those companies disclaim liability would be an absolute nightmare. Cryptocurrency has been an absolute boon to ransomware and scam enterprises that otherwise would not be able to take payments. So you will never convince Congress to carve massive, gaping loopholes in banking law the same way we did to defamation and copyright law.

A decade and change ago our biggest worry was that Comcast would try to turn the Internet into a series of cable TV packages. Now, we have forced so many people to effectively immigrate to the Internet, that they are in a position to demand that it does actually work like cable (in that things they don't like can be sued into oblivion or taken down). The old Internet cannot exist in a world where it can be used against itself to destroy itself.

[0] The oldest anarchy server in Minecraft.

[1] For the record, I am not opposed to CDA 230 or DMCA 512. But we still need to recognize that these liability limiters have massively harmed the ability for plaintiffs to prosecute legitimate defamation or copyright cases.

[2] I am aware that Tumblr got smacked down for this, but this is not because Apple refuses to accept filtering on social networks. They got smacked down because they are absolutely terrible at filtering anything, and an app reviewer saw CSAM.

Not just sanitizing, but sanitizing to US social mores. Showing a naked boob is considered porn and banned on most of these platform while public toplessness is perfectly legal in many jurisdictions worldwide. I guess it's lucky that at least these companies are not based in an even more restrictive society like China or we would see further restrictions become commonplace.

They're targeting the wrong layer. Regulate ISPs, and maybe big hosting companies like AWS and Cloudflare.

The shock stuff, edgy humour and 4chan-line shenanigans are still out there, even on mainstream social media like TikTok. It's just that most of 30 year-olds don't know about it any more because we're out of the loop. We're square.

You can be as independent as you want if you don't care about getting paid. If you want to run a small web site with handwritten HTML hosted on a server in your house that gets a few hundred visitors a month, you can still do that. (I'd be willing to bet it's easier now than it was in the 90s!) If you want to have ten million customers and a staff of full-time employees, then you'll be integrating with the rest of society whether you like it or not. I'm not sure that's unreasonable in and of itself, although I do agree that the way we treat porn (and sex in general) in the US is pretty bizarre.

Be the change you want to see and stop using normie, silo'd sites

It's always people who produce zero meaningful creative content who complain most vociferously about Internet censorship.

It would be better for the average content creator if porn were blocked. I also think things like virtual slot machines should be banned from the App Store. I think conspiracy theorists should be banned.

Why do we tolerate ads? A branded video game doesn't have to make money, so it can focus on being fun. There are fun branded games. The budgets are bigger. You don't give a fuck that it's a fucking cereal or cookie or whatever, it doesn't really matter. Chex Quest was a branded video game. And nobody is forcing a creative person to make games sort-of promoting junk food. Like everything it has tradeoffs.

But seriously, it's the same people who say "sanitizing the Internet" as the ones who pay for literally nothing new. They are the mouth agape neckbeard guys clutching a fistfull of dollars for a 30 year old gigantism IP, only paying for Star Wars and Game of Thrones, and if it was something that Hollywood hasn't yet said is good, they just do not care. They don't pay for porn. They complain about it being not in the App Store and then they don't pay for it. They are the worst audiences!

All this crummy stuff drains audiences away from more substantive cultural endeavors. I understand it is stuff people want, and is high engagement, but honestly, who the fuck cares? So what. What comes next? Engagement is not meaning. But audiences have a finite amount of time. You will reduce meaning if people spend all their time on meaningless things. That's just common sense.

And if you actually knew a single talented creative person in your life, you'd learn that they yuck people's yums all the fucking time. It's an essential reason they are successful - they have opinions about good and bad.

A certain Twitteratti demand Apple show the nipples and Netflix, in the opposite direction, ban the saucy comedians. In service of what? For really dead end, lame, seriously unfunny and uninteresting teenage-depth narratives about sex. Seriously, again, who the fuck cares.

I think the blame is displaced. It’s not these nice companies that decide what you are and what you are allowed to see. It’s you. Or more generally - we, the People, ourselves.

Indeed: Gab is not using Amazon or Google cloud services, Visa and Mastercard do not serve Gab - it has to rely on checks, money orders and crypto. Gab does not have an app… actually it has, in a way of a web link, copied to your home page - btw I have never seen an app that was better than a web page for the same company, have you? Gab has even launched GabPay, its own payment processor open to others. Gab explicitly promise not to delete anything unless it is found illegal by a court.

Still, you the People are not using Gab, you are using Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Why are you not using Gab? Last time I’ve checked it was because Gab… does not delete the content that you the People find objectionable!

A cherry on this cake was the decision of some state GOP party committee to delete their Gab account because Gab refuses to censor anti-Semitic content.

So, please - do not blame this nice long list of the evil companies. You have at least one alternative. You, the freest people in the world, are not using it. Not enough censorship there.

The auto-mask feature in ios16 will do shirtless men, but not shirtless women.

I’m a photographer who shoots a lot of nudes, and I don’t use iCloud at all.

This is the local, on-device software editorializing over my art.

And these companies you mention are getting wrongfully blamed.

It’s must simpler, it’s just the digital equivalent of a brick & mortar business saying “no shirt, no shoes, no service”.

Additionally, there’s regulatory requirements for some of these companies to not do business in certain circumstances. You can’t fault them for refusing service in order to comply with laws.

Would absolutely vote for this assuming it starts when the company reaches some size.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.h...

Sometimes they win, sometimes their effort backfires like that elderly lady with a cliffside beach house.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Did you miss this part?

> There are lots of new rules around verifying consent and age in adult content. The rise of smartphones also means that everyone has a camera that can capture pictures and video at any time. Non-consensual sharing has grown exponentially and has been a huge problem on dedicated porn sites like Pornhub – and governments have rightly been expanding laws and regulations to make sure everyone being shown in online adult content is of legal age and has consented to the material being shared. Tumblr has no way to go back and identify the featured persons or the legality of every piece of adult content that was shared on the platform and taken down in 2018, nor does it have the resources or expertise to do that for new uploads.

Second, I don't find it worthy of contemplation if such laws would help, because if they would — they just wouldn't be passed, simple as that. The same way as there's no real point to invent a perfect cryptocurrency, because if it would actually enable things that crypto is supposed to enable — it would be basically shut down, like Monero.

In some cases the laws are front-running the tech companies, and in other cases it's the reverse. The problem (hand-waving warning) is the vocal minority of the easily-offended enforcing their sterile worldview on a political class too scared of being seen to be permissive of anything less than that which would paint them as puritanical.

Despite the realities these laws and policies are incompatible with.

Having said all that, yes, it _should_ be laws that address these things.

They've effectively become the highest authority on what is "legal". The worrying thing here is that of course they don't implement any form of democracy (other than share holder voting). They are deciding for us but we don't get to be involved in that decision process.

Credit card companies are doing the same. They are telling people what they can and cannot spend on and they are telling businesses what they can and cannot use their payment systems for. Effectively they are discriminating between businesses they like and businesses they don't like based on criteria that they define. Discriminating people is illegal. But discriminating against companies (which in a legal sense are regarded as persons) is fine. Maybe it shouldn't be?

The solution is breaking monopolies like that and forcing competition to happen. Apple and Google own app stores. That's fine; good for them. But banning other people's app stores isn't. If they don't want to sell something, somebody else will happily take that business.

In the same way you can use any credit card you want as long as it is Visa or Mastercard. None of the other ones matter anymore, which is weird. Effectively Visa and Mastercard monopolized online payments and are re-enforcing their position through anti-competitive moves. And of course Apple and Google have payment solutions too that are actually based on those. So, we're talking about an oligarchy that controls payments and online distribution of content that only consists of a handful of companies. They decide what's legal and isn't legal. And they profit from all transactions that happen. And they are fiercely defensive of their exclusive control as it is highly profitable. So, competing with them is one of the things that they've simply decided is illegal.

Websites with content moderation should be allowed to exist.

Since Pornhub could not guarantee they had 0 underage content, the credit card companies decided to withdraw.

Because if the law finds out the credit card companies dealt with Pornhub, and Pornhub was hosting underage people's explicit content, then the credit card company would end up in real trouble. Human trafficking and child pornography laws are no joke.

I'm confident Reddit and Twitter will be targeted and announce a crackdown on adult content soon enough.

I can't think of a single policy in which they disagreed or were not in lockstep. So it's like we have a single cabal, not 6

> how successful people have been sanitizing the internet.

When you accumulate money, your interest is to protect it, not to make more

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/09/27/paypal-reins...

[2] https://freespeechunion.org/about/

For the most part (leaving aside harassment, actual crimes) there's nothing stopping you from setting up a personal website to post photos of your nuts on the internet.

But all of these platforms are about making money selling ads, so they are going to make policies that are advertiser friendly.

If you want the internet of 1996, you can still have that, but you're going to have to run your own server. Most of the "hackers" on this site are not prepared to do what the old-school web required.

5 out of the 6 companies you mentioned are only involved in how you consume goods and services.

Not being able to buy something is not the same as the web not being centralized.

Also, the reference point you're using as a paragon for decentralized web is also a point in time when people were not able to buy goods and services from any of these companies.

Consumerism and free speech are not the same thing.

In theory yes, but maybe envision the lawmakers as a monopoly with vested interests and no accountability then project the result.

It’s possible that a “choose to be utility or publisher” world would have an extremely polarised internet. On one hand, “utility” services with a lot of illegal content and the police playing whack-a-mole. On the other hand, “publisher” services with liability and therefore intensely risk averse, allowing only the most anaemic content.

    The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we 
    have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare

Currently, for most of the world, that means you need to take credit cards.

It's also crucial for us to note that Visa and MC don't care about porn for puritanical reasons; they're not the root cause of this particular issue. They care only about money.

People buy adult content and frequently dispute the charges, which is a headache and eats profits.

Nowadays you have to take active measures to disconnect.

I'm not sure what to do about this.

Fascism was alive and well in Yerp before WW2 started in the form of old aristocrats who lorded over the soon to be new aristocrats, who had yet to claim total control of public institutions. So with that in mind the “solution” is public control of life preserving logistics networks, and tribal, de-centralized DIY social media for fluffing our imaginations. Ogling punsters, memes is hardly a universal preference.

Decentralized filter bubbles are getting easier and easier to host; Docker and k8s via private Wireguard networks anyone?

There’s a lot of chatter about new protocols needed for decentralizing. Other than email, I have been self hosting a long list of personal services via Docker for years. I am shocked other hacker types are bought into all the service subscriptions. New protocols will be taken over by old social forces.

Tech workers have been told to dog food products as if they’re pets. As a society we once made shopping at the company store illegal. Monopoly busting is about avoiding a minority guiding species agency at scale.

Earlier this year Twitter considered competing with OnlyFans in having a paid porn product. No company wants to be the most lax company in the space, and twitter determined it didn't have the ability to ensure that child porn wouldn't end up on the service, and they killed the effort.

> "Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale" the Red Team [at Twitter] concluded

I think that's a completely valid outcome - I think it's valid for no one to want to be responsible for facilitating that. https://www.theverge.com/23327809/twitter-onlyfans-child-sex...

This is the key observation, I think. It's a real race to the bottom, except that the bottom is a place where absolutely no actual bottoms are allowed.

Honestly, in my opinion having such a public image can also be a market advantage for such a company. For example in its early days, Reddit attracted a huge initial audience by being perceived this way and being perceived as a very pro-free-speech website.

Some of those people have kids and stopped saying racial slurs and just grew up. You're talking about forums that were overwhelming inhabited by 15-22 year olds.

1. Regulate data privacy and tracking

2. Regulate porn/liability risks

The first camp generally opposes Facebook for its huge collection of personal information and tracking across the web. By “regulation,” they mean make this kind of behavior illegal so I don’t have to run Facebook Container and try to cover my tracks to have privacy online. I don’t really believe these sorts of people have issues with porn online, unless their porn habits/opinions are used to profile them perhaps.

The second camp is the likes of Nicholas Kristof and FOSTA-SESTA, who believe that unregulated social media will lead to sex trafficking and prostitution. I’m not gonna get into the validity of these concerns, but generally these people are not concerned about data privacy and in fact want companies to be able to identify people by name and stop any crimes facilitated via their site.

You also have another curious mention of regulation for kids which I interpret as a reference to Instagram Kids. The backlash here was, from my memory, much broader than the likes of either the EFF or the porn crusaders alone and had a lot to do with the recent press about Facebook being harmful to teenage girls in particular and children in general. So, a lot of parents were upset at the idea of an entire app dedicated just to Instagram for kids. Of course, I am sure there were also people concerned that Facebook was further cementing a digital “pipeline” from childhood to adulthood where your Facebook account follows you the whole way and makes data collection and surveillance even more powerful.

I also disagree with the notion that “no company wants to be the most lax company in the space.” If anything, from this post and also from sites such as OnlyFans, I think many sites “want” to host adult content in the sense of “want” meaning don’t want to turn away potential users. The issue is, as this post touches on, being associated with adult or illicit content can result in payment processors blocking your accounts and advertisers souring. You can see a milder example of this on YouTube with unsavory videos being demonetized because advertisers don’t want their ads played over a video about serial killers or racism. It’s not that YouTube is cowering at some journalist penning them as a public menace, it’s that they want advertisers’ dollars and advertisers don’t like adult content because it’s a threat to their public image.

Regardless, this “race to the bottom” theory doesn’t really hold water when you consider that only Tumblr has banned adult content. Twitter and Reddit still allow it and there are even whole sites dedicated to distribution of it (OnlyFans and its clones) which have never existed before on this scale. Then again, you have things like PornHub taking down “unverified” videos after threat from Mastercard, so it’s not really clear either way.

This was a very long reply I realize, but I had a lot to say I suppose.

I was a "free speech absolutist" in the early 00s, which was the "default" on places like Slashdot, and later on places like Reddit and HN. The reason I changed my opinion is that I was generally surprised by the amount of real harm that can be caused by the way technology can amplify false or harmful content. Specific examples:

1. I was actually surprised by the amount of glee people would take in online harassment, things like r/jailbait and fatpeoplehate. I believe that the social norms that would have prevented the proliferation of this content "in the real world" were ineffective in the anonymous, online world.

2. I was surprised by the amount of laughable BS that got real, widespread traction, stuff like QAnon.

3. Regardless of your politics, interference from foreign powers in democratic governments is now a much more realistic and effective attack scenario.

So I guess the short of it is that some "axioms" that I used to believe about free speech (e.g. "the truth will always bubble to the top in open debate") I no longer believe to be true in the way that technology can "hack" people's emotions. I definitely don't know what the right solution is, but I think that unfettered anonymous free speech on the Internet will lead to a type of society that scares me.

I actually wonder sometimes if the real reason why the tech monopolies aren't busted is because the threat of anti-trust is a very effective tool to get them to censor things without having to go through legislation.

I disagree. It seems like if anything, it's the public of today that has let down the hackers. In all honesty though, it's probably more just, "people gonna people."

Originally I switched to using home screen bookmarks to save some storage on a cheap iPhone but now I can't go back.

I wonder how long it will be until a popular social media site avoids the app stores completely due to content and payment restrictions.

Though we reject Chinese style censorship which is more restrictive but unacceptable.

Nobody remembers that in 2007, Prince used shadow puppetry to stroke a penis-shaped guitar. Not one peep about that.

The bloodlust is easy to explain. The tribe better at war survives. Veneration of honorable warriors runs deep in our veins. Sales for Top Gun, Marvel movies, action games continue to soar.

The puritanical outlook developed to create stable monogamous families. That bit of artifice is dissolving now. More polygamy means the top men hoarding reproductive access, which historically leads to instability. Sexual socialism was an interesting run, but with the demise of religion, I'm not sure how we could save it.

Imagine if they were consistent and movies/tv/video games were also whitewashed of blood too. What a miserable media world we'd be in.

I can remember how disappointed I was when I bought home Mortal Kombat for SNES and there was no blood. Truly horrifying.

The US armed forces, with close to 1.4mln personnel, is one of the largest employers in the country.

With success, the crowds at the shows started to change, eventually to the point Kurt lamented “why are these people here? these are the people who beat us up in high school.”

“If your app includes user-generated content from a web-based service, it may display incidental mature “NSFW” content, provided that the content is hidden by default and only displayed when the user turns it on via your website.“

Also, while true that CC companies aren't anti-porn in a strict sense, credit cards really do not get along very well with sex work or porn in general. They'll reluctantly take their money, but it's a very strained relationship, with high fees in part due to the high number of chargebacks, and in part because no one is going to go to bat politically for porn sites.

It's arguable whether the CC companies are "anti-porn", but they are definitely not "pro-porn".

The age of people being able to freely share content with each other is dead I see.

What is UGC porn?

Another way to word this is that he is making a business decisions base on the financial viability of the company.

I doubt many of their employees would fight for those values enough to consider working unpaid for an extended period of time. Would you?

Not really sure what I'd do with that domain, though. A gallery of almonds and cashews would be good for a sensible chuckle, I suppose, but not really worth the effort.

They're also really, really against getting caught having anything to do with anything illegal, and there's a lot of illegal stuff associated with porn. It may be only a small percentage, but the last thing they want is to be sued or criminally charged.

So, they are very, very wary of anything to do with porn. I'm sure they'd be happy to have their cut of that very lucrative industry, but they'd rather forego it than having their entire business destroyed over it.

It's an understandable fear. It's just a sad fact that they are an effective global duopoly so if they chicken out there's no alternative for people to turn to. More competition would help with this, but the threat of the lawsuit floodgates opening would still be there and create a chilling effect on payment processing. That has to be handled by legislation, but that's going down a whole other thorny road with many possible bad outcomes. The legislation we get may introduce new problems even worse than the ones it attempted to solve.

But I think it's still worth trying. The present situation is very bad for the future of an open internet.

Pretty sure if you're a vendor selling mail-order "adult" DVDs/BDs from major publishing houses, that's a business that you'll have no difficulty running with credit card sales.

Where you'll run into a problem is if you're a website that wants to charge subscriptions for access to loosely-sourced, user-generated content.

Really the business in internet porn is psychological manipulation and compromat. There's no business otherwise, it's sex, it's bad for sex to be efficient, porn is efficient, too efficient. No business. As a straight model I can tell you the business is in being very close to pornography without ever actually crossing the boundary.

Teasing.

Very inefficient.

I got down to my underwear for my portfolio day 1, no problem. Absolutely no problem. There was a girl [a very young woman model age, like 19, I was 24, her name was Antonia] getting her portfolio done simultaneous, she was naked too, but with lingerie. Our agent was there, telling me just strip, don't go to the bathroom, look at her, está en pelota she's naked. It's a living. Our interest in each other was purely professional.

Teasing. Like the Russky pop stars. That's where the money is.

Maybe it is because Tumblr allows wild customization, instead of forcing a unified corporate approved interface.

It felt like a place to explore and discover things about yourself in the process. Much of the porn on the internet these days feels like it's just trying to profile and exploit you .

Mobile browsers exist