Tumblr and why ‘the porn-friendly era of the internet is over’
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Adding insult to injury, the company behind the service loudly markets that they support Pride every year. The payment processor has pictures on their Facebook of employees attending the Pride parade... We're not a commercial entity, our activities are legal and we also march under the same (rainbow) flag.
Oh, and there is no reasonable appeals process. We initially applied for a different product a while back and got rejected since they had run our web page through Google Translate and determined that we were involved with "public group sex". Asking the service to get is in touch with the payment processor to clear up the misunderstanding was not possible, they just said there was no way to appeal and our best bet would be to contact them ourselves through their website.
/rant.
This was all going in the right direction of freedom of speech == sexual freedom == censorship free internet.
Then Steve tried to market the appstore as a walled garden and wanted to keep 30% of the revenue so he branded everything as "safe" including no-porn. I don't think this was his intention but it snowballed into this.
I hate crypto with a vengeance but when I hear stories like this I totally get why people are so much into it.
That's a very interesting observation.
So if most people want to be sheep they can and will, but it isn't an inherent property of the medium.
Sites like 4Chan end up with a uniform tone because trolling, immaturity, and vulgarity will cause anyone with higher standards to quickly self-select away from the site. The content trends toward a sort of stability around content that repels people who don’t want to see it. Bad behavior is essentially rewarded by reinforcing the echo chamber.
Similar patterns occur on alternative sites created to escape moderation on popular platforms: Voat was created to escape perceived unfair moderation on Reddit, but quickly became an echo chamber of all the terrible content that Reddit wouldn’t tolerate. A similar story is playing out with the new TheMotte website that left Reddit, which is systematically collecting all of the people with terrible, racist opinions who weren’t welcome on the Reddit equivalent.
Self-/unmoderated ideals always reminds me of this:
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
* https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
In the case of porn this is not much of an issue, but the fact that these companies have that kind if power I find really scary. As stated in the article Apple (and Google too one would think) have the power to shut down many businesses for whatever reason they see fit.
The practical upshot of this is that nobody has bothered porting a browser engine to iOS, since it's javascript performance would be unacceptably slow.
Google allows sideloading of apps. Of course if you start on the play store and get kicked off that can kill your business, but if you build your audience elsewhere it can work out just fine. There's a pornhub Android app, and an ecosystem of dating sims, visual novels containing erotic content, etc. Patreon is probably responsible for a couple of million dollars a month in Android app "subscriptions".
And the situation is even worse when you factor in AWS and Cloudflare. When "free markets" are controlled by a few powerful gatekeepers they cease to be free markets.
While this is a technically correct statement, it is also hiding the truth. Android makes up 70% of the smartphone market still, but the phones are made by different companies (hence why the iphone is the post popular smartphone, just not the most popular OS). So 70% of phones can still sideload.
It is.
> but the fact that these companies have that kind if power I find really scary.
And you just said why it is :)
Infrastructure providers (Visa, MC, Google, Apple, $RANDOM_ISP) shouldn't be allowed a say on what they're used for.
If they're saying they want to pick winners, they should be responsible for the harms those winners they pick create. Otherwise, let the police do the policing.
Who decides what causes harm? The pressure group with the most donors for the lawsuit expenses?
We should be damm glad that the web got invented when it did, because nobody would accept the web if it was invented today.
Note also this is hardly the only controversial class of content. Consider two others: the manufacture of weapons and explosives, and the manufacture of drugs. These also break down on the legal/illegal boundary.
For example, with weapons, what's allowed? YT is full of videos on how to reload gun ammunition, for example, but when it comes to home synthesis of gunpowder needed to reload those cartidges, using the well-known historical recipe (charcoal, saltpetre, sulfur), it seems those are all taken down under 'YT community guidelines'. Curiously, automatic weapons or machine guns (including disassembly and repair) are also all over YT, even though owning such weapons without a license is about as illegal as home synthesis of explosives is.
Another example: drug chemistry. Aspirin is common household medication and is synthesized by the reaction of salicylic acid (from willow bark) with acetic anhydride (basically, dehydrated vinegar). There are no shortage of detailed walk-through videos on how to do this reaction on YT. However, if we simply replace the willow bark extract with opium extract (i.e. morphine), we are now making heroin, diacetylated morphine. No such hands-on walk-through videos seem to exist on YT, or for say, the conversion of coca leaves to cocaine sulfate paste to cocaine hydrochloride or freebase cocaine (i.e. crack). There are of course, no such restrictions on videos about the fermentation of agricultural products and the distillation of the result into strong liquors (does YT block this in Muslim countries?). Growing cannabis is currently a kind of grey area.
It seems that social media companies want their user-uploaded content to be in line with the regulatory norms of their viewer's host government (and perhaps more fuzzy concepts like local social norms), but those norms, globally speaking, are all over the map.
I'm wary for the day ML de-anonymizes a popular non-de-plum - someone carefully disguising their artwork to release their passion under one name, and their day-job art under another. Written and visual both seem susceptible to this as we follow the arrow of time.
What happens to art when you literally cannot hide your name?
Using the correct spelling of words would be a start in defending against such models
*Nom de plume. Pen name.
The technologies to do this are already adequate (though there's always room for refinement), but the marketing and onboarding to make it mainstream aren't there.
and then , i remember back in the days of TV there was soft porn or adult talk shows on TV late at night. They did have ads, and not the cheap kind (cigarettes, alcohol etc). TV was somewhat self-correcting, because kids are usually asleep past midnight so the ads matched content . On the internet it's nigh impossible to keep kids outside of content, so maybe that's a reason why adult content is unfundable and why the default for censorship is to make everything kid-safe. But maybe there is a way to make that work, i dont know
What do you mean by this? Zoomers are the new puritans not the previous generation
Which generation is the new Huguenots?
Just a small case in point: Gen Z is the most openly queer/non-traditional generation in US history. There are entire segments of our population that consider that nature to be sexually deviant and want to control it with social restrictions. So why are Gen Z the “puritans”?
In essence, an extremely conformist and neurotic generation.
I haven’t seen any evidence that they’re particularly conformist, or more neurotic than most people I’ve talked to. This comment in point: what’s more neurotic than saying that an entire generation has an “inquisition like air”?
I think they’re a group of people with too much knowledge but nearly no wisdom. They mistake knowledge for knowing something. Again, generally speaking.
I don’t think it’s their fault. We have infantilized them and never let them out of the cage. We were so scared of them failing that they’ve picked up on it and have packaged it as compulsive neuroticism. They’ve been overloaded with information from dubious sources for years now.
Saying that there’s a lot of great kids out there.
Sure, but this is not a particularly new phenomenon. Nobody expects a generation of children and young adults (at the absolute oldest!) to be wise beyond their years. I'm in my mid-20s, and even I'm too old to be a Zoomer.
People accused Gen Xers of being coddled and "smart without being wise." They called them zealots when they burned their draft cards and tied themselves to trees, engaged in mass strikes, etc. Passion in young people is not new, and neither is "but this generation is different."
For what it's worth, I actually do agree that helicopter parenting (among other things) have a deleterious affect on kids. But that's a 40+ year old phenomenon, one that's not unique to gen Z. And of all the people I know online, Zoomers are the least susceptible to fake information (if only because so many of them are nihilistic).
GenX has very suspicious of group identity and “selling out”. A corporation pandering to their values would be mortifying. Very much the opposite of todays kids. Which makes sense as it’s their kids.
> GenX has very suspicious of group identity and “selling out”.
The Pepsi Generation is suspicious of selling out?
But they "party" less? And it could absolutely be the case that they're content at home with videogames over Discord. I suppose there's something special about my 20's that -- hey, maybe they don't feel like they're missing anything at all -- but e.g. "incel" and "incel-adjacent" feels like it could be something that could be improved.
Now, back to my Facebook group of 40-50 year olds who trade dirty memes and use getting temp-banned as a jokey "sign-of-honor" :)
Regardless, I don't feel like "active participation/commentary by this generation of older people" is a big factor?
My other grandma was a medical technician of some form in the Wehrmacht in Austria.
Maybe one day we'll end the fiction that old people don't know about pornography.
Apps such as gab were banned completely for not complying.
This is just a few examples of apps that I know of (I don't use that many) --- there probably are many more examples that I'm not aware of.
Abstract: Pornography is reasonably well-understood by honest adults. "NSFW" is a bullshit term that's expanded based on how criticism-averse the host is, and how effectively the assholes can come out to shit on minorities.
Queer content is often marked "NSFW" simply for being queer, even if it isn't pornographic as a rational adult would understand the term.^1 Saying "NSFW" or "inappropriate" content is being removed is a typical content-free claim from companies that don't know, and don't care, how much queer content will be removed and how much will never be created due to the chilling effect.
^1 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444820904362
Of course, add to this the usual tactic of people insisting that the very existence of queer people is "inappropriate" or "NSFW" and the host is opening itself up to a shitstorm it is likely to resolve by increasing its content controls and doing further damage to queer expression on the platform.
A) I'm not defending the outright removal of porn/NSFW content from Apple App Stores or other sources.
B) I don't see a meaningful distinction in the way the terms are USED. LGBTQ relationships are typically seen as more sexually explicit and thus, more pornographic (as your source attests). Calling that material "porn" or "NSFW" is ultimately meaningless.
EDIT: Thank you to the commentor who chose to prove my point as I was writing it. :P
Google has the Play Store, and it doesn't allow content it doesn't agree with, but at the end of the day, I can go grab it from F-droid or wherever else it may be hosted. The idea that you have to force your users into your walled garden, rather than offering it and treating them like the adults that, you know, OWN the device, is despicable. There are plenty of things about iPhones that at times appear superior (such as not relying as heavily on the advertising model), but at the end of the day, this persistent hostility towards customers is why I will not buy a single thing from this company.
1. Ideas that are directly trying to silence others or obscure empirical reality.
2. Ideas that actually can be said but are marketed as being "censored" or "counter culture" to give weight to a narrative.
3. Vague gestures to some other idea that is supposedly neither 1 or 2 but is unable to provide any evidence
I would love to add a fourth entry but in the same way it's inaccurate to assume this is 1 (Apple's "victory", apparently), it would be equally inaccurate to not categorize your views in 3 until you were able to provide specific evidence.
Porn has had and is having an extremely destructive and deranging effect on people, especially the young and especially men, especially given its ubiquity and accessibility today on the internet. It corrupts their ability and motivation to seek out and develop healthy relationships with others. I'm sure it plays some role in the demographic crisis. Whereas Gen X and even Gen Y (Millennials) were first exposed to pornography in very limited ways (the odd Playboy magazine), Gen Z has been practically raised on porn having been exposed to indefinite amounts of it on their smartphones.
I welcome the withering of "porn culture" and the crippling of this depraved industry of exploitation and corruption. It destroys individuals and rots societies.
Humans can do just fine without much in the way of sexual interaction, as evidenced by centuries of communities across a variety of cultures that take oaths of celibacy. I'm not so sure the same can be said of large groups of people sharing resources in common without having social skills.