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Comment by anoonmoose | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've been a little surprised by is the idea that, even if the API pricing was reasonable and these apps weren't shutting down, that they wouldn't be heavily and severely impacted by the fact that 3rd party apps will not be able to access NSFW content. Reddit has a LOT of porn on it. Preventing 3rd party apps from accessing that content is a pretty good indicator to me that they're going to completely get rid of that content, eventually. People keep making Digg references, but I'm not sure the real answer won't actually be Tumblr.

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I don't think porn is the primary use of Reddit for many users. There are other source out there and it's relatively easy to replace it. At least for the more generic genres.

What Reddit good for is communities. Especially niche communities (including NSFW ones). That will be much harder to replace for users. But also Reddit is miserable in its new web UI and mobile app. It's so much worse than many third-party apps that, I believe, most users will likely quit Reddit altogether.

I don't have any proof and if I knew where to get it I would supply it, but reddit's porn scene is huge. There are almost 5m people just on /r/gonewild

If the "Map of Reddit" project is any indicator the total NSFW subs are about one-third to one-fourth the size of the total non-NSFW subs. That's a non-trivial amount of use to gamble with, but the legal and regulatory headaches may make it necessary.

https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit/?x=18239&y=12514&z=46...

It may even be higher than that, because some of the usage of the other subreddits may be a consequence of being co-tenant neighbors to the NSFW subreddits, making it easy to move between the two kinds of content on the same site.

Which as a url, doesn't necessarily trigger corporate or school blocks unless the gateway is whack-a-mole filtering on subreddit names as well, and I suspect quite a few of those are designed not to reveal the nature of the content through the name alone.

This must also be the main marketing channel for a lot of OnlyFans.

Yes. Original content is an automatic ticket to the top of any niche NSFW sub where you will probably be exposed to a bunch of Onlyfans users

https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit gives a sense of the sheer number of nsfw subreddits, shown on the southern continent.

Map is generated by clustering subreddits based on users who comment across subreddits, so I don't think you can infer much from the colored area. That's just background for each group of the graph.

Not even close to the top 50 https://www.myheen.com/reddit/most-followed-subreddits-world

Kinda hard to compare when some are default subs though

I’m not saying it’s small. I’m sayin most of it is easily replaceable content-wise. My hypothesis is that NSFW communities (what’s hard to replace) are a relative small fraction of all NSFW subs.

> One thing I've been a little surprised by is the idea that, even if the API pricing was reasonable and these apps weren't shutting down, that they wouldn't be heavily and severely impacted by the fact that 3rd party apps will not be able to access NSFW content.

Oh no they absolutely would be. And that ad-supported application won't be allowed anymore either.

But given the API pricing both are second-rate issues, they don't matter because the API pricing makes third-party application non-viable anyway. You don’t worry about your cancerous moles when your femoral artery has been cut through.

Side question, how did twitter survive through its porn filled timelines and advertisers being ok with it?

They recently made it impossible to view NSFW-flagged content from a logged-out session, which makes me wonder if they're struggling with it too (this may also be a geo-restricted thing, I'm visiting from a UK IP address).

Ah, interesting. To be fair, super-majority of users on mobile are already authenticated in the app, so I don’t think it would be any loss. I guess, maybe for people who don’t want to be tracked about their NSFW browsing.

Still curious how Twitter was a pass, but Tumblr/maybe Reddit are no go. Maybe the way ads are being shows when there’s NSFW content?

I'm not convinced it has anything to do with ads. The redirect isn't necessary to just not show ads for Kibbles N Bits on bestiality porn subreddits.

It does have two other effects though:

- Inflates registered user count, which is useful ahead of an IPO

- Maps very niche porn habits to individuals, to way finer degree than your PornHub favorites/history. I don't know of anybody reselling this sort of data, but also don't work in this space.

Last I checked that restriction was not there for old.reddit.com and for the actual image/video files.

Twitter is way smaller than the media makes it seem. It's in the second tier of social media, along with Twitch, Snap and Pinterest. It's not a major marketing channel for any of the big brands with strict brand safety guidelines. Note that pushback on NSFW content is usually just a price negotiation tactic of big brands on their biggest marketing channels

> they're going to completely get rid of that content, eventually

Or they want to capture all the ad revenue for that content and have a plausible excuse to ban 3rd party access.

That's a good point. I use twitter primarily for adult content and still get ads.

I've never consumed NSFW content on a NSFW sub on reddit. I do however run into NSFW content all over the site on random posts across reddit. Some much more NSFW than others. I wonder how they will define that content.

I'm a new twitter user but I have literally never seen NSFW content on twitter other than occasional war clips from Ukraine. I mostly use twitter for financial info. Compare that to Instagram where you just get bombarded with it.

That is my experience as well. On twitter I don't see adult content without looking for it specifically vs Instagram pushing me in that direction. Reddit will expose you to nsfw content but there are big differences between recommendation engines pushing you in one direction and the different ways you can consume reddit as a user.

r/all, frontpage, only following niche subreddits, only following your city's subreddit, only nsfw content, only gaming subreddits, only memes pages, only gardening etc.

Reddit is an advertising company. Of course they're going to get rid of it.

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