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Comment by kredd | Hacker News Reader

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

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