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Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

Is this the joke social network that lost 99.7% of its value?

It’s literally a case study of how to drive a social network into the ground. It was sold for 1 billion in 2013 and for 3 million in 2019

They banned most of their artists and content creators when the new owners started their neo-puritan war on porn. Thousands of artists used it to get commissions of fan-art. They suddenly found their income disappear and didnt know why - they were getting shadow banned, often in error.

In this announcement I see no indication that they’ve learned anything

Once the creators leave, they are not coming back. Quality content is gone. The social network only lives so long as they can re-market someone else’s work. It’s a predatory business.

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The adult content guidelines have been normalized on Tumblr since November 2022, but if you want to know why it's not free for all porn anymore check out this post: https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/696629352701493248/why-go-n...

It’s very interesting how this never affected Twitter despite how they have existed concurrently for most of their histories. I wonder if maybe this argument is bullshit or something…

I think Twitter's lack of safety and moderation of adult and illegal content is one of the next shoes to drop in the amazing reality show of the Twitter takeover. There is so much hardcore content on Twitter I have no idea how they get away with it. It's an area though where no service that accepts user-generated content is perfect, it's just how fast and well you respond when something goes wrong.

Reminds me when a morning news service was live scrolling a twitter hashtag on tv and a dick pic popped up. The reporter was so surprised, lol.

I never encounter it -- so on some level, Twitter is managing it well. If people who don't want it aren't seeing it, and those who do, are, then it's working.

You don't have to want to see it. You just have to follow a topic whose majority audience wants to see it.

It has been falling apart in recent times, but they may still course correct.

I had heard that this aspect had actually improved somewhat following the acquisition, but maybe that is wrong?

Like others said I think:

- Porn was quarantined reasonably well

- Twitter was "too big to ban"

Those factors are rapidly disappearing, so it will be interesting to see if Twitter lasts...

Well that was depressing. About sums up how the modern internet feels

> If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you’d need to be web-only on iOS and side load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don’t dox your users

The verification part makes sense¹, but the rest of it... this is why I try to be conscious of what kind of payment methods and app stores I use and incentivize... (that is, no paypal/creditcard if avoidable; f-droid or install directly from developer's own site if they publish it)

¹ though I don't see why you couldn't rm -rf verification data upon setting verified=1 on the account, with a SFW picture in case you need to later check that the person being shown is the one on the material; or keep a provably random 1% of each year in an offline vault to prove that guidelines were followed; or... there are options here

Still worth it. Right now they have nothing.

So how does Twitter and Reddit allow porn then?

I don't know that there is porn on twitter, but notice how reddit is pulling back on that as well. I thought they were going to block third party apps from viewing that, but no: you can't view it on the official site either! You need to install their custom software on your device first. Color me unsurprised if reddit does a tumblr in two years, with the difference that afaik >50% of people on tumblr were (also) there for the porn(-equivalents) and on reddit that's not the case, so they can much more safely ban all of it

Internet is great these days

I'm less sympathetic, since (a) Tumblr did the changeover in the most hamfisted and destructive way possible (rape is bad, better delete/ban anything that mentions rape! Rape survivor groups? What are those?) and (b) it's 2023 and Twitter and Reddit still have tons of porn.

I hope it's going to be a case study in how to turn things around, much like Reddit did after they were acquired by Condé Nast/Wired in 2006.

All we can do is make the tools work really well, and then people can choose how they want to use them or not.

> All we can do is make the tools work really well, and then people can choose how they want to use them or not.

That's a great idea, I'd love to see a company try it some day.

some creators never left, some came back. (even before twtr started going downhill.) whatever idea of the state of tumblr that is, it's probably not really reflective of the state of it now. believe it or not, art does not revolve exclusively around porn. bizarrely, tumblr now somehow turns out to be one of more stable platforms for art. well, if your idea of art isn't just that it's porn. (and the sentiments like this, that almost equate those things, kinda make me appreciate them shedding the pornhub audience, in favor of fandom audience and art audience. like, legitimately, if all they lost is people like this, who think of art and creators in terms of what porn they're posting - good riddance.)

> believe it or not, art does not revolve exclusively around porn.

Sorry, but you're missing the point. The problem isn't that all art is porn. It's that all porn is art.

A drawing or a photograph is not magically less of a creative endeavor because there's a dick in it, or two people fucking. It does create some complications for cultural or other human reasons, but it changes squat about the actual creative input. It sparks emotions, and why anyone ever thought appealing to the emotion of lust was any less valid than any other emotion is confusing as hell to me.

Constraints and limitations sometimes breed a level of creativity, but when you just suddenly limit expression to the degree that Tumblr did, it's a smack in the face to artists, even ones that do not necessarily produce pornography at all. I know they had their reasons, but still.

Of course, you can still have an art community with no porn. Obviously. But what they did was cut off a lot of people's existing avenues for expressing things, and that is not something that people tend to take lightly. It feels very personal.

i am not sure if you've met artist, bur like lnisity in art is a big deal.

You learn to draw a human body naked. You learn how to draw muscles correctly, each of them, then you add clothes.

And the rancid algorythm would shadowban people for like a drawing of an elf showing a boob. You didnt need to share hardcore porn to get banned.

I see no indication that they’ve learned anything

To be fair, it was Yahoo that banned NSFW but Automattic are the current owners of the property.

I somehow can't see the Wordpress people wanting to become porn moguls.

Though on the other hand, they're also the WooCommerce people - with such a name, who knows...

We now have Woo.com!

Nice! I'll await your pivot into the business.

Sure, but "Tumblr is not easy to use" doesn't really instill confidence. Tumblr used to be very easy to user. Perhaps one of the easiest websites out there in terms of usage.

The underlying problem is actually two fold:

1. They didn't understand their own customers need (which was, to be frank, share porn) 2. That they quite simply lost momentum

The first one is addressable. Just say you're going to allow porn again. The second one... Well, that's harder to address.

It's hard to make legitimate money from hosting porn. Most people don't want their ads next to porn, so you either need to have sex-related ads or a subscription fee.

Twitter and Reddit have kind of built legitimate businesses on porn hosting, but they also host a lot of non-porn that makes them seem more legit. Tumblr wouldn't have that.

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