X confirms plans for NSFW Communities | Hacker News Reader

X confirms plans for NSFW Communities

techcrunch.com

38 pointsrbanffy61 comments

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So last year when Linda Yaccarino said, "With X we will go even further to transform the global town square — and impress the world all over again. Our company uniquely has the drive to make this possible. Many companies say they want to move fast — but we enjoy moving at the speed of light, and when we do, that’s X. At our core, we have an inventor mindset — constantly learning, testing out new approaches, changing to get it right and ultimately succeeding. [...] Please don’t take this moment for granted. You’re writing history, and there’s no limit to our transformation. And everyone, is invited to build X with us."

What she really meant to say was they're going to clone OnlyFans.

Or she just looked over at how well Tumblr did after banning pron and decided to let let people do their own thing in their own corner =P

You can say "porn" here, it's ok.

"pron" sounds funnier. I still think "My toothbrush started to shit the bed" is out of place (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36284643).

I've been using stb for very (too) many years. As have many of my friends.

Might be a uk thing, but I hear it often from USians, too.

tumblr kind of had their hand forced by apple on that one. I don't think that would happen to twitter in the same way, especially with the appstore rules they already have a carveout for.

Maybe stop treating X like a day care and allow people to post stuff that are “NSFW” is what people want

To be fair - old Twitter was already about to launch a competing product. It got canned at the last minute due to their inability to moderate which is really important for adult content

https://www.theverge.com/23327809/twitter-onlyfans-child-sex...

> inability to moderate which is really important for adult content

Given Elon Musk twitted about moderation being censorship (twist: it is not), what could go wrong!?!

This is one where “won’t someone thing if the children” (underage and non-consensual) is relevant. It tends to be a lot more… universally agreed upon limits to whatever you think free speech is.

His position was about moderating legal content. He thinks moderating legal content is censorship. He is in favor of taking down illegal content. If people think currently legal content should be taken down they should appeal to change the laws and it shouldn't be part of at least their platform to judge the legal content. That's his position, not my position.

That's what he says his position is. He bans people who post the movements of his private jet. He also has had Twitter file lawsuits against people merely for saying mean things about Twitter.

Of course, it's also possible that he's a complete idiot and has no idea what the First Amendment actually permits in speech, like he stopped paying attention after Schenck v US.

Yeah, that is hypocritical. He should be congruent in his views and in any ambiguity in content disfavoring him he should lean towards giving benefit of the doubt to prove lack of bias. Although in this case there didn't seem to be any ambiguity, he should have not banned the account.

Just because he's a hypocrite, doesn't mean we should censor more.

Filing lawsuits is entirely consistent with a position that the courts, not private companies, should regulate speech online.

Then there's Jack Sweeney, the guy tracking Elon and his private jet - who, by the way, was accused of facilitating stalking by Taylor Swift. For him, X made a policy against any account "doxxing real-time location info of anyone".

Does anyone here actually want to argue that tracking real-time location info should be allowed?

I'll bite.

Real-time tracking of a person or their ground transport: not ok.

Real-time tracking of a person's plane: ok.

And the reason for such a distinction is that planes can only land on specific ground slots. That also means that real-time tracking of a person's helicopter falls under "not ok". And by extension, the same will hold for flying taxis, once they take off[tm].

We don't (yet?) live in a world where shoulder mounted surface-to-air missiles, outside of war zones, are a realistic threat.

Once a stalker knows a specific place and time to find their victim, they can simply follow them until they have an opportunity to do worse.

"Missiles" are just a straw man.

Hopefully Taylor Swift will follow through, Sweeney will be sued or even prosecuted for stalking, and we'll find out if this really is legal.

He just banned posting the identity of pseudonymous accounts which is definitely not illegal. He also banned posting public information about the movements of his private jet which is also definitely not illegal.

This stuff would easier to take seriously he was consistent about it. At this point it’s kind of insulting

> Elon Musk twitted about moderation being censorship

And instead, X has implemented hellbanning, where nobody outside X knows who is being censored and why. People just slowly figure out that, actually, no one sees their posts. At least with outright <scare-quote> "moderation" you would know that you had been cancelled.

corporate speak to the max

Yeah idk this is literally what happened on Tumblr before they purged porn. Accounts had to hit a switch if they were posting porn and it ultimately blocked their blog from public view and removed their posts from tags. This was prior to the deletion.

People seem to be perceiving this as formally legitimizing “NSFW” but in practice it’s just putting the bell on the cat.

Surely thats the point

You mean prostitutes and camgirls won't get to advertise for free anymore??

I think it's a good thing. There's many teens on Twitter and underage ones at that.

Accidentally coming across porn was a rare thing in the early days but would occasionally happen with low quality ads. Twitters algorithm sends out rogue content all the time because of mis-characterisation.

The change is adding a NSFW tag. Seems like a way for people to find/avoid that content more easily depending on their taste.

Why is the whole article dooming about adult media on twitter? Is there a porn problem that in all my twitter use I've yet to stumble upon? Is it because other platforms have hard sent on TV-14?

Because Elon Musk is the Emmanuel Goldstein du jour, and any time his name or the name of one of his companies comes up it's mandatory to stage a Two Minutes Hate.

In this case, the outrage is about Porn!!!!! on X!!!!!.

If instead they were trying to ban porn outright, the outrage would be about how X!!!!! is Censoring People!!!!!

And yeah, I don't even remember the last time I saw porn on there, myself. I'm sure it's there if you look. But if you're looking for it, why the hell are you complaining about it?

Try to be more disingenuous.

Porn and bots (most of which are porn related) were some of the stated reasons for Elon to back out of purchasing Twitter.

Porn has always been part of Twitter, the old company always tolerated it but tried to avoid it coming into contact with the mainstream. Mostly due to protection and advertising concerns. They never tried to seriously monetize it.

This basically proves that Elon has given up on mainstream advertisement (or rather mainstream ads gave up on him).

> Try to be more disingenuous.

Try to be more objective and less blinded by hate.

> Porn and bots (most of which are porn related) were some of the stated reasons for Elon to back out of purchasing Twitter.

And? Since he wasn't able to do that, he's now taking steps to isolate them.

> This basically proves that Elon has given up on mainstream advertisement (or rather mainstream ads gave up on him).

Musk could literally burn the entire company down, bulldoze the remains, and sow the ground with salt, and he'd still be the richest person in the world. I think you're wildly overestimating just how desperate he is, and wildly underestimating just how much he simply does not GAF.

But sure, continue crying Twitter doom just like you and your cohorts been doing since before the deal even settled.

Company's still there, mang, and while it may not be profitable, it's not bleeding money nearly as fast as it was before he bought it.

"Disingenous" indeed.

Objectivity. Look into it.

Yes all of that stuff you posted was sure objective. It’s amazing how triggered you got at the mere suggestion that Elon might have made a mistake. Real snowflake energy.

> Yes all of that stuff you posted was sure objective.

That Emmanuel Goldstein...er..Elon Musk is the richest man in the world? That Elon Musk could wipe his butt with $40 billion and still be incredibly rich?

That people have been predicting the immanent death of Twitter ever since Musk took over, and it's still there a year and a half later?

(Actually, it looks like Musk is down a bit today ($195B), and Bezos is (at least for today) slightly wealthier ($198B). But the point remains: if he lost every penny he put into Twitter, he'd still be wealthy far beyond his ability to spend it.)

It is utterly irrelevant whether or not Musk "made a mistake". I'm saying that it doesn't matter.

All of those are objective facts. If you have evidence otherwise, I'd be delighted to hear it.

So all the pornbots following me will now go away and stay exclusively in their NSFW Community, right?

More porn bots for you :)

Well that would be a blessing, you post some stuff and like 4 porn bots like the post or post |pussy in bio| message under your post.

More likely bots will post more borderline content in an attempt to attract you to their accounts and hardcore NSFW stuff

So they can comply with Texas anti porn laws?

The was always the long game for Elon using his single-character-apex-domain flex.

Can't have a global town square without a red light district, this is true to their mission statement

Would the penis enlargement ads that somehow hide as posts end up in these "communities"? That wouldn't be enough to lure me to X, but it would be a step in the right direction.

Porn advertising doesn't bother with contextual decline of the platform they advert on.

It's a good move by Musk, but it smells desperate.

Any guesses what rate they'd rate for such ad spots? I'd assume the CPM would be low.

Yes, I guess it'll be pretty low, but low and a lot is better than nothing.

You know, the usual decline of a page.

This actually sounds like a solid move. There is obviously a huge market for a porn, nudity and kink related community. As proven by the decline of tumblr. I guess most US companies are too prudish to capitalize on the opportunity.

I guess the hard part is compartmentalizing the content spheres and public image perception.

There is no money there. Advertisements won't be shown next to those posts. Or at least non-adult brands -- Apple, Microsoft, BMW etc won't want to have their ads shown next to NSFW content (if they are still doing business there). Twitter/X is creating infrastructure and providing bandwidth for content that will barely give them any revenue in return.

Plus, companies will think more carefully before showing ads on Twitter/X -- even if their ads aren't shown next to NSFW content, if the platform is lax on moderation (non-consensual content etc) they likely don't want their brands to be associated with such a website.

Well, unless in the case where people who view NSFW content a lot are also active Twitter users otherwise and would click on "normal" ads. But I don't think that is going to happen.

X for XXX

You can't spell XXX without X!

by adding NSFW tag doesn't it make the NSFW content official? How does it work on iOS with Apple's restrictions? e.g. Reddit app if i am not mistaken hides all adult content on iOS.

If it’s segmented and opt in then there’s no issue here.

X is a pretty good name for the site because it already is full of NSFW content. I have very few followers and still get porn bots replying to several of my posts and comments. It's frankly pretty gross.

I predict that we're eventually going to discover that like Tumblr and Reddit, hosting porn was a key part of Twitter's business all along.

Weird Elon fans are downvoting you for obvious reasons but it’s literally the truth.

Twitter was always a business on the precipice and since their other revenue streams have been obliterated this is the only way forward, not to profitability but to drowning in marginally less deep waters.

Probably downvoting because they disagree? I don't use X that often but when I do I see 0 porn.

I don't even know how to find it.

If you are a very occasional user, you probably don't interact with much of the porn on Twitter because they keep it pretty well isolated (except when it leaks out).

However, X hosts a plethora of porn bots that reply to anyone with any sort of follower count, usually ending up in the "show more replies" section when you look at someone's post, so if you don't look there you won't see them either. If you look at the trending tab, you can often see an NSFW hashtag or two trending - these are usually suppressed, but some of these hashtags make it through the filters because they are designed to _look_ non-sexual. A lot of big-time pornstars supposedly also use Twitter as their main social media platform.

I can see how if you just go on Twitter to read one or two peoples' posts every once in a while you will never see the porn, but the same goes for Reddit (and even Tumblr).

Edit: Until /r/all, a lot of people didn't know about how much porn was on Reddit. I think Twitter is in the same situation. It takes a few hundred followers before the XXX parts of X leak out to bother you.

Lol “I don’t know how to find porn on the internet”. Sure, guy.

Porn bots were literally one of the arguments Elon made about Twitter’s overvaluation.

Oh, I know how to find porn on the internet just fine.

I (and I expect, the OP) just never see it on X.

That 's a pretty desperate move imo haha

I mean pornhub needs some competition.

Especially since they moved to texas

The reason for this is because X already wants to censor/moderate less and you can already easily come across a ton of NSFW content, so having a exclusive place(inside communities) to post it is better. I suspect many that are downvoting it may not have used Communities before

X is slowly turning into 4chan

except not slowly

I simply can't call Twitter by the name "X" as it suggests acceptance of what Musk stands for. But he's just a terrible human being with a head full of garbage.

I might start calling Twitter "X" once twitter.com redirects to x.com and not the other way around.

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