New NSFW content restrictions enrage Tumblr users | Hacker News Reader

New NSFW content restrictions enrage Tumblr users

dailydot.com

169 pointsmcrittenden120 comments

Along with the fact that if your blog is flagged adult they set robots.txt to noindex on your whole subdomain, so you're nuked from google (and there is nothing you can do about it). Now you're out their internal search engine too - They're doing their best to hide away the porn as much as possible without actually removing it.

A site:tumblr.com now returns 943 million URLs in Google. It would be interesting to see this number in a few weeks time.

581,000,000 for me.

googlebubble makes google a bad source for this kind of estimation now, I guess.

same here.

I just tried https://www.google.com/search?q=site:tumblr.com+blowjob and got 795,000 hits. Adding a 24-hour recency restriction still shows results past the tenth SERP.

I'll have to check back later and see if anything changes.

As my friend said: "I love watching Yahoo spend nine figures on things only to offhandedly gut them like a child playing with sharp knives."

Got to agree here, despite all its talk, it seems this leopard has not changed its spots.

A great line. But maybe Yahoo is playing with dull knives, as it seems to achieve maximum pain for minimum gain.

One could also argue they're holding their knives backwards, so in addition to being causing damage by using the knife improperly they're also cutting their hands up by bleeding money.

I'd characterize it as a knife with no handle.

Dull razor blades?

More like a knife with a blade as a handle.

They grasp the knife firmly by the blade, and disembowel with the dull handle.

"Tumblr! I'll cut your heart out with a spoon!"

Eh, the tumblr community as a whole has always squealed extremely loudly about stuff, and the status of nfsw content has always been a bit hit and miss.

What seems to me to be the key difference is that now they're owned by yahoo, the latest grudge match between tumblr and its users is news rather than business as usual.

I heard it being described like "Buying Playboy for the articles"

As a guy with a larger reach on Tumblr, I've been asking my readers about this, about how they would suggest handling this situation:

http://shortformblog.com/tagged/nsfw-tumblr-feedback

I've only posted a sampling of the responses I've gotten. I have more than 60 sitting in my ask box right now. People are REALLY upset about this.

The market seems to be voluntarily making a massive hole for an adult-content-friendly blogging platform to fill, I wonder why the startup scene here isn't jumping on that?

(I'd do it myself if I knew of any appropriate payment system; but my only payment systems experience is with paypal, who hate adult content more than the blog hosts do, and bitcoin, which is unheard of outside of geek and finance niches...)

This is going to sound assholish

but that sounds like an excuse. If you can write a blogging platform, you can figure out a payment method.

Payments are way, way, way harder than blogs. Payments have consequences.

Bitcoin payments, not so much. :)

Yeah, I don't know if I want to make a billing service on top of a system that has no concept of refunds.

Sure it does. They send you back your bitcoins. And any reputable organization that accepts bitcoins as payment, would do so.

What it doesn't have is a concept of chargebacks, where you basically Indian-give your money.

It was an asshole way to put it and I didn't read the comment correctly.

I read it as "I don't feel like looking for a payment provider/method" not "A payment method does not exist." Admittedly, I'm pretty ignorant as to adult site payment methods but it would seem that, for such a massive industry, someone out there is accepting payments, is it really each individual site handling CC info?

Adult content is said to be a particular issue for payment processors because of the reportedly-high chargeback rate. People get caught when their spouses see their credit card bill and make a big show out of claiming their charges were fraudulent.

With traditional paper magazines it wasn't such a problem; there was less plausible deniability due to the fact that they showed up in the mail addressed to you. But now it's apparently too easy to claim you didn't order whatever it was you ordered.

Sounds like the real product you need to build is the payment system for adult sites. Schlep Blindness: http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html

Or sign up with an extremely well established existing one.

http://www.dhdmedia.com/

Spun off from Danni's Hard Drive a decade ago, they have as much experience in that very problematic space as anyone.

The market seems to be voluntarily making a massive hole for an adult-content-friendly blogging platform to fill

There is so much euphemism in that sentence when referencing porn that it's almost palpable.

That said, I agree. Doesn't everything on the internet start with porn?

Relevant video content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-TA57L0kuc

> Doesn't everything on the internet start with porn?

It's hard to say, without a clear definition available or even, arguably, possible... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

Which strikes me as extremely weird.

Adult payments are a solved problem. Just look at existing adult content's payment providers you'll see the solution.

Bitcoin as a promotional addon.

Every time any sort of "controversial" content gets hassled by mainstream payment services, a Bitcoin gets its wings.

I wonder why this is blowing up today? It's not a brand new policy: it's been largely the same since at least April 29 of this year, i.e., before Yahoo bought Tumblr: http://web.archive.org/web/20130426023137/http://www.tumblr....

What seems to be new is a) the addition of the "Adult" category, which is blocked from safe search tag pages even for people who follow a particular blog and b) a slight relaxation to the third-party indexing policy, where NSFW (but not Adult) blogs are now indexed by external search engines.

I don't use Tumblr, but I think you're underestimating the change. While blogs in the NSFW category had little restrictions, 'Adult' ones are completely hidden from everyone except those who have already subscribed. Characterizing Adult vs NSFW is arbitrary, so your blog might simply disappear without any warning.

How about the part where, for example, the #gay tag returns zero results unless you turn safe search off? It's now impossible to search for gay support/community stuff on Tumblr without making an account and explicitly enabling porn.

I can see why: given Tumblr's focus on images, porn or at least NSFW material seems like a logical use pattern. For text, at least, I prefer Wordpress.

DailyDot doesn't cover this, but I wonder: what is the logical NSFW-friendly alternative to Tumblr?

Blogspot is one of them.

It's not a real alternative, though. The feature of reposting with backlinks turns Tumblr from a basic imagelog hosting service into a very interconnected community.

You're not allowed to make money on adult content on Blogger. https://www.blogger.com/content.g This is a recent change, and feels a bit like a shot across the bow designed to force the biggest adult bloggers off the service.

I like the way google warns you that there may be NSFW stuff in a blog then you have the option to click through. The issue with tumblr is that a lot of teenagers use it and they may have around 2, 3 NSFW pics and the rest is artists, gifs, sports gifs, quotes etc. The other option is to maybe only block the image and then allow the user to click on the image to reveal it.

Yeah - blocking adult stuff from a "safe mode" search doesn't seem like a particularly bad thing, but Tumblr seems to just completely make stuff disappear, rather than making users aware that there is other content available which they could see if they left safe mode. This seems less than ideal - if content is being removed from searches, the user should be informed.

sex.com? I have tried that domain wondering who has probably paid gazillions expecting a pile of rubbish, but...

The owner of sex.com got it by taking it over with a nasty lawsuit, not just by paying gazillions.

Their lawyer was Charles Carreon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Carreon), who would later be disgraced and make enemies of the entire Internet by personally suing The Oatmeal, then IndieGoGo, the National Wildlife Federation, and the American Cancer Society.

I think NSFW content is so rampant on Tumblr because of the reblogging feature. Some kinds of blogs lend themselves to nothing but reblogged posts - just like the fanbase community who do the same.

Of course, the answer depends on whether you ask for a place to put the content or view the content.

I imagine the best bet is some sort of Pinterest clone. Still, it's probably not going to work due to the server costs and underlying licensing issues, I imagine.

I guess you could created a closed pay-for community, but then you assume responsibility once or if the superseedy stuff starts getting uploaded.

There is no real logical alternative to Tumblr because what makes Tumblr Tumblr isn't just a set of features that define the blogging platform it offers, it's the larger community of users that has grown there. Even if there were an identical mirror of the service at tumbls.com right now, that unquantifiable "feel" that made tumblr uniquely appealing is going to be lost unless more or less the entire tumblr community migrated over simultaneously, which is impossible. edit: clarity

Didn't David Karp say jus the other day on Colbert he wasn't going to censor Tumblr? What happened?

He must have gone to school the same place as James Clapper. He didn't "censor" anything by removing the content. He simply removed all search index references.

Oh, they aren't censoring it in the strictest sense of the word. They are just making it so they can't be found. Censor carries a lot of negative connotation, and they are trying to distance themselves from that on a technicality.

This sort of spin is marvelously effective because, even though it leaves a bad taste in the mouth of anyone who recognizes it for what it is, it allows people in Karp's position to dig rhetorical trenches out in front of the substance of their actions and redirect any discussion into one about defining terms. It doesn't matter one whit that making it prohibitively hard for anyone to access content is just as much censorship of that content as disallowing it entirely is; nothing sucks the air out of a discussion faster than an extended yes-it-is/no-it-isn't headbutting contest over the meaning of a word.

Because when someone like David Karp speaks, he is talking about a strictly, technical truth and not the practical truth of the situation. We punish are children for being deceptive when the pull this stunt, we reward[1] or ignore politicians and business folks.

The practical truth is that these blogs have been censored, because if Google cannot see something, it doesn't exist for 99.9% of the people.

1) You might be saying to yourself, I don't reward or approve this conduct. Did you watch West Wing? Did you like the C. J. Cregg character?

The other big question was, would Tumblr give up Colbert's data to the government? Karp's answer to that was to blink and say nothing.

Both answers, aroma of attorney.

May as well have had the lawyer do the interview instead.

From the article:

"Adult and NSFW content will be visible to anyone who has opted-in via their Settings page."

Seems reasonable...

Yes, but the point is that you cannot opt into being able to search for adult blog content.

Ah, I see...the 'Adult' column is rather sparse...

http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw

So the opt-in setting only controls direct access to the content, but there is no way to opt-in to having it show up in search?

What's the difference between NSFW and adult?

NSFW = 'Occasional' adult content

Adult = 'Substantial' adult content

It will still show up in tag searches, and Tumblr doesn't have any other kind of search.

Looks like a good opportunity for someone to build something tumblr-like strictly for NSFW content that encourages people to build connections like tumblr does (or did)

The problem with a site explicitly being for NSFW content is users avoiding it in case it accidentally shows in history/logs. With tumblr they can claim to have been looking at/for something else entirely.

The subdomain would already show up in history and logs. It's hard to explain away e.g. fuckyeahboobies.tumblr.com

The vast majority of Tumblr users browse via the dashboard rather than the subdomains.

Is there a way to follow somebody without visiting the subdomain?

Yes - all via the dashboard/search functionality.

Great comment. Strategic ambiguity is important.

Most sites, including community sites, built explicitly around NSFW content are, for lack of a better word, gross. I want little to do with them and most women I know want even less to do with them. It's hard or impossible for them to have any taste.

One key to the success of NSFW communities on Reddit (like GoneWild) and Tumblr may be their "dual use" purpose; they tend not to be completely gross (though there are obviously exceptions) and consequently they also attract women.

I think this is basically correct (and I love the term "strategic ambiguity" as much as I like "plausible deniability"), so the market opportunity is to create a new Tumblr. At least initially the code wasn't particularly complicated.

The challenges are two fold, one if you put a stake in the sand vis-a-vis porn and nsfw content then you may find yourself without an exit strategy. That is just another way of saying that you will want this new thing to be self supporting (unlike the original Tumblr) which might mean ads earlier rather than later. But it also might mean a membership fee of some sort.

Seems like a job for reddit.

Sounds like a good opportunity for a third-party (robots.txt ignoring) tumblr indexer.

That said, yahoo's probably trying to remove NSFW content to fill the ad spots that they're invariably planning on throwing down everywhere, so I'm not sure how well an indexer would do on its own.

No big loss, since Tumblr search is TERRIBLE. As are most features - the service feels like a creaky pile of hacks for viewers and publishers alike.

A Tumblr directory/web crawler would be really great.

This isn't just Tumblr's search. They're cutting blogs off from search engine indexing too. And if you reblog anything from a blogged flagged as adult, it's looking like your blog gets flagged too.

A lot of the line between "adult" and "art" is very blurry, but anyone who deals with nudity is at risk here. Tumblr has a huge community of artists, who now have to worry of being censored.

"Sure, you can have a blog, but no one on the Internet will find it, ever." Sounds great.

Have you tried search recently? Curious if this opinion is on the old search features or the recently updated search.

Pretty funny. Buy the new cool thing all the young people love, then start isolating and hiding the sex appeal that got it where it was.

If you are surprised that Yahoo is ruining Tumblr you're either so optimistic that I envy you, or have no knowledge of the history of Yahoo or acquisitions in general.

Crazy. Why would they prevent Adult-flagged Tumblrs from being indexed by 3rd-party search engines?

http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw

Advertisers don't want controversy. Advertisers are the customers.

Right. More specifically, here's what's actually going on:

10% of Tumblr is porn, right? And it's not amateur porn, or "oh hey I reblogged a butt." No, the vast majority of that 10% is one thing and one thing only: mirrored rips of full galleries from paysites. Illegal, copyright-infringing rips.

Basically, if Tumblr had any sort of scalable process to distinguish these from their other content, they'd just shut them down immediately. Using Tumblr just to bulk-rehost copyright-infringing images is 100% against their TOS, that much should be obvious.

Basically, Yahoo gave Tumblr some good advice here: if they don't want to fundamentally restrict their users from posting adult content, then it's all Tumblr can do (legally) to sweep these gallery-rip Tumblrs under the rug, so that you can only find them by seeing a reblog from them or by knowing their URL (which also, a lot of the time, means "by following a link from a porn subreddit.") It's not that they're adult; it's that they're in breach of copyright, and giving any public-facing path to them is the same as endorsing them (thus opening Yahoo to being sued for that infringement.)

This whole thing isn't about "OH NO A BUTT"; it's more for the same reason Mega's internal search won't show you "Adobe CS6 Master Suite [cw33t].rar", even though you could get that from them with the right URL. Hosting something is one thing; advertising it is another. Tumblr's emphasis on free speech is a mask for one thing here: they want safe harbor provisions to apply to them as far as this content goes, by not giving it any attention/promotion.

EDIT: I reposted this to Tumblr, expanded and phrased in a slightly more Tumblr-audience-targeted manner, explaining what safe-harbor provisions are and such. http://leviaul.tumblr.com/post/55886555106/you-guys

I really couldn't imagine that Yahoo would be liable for copyright infringement on user submitted content. Assuming they have a process for Porn Companies to submit DMCA Takedown notices, it seems Yahoo and Tumblr would be protected from being sued for infringement by the DMCA Safe-Harbor Provision[1].

[1] http://chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi#QID127

Actually, I think most of the stuff I've seen is amateur porn, either posted by its creator or reposted by others. You might be underestimating just how much genuinely amateur porn is out there these days.

maybe, but that might not be any better. I can imagine the consequences for being known for hosting "adult content" where nobody is checking the actor's ID at the door could be way worse than the consequences for hosting stuff the copyright holder doesn't want you to host.

I follow a lot of comic book-related tumblrs and I see entire pages of comics posted, covers, all kinds of material that's copyrighted, no problems finding that.

If I ran Tumblr, I wouldn't either.

It's quite simple: unless you're actively seeking adult content, it's vastly better for Tumblr's brand image to hide the fact that such content exists, so that only people "in the know" are using it.

Otherwise, Tumblr would run the risk that the top 10 results when googling for "Tumblr" might be all porn-related.

There is a option in the settings:

   Browse tag pages in Safe Mode
   Hide content from NSFW blogs.

It works exactly like it says on the tin.

The article makes it seem like they removed the content from search unilaterally. If they merely hid it under a setting, I don't see what the problem is. It's their playground, they can set whatever rules they like.

As I've just learned, the way tumblr categorizes content, there's a difference between 'NSFW' and 'Adult'. 'NSFW' (occasional adult content) still gets indexed and is searchable (provided the profile is opted in), but 'Adult' (substantial adult content) is never indexed and/or searchable, regardless of your profile settings.

I can confirm that turning safe mode off still produces decidedly uncensored tag search pages. It is now back on.

But, but ... censorship!

Seriously, I have to wonder who is actually enraged by this. If you want to browse for NSFW content, check the box and get on with it. If you want your NSFW posts to be displayed to unsuspecting people... I guess you're out of luck.

What if I want to browse for Adult content?

Then find something else - I fail to see how you have a particular right in this case for Tumblr to provide your adult content to you.

Oh, for sure, I'm not one of the "enraged" people; I just wanted to point out that it's not just a matter of changing a flag.

You're right. I wasn't really aware of the NSFW vs. adult distinction when I posted.

So NSFW content is available, but only from blogs that feature it occasionally? Adult blogs are not searchable, and not indexed in Google? Only days after Karp appeared on TV and said Tumblr won't police adult content?

Well, it's Yahoo/Tumblr's prerogative to handle NSFW content however they see fit. I'm not enraged, but... I don't get it, and it seems like a lame move.

NSFW and Adult are separate categories and you cannot reenable Adult.

Except there are 3 categories of blogs: normal, NSFW and Adult. Even if you turn safe mode off, Adult blogs will no longer show up.

As the update to the article makes clear, that's wrong. Switching safe-mode off shows both NSFW and adult content.

http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw says "Blog indexed by Tumblr search: No" for adult blogs, which implies even switching off safe mode won't show adult content.

It might imply that, but such an implication is clearly inaccurate. The Tumblr rep quoted in the linked article says "Adult and NSFW content will be visible to anyone who has opted-in via their Settings page."

I believe there are 2 different flags: 1) NSFW; 2) Adult. NSFW tags will show when safe mode is off. Adult will never show. That was my take from the article at least.

As others have said, Adult and NSFW are treated as 2 different things here. See: http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw

I don't see a problem here - given that NSFW/porn traffic is worth much less than other traffic and even less to a generalized blogging platform like Tumblr, what's going on is that they are presently subsidized. This is an attempt at reducing the subsidy and making the platform less attractive for pornographers or even casual NSFW bloggers. For instance, if a porn pay site wants to create a blog to promote their site, why should Tumblr make it easy for them to do this on their platform? It doesn't really help them in any realistic way.

Apparently they consider tags like gay and lesbian to be Adult.

No; the disappearance of content on these tags was coincidental in time, and mentioned in the same article only as inflammatory speculation. Tumblr hasn't said anything to indicate that this was part of their "adult content" changes.

I can guess another, more likely purpose for this particular change... (I'll focus on #gay in particular here, but it applies equally well to #lesbian):

Think about how tags are used on Tumblr--it's a lot like Twitter. People tag a post with something to add it to a conversation it wouldn't otherwise be a part of. So, what gets tagged as #gay?

You don't tag a picture of two handsome naked homosexual men with "#gay", usually; that tag is too vague to serve any purpose. Usually the people who post porn have their entire blog dedicated to one type of porn anyway, so tagging #gay on your Gay Porn Blog would be fairly useless. Even if you did, the Safe Search mode would hit this tagstream just like any other one, so there'd be no reason to censor it in particular if that's all it was.

So, #gay != gay porn, okay. So, maybe #gay is/was for rights/social justice issues related to homosexual men, then? Not in my experience; social justice folks are generally entirely too inclusive to talk specifically about #gay or #lesbian anything. I've never seen a post about gay rights specifically tagged as #gay. Maybe "#gay rights" (that's a separate tag; Tumblr allows spaces in them) but not just #gay. [On the other side of the social-justice fence, notice that #lgbt is still a working tag. http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/lgbt]

So what was getting tagged as #gay? I would guess (I never saw their content streams, but it seems plausible) that Tumblr eliminated these two tags in particular more for their potential for use in hate-speech or in "outing" people. I would bet (real money!) that posts were getting reblogged and tagged #gay and #lesbian for entirely malicious reasons, and Tumblr was often having receiving requests to "de-tag" the reblog so people couldn't find their post through it, somewhat like requesting to get your name taken off someone else's photo of you on Facebook. Imagine if you typed "gay" into Tumblr's search box, and the first result was a picture of your face! [I don't think Tumblr actually had a mechanism for resolving these de-tagging requests, but it was still likely a high-traffic request.]

I'd bet (again, real money) that we'll see other high-potential-for-hate-speech tags disappear. In fact, they might already have, and it's just that no one has thought to look. Anyone want to think up some tags to try, and report back any that "should" have posts but are completely blank? Or, on the obverse, anyone with actual knowledge/anecdata of what #gay and #lesbian did contain before Tumblr blocked them out?

Well:

>The reason you see innocent tags like #gay being blocked on certain platforms is that they are still frequently returning adult content which our entire app was close to being banned for.

http://staff.tumblr.com/post/55906556378/all-weve-heard-from...

Because they get to roll out ads. The platform is only as useful to them as the size of their user base.

You can't roll out regular ads on their porn/nsfw blogs. That will destroy their relationship with advertisers or result in steep pricing discounts.

what do you even mean by "regular"? do you mean "targeted"? because yes, you totally can roll out targeted ads to a viewer seeking out particular content.

What's your source for that "NSFW/porn traffic being worth much less than others"?

As far as ads go, traffic is traffic, and clickthroughs are clickthroughs. Not only that, but Tumblr is a social media service, and like all social media services, they live and die by the amount of users they manage to keep. People who join for boobs are still people that can convince their friends to join.

No, traffic is not traffic in advertising. If you have a popular blog on home improvements, advice on mortgages or home purchases, the price you get for advertising is going to be orders of magnitude higher than advertising on random lolcat blogs, which in turn is going to be significantly higher than ads on porn blogs.

UPDATE: Tumblr says this was all a combination of poor design, anti-spam measures, App Store censorship, and plain old misunderstandings. http://staff.tumblr.com/post/55906556378/all-weve-heard-from...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6073519

Thefreepornguide.com has a list of all nsfw tumblrs.

This is really sad. I am unable to understand why the mainstream web companies like Yahoo! Google has such disdain for pornographic content.

I can fully understand that they do not want their family traffic to go there, but then why cant charge us a small amount and give a better access to all those adult blogs in much more efficient way ?

People don't want their products advertised next to porn.

Yes, that is perfectly understandable. Do not advertise those guys but there might be people who wish to do the same, also there might be other monetizations methods that can be used.

theworstdrug.com scrapes a lot of NSFW animated gods from Tumblr.

TechCrunch article here: http://m.techcrunch.com/2013/05/22/what-is-it-about-porn-an-...

It seems that as long as Yahoo has resources at its disposal, it will buy and destroy everything it can. Even worse, their addiction to failure transcends management shakeups. I used to simply not care about Yahoo; now I actively want to see it fail.

i want a search for porn tumblr sites only please! you guys can have the rest :)

Doesn't the opt-in setting make this a non-issue?

(not a tumblr user, so I might be missing something)

You can opt-in for "NSFW", but not for "Adult". http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw

Well that is unfortunate. Thanks for the clarification.

A sad day for attention whores and basement wankers indeed.

Safer web always wins.

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