Hacker News Reader

Comment by epochwolf | Hacker News Reader

So... this doesn't really seem to add anything. They admit to having a Adult flag which removes the blog from all site listings and from google searches. This effectively kills the blog. What they don't deny is recently and massively increasing the scope of the flagging. This is what people are worried about. People are claiming non-spam nsfw blogs are being flagged. Blogs that wouldn't have been banned before.

Blocking tags on the mobile app is a separate issue, they don't really have a choice here. Apple will pull their app if they don't.

View on HN

The article says that being blocked from searches and search engines was a bug:

> As some of you have pointed out, disabling Safe Mode still wasn’t allowing search results from all blogs to appear. This has been fixed.

> If your blog contains anything too sexy for the average workplace, simply check "Flag this blog as NSFW" so people in Safe Mode can avoid it. Your blog will still be promoted in third-party search engines.

Actually I admit to not knowing much about the topic, but from the original dailydot article, it seems there are 2 levels of flagging involved - NSFW and Adult. The Adult category is the one that's been completely blackholed. This article seems to be deliberately trying to confuse the two types.

I haven't been keeping up with this (I don't use Tumblr myself) so I can't really give an educated opinion one way or the other.

Searching for NSFW tags is working fine now on the web app. It wasn't this morning. That was the bug they fixed.

Unless I misunderstood, the article other I read said there was no way to search for the NSFW tumblrs (or however you'd say it) _within_ tumblr. That would be a much bigger deal than not being able to find it from google. If you can't find it within, that means it's nearly impossible to find it in the future.

Do we know that a significant number of non-spam NSFW blogs were being flagged as "Adult" by Tumblr, or is it possible that people were enabling this flag themselves without realizing its implications?

While I don't really follow Tumblr enough to know for sure, it's not that hard to turn up blogs that aren't advertising anything, appear to be incredibly popular, and have been blocked from search. (For example http://damn-hot-gay-porn.tumblr.com/ - NSFW, not advertising anything that I can see, first Google result for "tumblr gay porn" and a huge number of reblogs, now completely blocked by robots.txt. Along with, apparently, most of the equally-unspammy blogs that have reblogged their stuff.)

Edit: Salon.com did a feature on the best porn Tumblrs: http://www.salon.com/2013/05/26/the_best_of_tumblr_porn/ It appears a large proportion of the Tumblrs featured there have also been marked as adult and removed from Google search.

Edit 2: I think they've basically marked all porn-heavy blogs as adult and forcibly delisted them from search, exactly like they originally said they were going to do and regardless of how spammy they are.

They admit to having a Adult flag which removes the blog from all site listings and from google searches. This effectively kills the blog.

So what? nobody owes you a free search engine listing.

What does "owing" have to do with anything?

Microsoft doesn't "owe" you a start bar. If your mother complained about it missing in the initial Windows 8 release would you tell her "So what? nobody owes you a start bar."?

Would you tell people in the 80s "So what? nobody owes you classic Coca-Cola."?

(Your profile lists no contact info, so saying this here instead of in DM:) I love this comment and, by extension, I love you, JLGreco.

If your mother complained about it missing in the initial Windows 8 release would you tell her "So what? nobody owes you a start bar."?

Yes...as a matter of fact that's one reason I have not bothered to upgrade from Windows 7.

Would you tell people in the 80s "So what? nobody owes you classic Coca-Cola."?

I'm petty sure I did tell people that. I'm a big believer in voting with your wallet. Of course, your examples involve things that people pay for, whereas setting up a Tumblr page is free (thus giving you even less of a claim on Yahoo's actions.)

So you would have people vote with their wallets, just so long as they don't also complain while doing it?

I don't think you would really tell your mother that. Maybe you would tell your mother to stick with Windows 7 after trying out Windows 8 in the store, but I do not believe for one second that you would say anything to the effect of "Microsoft doesn't owe you that" in response to her reacting to the change.

Vote with your wallets and complain. Why the hell not?

> "Of course, your examples involve things that people pay for"

Admittedly yes, in the Windows 8 case (outside of trying it out in the store). Not so in the New Coke case. Nobody bought a lifetime subscription of Coke. People were upset because they could no longer buy the old Coke, not because they were duped into buying New Coke (well, not for more than a few cents anyway).

Nobody was owed the ability to buy classic Coke. Complain they did though, and can you really fault them for that? Really?

I do not believe for one second that you would say anything to the effect of "Microsoft doesn't owe you that" in response to her reacting to the change

Why not? My mother's no idiot; she may not understand the intricacies of her computer works but she doesn't expect Microsoft to automatically accommodate her tastes any more than she expects Volvo to keep making her favorite model from the 80s. If anything she helped instill this attitude in me when I expressed disappointment about my favorite kids TV shows going away. As a consumer I don't expect producers to be sentimental about their offerings; if I think some particular change is foolish then I argue that on economic grounds (but if it turns out to be the profitable thing to do, then I have to accept I was wrong).

I mean, there are certainly choices I'd like corporations to make - I'm into synthesizers, for example, and I really wish that Roland corporation would start issuing TB-303s again, especially now that their competitors have chosen to resissue some of their classic designs at affordable prices. But after analyzing the numbers and potential profit margins, I'm 99% certain that it's Not Going To Happen no matter how much I and my fellow synth geeks beg for it. It's not worth the risk involved, and they don't owe me such a product. (On the other hand, it would make good economic sesnse for them to reissue certain classic drum machines...)

Not so in the New Coke case. Nobody bought a lifetime subscription of Coke.

They bought bottles and cans of Coke, and when they discovered that they didn't like the taste of New Coke I presume the they stopped purchasing it. I guarantee that Coke executives paid a great deal more to consumers' behavior than whatever it was they said.

When someone voices a complaint, they are not inherently making an implicit statement about being owed something.

I doubt you would speak to your mother that way because, frankly, it is an rather anti-social reply. She's not dumb, she knows she is owed nothing. In the hypothetical complaint she was not claiming to be owed anything. Your quip is clearing nothing up.

I disagree. Complaining about some deficiency on a free blogging platform sounds exactly like a misplaced expression of entitlement to me.

Maybe it is anti-social, but I don't feel bad about that. I have yet to receive a coherent answer to my original 'so what' question, about why Tumblr should enable NSFW content indexing on Google if they (Tumblr) feel that it's hurting their brand to do so.

The thing about "so what?" questions is they are rarely real questions.

I like apricots... so what? Taxis are yellow... so what? This T-Mobile coverage at the airport is shit... so what? Some people are displeased with recent tumblr changes... so what?

Why would you expect an answer to any of those "questions"?

I wouldn't, but that wasn't the sort of question I asked. Instead, I quoted the specific context, because I was curious about why the parent poster thought it mattered if adult-flagged blogs got delisted from search engines. He had phrased his comment in such a way that it seemed like he considered this a Bad Thing, whereas it seems to me that a) you could still build an audience without relying on Google and b) it seemed strange to me that the existence of a blog should be measured only in terms of its readership.

I think this was perfectly clear from the context, and substituting arbitrary statements about nothing in particular to critique my original question (after having complained about how I would communicate with my mother or console a bereft cola drinker) suggests to me that it's you who doesn't have any particular point to make.

I found some of the other comments disagreeing with my viewpoint more enlightening, but I'm not clear on what your point is other than having a go at me.

Did it occur to you that perhaps he thinks it will negatively impact him?

If that is genuinely what you were not getting, then you have been anything but clear. My point is that you seem to be engaging in a sort of senseless anti-social comment sniping. I think that has been pretty clear, though I admit I could have done more to make my intentions plain.

>I'm a big believer in voting with your wallet.

How is this suppose to work. Voting with your wallet is a very course signal, saying no more than that you do not like some recent change. If you complain, then the company knows what it is that you do not like, and can make a better informed decision if they should continue to do it. This complaint can be backed up by voting with your wallet, but you need both.

I like to hear about it when my users dislike a change, even if I don't owe them anything. I also believe that I actually do owe users something when they invest time into my product.

I pay for Tumblr by providing information they use for various purposes. Information has value, and is being exchanged for a service.

No one is saying that its their right to have their blog indexed, they are simply expressing dissatisfaction with a change in service, which is a completely fair way for consumers of a product to interact with its creators. Tumblr has every right to not grant it, users have every right to be upset. Tumblr also has the right to remove EVERY blog of theirs from indexing, that's not the point.

By your line of argument, tumblr doesn't owe any user anything.

That's right, except insofar as they enter into some kind of contractual relationship (eg 'we will host your stuff reliably in accordance with our T&C, in return you allow us to stick adverts on it from time to time.')

Tumblr doesn't put ads on the persons blog, just the dashboard - which is the primary way users consume content on the site. The users tumblelog is theirs to do with what they want (within legal limits, and certain TOS limits...) including putting their own ads on them.

It's just an example of what sort of agreement could exist between a service provider and user. I chose the example of ads because a) Yahoo now owns Tumblr, and Yahoo's major source of revenue is ads, so that could happen in future; and b) in contract law, you typically have no rights to a free service but if you there is some exchange such as their putting ads on your log then a commercial exchange wouldbe taking place.

Right - I am just stating as a current Tumblr employee how it currently is - obviously the future is hypothetical and not something I will personally speculate on with regards to my employer - but I understand the point.

They probably don't.

> So what?

A fine example of a thought-terminating cliché. You should add it to the list!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_cliché

These blogs are mostly posting pics from porn sites and slapping ads on them. Search is irrelevant. There isn't really any context.

So this doesn't kill the blog as long as people spam links to the site on Reddit. They were never going to be found by (or linked to) google in the first place.

Wait I think your wrong - it says

"Flag this blog as NSFW" so people in Safe Mode can avoid it. Your blog will still be promoted in third-party search engines."

...which implies you CAN search for NSFW tumblr blogs, with google?

Or am I wrong/confused?

There are two different classifications, NSFW and Adult. NSFW is opt-in by the creator of the blog, and still allows the blog to be indexed by search engines. Adult is an automatic classification applied by Tumblr (previously the blog creator could also opt in to it, but in this announcement they say that will no longer be the case), and prevents the blog from being indexed by search engines.

See this table for details: http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw

instagram blocks certain hashtags. will just silently return zero results.

Yes: Anything pornographic or even possibly-pornographic (#instahot is banned), and politically incorrect/harmful hashtags such as #thispo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com