[HN Gopher] Why "go nuts, show nuts" doesn't work in 2022
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Why "go nuts, show nuts" doesn't work in 2022
Author : firloop
Score : 267 points
Date : 2022-09-29 19:00 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (photomatt.tumblr.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (photomatt.tumblr.com)
| jjulius wrote:
| I can appreciate the second point about how app stores are anti-
| porn, particularly in the broader discussion about how difficult
| it is to operate a site that hosts pornographic content, be a sex
| worker, etc.. Definitely worth discussing.
|
| That said, am I crazy (ignorant, perhaps?) in thinking that it's
| irrelevant to Tumblr? Tumblr.com still works in all browsers, and
| surely (here's where that ignorance of mine might come into play)
| it's possible to have a very similar experience via browser as
| you would via app. I mean, you can use FB and Instagram on mobile
| browsers just fine for the most part, and Tumblr, too.
| wmf wrote:
| I guess ads in mobile apps are worth dramatically more than Web
| ads.
| colechristensen wrote:
| There probably needs to be a "show nuts" compliance platform for
| standard practices, auditing, etc. for nudity and porn on social
| networks. Payment processors, app stores, and the platforms
| themselves could point to these things to prove and practice good
| faith so we can exit this prudish phase where in many cases less
| is allowed now than was broadcast on the air tv decades ago.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| Anyone bemoaning a lack of porn on the internet must be using a
| different internet than I am. Porn is ubiquitous in all its forms
| and varieties. Anything you could possibly want is just a click
| away.
|
| It is, however, very difficult to base a business on internet
| porn. That might be a problem in some ways, but it is a different
| problem than lack of access.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Not just a click away. You also need a little typing.
|
| Really the business in internet porn is psychological
| manipulation and compromat. There's no business otherwise, it's
| sex, it's bad for sex to be efficient, porn is efficient, too
| efficient. No business. As a straight model I can tell you the
| business is in being very close to pornography without ever
| actually crossing the boundary.
|
| Teasing.
|
| Very inefficient.
|
| I got down to my underwear for my portfolio day 1, no problem.
| Absolutely no problem. There was a girl [a very young woman
| model age, like 19, I was 24, her name was Antonia] getting her
| portfolio done simultaneous, she was naked too, but with
| lingerie. Our agent was there, telling me just strip, don't go
| to the bathroom, look at her, _esta en pelota_ she 's naked.
| It's a living. Our interest in each other was purely
| professional.
|
| Teasing. Like the Russky pop stars. That's where the money is.
| softcactus wrote:
| Why does this read like Chuck Palahniuk
| teddyh wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=daniel-cussen
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| At it's height, Tumblr porn was different. Similar to Twitter
| and Reddit, yet somehow more human.
|
| Maybe it is because Tumblr allows wild customization, instead
| of forcing a unified corporate approved interface.
|
| It felt like a place to explore and discover things about
| yourself in the process. Much of the porn on the internet these
| days feels like it's just trying to profile and exploit you .
| naet wrote:
| When the author sees that twitter and reddit both have iOS apps,
| he handwaves it away as a mystery why they are allowed to exist
| on iOS. Doesn't this go directly against his claim "no modern
| internet service in 2022 can have the rules that Tumblr did in
| 2007"? They are literally the direct competitors of Tumblr, and
| they didn't alienate a huge chunk of their audience with strict
| content policies.
|
| Maybe he wasn't part of the organization at the time, but Tumblr
| was removed from iOS for a widely publicized child pornography
| incident. They made an internal decision to axe any and all adult
| content as a PR response. The app store did not mandate this.
|
| (edited for clarity)
| kurtreed wrote:
| Yeah Reddit and Twitter are mentioned in the article
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| These points are addressed in the article.
| saurik wrote:
| CollegeHumor, soon before it was forced to dismantle itself, did
| a sketch involving the CEO of Tumblr coming to realize just how
| much porn was really on the site. This article is an amazing
| sequel.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtUuab1Aqg0
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| This mentality change goes far beyond porn. A decade ago comment
| sections like Slashdot and Hacker News were almost unanimously in
| favor of keeping the internet as unregulated and open as
| possible.
|
| Now it seems like every headline about social media companies
| attracts a lot of comments demanding regulations, restrictions,
| and laws to crack down on... something. Even here on HN it's
| common for threads about Meta to devolve into a lot of angry
| calls for Facebook to be "banned" for kids or for lawmakers to
| step in and regulate.
|
| Meanwhile, journalists and politicians _love_ to amplify stories
| about tech companies doing harm to kids. Allowing, or even
| encouraging, something like porn on your platform is an open
| invitation for these journalists to put you in their sights. No
| company wants to be the most lax company in the space, so it 's a
| constant game of companies tightening their standards.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Weird how you paint journalists spreading awareness of Bad
| Things Happening as the evil here.
|
| Earlier this year Twitter considered competing with OnlyFans in
| having a paid porn product. No company wants to be the most lax
| company in the space, and twitter determined it didn't have the
| ability to ensure that child porn wouldn't end up on the
| service, and they killed the effort.
|
| > _" Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation
| and non-consensual nudity at scale" the Red Team [at Twitter]
| concluded_
|
| I think that's a completely valid outcome - I think it's valid
| for no one to want to be responsible for facilitating that.
| https://www.theverge.com/23327809/twitter-onlyfans-child-sex...
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > Weird how you paint journalists spreading awareness of Bad
| Things Happening as the evil here.
|
| Counterpoint. There really is a lot of high-class clickbait
| in journalism though. Most is probably well-meaning and it
| might even be unintentional. My own anecdote: I like to
| listen to NPR which is a great source of civil discussion and
| journalism. A lot of their pieces, in the aim to be
| humanistic, end up bouncing from one group of (legitimate!)
| victims to the next. Every story is about someone with a
| problem, and the implied question is always _what are we
| going to do about it?_ When these stories inevitably drift
| toward social media, that question is always directed at the
| company. What is TwitBookStagramTok going to do to fix ____
| issue? These are legitimate questions. But you end up
| reaching a point where the story just doesn 't end, it keeps
| being brought up again and again as bad press for company
| ______ and so of course, after a period of attrition, the
| company eventually performs some action to curtail the
| mountain of bad press. And that action is almost always
| heavier moderation. And when companies don't respond the
| conversion shifts toward regulation.
|
| And that sounds good right? But the question that doesn't get
| asked enough is if the company should have just ridden out
| the bad press and fought the regulation as a matter of
| principle, and if that principle is good and sound and should
| be embraced by our society; the question being pondered by
| this HackerNews thread. That's rarely the perspective offered
| by an entity like NPR because humanism is their form of
| clickbait. Neither their listeners nor their producers are
| much interested in that, it seems. So while "more censorship,
| less freedom" might not be the mantra coming from the mouths
| of NPR personalities, it's sort of a de facto result of their
| tendencies.
| draw_down wrote:
| notacoward wrote:
| > No company wants to be the most lax company in the space
|
| This is the key observation, I think. It's a real race to the
| bottom, except that the bottom is a place where absolutely no
| actual bottoms are allowed.
| anyfactor wrote:
| I used tumblr as my personal blog in 2022. I have never used
| Tumblr before, but I felt like the platform was designed for me.
|
| I can't put my ideas into a tweet without creating a thread and I
| despise threads. Twitter promotes a weird impulsive behavior to
| write everything without thinking.
|
| On the other hand, I think blogging platforms like Medium has a
| "commitment to read feel". You know you see the header then you
| convince that is something you must read, that would be that
| "commitment read thing". The content is hidden so you have to
| micro-commit to click and wait for the page to load, based on a
| single sentence called title. Not my thing I guess. My personal
| blog is personal and thus is poorly written. So Tumblr has the
| perfect design as to me it feels like an uninterrupted twitter
| thread (twitter if you steal this idea, pay me).
|
| Obviously, the better option is to create your own static blog
| site based on Github pages and Hugo. I am not sure where Tumblr
| could pivot, as people who could have used Tumblr to give it's
| second life now has their personal blogs and they post those
| blogs into other platforms. Blogging as a writing method has
| shifted to become platform agnostic.
| shrubble wrote:
| The domain "gonutshownuts.com" appears to be available, I have no
| need of this domain, but maybe another HNer can use it?
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Should be gonutsshownuts.com, though that seems to be available
| too.
|
| Not really sure what I'd do with that domain, though. A gallery
| of almonds and cashews would be good for a sensible chuckle, I
| suppose, but not really worth the effort.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| _Should be gonutsshownuts.com_
|
| Should it?
|
| I present to you: RAISERROR
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/language-
| element...
| bohdank wrote:
| Web3 Tumblr anyone?
| lakomen wrote:
| We had the sexual revolution in the 60s 70s. Where are we now? I
| can't watch porn on Android or IOS, because the apps won't get
| listed on the app stores. So companies censor themselves or ask
| that you buy a dedicated and crippled set top box.
|
| We need a revolution.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| > I can't watch porn on Android or IOS
|
| Mobile browsers exist
| PTcartelsLOL wrote:
| Sweet summer children everywhere!
| pessimizer wrote:
| Judging by who is armed, organized, and has shared values that
| they're willing to go to war to protect, any revolution in the
| US would be more likely to result in women wearing veils than
| porn everywhere.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Matt is correct. Things have chanced, and not for the better.
| Having mega-international corporations dictate our morals, among
| other things, is not something that should be rationalized so
| easily. Is this something about being a self-proclaimed
| Libertarian I don't understand?
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _If Apple permanently banned Tumblr from the App Store, we'd
| probably have to shut the service down._
|
| I'm not finished reading but this sounds like a bunch of shit to
| me. If this is true it is only because they force people to use
| the app by sabotaging their own web page. Tumblr has been dead
| since Verizon took over, it's legacy is pervasive infinite scroll
| throughout the internet.
| kleiba wrote:
| One problem that's perhaps underdiscussed is that all of this is
| coming from an entirely US-centric world view. In Europe, for
| instance, we are generally less paranoid about nudity, I don't
| think that the notorious "nipplegate" halftime show incident back
| in 2004 would have caused any uproar over here, perhaps
| bemusement.
|
| But because the "world wide" web is really a "US-American" web at
| its heart, we now have to adhere to whatever standards are en
| vogue there today.
| seandoe wrote:
| Who's we? Who says the web has to be us-american? Make a good
| fuckin website, host it in fuckin Europe, get some euro bank to
| handle fuckin payments and quit fuckin complaining about how
| america took your teddie bear. half-kidding there... But
| really, I don't see why US puritanical issues have to be the
| world's issues too. I guess if you're operating at a global
| level, but if you're that big you can fuck off anyway.
| [deleted]
| zoba wrote:
| Or, perhaps it is "whatever are most restrictive but still
| societally acceptable". Europe has impacted the web by forcing
| us all to accept cookies.
|
| Though we reject Chinese style censorship which is more
| restrictive but unacceptable.
| Retr0id wrote:
| > 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, and make a ton of money.
|
| It's really quite sad that this is the case. What can we do,
| collectively, to fix it?
| [deleted]
| intrasight wrote:
| "Nothing to fix - it ain't broke". That's what the puritans
| against porn and other vices would say.
| strathmeyer wrote:
| Dude is describing Fetlife.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| > do a ton of work in age and identity verification and
| compliance so you don't go to jail
|
| This reminds me. A while back, we were researching selling
| something online that required age verification, and for our
| system to be legal, we needed to use a 3rd party system to verify
| ages.
|
| Which we were fine with.
|
| However, if the 3rd party was wrong, we were legally liable.
| Which we were not fine with. Going to jail because a legally
| mandated 3rd party system is wrong was not on our bucket list.
| giantrobot wrote:
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| colordrops wrote:
| > Credit card companies are anti-porn
|
| Why?
| antonymy wrote:
| It's not that they're "anti-porn" it's that they're anti-risk.
| Porn sites have been getting in increasingly hot water for
| years for a variety of legal reasons, and all it takes is one
| major lawsuit against them trickling up to the payment process
| for enabling harm to set legal precedent and then they're
| getting sued for anything and everything on the basis they are
| enabling almost all kinds of web content.
|
| It's an understandable fear. It's just a sad fact that they are
| an effective global duopoly so if they chicken out there's no
| alternative for people to turn to. More competition would help
| with this, but the threat of the lawsuit floodgates opening
| would still be there and create a chilling effect on payment
| processing. That has to be handled by legislation, but that's
| going down a whole other thorny road with many possible bad
| outcomes. The legislation we get may introduce new problems
| even worse than the ones it attempted to solve.
|
| But I think it's still worth trying. The present situation is
| very bad for the future of an open internet.
| colechristensen wrote:
| "Porn" has done a historically awful job of filtering out
| exploitation and abuse, and made a lot of money from it.
| dllthomas wrote:
| On the one hand, yes. But on the other that's also been true
| of The Gap and Nike. Fruit companies have toppled
| governments, and people have been shot suppressing
| unionization in a host of industries.
|
| I am not convinced that the morality is enough to convince
| the credit card companies to forgo their cut of that "lot of
| money."
|
| I suspect that the bigger concern is the higher levels of
| fraud when many participants in a market are unusually
| uncomfortable turning to public courts to address disputes.
| lupire wrote:
| GAP and Nike abuse poor foreigners in poor countries. No
| risk there.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > "Porn" has done a historically awful job of filtering out
| exploitation and abuse,
|
| Has it? Does it have an actual record of abuse* that is
| better than, for example, the meat packing industry, or
| janitorial services?
|
| -----
|
| [*] (I don't know what you mean by exploitation, I'm assuming
| it's just an expression of disapproval)
| Jolter wrote:
| My guess is the risk of legal liability. There are laws in many
| countries that forbid them from (knowingly or unknowingly)
| financing child pornography or trafficking. The due diligence
| of verifying every transaction just seems immense and perhaps
| not worth the risk to them.
| jfengel wrote:
| They're not exactly anti-porn, but they're anti-chargeback, and
| they know that sex work of all kinds has a high chargeback
| rate. People do things, regret it (or get caught), and insist
| that the charge is false and must be reversed.
|
| They're also really, really against getting caught having
| anything to do with anything illegal, and there's a lot of
| illegal stuff associated with porn. It may be only a small
| percentage, but the last thing they want is to be sued or
| criminally charged.
|
| So, they are very, very wary of anything to do with porn. I'm
| sure they'd be happy to have their cut of that very lucrative
| industry, but they'd rather forego it than having their entire
| business destroyed over it.
| blintz wrote:
| I guess I don't quite understand why using something like a
| debit card doesn't work. The marijuana companies seem to have
| effectively figured how to take payments with almost no help
| from the traditional players (credit card companies, banks).
| jfengel wrote:
| I don't know, and it's a good question.
|
| I wonder if it has something to do with it being (for now)
| a local business. I am _extremely_ wary of using my debit
| card online. The credit card comes with a lot of protection
| if the information is stolen. A debit card lets them empty
| my bank account. In theory, I can get it back --
| eventually.
|
| If somebody who has stolen a debit card tries to use it in
| person, they're running a much higher risk. So the
| marijuana sellers may have an easier time getting access to
| that network.
|
| That's purely speculation, however. I know effectively
| nothing about the business.
| blintz wrote:
| That's a fair point, although you can use a debit card
| for cannabis delivery services too. Maybe a good
| mitigation for the fraud concern is just using 'virtual'
| or physical prepaid debit cards that have a fixed
| balance.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| They aren't.
|
| Pretty sure if you're a vendor selling mail-order "adult"
| DVDs/BDs from major publishing houses, that's a business that
| you'll have no difficulty running with credit card sales.
|
| Where you'll run into a problem is if you're a website that
| wants to charge subscriptions for access to loosely-sourced,
| user-generated content.
| puglr wrote:
| It is notable that the first item in their list is objectively
| false:
|
| > You've probably heard how Pornhub can't accept credit cards
| anymore.
|
| That was only temporarily true due to illegal UGC. It lasted less
| than a month. Once pornhub removed their unverified UGC they were
| allowed to take credit cards again, or at least Visa.
|
| One would think that given the nature of this post, they ought to
| have their facts straight.
|
| Credit cards aren't anti-porn. They are anti-unmoderated UGC
| porn, for obvious reasons.
|
| It's understandable that this does present a problem for sites
| like Tumblr. But the way it is presented is misleading at best
| and in part based on a false premise.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| The fact check here is important, but saying that it was just
| "due to illegal UGC" downplays the fact that there are lots of
| platforms with oodles of "illegal" UGC, but it's the porn
| companies that have gotten the brunt of CC companies' ire. The
| increasing scrutiny specifically on porn (some of which is due
| to SESTA/FOSTA, as another poster pointed out) has had a
| chilling effect on sex work across the whole web.
|
| Also, while true that CC companies aren't anti-porn in a strict
| sense, credit cards really do not get along very well with sex
| work or porn in general. They'll reluctantly take their money,
| but it's a very strained relationship, with high fees in part
| due to the high number of chargebacks, and in part because no
| one is going to go to bat politically for porn sites.
|
| It's arguable whether the CC companies are "anti-porn", but
| they are _definitely_ not "pro-porn".
| controversial97 wrote:
| It appeared to me that at least 99% of the porn on tumblr was not
| original content, it was commercial porn upload by random people
| in violation of copyright law.
|
| They must have had to deal with a very large number of DMCA
| takedown requests.
|
| Even with automation that takes down every blog entry that is
| reported through a web form, it seems very likely to me that just
| the staffing cost of dealing with emails and paper letters would
| outweigh the meagre advertising revenue from porn blogs.
| intrasight wrote:
| > the casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is
| currently impossible
|
| There are plenty of porn sites. Some are even pretty good. I
| subscribed to MakeLoveNotPorn after hearing about it on a
| podcast. Credit cards accepted.
|
| I honestly don't get what is the argument or point he's trying to
| make. I'm sure that he could make a new porn startup if he
| wanted. There's a lot of competition but it's probably still
| profitable for those that succeed.
| HomeDeLaPot wrote:
| If you buy porn with cash, there's no payment processor to stop
| your payment from going through.
|
| But now that we all use credit cards, it is technically feasible
| to stop your payments from happening depending on what you are
| trying to purchase. And so credit card companies are under
| pressure to do so.
|
| It's not just limited to porn. If anything is controversial
| enough, then its payments can be shut down. I was just reading
| this earlier today: https://world.hey.com/dhh/i-was-wrong-we-
| need-crypto-587ccb0...
|
| What should the future be: cash, crypto, or mobile payments a la
| WeChat?
| bluedino wrote:
| Couldn't you buy some third party credits that could be paid
| for with credit cards and accepted by the unacceptable
| companies?
| oldpmfan wrote:
| Nice article. What would Hugh Hefner say about this World (I
| think it was addressed in his magazine once or twice when it was
| still published).
|
| We are censored and controlled by (US) political correctness
| World View of
|
| * App Stores: Google and Apple
|
| * Social media platforms from companies like Meta (no nipples in
| IG or Facebook). Try visit Playboy IG, it's a pixel joke.
|
| * Payment (although Visa and Mastercard are not against porn
| totally)
|
| * Infrastructure. Good luck running a porn site from common known
| cloud providers (btw. Cloudflare is an exception in this list).
|
| Why it is 2022 and we are not allowed to see any nipples on Apple
| or Google devices (only exception reddit and twitter) unless it's
| on websites or transferred on my own on devices? I'm clearly old
| enough but US companies trying to protect me by basically
| enforcing CENSORSHIP here. It's nothing else.
|
| To this day I cannot understand to see easily violence and horror
| things on all these platforms but beware we see ONE uncovered
| NIPPLE.
| antonymy wrote:
| It's why I despair of smart phones dictating the course of the
| internet. These are platforms that are locked down to a degree
| that slowly strangles the rest of the internet. It's censorship
| not through the heavy hand of the state arresting people and
| confiscating servers, but creating a climate of fear and
| uncertainty over ruinous lawsuits and chasing advertising
| dollars. The censorship effect is obfuscated through so many
| apparently voluntary and open transactions that the public at
| large has no idea it is happening. It's extremely hard to talk
| about this with people in my life without sounding like a
| paranoid conspiracy theorist.
| [deleted]
| nostromo wrote:
| It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the
| internet.
|
| The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa,
| Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we
| are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. And virtually in
| lockstep, they are becoming increasingly prudish.
|
| I'm curious if this could be addressed with laws that force
| companies to either be utilities or publishers. If you're a
| publisher, you take liability for your content and can edit it at
| will. If you're a utility, you do not take liability for your
| services, but you cannot pick and choose which customers you
| service so long as it's legal.
| synergy20 wrote:
| Based on this trend, maybe it's time to load up some bitcoin
| for a profit down the road?
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Meanwhile lawmakers are focusing on regulating Twitter to give
| everyone the right to post their sentence amongst the ads.
|
| They're targeting the wrong layer. Regulate ISPs, and maybe big
| hosting companies like AWS and Cloudflare.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around
| it" is propaganda and cultural myth.
|
| Conditioning liability limitation on being hands-off will only
| go so far. For one thing, most platforms are basically unusable
| if you try to turn them into the verbal equivalent of 2b2t[0].
| You need to do spam filtering at the least, and that implies
| making editorial judgments as to what users to take on. It is
| also possible to use free speech as a censorship tool - say, by
| harassing or doxing users as reprisal for speech.
|
| Even if we walked this back to "utilities must have
| _consistent_ rules and users can sue for unfair application of
| them ", this is still historically _lenient_ in terms of
| intermediary liability. The law does not chase pointers: with
| literally _any other_ field of endeavor, we don 't accept the
| idea that someone can facilitate a crime without being liable
| for it. That would be a massive loophole. But we accept it for
| defamation and copyright law because we convinced Congress to
| accept the propaganda of the Internet[1].
|
| _Under current law_ , Visa and Mastercard _cannot_ disclaim
| liability that Apple or Google can. This is why the anti-porn
| campaigns have been so successful at killing amateurs in that
| space. Apple might be prudish about not having porn in their
| app, but they can at least accept filters on the app[2]. And,
| as we 've seen with cryptocurrency, letting those companies
| disclaim liability would be an absolute nightmare.
| Cryptocurrency has been an absolute boon to ransomware and scam
| enterprises that otherwise _would not be able to take
| payments_. So you will never convince Congress to carve
| massive, gaping loopholes in banking law the same way we did to
| defamation and copyright law.
|
| A decade and change ago our biggest worry was that Comcast
| would try to turn the Internet into a series of cable TV
| packages. Now, we have forced so many people to effectively
| immigrate to the Internet, that they are in a position to
| demand that it _does_ actually work like cable (in that things
| they don 't like can be sued into oblivion or taken down). The
| old Internet cannot exist in a world where it can be used
| against itself to destroy itself.
|
| [0] The oldest anarchy server in Minecraft.
|
| [1] For the record, I am not opposed to CDA 230 or DMCA 512.
| But we still need to recognize that these liability limiters
| have massively harmed the ability for plaintiffs to prosecute
| legitimate defamation or copyright cases.
|
| [2] I am aware that Tumblr got smacked down for this, but this
| is not because Apple refuses to accept filtering on social
| networks. They got smacked down because they are absolutely
| _terrible_ at filtering anything, and an app reviewer saw CSAM.
| boppo1 wrote:
| Copyright only hurts the small creators it was intended to
| protect. Hell, I work in a creative field and in order to get
| employment that isn't soliciting freelance work on a project-
| by-project basis, most companies _heavily_ push creative
| people to sign away all rights to the things they make on or
| off company time. I 've only successfully gotten a company to
| drop onerous IP language once. The other times I've walked
| away from what are otherwise dream jobs.
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| > The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have
| Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding
| what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. And
| virtually in lockstep, they are becoming increasingly prudish.
|
| You can be as independent as you want if you don't care about
| getting paid. If you want to run a small web site with
| handwritten HTML hosted on a server in your house that gets a
| few hundred visitors a month, you can still do that. (I'd be
| willing to bet it's easier now than it was in the 90s!) If you
| want to have ten million customers and a staff of full-time
| employees, then you'll be integrating with the rest of society
| whether you like it or not. I'm not sure that's unreasonable in
| and of itself, although I do agree that the way we treat porn
| (and sex in general) in the US is pretty bizarre.
| IntFee588 wrote:
| Perhaps this is true, but this is all the more reason why
| giving social media sites the right to police free
| speech/expression is too much. Public discourse today happens
| online. The "uhhhh, this is a private venue, they don't owe
| you a soapbox" rhetoric rings increasingly hollow when we
| just went through a multiyear period when society
| collectively forced millions of people to work or go to
| school over the internet, often through big tech platforms.
| Telling people who don't like the current state of the
| mainstream web to find their own platform is like telling
| people who are unhappy with food prices to simply farm their
| own crops; it's not technically impossible, but there's more
| likely to be civil unrest before people start sowing seeds.
|
| It is also very telling that when independent discussion
| platforms do start to reach critical mass (4chan, voat,
| wherever else) there is often collusion or pressure to take
| down their hosting or stop payment processors from working
| with them.
| MartinCron wrote:
| _The "uhhhh, this is a private venue, they don't owe you a
| soapbox" rhetoric rings increasingly hollow when we just
| went through a multiyear period when society collectively
| forced millions of people to work or go to school over the
| internet, often through big tech platforms._
|
| That feels like a non-sequitur. People can both use
| mainstream platforms for work/school and create/find their
| own platforms for other parts of their life.
| jlawson wrote:
| It's fine to have to 'integrate with society'.
|
| The problem is that you have to 'integrate with this very
| short list of megacorps, and if they don't like you you are
| not allowed to operate'.
|
| At any substantial scale at all, these are true:
|
| - If Cloudflare doesn't like you, you can't have a website.
|
| - If Google doesn't like you, you can't get discovered.
|
| - If Visa and Mastercard don't like you, you can't get paid.
|
| We never elected these corporations; they power they wield is
| illegitimate.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| > We never elected these corporations;
|
| Sure we did. We voted with our wallets. I'm not sure why
| you believe it would be any different if we _had_ elected
| these companies with votes.
|
| In the current policital landscape in much of the western
| hemisphere has lots of people arguing for restrictive
| policies around speech or access to healthcare.
|
| At least with the megacorps there is the potential to build
| a competitor. If they were heavily regulated good luck
| getting your account reactivated when the government
| sanctioned monopoly decides it doesn't like you.
| jjulius wrote:
| >It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the
| internet.
|
| >The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa,
| Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what
| we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. And virtually
| in lockstep, they are becoming increasingly prudish.
|
| I mean, yes and no. People have been successful in sanitizing
| the mainstream internet, the pop culture internet, the one your
| grandparents like to visit. There's plenty of internet out
| there beyond what is commonly used.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Sure, but more of the internet is sanitized compared to 10-15
| years ago, which is likely what they meant. More restrictions
| in place over more domains. Couple that with the fact that
| more people spend their time on fewer sites these days than
| they did in 2007, and it's hard to really argue that the
| internet most people experience isn't more content
| restricted.
| lupire wrote:
| That's good. People who don't want to be bothered aren't,
| and people who want fringe stuff can enjoy it semi-
| privately.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Or let me have some toggles so I don't have to seek out a
| hundred different fringe sites.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Most of this stuff used to spread word to mouth. It still
| does.
|
| 'Funny people' on Reddit still post links to NSFW in SFW
| spaces. Googling something angsty can be interpreted as a
| search for XXX. Twitter isn't exactly safe either, and can
| teach a few people NSFW words to get curious about. R34,
| DeviantArt etc. are all alive, and anything hentai related
| is far more prominent and mainstream than before. People
| interact on these sites and suggest enough to instill
| curiosities.
|
| It's not as on the nose as old flash game sites showing a
| highlighted "18+" with a shitty age verification or a
| random ad sending them into the rabbit hole, but it's still
| very much there.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the
| internet.
|
| Not just sanitizing, but sanitizing to US social mores. Showing
| a naked boob is considered porn and banned on most of these
| platform while public toplessness is perfectly legal in many
| jurisdictions worldwide. I guess it's lucky that at least these
| companies are not based in an even more restrictive society
| like China or we would see further restrictions become
| commonplace.
| largepeepee wrote:
| Having grown up in an authoritarian country, then having the
| internet basically force it to liberalize was a great
| feeling.
|
| Ironically some liberties offered even less than a decade ago
| are eroding away because of the new internet overlords, often
| under the guise of some trumped up reason like "security" or
| "social" cause.
|
| These day they don't even try to hide their true greedy
| objectives anymore, as seen in the removal of the YouTube
| dislike button or manifestv3.
| Conan_Kudo wrote:
| Public toplessness is also legal in most of the United
| States.
|
| See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topfreedom_in_the_United_S
| tate...
| silisili wrote:
| Warning - Above link is NSFW(images of topless women).
|
| That said, I found it very interesting. I honestly had no
| idea it was legal anywhere outside of private or 'cordoned
| off' places.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >Showing a naked boob is considered porn and banned on most
| of these platform
|
| Probably because a lot of kids use these platforms aka social
| networks
| t_mann wrote:
| Is there any evidence that seeing topless women is bad for
| kids in some way, or is that just a US cultural norm?
| djbusby wrote:
| In the USA we can show bloody violence on over-the-air
| TV, guns and shooting.
|
| Naked humans are too scary for us.
| uni_rule wrote:
| I mean legally they shouldn't be with COPPA and all that,
| otherwise there are far more regulations in relation to
| their privacy, the two ideas of toning it down for children
| and not following children's privacy standards would
| visibly contradict each other. Doesn't stop children though
| since the most blocking then from registering for most web
| sites prematurely like that is a text box that might as
| well say "I am above 13 or willing to claim I am". A more
| cynical person would say that's by design but there really
| is no unintrusive to verify that either otherwise such a
| thing probably would be enforced for legal reasons.
| quest88 wrote:
| I would argue it's laws that make them behave this way. Of
| course profit-seeking companies would like to profit off
| everything. But they also don't want to risk be sued or
| investigated.
| jmcgough wrote:
| A lot of these laws are being pushed by religious-affiliated
| anti-porn groups that rebranded as anti-sex trafficking
| because it's more effective for them to make that argument.
| bawolff wrote:
| > It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the
| internet.
|
| Not just in a porn way. Looking back at archives of the old
| internet just seem way more risque. For example, take the
| hacker magazine phrack. Maybe its a bad example because a
| hacker mag is always going to be out there, but the early
| issues included all sorts of stuff around making improvised
| bombs. Its hard to imagine anything like that on the semi-
| mainstream internet now a days.
| lupire wrote:
| So, non mainstream stuff still isn't mainstream?
| bawolff wrote:
| But was it actually not mainstream back in the day? Or even
| if not mainstream, your average user was still highly
| likely to encounter it, well going about their mainstream
| day which isn't true anymore.
| spookie wrote:
| I believe you're right. In part, I blame the shift of the
| internet's target audience. It had a serious pull of that
| fringe of society in the early days.
|
| Nonetheless, content sanitization has become more and
| more prevalent. It's disturbing to think, of the
| influence of social bubbles, and algorithmic driven
| content proliferation. How much of this mix of content
| moderation + appealing to a bigger audience affects our
| own thoughts/opinions.
|
| I understand that a lot of it should be sanitized. But
| this thought is terrifying.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| I think you might be overestimating the pervasiveness of
| hacker culture - even now, never mind ~25 years ago.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Look to Hackers (1995) for an proxy of how well hacker
| culture was understood at the time. Pretty sure the
| sports in Space Jam (1996) got a more accurate
| representation than hacking got in Hackers.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| I mean sports is ... _very_ mainstream.
| ethanbond wrote:
| I struggle to see how that's a bad thing. Most people
| don't need to be coincidentally picking up bomb-making
| information.
| q-big wrote:
| > Most people don't need to be coincidentally picking up
| bomb-making information.
|
| And because they _don 't need to_, we should censor this
| kind of information?
| AngryData wrote:
| I struggle to see how it is a problem, a free and fair
| society should have no qualms with people having such
| information. And anyone dangerous would have no problem
| finding it out anyways. Its not like we can scrub
| chemistry knowledge out from public access. Not to
| mention most "bomb making" knowledge is also applicable
| to many other fields and uses.
|
| I find the mechanics of guns and firearms fun and
| interesting, that doesn't make me any more dangerous than
| someone who has no idea how guns work.
| ethanbond wrote:
| But what's being discussed here isn't _blocking_ that
| information, but sadness over the fact that it's not
| something you're likely to stumble upon today.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Ahh.. and this is where it gets fun. You are
| automatically assuming that you know better how a given
| person should spend their time. Person might be
| fascinated by how a given formation absolutely hates
| being squeezed. You see a bomb, but he sees a rare
| material property. How do you decide ( and who does
| decide ) what information is 'sanitary' enough for the
| public to handle? I thought we were supposed to be our
| own arbiters? Or is it just imaginary freedom on
| increasingly more restrictive guardrails?
|
| I genuinely dislike the current trend. I personally
| played with all sorts of chemicals in my dad's garage (
| he was a mechanic ) and these days my interest would be
| at best seen with suspicion.
| ethanbond wrote:
| No one (in this thread at least) is suggesting that
| information shouldn't be available to people who are
| seeking it.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| <<I struggle to see how that's a bad thing. Most people
| don't need to be coincidentally picking up bomb-making
| information.
|
| I might be misreading this, but to me this sentence reads
| as 'this information does not belong anywhere where
| normal people roam'. It is possible that "shoulnd't be
| available" is making me read it this way.
| watwut wrote:
| First, it was not mainstream. Second, I run into literal
| nazi propaganda randomly and into literal behading videos
| with one search (after random find suggested it exists).
|
| I also randomly run into write up a out how to steal cars
| and how to put spyware into someone else's phone.
|
| None of that stuff is hard to find. It is just that
| mainstreami mainstream is not interested and it would be
| absurd to blame them.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| atat-aura wrote:
| to take a less extreme example, if you search for "shop-
| lifting techniques" on google, or any other modern content
| provider, you'll - exclusively - find moral anodised stuff
| about catching criminals. if you go on old internet portals
| or archives, you'll find edgy indie websites telling you
| naughty secrets
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| >you'll - exclusively - find moral anodised stuff about
| catching criminals
|
| I can confirm this is false. First page Google already
| showed naughty secrets.
| samatman wrote:
| Magic of the algorithm, the poster you're replying to may
| be in a different legal regime which takes that sort of
| thing more seriously than your own.
|
| The black-box nature of search becomes less and less
| satisfying as time passes.
| mfer wrote:
| > It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the
| internet.
|
| It's far more complicated than that and looking at the
| complicated details is useful to understand the bigger picture.
|
| Here are some examples...
|
| 1. It's now that far more things are on the Internet than there
| used to be. Some things that used to be huge are now a smaller
| percentage in an immensely larger space. In some cases they are
| bigger now than they used to be.
|
| 2. Sex slaves and porn are a thing and a problem. There's both
| more of it and more awareness of it. In many places there are
| laws about this that companies who process money have to take
| in to account.
|
| 3. Kids and the Internet. About half the 10 year olds I know
| (which is more than a few) have phones with no filters on them.
| Kids running wild. If more things were more easily accessible
| than the culture around screens and handling that with kids
| will need to change. Kids are ready for different things at
| different ages and the way they view things during their
| formative years impacts the way they view and treat others.
|
| I use these to just illustrate that it's more than money,
| power, and control by the wealthy. Sometimes (like in the case
| of #2) it's about the most vulnerable.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > Sex slaves and porn are a thing and a problem. There's both
| more of it and more awareness of it. In many places there are
| laws about this that companies who process money have to take
| in to account.
|
| Citation needed. Unless you're taking about CSAM shared on
| the dark web, I seriously doubt that sex slaves account for
| any significant portion of pornography. The only way I can
| see this being true is with a very wide definition of "sex
| slave" that includes someone doing porn to pay for rent.
|
| #3 was no less true in the 2000s - I can attest to that
| myself.
| sneak wrote:
| I used to have your view, then I learned about the amount
| of porn production that happens via organized crime that
| traffics young (17-22) girls for this express purpose.
|
| It looks the same as "normal" stuff. You can't tell from
| watching it.
| stuckonempty wrote:
| You also can't tell if what you're saying is factual
| because you've provided no source
| mrkramer wrote:
| I assume you speak about East Europe and perhaps South
| America but most of them are lured into porn not forced.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > I learned about the amount of porn production that
| happens via organized crime that traffics young (17-22)
| girls for this express purpose.
|
| I know of one instance [1] of criminal porn production,
| and it involved deception and fraud rather than
| kidnapping women - which, to be clear, is still terrible
| and should be prosecuted. And it ended with the people in
| charge getting convicted and imprisoned.
|
| I am not at all convinced that a substantial portion of
| legal pornography involves organized crime. Again, the
| logistics of producing content that also serves as video
| evidence of a crime is difficult to overcome. If there is
| evidence that this is more widespread, it'd be good of
| you to share it.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GirlsDoPorn
| spookie wrote:
| Come on now... Do you really think some of the pr0n out
| there was consented upon by all parties?
|
| Let's be real. Even the largest pr0n sites have had a shit
| ton of cases come to surface, which should've put them out
| of business for good. And yes, some of it is about sex
| slavery.
|
| The pr0n industry is all rotten. Great to see legit, humane
| alternatives gaining traction, don't get me wrong. But,
| most of it, is just pure misery.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| What is the motive to producing non-consensual
| pornography? The risks are large: you're literally
| recording yourself committing a felony and publishing
| evidence of the crime to the world. Most porn production
| companies are looking to make a profit, not land
| themselves in jail. In the US, there's regulations to
| ensure all actors are of age and consented to recording
| [1].
|
| 1. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2257
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Does "female presenting nipples" === porn? It was a SCJ who
| said, "I'll know it (i.e., porn) when I see it". Also, it's a
| double-standard to say men can have free-will to present
| their bodies as they see fit but women can not.
| bluedino wrote:
| Did you have internet access when you were ten?
| cowtools wrote:
| > Kids and the Internet. About half the 10 year olds I know
| (which is more than a few) have phones with no filters on
| them. Kids running wild
|
| And whose responsibility is that? People start treating the
| internet like TV and radio, so we have to start sanitizing it
| like TV and radio?
| Spivak wrote:
| Yes because the internet, really the web, is a shared
| public broadcast medium. What makes it any different than
| radio? Don't say logins because sites where basically
| anyone can join is essentially public.
| q-big wrote:
| > 3. Kids and the Internet. About half the 10 year olds I
| know (which is more than a few) have phones with no filters
| on them. Kids running wild. If more things were more easily
| accessible than the culture around screens and handling that
| with kids will need to change. Kids are ready for different
| things at different ages and the way they view things during
| their formative years impacts the way they view and treat
| others.
|
| Honestly, this was not different in my youth. When we found
| access to the internet, we of course looked for weird stuff
| (for those who remember: for example rotten.com; I was rather
| disturbed by it and learned my lesson that you shouldn't
| click on every link that you see on websites).
|
| I can tell how this transformed me: if you have seen the
| early free spirit of the early web in your formative years,
| you become deeply suspicious of the political attempts to
| censor the internet - for example to protect the children.
| This is what the authorities really fear: that people don't
| believe that this is all for their best.
| Griffinsauce wrote:
| > "About half the 10 year olds I know (which is more than a
| few) have phones with no filters on them."
|
| This is on parents (and how they are educated around
| parenthood) IMO. Notice the comment about Reddit, even with
| all the sanitization it's ridiculously easy to find very
| hardcore (in every sense of the word) stuff.
|
| In the same way that you hold hands when you walk past a busy
| street, you cannot expect the internet to be a safe place. As
| a parent you have the responsibility here.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| I felt it was better to teach them that 'there's stuff out
| there you can't unsee', because I realized they were one
| sleepover away from getting around any filter I could put
| in front of them.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| This is how it worked for us. Parents did what they could
| to block PC access, but me and my brother managed to
| break them all to do what kids do online. At certain
| point, you have to actually talk with your kids even if
| it is the kind of 'smoke that cigar until you are sick'
| approach. Naturally, my dad being my dad, took a
| different tack. He just picked the PC and took it to his
| shop.
|
| Different times. Needless to say, I don't think I will be
| able to try the same approach.
| Cr4shMyCar wrote:
| It's like the infinite monkey theorem, but faster. Give a
| bunch of tweens long enough and they'll find their way
| around any internet filter.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| > This is on parents
|
| Growing up my father believed playing the GTA would be
| detrimental to my development. He banned them from our home
| and told the parents of my friends not to let me play those
| games at their house, if they said they wouldn't enforce
| that rule I wasn't allowed over.
|
| Didn't matter, I played the games to completion at friend's
| houses because _their_ parents didn 't really give a crap.
|
| Looking back, I think the only way my father could have
| reasonably stopped me from playing these games would have
| been to isolate me from my friends and wreck our
| relationship. Now luckily, we're pretty sure no harm was
| done in this case, but the point is that there's not
| actually that much parents can do to limit access to
| content if other parents aren't similarly vigilant.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >Growing up my father believed playing the GTA would be
| detrimental to my development.
|
| Almost all parents think that, COD included. But I think
| recent studies said that video game violence does not
| influence kids and teens to commit real life violence. At
| least kids and teens today play Minecraft and Roblox
| which are to lesser extent violent than GTA and COD.
| watwut wrote:
| You don't hold 10 years old hands when crossing the street.
| At that age, they are going through streets alone when they
| go to scool or club or visit friends.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| > At that age, they are going through streets alone when
| they go to scool or club or visit friends.
|
| In the united states, this stopped being socially
| acceptable sometime time in the past 20 years. Letting
| your kids walk to school before high-school (13/14) is
| considered child abuse by many. Not everywhere, not
| everyone. But there has been a huge shift in views around
| what kind of out-of-the-home-unsupervised activity is
| seen as normal.
| Spivak wrote:
| It's crazy to me that "just exercise complete control over
| what your kids do and see" is touted like it's not the
| start of a black mirror episode.
|
| > In the same way that you hold hands when you walk past a
| busy street
|
| This logic isn't scale dependent and I know you have a line
| somewhere before "it totally fine to have landmines in
| random patches of grass -- parents responsibility!" Where
| is it?
| jlawson wrote:
| Isn't "just have megacorps exercise complete control over
| what everyone can see" even more of a terrifying Black
| Mirror episode?
| ok123456 wrote:
| It's not complicated. It never is.
|
| Either you believe in an open internet or you don't. Either
| you're with us, or you're against us.
| lovich wrote:
| I would be surprised if the number of people who believe in
| a truly open internet like that are even a 10th of a
| percent of the population.
| _gabe_ wrote:
| It's complicated. Unfortunately real life is never binary.
| There are several gradations between open internet and
| dystopian closed internet that only allows you to see what
| the governing powers want you to see. Most people are
| somewhere in the middle, as with all things.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Nope. There is no middle ground. It. Is. Not.
| Complicated.
|
| Either you think of the internet as a utility where
| everyone is equal, like a telephone, or you think people
| should be "nudged" into harmonious behavior, where it
| takes on the worst aspects of a broadcast medium.
|
| The problem with "nudging" people is there's an equal and
| opposite reaction through the cybernetic system. For
| instance, adding fact check labels to every sensitive
| topic, COVID vaccines for instance, will lead people to
| think that it's all part of a larger conspiracy and
| they'll get a hit of dopamine when they "follow the
| qlues."
| lovich wrote:
| Even utilities have limits on the behavior you can use
| with them. Granted you gotta really go out of your way to
| trigger those limits but there is no society wide system
| in existence that follows that level of openness
| ok123456 wrote:
| Doing actual actual crimes or committing a fraud using
| the phone, computer, fax, telex, or whatever other
| electronic means generally falls under wire fraud.
|
| The phone company doesn't de-platform "literal nazis"
| simply for being "literal nazis."
| Spivak wrote:
| And if the literal nazis we're actually using a private
| person to person (can be through a service) communication
| medium like a phone the number of people who want them
| deplatformed would drop to basically zero.
|
| Your argument has to account for the fact that Twitter is
| more like public radio than a phone and that WhatsApp is
| more like a phone than radio.
| lovich wrote:
| You are correct, but now you are getting into shades of
| grey more nuanced than
|
| > Either you believe in an open internet or you don't.
| Either you're with us, or you're against us.
| ok123456 wrote:
| The distinction is between perfectly legal speech, and
| specific acts fraud or things that are direct,
| actionable, and credible threats to physical safety
| (e.g., bomb threats). This isn't a complicated blah blah,
| where we need a technocratic meta-god to put his thumb on
| the scales. The existing legal pre-computer legal
| frameworks cover these cases.
| boppo1 wrote:
| >Most people are somewhere in the middle, as with all
| things.
|
| And they're wrong. I'd agree that perhaps there should be
| guardrails, but for those who want to leave the safe-
| zone, it ought to remain without filters.
|
| It's about the same argument as general computing. Should
| it be illegal to have root access on your devices? Do you
| think it's a fair compromise in order to be able to have
| convenient streaming entertainment?
|
| I rooted my android phone and now I can't access Netflix
| (well, not without putting in effort I don't care to).
| Fair trade for me, I prefer to actually have control over
| my devices.
| bawolff wrote:
| For 3 - kids have been on the internet for a while now. If
| anything there was much more of a moral panic about it in the
| 90s.
|
| I think point 1 is key - the internet is a bigger place,
| which also means things get more specialized and separated.
| You dont stumble across specialized content as much anymore,
| you have to go looking instead.
| lupire wrote:
| > Sex slaves and porn are a thing and a problem.
|
| They are two different things. Did you mean "sex slaves in
| porn"?
|
| Also, any kind of slave is a problem. You don't need to
| qualify it.
| boppo1 wrote:
| I think he meant human trafficking. There's a lot of videos
| out there of women under duress.
| jedberg wrote:
| > If you're a utility, you do not take liability for your
| services, but you cannot pick and choose which customers you
| service so long as it's legal.
|
| Unless you have an ironclad way to verify the identity of every
| poster, you'll get a bunch of illegal stuff anyway. And if
| you're a "utility", then who is responsible for removing that
| from your service?
|
| What you're really suggesting is "common carrier", but the
| difference is most common carriers carry the content in a point
| to point way, not publicly (FedEx, UPS, your telephone
| provider). For the common carriers that do have public
| broadcast (radio, TV, cable) they either have to moderate all
| their content and _are_ responsible for it (TV, radio) or they
| have to provide an unmoderated but public access section where
| they know exactly who the content provider is (cable TV, who
| gets to choose which channels to carry as long as they have a
| public access channel).
| bilbo0s wrote:
| That's the part people forget about "utilities" and
| "carriers". The reason they were indemnified, is precisely
| because they know the exact identities, (and even locations),
| of all of their users. The cops can handle things themselves,
| they just ask the "utility" or "carrier" who X is? And who is
| X connected, (or even connecting), to.
|
| We have to think up an entirely different model for the newer
| technologies we are using.
| tsavo wrote:
| Your points sound awfully close to Net Neutrality.
| IntFee588 wrote:
| Freedom of choice aside, there is also a shocking lack of
| awareness that a major factor in the rise of the internet is
| that it wasn't like traditional media. There were memes, blogs,
| video content, music, etc. that would never gain traction with
| the legacy entertainment industry. There is no point in using
| youtube or twitter if it's all just clips from mainstream tv or
| shittakes from established pundits that I can see on repeat on
| cable all day anyways.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >There were memes, blogs, video content, music, etc.
|
| Aka user user-generated content.
| vlunkr wrote:
| I don't really see how cloudflare fits on that list. There are
| dozens (hundreds?) of other DNS services. 8chan and kiwifarms
| have found different providers.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| they're fairly unique in their free DDoS protection. They
| provide a LOT of security and uptime services for free that
| you just don't really find elsewhere (at least, the last time
| I checked; I'm sure they have reasonable competitors by now).
|
| Even if a monopoly is not legally enforced, it can still
| dominate through quality or market forces or numerous other
| avenues.
| elil17 wrote:
| Right - Visa, Mastercard, Apple, and Google are walled
| gardens and should, in my personal opinion, be held to a
| somewhat higher standard in terms of free speech (Yes, I know
| that the first amendment doesn't apply to companies. I'm just
| saying how I think things ought to be, not how they are).
| It's unreasonable to expect consumers to get a new credit
| card or buy a new phone to use your service. But companies
| routinely choose alternate DNS providers and lots of people
| buy things that aren't on Amazon.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I've got a teenage cousin with a dark sense of humour.
|
| The shock stuff, edgy humour and 4chan-line shenanigans are
| still out there, even on mainstream social media like TikTok.
| It's just that most of 30 year-olds don't know about it any
| more because we're out of the loop. We're square.
| boppo1 wrote:
| >The shock stuff, edgy humour and 4chan-line shenanigans are
| still out there
|
| It's different now. I've been on 4chan a long time. It's a
| more sinister and hateful place than it was when I was a
| teenager.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| The majority of the net is easily accessible porn. If there is
| anything here showing how easy it is to decentralize and stay
| alive, it is probably porn.
|
| The big boys make it harder and squash the heads sticking out,
| but people are acting like you won't find ungodly things the
| moment you turn off the safety filters and pick your words a
| little recklessly.
|
| Including Google.
| lupire wrote:
| Most of the commerical porn on the net is run by very few
| companies with many many brands. It's hard to run your own
| porn business if you don't rely on a major company.
| bambax wrote:
| If you search for porn images on Google you get much more
| porn _without ever leaving Google_ , than you could have
| dreamed on all of the specialized forums in 1997.
| Bubble_Pop_22 wrote:
| > It's hard to run your own porn business if you don't rely
| on a major company
|
| It's hard to run your own porn business even if you are a
| major company.
|
| People act extremely sensitive about their fetishes and
| think they are connoisseurs. but the reality is that 1000
| porn movies in the 70s and 80s could satisfy jackoff habits
| of the whole global population for the forseeble future.
|
| The marginal value of more porn being produced is
| essentially zero
|
| OnlyFans is very present in culture and has a monstre
| evaluation, but if you look at revenues you'd be looking at
| the sum of some 300 big gas stations. Also OF is not a porn
| website it's an online GFE service.
| bliteben wrote:
| When will we reach the optimal number of books or
| mainstream movies?
|
| How many programming languages is optimal?
|
| Marginal value lol
| compiler-guy wrote:
| By this standard we don't need any additional media of
| any kind. No new movies, books, or tv shows.
|
| 99% of everything is crap. Most new movies or books are
| awful or entirely pedestrian and completely unoriginal to
| boot, and most don't turn much of a profit.
|
| But people still make them for a huge variety of reasons.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| OnlyFans has its struggles, and is distasteful in many
| ways, but plenty of folks have their own businesses built
| on that.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| So, relying on a major company.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| It's a very rare business indeed that relies on no
| vendors, or only small vendors, if that is your standard.
| toss1 wrote:
| Sure there is all kinds of stuff out there.
|
| Seems the main point of the article was that it is being made
| highly impractical to build any system that allows you to get
| paid for it, short of using crypto, which (15 years later)
| still has an abysmal UX.
|
| Seems like an opportunity for some ShadyBank to make a new
| payment scheme, with KYC (not get busted), small transactions
| only (not attractive to money-laundering), and transfer from
| customers to vendors, but building the anti-fraud infra from
| scratch would likely kill it.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Or just post teasers and redirect to OF. It's so obvious,
| several well known female streamers are doing it.
|
| People are way overthinking this.
| helloworld97 wrote:
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This isn't true, though. Porn makes tremendous money, using
| normal payment methods like anything else. All of the
| repression is on user-generated content hosting platforms,
| not porn in general. So sure, direct performer to consumer
| without a studio is difficult to monetize, but that has
| always been the case. It hasn't become harder. User-
| generated content platforms largely didn't even exist a
| decade ago. Porn on the classic Internet people are pining
| for was still mostly studio-produced and stars needed
| agents.
| bergenty wrote:
| Even porn websites are sanitized. Pornhub purged all their
| user content sometime ago and the parent company owns all the
| other major streaming sites. The only non sanitized stuff is
| torrents as it's always been.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| There is an immense gap between 'major streaming sites' and
| torrents. If you're a bit unlucky, you'll find stuff
| straight up illegal to create through rather innocent
| searches.
|
| Whoever did the 'sanitizing' of the web should get charged
| a fine for doing a shoddy job.
| vkou wrote:
| > The whole point was to be decentralized
|
| Why do you say this?
|
| The whole point of the internet was for distant parties to be
| able to communicate. That's it. Parts of it were implemented in
| a decentralized fashion because neither the nodes, nor the
| links between nodes were considered reliable.
|
| You can still do all that communication in a decentralized
| fashion, you're just unhappy that all the value-add services
| built on top of that substrate don't share the initial design
| constraints of the network.
| version_five wrote:
| Isn't this some variation on the idea that as something gets
| "successful" it becomes shitty? I'm sure there are private
| corners of the internet where lots of people are going and
| showing nuts, that by definition most people don't know about,
| allowing more people than in 2007 or whatever to share what they
| want. But the internet is also now completely dominated by the
| blandness of success, so what we see are the successes that have
| been forced to sell out to the complainers and pearl clutches
| (there's an associated name I can't remember).
|
| (Incidentally, this is a reason I've argued that the facebook
| metaverse will suck. It is never going to have some halcyon days
| as a cool site before success ruins it. It's coming out of the
| box with people worrying about "groping" and whatnot in a way
| that will force it to suck by design because everything will be
| about "safety" and the like, before anything good takes hold. See
| also the Zune)
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I can't tell one way or the other if people have forgotten that
| SESTA/FOSTA passed in 2018.
|
| All of this is consequence of that law working as intended (not
| as described; it's supposed to stop human trafficking, but those
| supporting it made no bones about their position that if it
| chilled all online pornographic content, they didn't care).
|
| All of these companies pivoted hard because hosting previously-
| legal content may now be a federal crime, and nobody wants to get
| dragged through the mud of that legal case. Until and unless that
| changes, this is the new status quo in the United States (and
| therefore, much of the Internet).
|
| Matt on Tumblr seems to have missed that even if a company does
| all the things on his list, their owners could _still_ end up in
| prison if they are aware that _any_ pornography on their sites
| was "facilitating sex trafficking," which is an extremely broad
| category (is someone using racy pictures as advertisement for
| face-to-face meetups? Oops, go to jail; Section 230 protections
| were specifically stripped out for that case and if it violates
| state law in the state you're operating in, the state the poster
| is in, _or_ the state the viewer is in, you 're now liable as the
| site operator!).
| elliekelly wrote:
| When WordPress bought Tumblr I was hopeful the ridiculous "female
| presenting nipple" nonsense would finally go away so I'm relieved
| to hear that's in the works. I understand and appreciate the
| compliance difficulties associated with "go nuts, show nuts" but
| I _do_ hope Matt & his team will be willing to push the envelope
| _a little_ and allow equal (re)presentation of _all_ nipples on
| Tumblr. Not for pornographic purposes but for equality.
| [deleted]
| eduction wrote:
| I think it's revealing that the founder and operator of
| WordPress.com openly admits he makes content decisions based on
| the values of executives at Apple and at credit card companies.
| He doesn't even bother with any hand wavy pretense of having his
| own core moral values or beliefs on civil liberties. Just pure
| kneeling before his betters.
|
| At least it's honest, I guess. Really sad though.
| karaterobot wrote:
| The post makes it blindingly clear that he disagrees with them,
| and that it's more a question of feasibility. Because Tumblr
| needs to work with credit companies and Apple in order to be
| sustainable, they have to play by their rules or not exist.
| henriquecm8 wrote:
| He raised an interesting question, why Twitter and Reddit get
| away with it, but Tumblr doesn't?
| jrm4 wrote:
| This is the "race to the bottom" that occurs here. Because
| someone trying to make a buck bought it and decided that it
| could probably make more money this way. That's all this is.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Twitter is jam-packed with hardcore porn.
| partdavid wrote:
| I'm curious too. Can you not view NSFW subreddits on the iPhone
| reddit app? Quarantined subs? (I don't know, I don't use the
| Reddit app and I don't have an iPhone).
| noahtallen wrote:
| You can view all NSFW content on the iOS app, but you have to
| log into an account and click a button to say you're old
| enough. I think they're trying to make it effectively opt-in.
|
| Another guess is that this is easy for Reddit to do (and not
| Tumblr) because Reddit has the concept of an NSFW subreddit,
| where all content under that sub is age-restricted. And
| content on other subs would be heavily moderated most of the
| time. Whereas on Tumblr, posts don't go directly to "pre-
| categorized feeds" in that same way, since you're just an
| individual making a post on your own page more or less. So
| moderation (I'd guess) would be a lot harder.
| [deleted]
| tpmx wrote:
| So US-centric. Meanwhile XVideos etc exist.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XVideos
|
| > XVideos, stylized as XVIDEOS, is a pornographic video sharing
| and viewing website. Founded in Paris in 2007, the website is now
| registered to the Czech company WGCZ Holding. As of September
| 2022, it is the most visited pornographic website and the tenth
| most visited website in the world.
| donatj wrote:
| What I've realized in my 25+ years of using the internet is that
| letting the normies on here ruined everything.
| throwaway292939 wrote:
| I was following until the mention of Twitter and Reddit. They
| should face every single challenge that Tumblr does regarding
| porn. What do they do differently? I feel that Tumblr should be
| able to overcome these issues.
| lofatdairy wrote:
| I was about to say the same thing. Reddit is a huge host for
| pornography, and Twitter is where most sex-workers share and
| network currently. Reddit certainly has advertisers and an iOS
| presences, not to mention people burning money on paying for
| awards. I can't speak to Twitter because I'm not on the site,
| but my understanding is that neither bother with any formal age
| verification either. Not sure what's different except maybe the
| size of their legal team.
| [deleted]
| Jgrubb wrote:
| It took me a minute to remember why the founder of Wordpress was
| posting on tumblr.
| wmf wrote:
| For those who are a little slower, Automattic (the Wordpress
| company) owns Tumblr now.
| bambax wrote:
| It took me a minute to remember Tumblr existed.
| intrasight wrote:
| True :) Is becoming a pretty distant memory now. Still sad
| when such good things go away.
| Ambolia wrote:
| The real story here is how we let mobile phones become completely
| closed and privative environments, and how credit card companies
| got into politics for some reason.
|
| Seems like hackers of today have really let down the public. Even
| bitcoin is 13 years old and I know nobody getting into it for
| utilitarian reasons unless they are already into it for
| investing.
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| Mobile apps are so bloated and intrusive these days that I
| vastly prefer the web app version of most social media sites
| even when they're feature limited like Facebook.
|
| Originally I switched to using home screen bookmarks to save
| some storage on a cheap iPhone but now I can't go back.
|
| I wonder how long it will be until a popular social media site
| avoids the app stores completely due to content and payment
| restrictions.
| ska wrote:
| It's not obvious to me that CC companies are acting out of
| political leaning, it could conceivably be mostly risk based.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Credit card companies acting to limit risk from discretionary
| enforcement of ambiguous regulations is also sort of
| political.
| _dain_ wrote:
| trust me it's political.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| I'm sure you're a nice person but I don't just trust
| unsubstantiated claims I read on the internet.
| aetherson wrote:
| Someone asserted to me that porn purchases have a really
| horrific chargeback rate, and that's the main reason credit
| card companies are against them. It sounds at least
| superficially plausible.
| notyourday wrote:
| That's not really true. I consulted for two companies that
| provided payment processing services for... non family
| friendly websites. They were making out like bandits
| charging ~30% fees. The blended charge back rate for this
| side of business was about 5%. The blended charge back rate
| for the family friendly side of business was around 3%
| patrickmcguire wrote:
| If you look at the timing of these decisions, it's pretty
| clear that that yeah it's risk based, but the risks are
| political. It's only a week between this op-ed calling on the
| credit card companies to drop Pornhub and them following
| through on it.
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-
| ra...
|
| There was a flurry of congressional bills specifically citing
| that article at the time. (Here's one for example:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-introduced-
| criminalizin...) I can't find one that specifically threatens
| the payment processors, most go after the sites or their
| hosting providers, but the payment processors probably had
| the sense to realize they were in the blast radius and that
| it was best to pre-emptively self regulate.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| I'm certain the reason CC companies want to drop adult
| services is because of the vastly increased risk of charge
| backs, but I suspect they'd cast a wider net if not for
| politics. Absent the risk they'd be happy to pocket the cash,
| but with it public opinion gives them an out
| arsome wrote:
| If it were just an increased risk of charge backs, surely
| they could just charge them higher fees and make it work
| out. Or tell them they have to eat all the chargebacks.
| PTcartelsLOL wrote:
| Not really. Merchants are the one who eat the chargebck
| costs plus the $20 fee for processing it that VISA/MC
| charge them. That's just pure utter bullshit.
| colechristensen wrote:
| The credit card companies had a point. By transacting with
| platforms that openly didn't care about selling access to
| content of unwilling, exploited, and underage people, the
| payment processors opened themselves up to liability and moral
| guilt. There is a difference between well moderated platforms
| and platforms that do a halfassed job and pretend that's ok.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| This is also, I think, a reflection of American values and
| culture on the internet and so also a failure of other
| countries to own more of the internet/tech world. Other
| countries (especially European) are far less bothered by nudity
| and adult content.
| mftb wrote:
| > Seems like hackers of today have really let down the public.
|
| I disagree. It seems like if anything, it's the public of today
| that has let down the hackers. In all honesty though, it's
| probably more just, "people gonna people."
| aliqot wrote:
| It's a tragedy of the commons.
|
| You used to have to -want- to be a hacker, and connectivity
| much less the processing power to receive it was not
| guaranteed. I had to mow lawns to get a ride to the library
| to read dusty Bell UNIX surplus manuals. You were lucky to
| even meet someone other than Dewey D who knew the same words
| or the nature of what you were doing.
|
| Consequently, when you met someone online, it didn't matter
| what kind of weirdo they were. You knew that when you were in
| certain spaces that anybody there had some special something
| and that kinship bridged all gaps and mismatches. Those
| friendships were forever and we didn't even know eachother's
| names or faces. That's not guaranteed now.
|
| Now everyone has an apollo mission's worth of compute on
| their wrist/pocket and the swill is so sweet nobody's hungry.
| If you extrapolate the current situation to other events in
| history, we're headed for danger and that's a good thing, we
| need that struggle.
|
| "Crises precipitate change", Deltron3030 was right.
|
| p.s. don't say 'mainframe' say 'cloud', you're all set.
| vlunkr wrote:
| How are hackers responsible for mobile phones becoming closed?
| I think that falls pretty squarely on Apple.
| zaidf wrote:
| >Credit card companies are anti-porn.
|
| False. Credit card companies are simply protecting their
| business. From what? The laws and court rulings that make them
| liable for damages from really terrible edge case scenarios.
| [deleted]
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