[HN Gopher] You Win or You Learn
___________________________________________________________________
You Win or You Learn
Author : Tomte
Score : 186 points
Date : 2023-11-09 14:25 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.threads.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.threads.net)
| burkaman wrote:
| Also mentioned in this thread: Tumblr's ActivityPub integration
| (discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33716429)
| was apparently announced without any plan and then immediately
| cancelled once they started thinking about how to implement it.
|
| - https://mastodon.social/@_jv_/110692236418053393
| grftloplthrow wrote:
| lol
| altairprime wrote:
| Glad to hear they dodged that bullet. Thanks for pointing this
| out.
| thejohnconway wrote:
| Who dodged which bullet? This is all just lose-lose as far as
| I can make out.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Though with the new context that a few months after that tweet,
| the whole of Tumblr has been put on life support, it seems
| there may have been business considerations he wasn't privy
| too.
| ggambetta wrote:
| Anyone knows when will Threads be available in the EU? :(
| troupo wrote:
| When Meta figures out a way to screw users without running
| afoul of Digital Markets Act.
|
| See what this act is about: https://ia.net/topics/unraveling-
| the-digital-markets-act
| ronsor wrote:
| No American media company wants to touch the EU now.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Wow, Facebook and Instagram finally pulled out of the EU?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| No, but thanks to a devil's brew of knee-jerk moral panic
| and regulatory capture, nobody else can afford to enter
| your market. You're stuck with the incumbents.
|
| Sorry, but you can't say you weren't warned. We're seeing
| the same thing happen with AI now.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Bluesky is an incumbent? Because that's where I am mostly
| now.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Enjoy it while it lasts.
| slimsag wrote:
| Bluesky is better anyway
| ggambetta wrote:
| How does one get an invite? I must message Christopher
| McQuarrie. He once sent me a DM on Twitter and made my month
| <3
| jacooper wrote:
| Don't worry, you're not missing much, it's really dead out
| there.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| It was up until a few weeks ago. There was a real change,
| loads of content and activity now. I'm getting decent
| engagement even without many followers. Good mix of local and
| national/international content. The algorithm got a lot
| better, too.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Damn it. I love Tumblr, but it is really hard to sell advertising
| against the content on there, I'm guessing.
|
| I wonder if it will get sold again?
|
| I wish it hadn't been cleansed. Reddit just ploughed through all
| the objections to their adult content and came out the other side
| unharmed. Tumblr could have done the same.
| Kye wrote:
| I always expected them to roll its functionality and community
| into WordPress.com and essentially turn it into a frontend.
| There's a lot of redundancy. They already have a whole service
| dedicated to making and maintaining custom WordPress installs,
| so that would be the obvious place to go.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| That's not _quite_ accurate about Reddit. It only made it
| through by purging dozens to hundreds of the more controversial
| NSFW subreddits. Most were justified, but they definitely bent
| to advertisers and PR like anyone else.
| thedaly wrote:
| They also stopped allowing NSFW content to appear on the
| front page of r/all.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| You also can't view NSFW content without being logged in
| any longer.
| mksybr wrote:
| You can with old.reddit.com
| schleck8 wrote:
| Which afaik has an expired certificate. Let's not act
| like anyone outside the hn and og reddit bubble uses it
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| It hardly matters that the cert is expired if you're not
| logging in. Contrary to popular belief, TLS is not
| beneficial for sites where you aren't sharing secret
| data.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| It's beneficial for all the other sites if non-secret
| data is TLS-encrypted, though. If I want to ban secrets,
| and HTTPS is only used for secrets, I can just ban TLS;
| but if HTTPS is used for most of the web, I have to ban
| most of the web (and such a ban will never last long).
|
| Additionally, metadata such as browser history can
| reasonably be considered a secret: TLS helps protect that
| somewhat.
| ytoawwhra92 wrote:
| > Contrary to popular belief, TLS is not beneficial for
| sites where you aren't sharing secret data.
|
| I wish this meme would die.
|
| Integrity is still important for non-secret data.
|
| Confidentiality is important for data which may be
| considered secret in some contexts but not others.
| mksybr wrote:
| Seems fine for me. Common Name (CN)
| \*.reddit.com Organization (O) REDDIT, INC.
| Organizational Unit (OU) <Not Part Of Certificate>
| Issued On Thursday, August 31, 2023 at 8:00:00 PM
| Expires On Wednesday, February 28, 2024 at 6:59:59 PM
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| > Tumblr could have done the same.
|
| Not without being removed from the iOS app store. Apple played
| their hand.
| Fabricio20 wrote:
| Yes they could have, just like other platforms do like
| Twitter or Discord, by simply hiding the NSFW content on iOS.
| ClearAndPresent wrote:
| https://archive.is/WNfDg
| thejohnconway wrote:
| It's not clear to me what this means. Freezing feature
| development? Rolling the backend into the rest of Automattic? Or
| the end of Tumblr?
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| Sounds like they are moving it from an actively developed
| project to one where they just babysit the existing users
| knowing they aren't making infinite money off them like they
| hoped.
|
| No new features, new features are for closers.
| araes wrote:
| And move to the next project where we hope to make infinite
| money with no work.
|
| Crypto had a great exemplary quote a while ago from poop face
| bros: "Obviously the crypto market did not live up to its
| lofty ambitions, so we're leaving."
| wmf wrote:
| Automattic has never been a get-rich-quick scheme.
| thejohnconway wrote:
| The only new feature I wanted for Tumblr was ActivityPub,
| that was nixed a while ago. Bad show.
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| Their entire argument appears to be "We aren't making more
| money than _all-time peak revenue_ and usage stats are
| lower than peak too so we aren 't wasting money on it any
| longer."
|
| Maybe if they had realistic goals that weren't just "try to
| make more money than ever before" they could have kept
| going at least somewhat...
| notaustinpowers wrote:
| Sadly any capitalistic company fails for the same exact
| reasons. They can't continue making more and more money
| every quarter, so they call it a failure and give up. To
| these company's, having a stable business is worse than
| having a failed business. Because a least a failed
| business can be sold off for parts.
| ytoawwhra92 wrote:
| Revenue is not profit. They're losing money. Their bank
| balance is decreasing.
| WJW wrote:
| Their problem is also that "all time peak revenue" is not
| enough to cover even just the server costs, let alone
| salaries. They're bleeding 30 million USD per year with
| no path to profitability ever.
| Kye wrote:
| A more accessible non-Threads version:
| https://xoxo.zone/@andybaio/111380745108104518
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Remember when people talked about Tumblr replacing Twitter as
| Elon Musk took over? Remember their pathetic bluecheck stunt?
| What's wrong with this organization? How did they fail to
| capitalize on such a massive opportunity?
| JohnMakin wrote:
| twitter still allows porn accounts
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Twitter is being replaced the way Craigslist was replaced,
| gradually and by many options instead of one. There won't be a
| single new sudden Twitter replacement. That's a good thing, I
| use a bigger variety of sources than I did before quitting
| Twitter. I don't rely so much on any one.
| thejohnconway wrote:
| Tumblr fundamentally doesn't work the way Twitter does (imagine
| if Twitter was all screenshot retweet chains!), and so it's a
| poor replacement. I find it hard to use - I get lost in the
| reblogs - and I've used it for well over a decade now.
| ulizzle wrote:
| Or you lose, as Tumblr is figuring out.
| hypertexthero wrote:
| Usability-wise, the thing that keeps me from using any Fb things,
| Threads.net included, is they break the bloody Back button!
| perfect-blue wrote:
| Going to a Microsoft support forum page will do this as well.
| At least in my experiences
| poilcn wrote:
| Youtube web version for desktop has the same problem if I get
| what you mean right.
| echelon wrote:
| Change of subject - any thoughts on the difference between
| user-friendly URLs?
|
| Root paths route to usernames:
|
| - https://twitter.com/username
|
| - https://github.com/username
|
| - https://www.instagram.com/username
|
| Sigil-scoped paths for usernames (these also use www-prefix):
|
| - https://www.threads.net/@username
|
| - https://www.youtube.com/@username
|
| Path-scoped usernames:
|
| - https://www.reddit.com/user/username
|
| - https://www.reddit.com/u/username (redirect)
|
| - https://bsky.app/profile/username.bsky.social
|
| There's obviously an engineering cost to having usernames at
| the root, but does that make sharing easier?
|
| Which would you use if you were starting a new app?
|
| Is the first option strictly better for growth? Are the
| technical caveats not worth it?
| kevmarsden wrote:
| I'm surprised that memo leaked. Automattic is very open with
| employees and trusts them not to share internal information.
| While I worked there (2013-2018) I don't remember any news
| leaking.
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| From a live-stream from the Tumblr staff convention this year,
| their CEO:
|
| > Yeah, so right now, we're burning. Which means spending more
| than we make. About 30 million per year more than we make.
|
| > So, that's a lot. We can't do that forever and so that's why
| we're really trying to figure out things that y'all would value.
| Whether that's merch or upgrades or badges or gifts or Blaze or
| other things. Every little bit helps, so please if you really
| enjoy Tumblr and want it to stay a thriving service buy things,
| and ask your friends to buy things.
|
| Tumblr's monetization strategy since the Automattic acquisition
| has been "throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks." Which is
| kind of your only option when the Tumblr user-base is actively
| hostile towards monetization attempts. Tumblr tried a "Tumblr
| Post Plus" Patreon-like subscription thing, and the creator that
| they enrolled in the test got so much hate they cancelled it
| before it fully launched. I could list the monetization
| strategies they've tried but there are too many. Merch, tipping,
| promoting your own posts, cosmetic check marks after your
| username, crabs, promoting other people's posts, lore behind the
| merch store, a "Luffy" tab on the top of the page (in between
| "Following" and "For You") (I think was a Netflix promo). At one
| point they were running ads for Tumblr on Tumblr. I should make a
| post describing them all.
| swagempire wrote:
| Didn't Tumblr do a whole "alienate your user base" thing like
| Reddit did recently? They got rid of all the racey hot content
| and basically made it super boring no?
|
| This always seems like a really bad idea.
| citruscomputing wrote:
| They did, but that was a while ago. Things are still pretty
| bad -- if your blog gets flagged for racy content, you lose
| the ability to have a custom avatar, for example. (Even more,
| and you get banned.) They've also had quite transphobic
| moderation policies (really strange considering their
| userbase!) -- normal, non-sexual photos of trans people are
| "nsfw" now, which'll get your account flagged or banned.
| They've been making the app actively worse, redesigned the
| website to look like twitter, and attempted to cram "Tumblr
| live" down everyone's throats (only having a "hide for one
| week" button). Generally doing things nobody asked for,
| nobody wants, and continuing to break existing functionality
| while not listening to their users. This is an own-goal.
| skupig wrote:
| Tumblr users are rabidly against all the user-hostile stuff
| other large free sites do. I think they probably could have
| put the site behind a $1/mo paywall two years ago and
| people would have gone for it, if they changed nothing
| else. There's a general "we're fucked" atmosphere on the
| site because we all know they're trying to wring money out
| of their users and the enshittification has begun. It
| doesn't seem like anyone in charge understands their users.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > normal, non-sexual photos of trans people are "nsfw" now
|
| FWIW, the algorithms that big tech companies use are often
| trained to recognize women's underwear. So non-sexual
| photos of trans men wearing women's underwear are often
| flagged, even when similar photos of women wearing boxers
| are not.
|
| I'm not saying it's right, just giving the actual reason
| this happens. (Albeit I don't have Tumblr-specific
| knowledge.)
| citruscomputing wrote:
| Cool. Now why does it consistently happen for images
| where no underwear is visible, and why doesn't it happen
| for cis women? Why are appeals not granted? And why
| didn't staff even _acknowledge_ there 's a problem?
| userinanother wrote:
| How sensitive/stupid are these? Can the behavior be
| exploited to force innocent images get flagged as
| explicit? Asking for a friend... also would make an
| excellent shirt design if properly tweaked
| underwater wrote:
| How is it an own goal? They were bleeding money, so tried
| to find a way to succeed through growth of users or
| revenue.
|
| The path where they just left everything untouched is a
| path to certain failure.
| notatoad wrote:
| that was a long time ago, under a previous owner. Automattic
| has seemingly tried to be a good steward of the tumblr brand,
| but it seems like at this point, the only people left using
| tumblr are unmonetizable.
|
| the bad idea was buying tumblr. but i think automattic knew
| that when they bought it, and just thought it would be fun to
| set some money on fire for a while.
| underseacables wrote:
| They did that because a lot of the people creating and
| posting that Content were kids...
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Things are pretty grim when you're asking your own staff to
| purchase merch because "every little bit helps".
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| This was live-streamed publicly and advertised to users. I
| didn't make that very clear.
| echelon wrote:
| The lesson:
|
| "Don't remove porn when the userbase is left-leaning and
| embraces it."
|
| Reddit and Twitter do it the right way: hiding adult-rated
| content behind the curtains.
| rchaud wrote:
| The lesson is that user generated content shouldn't be turned
| into an algorithmic amusement park for advertisers and data
| brokers.
|
| Tumblr wasn't making money with or without porn. It was just
| shifting between owners who thought they'd be better at
| squeezing money out of it.
| Spivak wrote:
| This isn't true at all, Blaze was a huge success, scrolling
| through Tumblr you see people with silly numbers of checks,
| lots of people pay to remove ads, it's just that that the
| successes aren't massively revenue generating in the way that
| ads are.
|
| Trying to monetize user generated content is hard because both
| the users and creators believe that it's their content (which
| it is that's how community works) and so locking it away and
| taking a non-trivial cut is going to be met with insane vitriol
| and there's not much value to add over the base experience.
| Tumblr's patron thing you should of think like Hashicorp re-
| licensing Terraform.
|
| And worse is that sometimes creating true value-adds naturally
| perverts incentives. Like for example a true value-add would be
| "bubble-as-a-service" because Tumblr has some really nasty
| subcultures which is why posters don't like when posts "break
| containment." It would be the easiest money ever to just pay
| and get a huge blocklist without having to go through the
| effort of making one yourself but then you kinda need those
| nasty communities to justify the value.
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| From the CEO's blog today:
|
| > You mention Blaze and Ad-free doing well, but their
| adoption is so small relative to the use of Tumblr their
| revenue couldn't support a fraction of the ~1,000 servers it
| takes to run Tumblr, much less any salaries.
| Spivak wrote:
| I think we're saying the same thing, they're successful in
| the sense that Tumblr users like them but they're small
| potatoes. Tumblr users aren't necessarily allergic to
| monetization but the ones they've found don't pay the
| bills.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > the monetization strategies they've tried ... crabs
|
| Like Bored Crabs NFTs or restaurant supplier or health
| insurance or...?
| tg16 wrote:
| A virtual pet that lives on your blog and occasionally tries
| to eat your mouse cursor.
| internet2000 wrote:
| Turns out social networks are hard to get right.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| I alwyas thought I did learn more from winning than from losing
| for future success.
| jacooper wrote:
| Wow, threads on the front page, is this the first time that
| organically happened (ie. Not the launch announcement)
| MissTake wrote:
| Sign of the times. Another classic name from the earlier days on
| the intertubes may be about to vanish.
| autokad wrote:
| I guess I feel old because tumbler feels like one of the
| 'newer' sites, as it came out about 2007 - when the great
| migration to facebook started.
|
| to me, 'early days' means 1995-2005
| gumby wrote:
| A side point, but: the title holds another important lesson. It's
| a well known truism that smart people learn from their failures.
| But most people also don't bother to learn from their _successes_
| , thus have trouble repeating them.
| Kye wrote:
| It seems like success is luck (usually timing) more often than
| anything else, while failure has a more diverse range of modes.
| troupe wrote:
| Interesting to see this was posted on Threads instead of Tumblr
| which might kind of show the root of some of their problems.
|
| Does $30 Million a year spend rate seem typical for their size?
| I'm assuming a large part of that is the salaries for 139 people.
| resolutebat wrote:
| If you're leaking confidential corporate info, you probably
| don't want to post the leaks on the same company's platform.
| mortallywounded wrote:
| Tumblr, a service mainly used by teenage girls is unmonetizable?
| You don't say...
| edmundsauto wrote:
| How do you know it's mostly teenage girls? Also, teenage girls
| buy a lot of stuff as well as heavily influence what teenage
| boys buy/like...
|
| I know it's cool to bags on teenage girl tastes but in reality
| it's not very accurate. The youth demographic is one of the
| most important for many consumer businesses.
| languagehacker wrote:
| Automattic's product catalogue kind of comes across as an
| elephant graveyard of formerly important services well past their
| prime, so this doesn't seem terribly surprising.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| It was like a somewhat more positive counterpart to 4chan, it was
| full of madness, toxicity and vice, and also a space for
| creativity like few others.
|
| It was also one of the walled gardens, even if it always felt
| more open than the rest, but the web continues to weaken as
| content creation and delivery continues to be consolidated in the
| exploitative platforms of Meta, TikTok, and now to a smaller
| degree, X, with their recommendation algorithms fine tuned to
| make you an addict to parasocial relationships and negative
| emotions.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Don't forget YouTube. Video thumbnails seem to be converging on
| a few clickbaity templates - probably to appease "the
| algorithm". Not even LockPickingLawyer is safe.
| notaustinpowers wrote:
| As an early Tumblr user, godspeed. You were fun while you lasted.
| DanielleMolloy wrote:
| Is there any alternative for having a gallery of text&photo posts
| without forced login and exploitative social media distractions?
| (except for self-hosting)
|
| When I looked for this 11 years ago, tumblr was the only platform
| ticking these boxes. I just wanted to share a link to photos of
| what we are up to with family and friends without asking them to
| register at another platform, and only tumblr allowed that and
| did not look as if it would close shop within two years.
|
| Looked again recently and it still seems to be the only platform
| filling that overall ,,niche". Also it has a clean and good user
| interface, and is customizable to the point of changing the HTML.
| I hope they can save or otherwise sustain it.
|
| Other social media attempts to constantly distract and
| emotionalize me to keep me hooked. Looking at a good art or
| photography Tumblr feels like relief now honestly.
| sp332 wrote:
| https://cohost.org/ ?
|
| Edit for a bit of info: There is no discovery mechanism built-
| in and no "algorithm". The way to find more posts on a topic is
| to use hashtags. Everything is reverse-chronological. If
| someone wants their post to have broader engagement, they will
| post with "#The Cohost Global Feed" or some broad topic. You
| can go browse if you want to, but the site isn't going to push
| anything on you (besides following the site admins lol).
|
| Cohost doesn't have full-text search built-in, but Google
| actually has it covered.
| https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=is%20piss%20a%20vegeta...
| yallpendantools wrote:
| Cool find! I'm trying to post a content-focused side project
| in as many grassroots platforms as I can. My main site is
| already in Neocities, for example. I think I could work with
| this too!
|
| That said, I wish they featured some random pages or
| categories from their homepage. I'd like to see what
| communities already exist around the topic of my project.
| neogodless wrote:
| Hmm not bad, though having to do 4 "pick the land vehicles
| from 4-bit images" was super annoying!
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Wordpress can be quite close to the aesthetic of tumblr. One
| blog post per event, with pictures and text in whatever form
| you want.
|
| You will have to pay for it though.
| treyd wrote:
| Pixelfed is trying to be a federated version of Instagram, with
| the generally pro-user design that goes along with it that goes
| along with that.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> losing $30M a year_
|
| _> 139 employees working on product and marketing_
|
| $216,000 loss per employee per year? Ouch.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| It seems like social medias, from a financial perspective, are
| more commonly bad than good. Out of all the mainstream social
| medias I know, these ones seem to be losing money (or at least
| aren't generating "enough" profit):
|
| - Twitter: halved in value in 1 year
|
| - Tumblr
|
| - Reddit: stated it wasn't doing well when it increased the API
| price
|
| - YouTube: seems to not be doing well because it's trying to push
| adds and increasing YouTube premium
|
| - Threads: I doubt this is generating profit, because I see
| multiple posts about how this "failed" and this is the first
| threads post I've seen posted somewhere else. Maybe I'm wrong
| though
|
| - Mastodon & rest of the Fediverse: not very mainstream, but
| funding seems to be a common issue among communities, and this is
| with the relatively small userbase
|
| - Stack Overflow and Quora: they've both done layoffs recently,
| and I've heard they're also faring poorly, but I don't have much
| information
|
| - Bluesky, the audio-only one I forgot it's name: these certainly
| aren't making money
|
| The ones which are doing well:
|
| - Facebook: seemingly generating a lot of revenue because of ads
| and data collection
|
| - Instagram: same as Facebook
|
| - TikTok: probably because China pays well do to all of the
| information they get
|
| - Discord: I haven't heard anything about them losing money, and
| they don't really push ads. Maybe because a lot of people pay for
| Discord nitro, or people pay for the servers?
|
| - Slack & Teams: I also haven't heard anything, but I doubt they
| are losing money because companies pay for these
|
| - Tinder: not really a social media but they're probably making
| money from people who pay a lot for premium
|
| - Hacker News: Because it's cheap to run being text-only and
| brings publicity to YCombinator and their companies, I'm sure
| this is considered a financially good investment. But even then,
| it doesn't generate any revenue on its own
|
| And ones I don't know:
|
| - Twitch: seemed to have issues with money but idk, they have a
| lot of deals and sponsorships
|
| - LinkedIn
|
| Of course starting a small social media is always a bad
| investment, because it's very hard to get popular. But it looks
| like even the popular social medias are burning through cash
| reserves.
| user_7832 wrote:
| I wonder if HN gets paid by companies recruiting, they might
| even manage to make a small profit if so. I think the "high
| density" of users is in favor of HN doing well - low server
| requirements and an average high median income per user (if HN
| ever need crowdfunding, that is.)
| phpisthebest wrote:
| Who would have ever though giving way your product for free
| would not be a good business model... odd....
|
| It is not "social media" that is the problem is the Ad
| Supported business model in general, everything ad supported is
| having problems right now, look at "news", blog sites, etc
|
| If it is ad support is has issue turning a profit.
|
| That is because ad supported is a terrible business model,
| however investors keep trying it for some reasons... it is like
| socialism, this time it will work .. we just have to "do it
| right"
|
| nope. ad supported will never work. google is the closest by
| control everything from the browser up, but as we see with YT
| they still struggle
| mewse-hn wrote:
| I think Tumblr is going to end up in business textbooks as a
| classic example of corporations seizing a community and
| strangling the life out of it
| x0x0 wrote:
| I think it's rather a cautionary tale of never growing income
| to meet your expenses. They never made a business; just a vc
| then yahoo then verizon then automattic-owned charity.
| WJW wrote:
| It's really fascinating how long some of these things can
| carry on. One of my contracting clients has been going for
| over ten years (!!!) without ever making a profit and even
| now with the waves lapping at their feet they're still
| angling for the next big investment tranche.
| durable_queue wrote:
| MindGeek should buy Tumblr and allow adult content again.
|
| Tumblr's success was that it was an adult space that wasn't
| strictly pornography. It was a "cool sex" to PornHub's "hot sex".
| parker_mountain wrote:
| Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Tumblr allowing adult
| content would probably get it removed from app stores. Only a
| few major apps get away with it, and when they're gone, they're
| gone.
| Bud wrote:
| Tumblr did fine before app stores ever existed, and could do
| perfectly well without them now as well. Web is enough.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Before app stores existed, smartphones weren't used the way
| they are today. Consumer habits have shifted... you'd be
| missing out on a HUGE part of the market.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| Missing out on a huge part of the market is comfortable
| territory for Tumblr
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > MindGeek should buy Tumblr and allow adult content again.
|
| MindGeek isn't interested in new investments allowing
| independent content creation.
|
| MindGeek has been the target of active - and successful -
| campaigns from anti-pornography groups with _explicit_
| religious motivation (Exodus Cry, Morality in Media, etc.,
| mostly funded by right-wing evangelicals). Those groups are the
| reason that Xtube shut down in 2021, and that Pornhub removed
| all independent content a couple of months later.
|
| Those same groups are also behind the new "age verification"
| laws in a number of states, which are the reason that accessing
| many big-name tube websites (both from MindGeek and other
| properties) now requires uploading your drivers' license along
| with biometric face scans, even when viewed from states which
| don't have such laws on the books.
|
| There's been a war on pornography on the Internet for the last
| several years, and the anti-pornography groups have won nearly
| every battle, in part because the only opposition has come from
| sex workers, who have very little lobbying influence. For some
| reason, most digital rights or general First Amendment advocacy
| groups have paid very little attention.
|
| If you wrote on HN in 2017 suggesting the possibility of a
| total ban on pornography on the Internet within a few years,
| you'd have been dismissed outright. But we're actually pretty
| close to a _de facto_ ban on pornography on the Internet. Very
| few websites still allow independent creators to upload
| pornography. Most of the ones that were around in 2017 either
| are dead, no longer allow pornography (Tumblr, Imgur), heavily
| restrict its visibility (Reddit), or only allow it from
| "verified creators", which limits it to commercial production
| (Pornhub).
|
| Even self-hosting is going to become harder, as these groups
| are shifting their focus towards pressuring payment platforms
| and hosting providers to drop customers who produce sexual
| content.
|
| Will pornography be _literally_ banned on the Internet in a few
| years? Probably not. But will it be extremely difficult to
| either find or post sexual imagery or nudity within that
| timeframe? Probably - and so far, the anti-porn activists have
| actually been operating _ahead_ of their own schedule.
| gspencley wrote:
| While I don't disagree with the bulk of your comment, it's
| worth noting that PornHub / MindGeek didn't just shoot
| themselves in the foot but hurt the entire industry when
| there were numerous videos of missing teens and underage
| content found on their site.
|
| I say this as someone who ran an adult website for 18 years,
| in Canada, until suddenly our bank informed us that they were
| closing our commercial accounts and we couldn't find a single
| other bank or credit union in this country that would take
| our business despite a pristine 18 year track record.
|
| The only thing that had changed was the MindGeek scandal.
| Maybe the media misrepresented it, maybe the content issues
| were fabricated by "anti-pornography" groups. But one day
| everything is fine, the next day MindGeek (a Canadian
| company) is in the news and the next day we're shut down
| despite having done nothing wrong.
|
| It's hard for me to scapegoat conservatives and anti-porn
| groups when they were WAY more vocal and active when I first
| started my business (back in 2004 this was when the George W
| Bush administration was prosecuting obscenity for the first
| time in decades, and passing USC 18 2557). By 2022 they had
| virtually gone away. Then MindGeek was caught allowing some
| some really shady shit on PornHub.
|
| Also this was just a year or two after the Girls Do Porn
| scandal (Google it if you're unaware). Those girls suing
| those assholes for sexual abuse and contractual
| misrepresentation was not "anti-porn groups."
|
| So my take, as a former business owner in the industry, was
| that it took a few public scandals and scares for the banks
| and corporate America to go "hmm... maybe we were wrong to
| get too liberal with this stuff." Some of that may have been
| fueled by the anti-porn lobby .. but if MindGeek had kept
| their nose clean it likely wouldn't have worked.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > While I don't disagree with the bulk of your comment,
| it's worth noting that PornHub / MindGeek didn't just shoot
| themselves in the foot but hurt the entire industry when
| there were numerous videos of missing teens and underage
| content found on their site.
|
| This itself is a misconception driven by those anti-
| pornography groups. MindGeek was _incredibly_ good about
| removing CSAM from their platform, not just reactively but
| _proactively_. If you look at the numbers, Facebook is
| actually a much larger source of child sexual exploitation
| material than Pornhub was. However, Exodus Cry doesn 't
| care about CSAM on Facebook, because their goal isn't to
| end CSAM: it's to end pornography.
|
| > It's hard for me to scapegoat conservatives and anti-porn
| groups when they were WAY more vocal and active when I
| first started my business
|
| Anti-porn groups are _way_ more active _today_ than they
| were in the early Bush years. The difference is that,
| unlike then, their campaigns aren 't receiving any
| attention outside the business, which is part of why
| they're so successful: there's no real opposition.
|
| > if MindGeek had kept their nose clean it likely wouldn't
| have worked.
|
| Anti-porn groups aren't going after these companies because
| they have scandals. They're going after them because they
| oppose pornography, and it fits their agenda. If they cared
| about ending child exploitation, they would go after
| companies like Facebook - but they don't, because that
| doesn't accomplish their _explict, stated_ goal of ending
| commercial sex work.
|
| It's missing the point to blame MindGeek for the "scandal"
| when they're nowhere near the worst offender - they're just
| being targeted by groups who have a specific political
| agenda. No matter how much work MindGeek does to eliminate
| CSAM, anti-porn groups will claim that it's not enough. The
| leader of the Exodus Cry campaign has _literally said_ that
| they want to make it impossible for MindGeek to operate
| legally.
| evanelias wrote:
| > Tumblr's success was that it was an adult space that wasn't
| strictly pornography.
|
| This is a common talking point here, but it just isn't
| historically accurate in terms of absolute numbers.
|
| Tumblr was most successful in 2011-2012. It started getting
| huge in 2010 in large part due to having built-in photo and
| video support, at a time when Twitter didn't have these, and
| Instagram and Pinterest were still both tiny. Tumblr also
| offered built-in reblog functionality before Twitter had built-
| in retweeting.
|
| For a little while there, Tumblr was a mainstream social
| network -- certainly a bit edgier and more liberal than most
| competitors, but still mainstream enough that many major brands
| had a Tumblr presence right alongside their Facebook and
| Twitter icons. Adult content was definitely present, but it was
| a single-digit percentage of posts at the time of Tumblr's peak
| historical traffic levels.
|
| A lot of those mainstream users started to decamp to Instagram
| and Pinterest after that point, depending on their personal
| use-case.
|
| That adult content percentage definitely rose over time, but
| timing-wise that coincided with total traffic decreasing, not
| increasing. It also scared off the brands, whose advertising
| dollars were sorely needed to achieve sustainability for the
| business. So to me, attempting to attribute Tumblr's "success"
| to adult content just seems way off-base.
|
| Source: I was personally responsible for a decent chunk of
| Tumblr's scalability and capacity planning for several years.
| 10g1k wrote:
| ( win || ( learn || wallow in self pity ) )
| Kye wrote:
| From Mr. Automattic himself:
| https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/733544011556618240/theres-o...
|
| Key part:
|
| >> _" I'm advocating for this change because I think it has a
| good chance at success. I don't do anything hoping to fail. There
| are lots of examples of products with hundreds of millions more
| MAUs and smaller teams than Tumblr currently has, and there are
| amazing examples like OpenAI and Telegram running circles around
| much bigger players with small teams. That's what we hope to
| replicate."_
|
| So it sounds like he hasn't given up on Tumblr.
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