I think Tumblr have made a choice between the cost of robust, working protection against rampant child abuse and the cost of losing all their porn content userbase and the take off and nuke it from space option was more cost efficient.
I’m OK with this. To get to where they are now they failed at quite a fundamental level thats already caused untold misery and abuse, so goodbye and good riddance.
Tumblr isn’t the only media host to struggle with this. SURELY, someone on a team or management there made a list and said, “you know, other companies have struggled here. What did they do right or wrong? Who successfully navigated this problem?”
Because ANTI-NSFW of any kind is NOT that answer. It’s an overreaching knee-jerk reaction to a problem that requires a much more precise method.
@playingwithknives My quote looked weird there, just letting you know I’m not talking about you, but about Yahoo/Tumblr management.
I think it’s probably as much about advertisers not wanting to be against potentially adult content as that. They’d still be doing it without SOPA-FESTA or whatever it’s called, but it’s definitely a thumb on the scale.
There is still plenty of NSFW on YouTube, but I’ll concede that point. To be fair, if YouTube had an actually, fully functional alternative that can host on that scale, do you think YouTube would still be the lead?
Software to recognize and flag illegal content including child porn is readily available and used by everybody. It sounds like Tumblr didn’t do that, for some reason.
I’m thinking those who used to make money on that model would go elsewhere. YouTube was also a way for many to drive that revenue, and all but the very top tier can still do so. There really isn’t a video hosting alternative that will let them do that.
But without a real competitor of that caliber, I’m just guessing.
It’s like drugs… the reason it’s everywhere, is because people like porn and drugs. Maybe folks need to just stop pretending like they don’t like porn and drugs.
Well, you’re half right. (The closest I have ever come to getting intoxicated is sipping wine, deciding it was gross, and only ever cooking with it going forward.)
That said, child porn is kind of genuinely an issue and that seems to be the actual problem Tumblr is trying to deal with however wonkily.
No it isn’t. The kiddy diddlers are a red herring, because they could have stopped them with automatic blocking software, and blocking all porn is a disproportionate response.
Verizon doesn’t want porn on their platform, period. Blaming wicked Uncle Ernie is just their convenient excuse to ban it.
I’m not so sure this is true. Certainly it is for images/videos with known fingerprints, but I’d expect Tumblr to have a larger proportion of un-fingerprinted stuff, and since Tumblr content is discovered by reblogging and liking, there’s no handy list of search terms to block.
Without a Google-size army of content reviewers, it’s a thorny problem, although Tumblr certainly seems to share some blame with their iffy reporting tools and seeming unwillingness to delete entire posts with their like/reblog histories, as opposed to just the content in those posts.
My understanding from reading articles over the years is the vast majority of it is reposted and retraded for decades. Of course some is new material, and you just rely on users reporting that stuff. So you do need some human content moderators, but you don’t examine every image posted.