The Antisocial Network

[nosimpleway]

I've seen Tweets inviting displaced artists and bloggers to come enjoy the imagehosting, commissioning, and promotional community ... at PornHub.

If you want a site that's really unlikely to get huffy about female-presenting nipples, there's that.

[beatbandito]

I would be 1000000% down for a porn site actually making the move to social media and I know at least Ted Cruz would, too.

All the sexy times people from Tumblr I've seen are talking about how they're going full Twitter because it's... so inclusive and no one has issues with post restrictions there? I'm personally excited to see just how weird the shitposts get when that's all that's left.

Re: Verizon, there were a few popular posts going around after the announcement showing a huge dip in Verizon stock, because obviously a company owned by a company owned by a company that they just bought is having major impact.


That only gets more stupid when you look at the stocks with any context.

[Thad]

Oath... I only just a couple weeks ago heard Tumblr was bought by Verizon, but that sure explains some things.

Technically Yahoo bought Tumblr and Verizon bought Yahoo.

[Brantly B.]

Nobody ever considers authorized exploits when talking about Software-as-a-Service. Well, nobody used to.

[Blossom]

I've seen Tweets inviting displaced artists and bloggers to come enjoy the imagehosting, commissioning, and promotional community ... at PornHub.

If you want a site that's really unlikely to get huffy about female-presenting nipples, there's that.

Pornhub’s entire business model revolves around stealing content made by sex workers without their consent and profiting off it with no compensation to the workers who generate the content they steal.

Sex workers are an incredibly vulnerable and stigmatised class of workers, mostly women, mostly younger, mostly not rich, with little recourse, socially or legally, against a massive corporation like Pornhub.

Pornhub relies on this, on how little you care about sex workers, to maintain a business based on stealing their livelihoods.

Stop applauding a corporation that literally exists to steal from marginalised workers just because they have a competent PR department.

[Mongrel]

[Thad]

I've seen Tweets inviting displaced artists and bloggers to come enjoy the imagehosting, commissioning, and promotional community ... at PornHub.

If you want a site that's really unlikely to get huffy about female-presenting nipples, there's that.

Pornhub’s entire business model revolves around stealing content made by sex workers without their consent and profiting off it with no compensation to the workers who generate the content they steal.

Sex workers are an incredibly vulnerable and stigmatised class of workers, mostly women, mostly younger, mostly not rich, with little recourse, socially or legally, against a massive corporation like Pornhub.

Pornhub relies on this, on how little you care about sex workers, to maintain a business based on stealing their livelihoods.

Stop applauding a corporation that literally exists to steal from marginalised workers just because they have a competent PR department.

That we need to show more respect to sex workers is a good point.

The rest sounds an awful lot like the same arguments Hollywood has been making about YouTube for the past dozen years, and the RIAA's been making since the days of Napster.

First, my issue with using "stealing" to describe copyright infringement is well-established.

Second, to the best of my knowledge it's users who are uploading copyrighted material without authorization, not Pornhub itself. While Pornhub is certainly aware that it is hosting infringing material and profiting off it, that problem is inherent to any media upload site. Users are going to upload infringing content, and moderation doesn't scale. It's not feasible for a site of Pornhub's size to verify that every upload is authorized.

(YouTube has upload filters, but (1) YouTube has Google resources behind it and (2) they still don't work particularly well. They create false positives for law-abiding users, while infringers can trivially circumvent them by zooming, stretching, or cropping a video.)

Also to the best of my knowledge, Pornhub complies with DMCA takedown requests (themselves a flawed and often-abused mechanism, but they're the legal way for a rightsholder to issue a takedown request for copyrighted material).

To the extent that putting up studio porn harms performers, it's by suppressing demand for paying for porn. I'm not aware of porn studios offering profit participation to performers, so if we assume watching a video on Pornhub is a lost sale (the flaws in this assumption are well-established, but let's go with it for the sake of argument), then the lost profits are to the studio, not the performers. That may affect how much performers get paid for their next movie, but they've already been paid for this one, and they're not going to get any royalties from sales.

I haven't studied the profits of various porn studios in the Internet age. I'm sure free porn everywhere has radically changed their business model. But as in music, games, and every other medium, it's possible to compete with free. The big studios, Vivid, Wicked, Bang Bros, Brazzers, etc., seem to be doing pretty good business.

The question of whether Pornhub harms smaller studios and independent performers who publish their own content is, likewise, similar to the question of whether piracy hurts small and independent music publishers. The answer is that it's complicated. There probably are instances where somebody was going to pay for content but decided not to because it was available for free. There are also certainly instances where somebody was never going to pay for the content, so watching it for free isn't a lost sale. And there are also instances where illegal online distribution can pull a performer out of obscurity and lead to larger success. The extent to which copyright infringement harms, helps, or has no effect is difficult to track, and can vary wildly from one creator to another.

The post you quoted is correct in that we should treat sex workers with the same respect we treat any other creator. But that means scrutinizing arguments about the effects of piracy on the porn industry in the same way we scrutinize arguments about the effects of piracy on any other creative industry.

[Brantly B.]

I am, despite what you may think, not an expert on the topic, but I believe PornHub actually has its own content platform which allows, er, artists to get paid for the work that they submit. It's still the porn industry, so I assume at the end of the day that pro creators are still getting fucked in both senses, but I don't know of any other non-cam porn site that has that.

[nosimpleway]

That's what they're promoting, at least. I don't have a dog in this race -- you let me know if you find a commissions market for half-assed lineart rubber-limb cartoon people, there's probably one somewhere -- so I haven't so much as glanced at the EULA to see how submitted content is handled.

[Blossom]

I've seen Tweets inviting displaced artists and bloggers to come enjoy the imagehosting, commissioning, and promotional community ... at PornHub.

If you want a site that's really unlikely to get huffy about female-presenting nipples, there's that.

Pornhub’s entire business model revolves around stealing content made by sex workers without their consent and profiting off it with no compensation to the workers who generate the content they steal.

Sex workers are an incredibly vulnerable and stigmatised class of workers, mostly women, mostly younger, mostly not rich, with little recourse, socially or legally, against a massive corporation like Pornhub.

Pornhub relies on this, on how little you care about sex workers, to maintain a business based on stealing their livelihoods.

Stop applauding a corporation that literally exists to steal from marginalised workers just because they have a competent PR department.

That we need to show more respect to sex workers is a good point.

The rest sounds an awful lot like the same arguments Hollywood has been making about YouTube for the past dozen years, and the RIAA's been making since the days of Napster.

First, my issue with using "stealing" to describe copyright infringement is well-established.

Second, to the best of my knowledge it's users who are uploading copyrighted material without authorization, not Pornhub itself. While Pornhub is certainly aware that it is hosting infringing material and profiting off it, that problem is inherent to any media upload site. Users are going to upload infringing content, and moderation doesn't scale. It's not feasible for a site of Pornhub's size to verify that every upload is authorized.

(YouTube has upload filters, but (1) YouTube has Google resources behind it and (2) they still don't work particularly well. They create false positives for law-abiding users, while infringers can trivially circumvent them by zooming, stretching, or cropping a video.)

Also to the best of my knowledge, Pornhub complies with DMCA takedown requests (themselves a flawed and often-abused mechanism, but they're the legal way for a rightsholder to issue a takedown request for copyrighted material).

To the extent that putting up studio porn harms performers, it's by suppressing demand for paying for porn. I'm not aware of porn studios offering profit participation to performers, so if we assume watching a video on Pornhub is a lost sale (the flaws in this assumption are well-established, but let's go with it for the sake of argument), then the lost profits are to the studio, not the performers. That may affect how much performers get paid for their next movie, but they've already been paid for this one, and they're not going to get any royalties from sales.

I haven't studied the profits of various porn studios in the Internet age. I'm sure free porn everywhere has radically changed their business model. But as in music, games, and every other medium, it's possible to compete with free. The big studios, Vivid, Wicked, Bang Bros, Brazzers, etc., seem to be doing pretty good business.

There is a pretty massive difference between "an end user that downloads a video without compensating the creator", "a free p2p program that allows end users to share vidoes without compensating the creator", and "an ad-supported site built and comprised entirely of videos uploaded and hosted on their own servers, streamed to users with ads and subscription fees, without compensating the creators unless they uploaded it directly to PornHub themselves, that in 2017 streamed 3700 petabytes of content and made more than $100 million dollars in profit." You have to see that.

It's not about performers for studios, either, it's about performers who create their own content for their own sites. Which is increasingly how a lot of sex workers, especially queer and especially trans sex workers, do it. This is about harming indies, not people who got paid for a shoot and walked away without a cut of sales.

The question of whether Pornhub harms smaller studios and independent performers who publish their own content is, likewise, similar to the question of whether piracy hurts small and independent music publishers. The answer is that it's complicated. There probably are instances where somebody was going to pay for content but decided not to because it was available for free. There are also certainly instances where somebody was never going to pay for the content, so watching it for free isn't a lost sale. And there are also instances where illegal online distribution can pull a performer out of obscurity and lead to larger success. The extent to which copyright infringement harms, helps, or has no effect is difficult to track, and can vary wildly from one creator to another.

https://twitter.com/forexposure_txt/

Also the snowplow thing was a hoax.

[Büge]

[Thad]

Tumblr's porn filter blocked Tumblr's images illustrating what Tumblr's porn filter won't block (note: link has nonsexual images of bare breasts)

[Yoji]

I just tried it myself, and it seems to check out. I never really doubted any of the stories coming out about all the hit-or-miss content blocking, but it's kind of another thing to see yourself.

Maybe when I get a chance I'll throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. I must have something in the black band sketchbook that'll trigger the bots.

[Mongrel]

Even in a country like the US where privacy standards are fairly lax (by western standards), I can't even imagine how many laws this must have broken.

Also the comment about "if they received money for it, then they didn't 'allow' or 'give', they SOLD, so how about describing it as that?" is fuckin' dead on point.

[Yoji]

So, the NSFW ban on Tumblr is in effect. Or I thought it was.

I thought I was going to log off in a huff and never come back, but I started wondering what I could fly under their crappy radar. A half dozen posts later and it's been a little curious so far.

I'm... not sure about sharing X-rated stuff in our fair forums and channel, especially something self-produced. It'd probably be awkward, so I'll just summarize:

-Black-and-white practically naked bondage babe: NOTHING. I forgot to add the NSFW tag at first, but that didn't seem to make a difference.
-Actually naked shibari babe: NOTHING. This one was a little weird, though. I only had the outfit and BDSM elements, but the figure itself was hidden (I was toying with the idea of an invisible figure at the time).
-Same as before, but with the sketch and figure layers partially visible: NOTHING. Starting to wonder if it wasn't overt enough.
-Young woman coyly revealing freaky underwear: NOTHING, even though a butt in flossy undies was right there.
-Naked shibari babe, fully revealed, with the words "nipple" and "vulva" thrown in for good measure: NOTHING. Anyone can see it's a blushing X-rated lass, but I did make her skin a weird color. Maybe that has something to do with it.
-Same as before, but with normal skin tone: BLOCKED. Finally getting somewhere!
-Same as before, but without NSFW tag: BLOCKED. Something tells me it was the skin tone that made the difference.
-Same as before, but with a colorful galaxy overlay: NOTHING. Adding or removing NSFW tag doesn't seem to change things. At least it's kind of pretty.
-Warcraft characters at the beach, including a draenei woman in stringy one-piece: NOTHING. Legs and boobs, but that wasn't enough somehow. Thought for sure she was pale enough to trigger it...
ETA:
-Lady in see-through magenta: NOTHING. It's old and low-quality, but still plainly provocative. Huh.
-Friendly young woman in a very trashy outfit: NOTHING. C'mon. She's wearing like a hoodie, stringy undies, and not much else. Naomi Armitage would tell her to dial it back.
-Lusty woman wearing even less than before: NOTHING. I guess... the pasties make it okay? Scratchin' my head here.

Weird thing to post about, but... I dunno. Feeling a little lonely here, I guess. It's all strange and confusing and disappointing, so maybe it'd feel better talking about it with chums.

[François]

It doesn't matter to The Company that their algorithm is so janky. A bunch of bean counters did the math, and they figured out there's more money to be made by appealing to prudish, high-paying advertisers than by monetizing sheer volume to advertisers willing to take the chance of being seen adjacent to a cartoon wolf lady giving a blowjob, or a sex worker trying to stay safe and take charge of their business, or a young trans person trying to figure themselves out, or a female-presenting nipple. So they change their Terms of Service and flip the switch on this completely moronic AI just so they can tell somebody else's bean counters "look, we've got robots power-washing the jizz stains off the ceilings, it's safe to give us money now". The harm done to all the NSFW people doesn't come into it at any level, and the fact that their AI doesn't catch everything it's meant to catch doesn't actually matter either. There is no one making the decisions at any level that cares about anything but dollars changing hands. Their so-called morality has no intrinsic value to them other than as a selling point, and even then the appearance of it suffices.

It was the same kind of deal with the youtube adpocalypse, and at its heart it's the same kind of deal with DRM on video games (or on pretty much anything else, really). It hurts legit folk and it doesn't stop bad actors, but someone somewhere brings a line graph to a CEO and gets a five figure bonus, huzzah.

[Thad]

The difference is, people still use YouTube and buy video games.

Certainly this decision was made by bean counters. That doesn't mean that it's the best decision for the company to turn a profit. These are the same bean counters who thought buying AOL and Yahoo was a good use of company funds.

I can't guarantee that this move will leave Tumblr in the same kind of state as MySpace. But I think that's the likeliest outcome.

[Brantly B.]

Also, don't assume that the parent company didn't intend to kill off Tumblr.

[Thad]

Quite possible, if you're suggesting that the parent company wanted to kill it outright and whoever's in charge of Tumblr said "Hang on, give us a chance to turn it around first" and this was some kind of Hail Mary.

If you're suggesting that they're alienating their userbase on purpose because they plan to kill Tumblr, that makes less sense. If everybody was in agreement about killing it, they'd just kill it.

[beatbandito]

I'm p. sure it was just that Tumblr was trying to moderate content in a reasonable sense but really super sucked at it so apple took them off the store and they started trying to moderate content in an unreasonable sense but really super suck at it.