Why “go nuts, show nuts” doesn’t work in 2022

It&#x27;s sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet.<p>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.<p>I&#x27;m curious if this could be addressed with laws that force companies to either be utilities or publishers. If you&#x27;re a publisher, you take liability for your content and can edit it at will. If you&#x27;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&#x27;s legal.

I can&#x27;t tell one way or the other if people have forgotten that SESTA&#x2F;FOSTA passed in 2018.<p>All of this is consequence of that law working as intended (not as described; it&#x27;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&#x27;t care).<p>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).<p>Matt on Tumblr seems to have missed that even if a company does all the things on his list, their owners could <i>still</i> end up in prison if they are aware that <i>any</i> pornography on their sites was &quot;facilitating sex trafficking,&quot; 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&#x27;re operating in, the state the poster is in, <i>or</i> the state the viewer is in, you&#x27;re now liable as the site operator!).

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.<p>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&#x27;s common for threads about Meta to devolve into a lot of angry calls for Facebook to be &quot;banned&quot; for kids or for lawmakers to step in and regulate.<p>Meanwhile, journalists and politicians <i>love</i> 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&#x27;s a constant game of companies tightening their standards.

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.<p>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.

One problem that&#x27;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&#x27;t think that the notorious &quot;nipplegate&quot; halftime show incident back in 2004 would have caused any uproar over here, perhaps bemusement.<p>But because the &quot;world wide&quot; web is really a &quot;US-American&quot; web at its heart, we now have to adhere to whatever standards are en vogue there today.

I&#x27;ve always been puzzled how in movies on TV in the USA, they&#x27;ll air brush nipples, cleavage and butt cracks away... in the same scene that someone is being gruesomely murdered with blood spurting and entrails hanging out. It makes no sense that nudity is too dangerous for children to see, but desensitizing them to violence and gore is OK.

Isn&#x27;t this some variation on the idea that as something gets &quot;successful&quot; it becomes shitty? I&#x27;m sure there are private corners of the internet where lots of people are going and showing nuts, that by definition most people don&#x27;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&#x27;s an associated name I can&#x27;t remember).<p>(Incidentally, this is a reason I&#x27;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&#x27;s coming out of the box with people worrying about &quot;groping&quot; and whatnot in a way that will force it to suck by design because everything will be about &quot;safety&quot; and the like, before anything good takes hold. See also the Zune)

What I&#x27;ve realized in my 25+ years of using the internet is that letting the normies on here ruined everything.

<i>If Apple permanently banned Tumblr from the App Store, we’d probably have to shut the service down.</i><p>I&#x27;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&#x27;s legacy is pervasive infinite scroll throughout the internet.

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.<p>I can&#x27;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.<p>On the other hand, I think blogging platforms like Medium has a &quot;commitment to read feel&quot;. You know you see the header then you convince that is something you must read, that would be that &quot;commitment read thing&quot;. 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).<p>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&#x27;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.

He raised an interesting question, why Twitter and Reddit get away with it, but Tumblr doesn&#x27;t?

It is notable that the first item in their list is objectively false:<p>&gt; You’ve probably heard how Pornhub can’t accept credit cards anymore.<p>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.<p>One would think that given the nature of this post, they ought to have their facts straight.<p>Credit cards aren&#x27;t anti-porn. They are anti-unmoderated UGC porn, for obvious reasons.<p>It&#x27;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.

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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=CtUuab1Aqg0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=CtUuab1Aqg0</a>

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.<p>At least it’s honest, I guess. Really sad though.

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 <i>do</i> hope Matt &amp; his team will be willing to push the envelope <i>a little</i> and allow equal (re)presentation of <i>all</i> nipples on Tumblr. Not for pornographic purposes but for equality.

&gt; do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail<p>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.<p>Which we were fine with.<p>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.

&gt; 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.<p>It&#x27;s really quite sad that this is the case. What can we do, collectively, to fix it?

&gt; the casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible<p>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.<p>I honestly don&#x27;t get what is the argument or point he&#x27;s trying to make. I&#x27;m sure that he could make a new porn startup if he wanted. There&#x27;s a lot of competition but it&#x27;s probably still profitable for those that succeed.

&gt;Credit card companies are anti-porn.<p>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.

During my time running an early Bitcoin casino, I more or less developed a template for each of the issues mentioned in this post&#x27;s final paragraph (with the exception of age verification for uploaded adult content, which strikes me as nearly impossible these days). It was a ton of work, it was certainly a lot more expensive than running a normal service, and it had operational risk - not the least of which waa that a misstep in KYC could have put me in serious legal trouble. Also, even in 2011, running something like that caused me to become the target of a ddos attack large enough to temporarily clog a major backbone and get kicked off what was supposed to be a bunker&#x2F;military grade host. That being said, I was doing it literally alone, with only the most indolent and shady of lawyers as erstwhile partners. It can be done. It&#x27;s definitely an uphill battle at every step, but operating only in crypto and setting up intelligently designed verification systems, and most importantly, spreading your server operations across as many different jurisdictions as possible in a federated way, you could probably still boot it for gambling. This also assumes you&#x27;re smart and go to great lengths to block jurisdictions where it&#x27;s illegal. For porn, I&#x27;m less sure.

As said, the main problem are visa and master who monopolized the consumer spending options and keep their firm grip on that parasitic business of theirs. Crypto SHOULD have changed but instead too many greedy people made it into a complete scam and took away any credibility it could have had. So we still have no alternatives and regulations and governments make it so we will not have those alternatives any time soon either. Banks are still living in 1980 and unable to do and settle payments immediately .... OVER THE *** INTERNET ... IN 2022. The entire financial industry is archaic AF. Porn used to be the pioneer with everything because it had the numbers behind it(they also had their hands in bluray vs hd-dvd war). But nowadays, thing have changed and it&#x27;s not like it used to be. Everything had been monopolized and regulated and gate-kept so moving forward is harder than ever, even though it sounds like it should be the other way round.<p>PS: look at visa and master cutting out russians altogether just because they felt like it. that is the power they hold.

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.

The domain &quot;gonutshownuts.com&quot; appears to be available, I have no need of this domain, but maybe another HNer can use it?

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.<p>That said, am I crazy (ignorant, perhaps?) in thinking that it&#x27;s irrelevant to Tumblr? Tumblr.com still works in all browsers, and surely (here&#x27;s where that ignorance of mine might come into play) it&#x27;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.

One of the listed reasons:<p>&gt; Credit card companies are anti-porn. You’ve probably heard how Pornhub can’t accept credit cards anymore. Or seen the new rules from Mastercard. Whatever crypto-utopia might come in the coming decades, today if you are blocked from banks, credit card processing, and financial services, you’re blocked from the modern economy. The vast majority of Automattic’s revenue comes from people buying our services and auto-renewing on credit cards, including the ads-free browsing upgrade that Tumblr recently launched. If we lost the ability to process credit cards, it wouldn’t just threaten Tumblr, but also the 2,000+ people in 97 countries that work at Automattic across all our products.<p>There are different ways to be &quot;blocked.&quot; You can be blocked because your website can&#x27;t accept CC payments, or you can be blocked because you are, for example, sanctioned by the US. It&#x27;s possible to be blocked in the former sense without being blocked in the latter. For example, you own a website that accepts Bitcoin payments and which does not link to your identity.<p>Like it or hate it, this is a use case. I bring this up because a favorite point of contention seems to be that Bitcoin has no use cases. Here&#x27;s one.<p>If that sounds outlandish, consider how very far the Internet has come along the free speech axis, as many commenters on this thread have pointed out. Now consider how far there remains to go and what the future is likely to hold based on past trends.<p>Granted, one thing Bitcoin hasn&#x27;t quite managed to do (yet?) is replicate automatic payments without trusted third parties.

Let me check if I&#x27;m getting this right - it sounds like the more fundamental way to address this wouldn&#x27;t be to make a new Tumblr&#x2F;OnlyFans&#x2F;..., but to make a financial services provider that doesn&#x27;t discriminate against those businesses? I wasn&#x27;t aware that you basically can&#x27;t use financial services if you&#x27;re in that business - is that true? How does OnlyFans handle this?

As someone who&#x27;s launched small social-ish sites (non-porn), I&#x27;ve thought about this too. There&#x27;s no way to keep your hands off the users&#x27; content, yet that can get you into trouble too, and laws are being proposed to make some forms of moderation illegal. The current easiest path for a small platform is to reserve the right to ban anyone for any opaque reason, and to do that a lot to avoid becoming the hangout place for mischief. The big platforms must find it impossible to satisfy all the regulators with one stance, especially since they&#x27;re international, so they wear multiple faces instead.<p>You at least dodge some liability by not being on the App Store. Apple will throw you under the bus for unpredictable reasons. They insta-banned several Civil War games for containing Confederate flags in a historical context, seemingly following a trend at the time.

It took me a minute to remember why the founder of Wordpress was posting on tumblr.

There&#x27;s something ironic about a centralised entity complaining about other centralised entities...<p>If you look at Matt&#x27;s conceptual framework, you can find the implicit frame around his argument. It&#x27;s not really &quot;impossible&quot;, but it is &quot;impossible <i>if you are a centralised, for-profit platform</i>&quot;.<p>As a counter-example to this post, look at Mastodon. There are iOS and Android apps available, dozens if not hundreds of servers which permit NSFW content, all operating quite happily and covering costs without making a profit. For example, mastodon.lol uses Patreon to accept donations for covering server costs.<p>Mastodon is not perfect, but don&#x27;t pretend that it&#x27;s impossible to build a &quot;go nuts, show nuts&quot; platform in 2022. It <i>might</i> be impossible to build a <i>centralised, for-profit</i> platform like that, but that doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s impossible <i>outside of the constraints of walled-garden attention-economy capitalism</i>.

Just move to a proper jurisdiction. America is historically puritan (which has its bad and good parts), continental Europe isn&#x27;t. Also web-only is great, I would never install the app anyway.

Does tumblr really hijack the browser back button? I tried to get back to HN from that link by hitting the back button, but I got redirected back to the tumblr article. I could have just closed the browser tab, but a long-press on the back-button allowed me to select this HN page from the recent history. Why does anyone still do this? Do they really think I give in and stay reading&#x2F;browsing tumblr forever instead of doing what I had planned?

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.<p>They must have had to deal with a very large number of DMCA takedown requests.<p>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.

&gt; are anti-porn<p>Are anti-nudity. Even nudist communities have to abide by the rules, wanna show nude you must post your passport.<p>Glad the real world ain&#x27;t that prude. Can&#x27;t people pay by mail cash?<p>&gt; It may already exist and I don’t know about it.<p>Yes , it&#x27;s cryptocurrencies, but people can&#x27;t be bothered. So we are going to need crypto-aggregators, which are not possible to be taken down. Users are probably going to have to host their content on something like ipfs , too

&quot;Credit card companies are anti X&quot; is an extremely worrying argument. Paying and being paid for legal goods and services should be a basic right.

If you buy porn with cash, there&#x27;s no payment processor to stop your payment from going through.<p>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.<p>It&#x27;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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;world.hey.com&#x2F;dhh&#x2F;i-was-wrong-we-need-crypto-587ccb03" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;world.hey.com&#x2F;dhh&#x2F;i-was-wrong-we-need-crypto-587ccb0...</a><p>What should the future be: cash, crypto, or mobile payments à la WeChat?

It&#x27;s odd how online media sites are so prudish, while Netflix et al seemingly can&#x27;t go 30 seconds without showing (usually good looking) naked people. Perhaps it&#x27;s the fear of online &quot;DIY nudity&quot; being liable to go a bit far - there are a lot of potential bad taste cliffs to fall off.

This is good for Bitcoin.<p>JK, sort of. As credit card companies get more prudish, paying for adult content may actually turn out to be the killer app that makes normies comfortable using crypto for payments. You could see an entire economy spring up based around an audited stablecoin, if one ever comes to be.

That’s a whole lot of words about a theory that the author admits would only be true if Twitter didn’t exist.

Besides the topic, this is an excellent example what corporate communication should be. We often blame companies for corporate-speak filled with platitudes and BS. This post gives a prime example how to do it right by externalising constraints honestly

So, some context for this. Recently a new feature was rolled out to Tumblr, where you can change or add a community label to a post. More details on it here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.tumblr.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;5436241401239" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.tumblr.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;5436241401239</a>, but the tldr is posts can be flagged based on some possibly troubling or triggering content for some viewers.<p>Once the general Tumblr-sphere caught on, people thought this meant &quot;Go nuts, show nuts&quot; was back; as in, NSFW is generally allowed again. However, that was definitely not the case, as nothing in the TOS or other site details was updated to reflect allowing NSFW. This was just an addition that we&#x27;re (Tumblr users) suspecting is one part of possibly allowing NSFW content again.<p>Thus the above is why I think photomatt put that post up, perhaps in response to all the inquiries and buzz on the site.<p>Source: daily tumblr user :)

&gt; Credit card companies are anti-porn<p>Why?

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&#x27;t this go directly against his claim &quot;no modern internet service in 2022 can have the rules that Tumblr did in 2007&quot;? They are literally the direct competitors of Tumblr, and they didn&#x27;t alienate a huge chunk of their audience with strict content policies.<p>Maybe he wasn&#x27;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.<p>(edited for clarity)

It’s so fucking nice to see a post like this coming from the top of an organization for once. Usually CEOs dance around this issue.

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.

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.<p>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.

Personally I think this is for the best. Maybe tech and laws can catch up some day but until then it is better to have &quot;bullshit&quot; restrictions than have real people get hurt and at scale too.

Reddit is kinda the only thing like that left...

So US-centric. Meanwhile XVideos etc exist.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;XVideos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;XVideos</a><p>&gt; 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.

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&#x27;t understand?

Web3 Tumblr anyone?

Absolute cowardice.

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).<p>We are censored and controlled by (US) political correctness World View of<p>* App Stores: Google and Apple<p>* Social media platforms from companies like Meta (no nipples in IG or Facebook). Try visit Playboy IG, it&#x27;s a pixel joke.<p>* Payment (although Visa and Mastercard are not against porn totally)<p>* Infrastructure. Good luck running a porn site from common known cloud providers (btw. Cloudflare is an exception in this list).<p>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&#x27;s on websites or transferred on my own on devices? I&#x27;m clearly old enough but US companies trying to protect me by basically enforcing CENSORSHIP here. It&#x27;s nothing else.<p>To this day I cannot understand to see easily violence and horror things on all these platforms but beware we see ONE uncovered NIPPLE.

We had the sexual revolution in the 60s 70s. Where are we now? I can&#x27;t watch porn on Android or IOS, because the apps won&#x27;t get listed on the app stores. So companies censor themselves or ask that you buy a dedicated and crippled set top box.<p>We need a revolution.