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Yahoo Censors Tumblr Porn
coolnumbr12 writes "When Yahoo purchased Tumblr in May, Tumblr founder David Karp said Tumblr wouldn't be changing, and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said, 'Part of our strategy here is to let Tumblr be Tumblr.' But a new search policy went into effect Thursday that excludes all adult blogs from Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines by disabling indexing of anything it tags as 'adult.' The policy effectively makes the content and 10 percent of Tumblr users completely invisible."
my robots.txt contains one item which doesn't exist.
If you try to access that item your IP is added to the firewall drop list. (until the next reboot)
I don't even have much hosted, just some pictures I don't want to give to flikr.
Well, first of all, there's the question of who determines whether or not it's 'Adult' or merely 'NSFW', since they're treated differently. Since the barrier for 'adult' appears to be that you post nudity often, there are some non-pornographic photographers that are being caught in the net.
Secondly, as of right now, #gay is a verbatim search term. This affects not just porn, but posts about LGBT politics.
Thirdly, lots of artists were migrating to tumblr BECAUSE it was a way to join a network where you could be discovered by fans. Painters and cartoon artists that post pornographic art also can't be found anymore. I know more than one artist that stopped hosting their own portfolio site because it was easier to post on tumblr and provide a DNS redirect. It was a good system, and now the rug has been pulled out from under them.
This isn't just about hardcore porn; most (all?) of that stuff is discoverable through google, even if it's not packaged up as nicely. There's a lot of fandom and art going on that counts as 'adult' content, and it seems to me that it's being unfairly punished.
Plus, honestly, it's nice for users like me to be able to follow some of these people and discover new things that I like and have it all mixed in with my goofy fandom gifs and gender politics and whatnot. I LIKE how tumblr works right now. To me, this is just the puritanical nature of North American culture and law rearing its ugly head.