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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."
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.
Only if you're one of the 10 people that use Yahoo to search the Intertubes...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
They didn't censor the content.....the just made it harder to find. Sensational headline.
boo hoo?
Good thing I have already found my favorite Tumblr, Short Shorts Obsession.
Unintended consequence - "adult" tag gets dropped
I dont think somehow this is such a bad idea. I mean, they could have just deleted all those pages really ( I know this is a not a good enough excuse). If you use Tumblr, you know most pages are inter-linked. So it is easy to go from one to next. Did they stop that as well? Also, I had noticed that most Tumblr pages did not have any warning for adult content.
My tumblporn is still turning up on google search...
Really? Erm, I think we should be given a list so that, you know, we can, err.., check their data-collating algorithms for accuracy. Yeah, that.
1984 had the idea of the State turning people into 'non-persons', even if they agreed to allow them to continue living. The idea was not original, but taken from standard Communist practice at the time.
Acceptable censorship MUST be honest and open. For Yahoo (an extreme zionist organisation, by the way) to use the trick of preventing third party search engines from indexing certain content, Yahoo uses the self same tactic detailed by George Orwell.
What Yahoo should do is one of the following:
1) ban the content
2) place the content under the name of a different service
3) create an 'adult-only' walled-garden within Tumblr
4) 'sell' the 'service' hosting the adult blogs to a third party
Yahoo, instead, chooses to play the dirtiest of games, and rely on a army of filthy shills to justify the move (like the scum who dribble "it isn't censorship when a company does it").
Well, we know the Internet routes around censorship, and in this case that means another popular service will arise that hosts similar content and services. And yes, when this new service becomes valuable enough, it too will be sold to some scumbag giant that LOVES genocidal violence in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria (Yahoo actively supports all of Obama's wars) but hates and fears Human sexuality. And so we go round and round in the same circle.
In the meantime, what happens when enterprising new search engines start to ignore "do not index" requests that are clearly attempts at unreasonable censorship? A search engine company is under ZERO legal obligation to assist companies who wish to censor access to material they publicly host. If Tumblr hasn't banned it, and it is visible to ordinary Internet users (no matter how hard it is to find), a search engine SHOULD index the content, regardless of what the scum at Yahoo say.
"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.'
Yeah, and when an independent website gets purchased by a large corporation the executives never lie to the users of a new acquisition to keep them from doing a mass exodus. After all, the users themselves are a part of the deal.
and make your own blog. Or use Google blogger. Or any of a thousand different ways. Why is this even news?
I like pr0n as much as the next guy but a Slashdot groupthink seems to be developing that any entity restricting porn is bad evil censorship. Even if that entity is not government and it's not telling anyone else what to do except on its own site.
Try to replicate this behavior which was in place before the Yahoo buyout:
1. Place pornographic term in tumblr's own search engine
2. Receive lolcats
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Rendering 10% of Tumblr invisible is an improvement and a great start. Please get to work on the other 90%, too.
Isn't this the equivalent of buying Slashdot and then censoring "Anonymous Cowards"?
Yahoo decides a tag should be filtered out.
If you at some point in the several year history of your tumblr posted something with this tag enough times you account automatically becomes set to NSFW->Adult, you cannot change this once it has been set.
From then on any post from your blog is filtered from tag search results and from search engines (via robots.txt).
The site wholly functions on tags, you can't find anything without them. You might get lucky and see a reblog from another account you follow but much like twitter the only way you can follow topics and not individuals is by the tagging system.
Given that Yahoo only recently purchased tumblr this is shaking up the user community.
Say it ain't so!!
Someone should just create a replacement and let tumblr die off. Wouldn't take long to write either.
When they said "tumblr won't be changing", it's cute how ANYBODY believed them. Acquiring companies always say that. It's always a lie. In this case, most people even predicted it was a lie.
Don't worry, this is just step one. They'll totally wreck things later.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
It's not just blogs that feature posts tagged as "adult," it's the entirety of any blog tumblr has already flagged as NSFW or adult (the overall blog flag, not just posts). My personal photography blog has been branded as NSFW, as I sometimes post risque work. Basically, there will be no new discovery of my blog, since Tumblr's also blocked internal tag searches for such blogs as well (unless one is already following said blog). My rate of addition of new followers dropped precipitously after that. Bastards...like the occasional nipple is going to end the world.
That? That was a pigeon.
There is porn on Tumblr?
David Karp insisted they weren't going to try and censor the adult blogs, while appearing on the Colbert Report just three days ago.
.: Semper Absurda
When Yahoo and Marissa bought Tumbler, it was only a matter of time till the porn was throttled. Most women can't stand porn and some try to snuff it out. Putting women in charge of stuff they don't understand has its problems.
You need to be able to do a 301 redirect rather than a $5 website meta redirect. And when you redirect to tumblr, it's going to hit the same robots.txt you would normally.
came here to say this as well. He just said that they would keep it pure when asked exactly this question! Hopefully colbert calls him out next week, or today.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
If a corporation with market power over a particular medium uses a government-granted power to curate speech, is that censorship? For example, Apple and the game console makers curate their devices' respective stores, and they enforce this through anticircumvention provisions of copyright law.
Can you segregate your adult stuff into a separate blog, or is there a limit of one blog per account and one account per person?
Way to go yehaa, someone over there has f#cked up a beautiful picture sight for EVERYONE. Dick#eads. Greedy #ucknuts tearing the world apart for a database of peoples' pics that aren't even yours just because people loaded them onto flickr. Just like every other greedy corporation out there.
Here are all these blogs that are tagging themselves NSFW. It doesn't mean they are all porn, it's just that it's more adult themed. I've seen quite a lot of "adult" tumblr blogs that are quite artistic. Instead of univiversally blocking them from search engines... They should innovate and start a robots tag that tags the site or certain sections NSFW. That could be carried through to search engines and "safesearch" options that the user selects. Just as much as I want information to be free... I want user choices to be respected.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
While 10% of the blogs are estimated to be tagged adult.. It's actually closer to 25% of their traffic. I'm guessing internally they knew that tumblr's adult content was rising faster than the rest of the site, and they certainly don't want it to be primarily adult. It might be better for them long term, but there should be some brushback over this.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Despite their explicit promise "not to screw it up", the very first action Yahoo has taken as owner of Tumbler, is to ruin Tumblr. Major bummer! Looks like I'm going to have to remove all my - decidedly non-pornographic - content and find a new home for it. Any suggestions /. for a less prudish microblogging site?
Can someone explain to me why Yahoo is still in business? Do they have actual users/customers??
...as if millions of wankers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Seriously though, Yahoo has a knack for turning acquisitions to shit. Nobody should be surprised here. Expect more "improvements".
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Fine! I'm gonna go build my own image microblog, with blackjack and hookers!
Probably should make it distributed and censorship-resistant by design.
I propose this new site be named bendr!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
porn ... legal definition of obscenity
obscenity != porn
(or at least not necessarily)
Sure would be nice if the search engines let you choose which of the two (if any) you wanted filtered.
Pornography is one of the MAIN driving forces behind much of what shapes the web today. It may be a waste of space in your opinion, but there are hundreds of advancements in web design, storage, streaming, and so on that would not be where they are today without Pornography.
If you don't like it, fine, but give it credit when it is due. Don't dismiss it.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
Most women can't stand porn? Are you a new kind of moron?
For a good discussion of this, see the following post at Eros blog:
http://www.erosblog.com/2013/07/19/tumblr-admits-then-denies-hiding-porn/
Eros reported on this back in May, and here has a good discussion of the evasions and falsehoods from Yahoo!
Porn is, by definition, obscene. Also, as a radio DJ who must be familiar with such things, the FCC says that things that are sexually explicit and have no "literary, artistic, political, or scientific value" are obscene (just like the earlier commenter posted).
I understand that the government isn't always right, and that the FCC theoretically only has jurisdiction over the United States, but the fact that a vague-but-menacing government agency also says that porn is obscene only helps to defend my (our?) point.
~Jarmihi
Also doesn't help that Mayer is a practicing Christian
Not surprising, this is the same thing they did after they bought egroups back in 2000, they waited a few months, then made the adult groups disappear from the listings and search.
Porn is just a word. The word refers to content some want to censor access to, not by themselves and any they have a legitimate right to control, but by Anyone and everyone (except themselves, who they imagine "able to judge"). This is censorship.
It is censorship that is Constitutionally illegal in the United States.
If "porn" can be censored, anything else can be also, based on the precedent that "porn" can and anything equally disagreed with, like other's politics, (e.g., communism), religion, criticism, etc.
Permitting corporations to censor for the public, for "consumers and potential consumers", who they have no rights to control, is another next step to a corporation-controlled corporatist state.
Marissa is sure a cunning runt.
All of the opportunity they have after winning the right to publish their private fight against the NSA and the PRISM program...all of the good publicity they could be reaping in...and bang, another shot straight to the same lead-filled foot they've been firing at the past five...six years? It's as if they're trying to succeed at exiting a business and failing at -that- too. I have no idea what they sell or why they're even still solvent, except for that they've just fucked over Tumblr, the only asset they own that I -have- heard of.
The people with porn Tumblrs don't need to move, they just need an easy way to be found. Why not a retro, Yahoo-style directory? That's how lots of us found things before search engines got so good. Just start tumblrporn.com (lawyers permitting) and list all the blogs Yahoo doesn't want indexed, in categories. Sell ads. Profit!
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
In my experience, many women on Tumblr enjoy porn that makes the average /.'er's porn look like Zoobilee Zoo.
Settings > Dashboard > uncheck "Browse tag pages in Safe Mode"
You're welcome.
It wont matter. Since, people *finding* your $5 website will be much harder than finding the real original tumlr site. sadly
So a search engine company just opened up a huge ass search opportunity for a competitor? I would sell their stock if I owned it. Bet this also means not only does Yahoo! search get another competitor but so does Tumblr.
This is enourmous work, but here goes,
1. *Copy* your entire Tumblr site to another site. Keep it offline for now.
2. Remove all NSFW content on your tumblr site to see if it can be accepted as non-NSFW...
*Keep* the entire page structure when possible.
3. Then start linking and rel=canonical from your tumblr to your new site.
4. Now make your new site go online.
(SEO sucks. But that is what makes it valuable, because so few does it right.)
it's a decent compromise between not wanting to appear as a smut hub but still allowing free speech for users.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
That's why she's hiding the porn instead of removing it.
Especially those who didn't migrate to something like Blogspot or Wordpress as soon as Yahoo grabbed Tumblr. Eight years ago I dumped Flickr when Yahoo took it.
I knew they would fuck it up and they didn't disappoint me. Yahoo is a cancer on the internet, and should be cut out.
Wow. I have no idea what Tumblr was supposed to be for primarily, but the only thing I ever visited it for was soft porn - i.e., tasteful photos of beautiful young naked women. RedTube and so on are really tedious. This Marissa Mayer is turning out to be a top-notch hypocrite and control freak. Everybody suddenly has to work on site, but only one person gets their own personal on-site crèche. Yahoo is a write-off, and she's just making it worse. For historical reasons relating to my ISP, I'm stuck with a Yahoo mail account, but I'm working on migrating away from it. Too bad, because Yahoo was ground-breaking at its inception back in the nineties.
Says one thing, does the opposite...
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/427790/july-16-2013/david-karp
So now if there is a blog on Tumblr that I disagree with, I post a comment and tag the post as adult, and the blog goes away. Most users have auto post turned on. Great.
It won't be long. Someone will just make another free-for-all porn host. The die has been cast. Yahoo will have spent a billion dollars for the privilege of watching some new site spring up and take back the golden goose. As for the concerns about moving to a new blog, I doubt seriously that it will be a difficult process. Word travels pretty fast round these parts.
That's why she's hiding the porn instead of removing it.
Jokes on her; I fap to this.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon