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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."
I think the point is that they're not allowing spiders to crawl pornographic tumblrs. That affects everyone who uses a search engine that respects robots.txt.
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Isn't the result the same? Whether you take it down or hide it, people who want it can't find it.
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Not only Yahoo's index, they're blocking indexing for Google and Bing also. Presumably via robots.txt or similar.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
Rendering 10% of Tumblr invisible is an improvement and a great start. Please get to work on the other 90%, too.
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.
point is that they're not allowing spiders to crawl
No, that's tangential. The point is people have made different types of information publicly available, using a private service, and now that information is being effectively taken offline with no recourse. The content is content tagged as "NSFW" or "Adult" which could affect educational content, or content not approrpriate for minors -- which isn't always porn.
This is really falls into the broader category of censoring information which was previously publicly available. FTFA that's about 12 million sites apparently
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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.
It's still a dick move, and you know it.
Some people use their blog as a source of income. That income depends on their blog having an established, searchable presence. Some of those blogs may have the kind of content (like porn) that you or other people may personally look down on.
"Just make your own blog" is a terrible option when you already *have* an established blog, because it means moving and losing a lot of your traffic.
I don't see anyone where arguing that what Yahoo is doing should be *illegal*. They're arguing that it's not a good thing to do, and I agree with them. Finally, I fail to see any good reason that they need to do it, since the major search engines all have adult content filtering already. It's unlikely that Google or Bing demanded that they de-index adult oriented blogs.
And, they are stipping the tags from those sites as well so that in internal search will not show those sites either. You have to either see their content through a reblog or if you're following them.
I got here through a series of tubes
To be classified as porn, two opinions have to be met: provokes a sexual response, and has no artistic merit.
Given that people have rather elaborate sexual fetishes, the first part can be (and is) used to classify practically any type of content as porn by at least someone. Not to mention that some people get a hardon from leather boots -- ergo leather boots are pornography? The second aspect is grossly subjective as well, as some people find art in the arrangement of trashcan contents.
Because of this, what get's classified as porn by one individual may not be classified as such by another. Strictly speaking, it becomes a scenario of "you can't look for this because I said so". Well, excuse me, but... I've outgrown the need for parenting on that level. We're basically all adults (or on the way of becoming one), and the world is ran by adults for adults. Subjecting all of us to childlike treatment is an insult.
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