Tumblr responds to complaints about censorship

http://staff.tumblr.com/post/55906556378/all-weve-heard-from-a-bunch-of-you-who-are

by AndrewDucker • 13 years ago

118 62 13 years ago

staff.tumblr.com

codezero• 13 years ago

I didn't even realize that Tumblr had community editors that curated their hash tags, is there some place with more information on this, besides this page? http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/editor_guidelines

gmu3• 13 years ago

I believe it is only true of a small number of featured tags: http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/featured_tags

epochwolf• 13 years ago

So... this doesn't really seem to add anything. They admit to having a Adult flag which removes the blog from all site listings and from google searches. This effectively kills the blog. What they don't deny is recently and massively increasing the scope of the flagging. This is what people are worried about. People are claiming non-spam nsfw blogs are being flagged. Blogs that wouldn't have been banned before.

Blocking tags on the mobile app is a separate issue, they don't really have a choice here. Apple will pull their app if they don't.

duskwuff• 13 years ago

Do we know that a significant number of non-spam NSFW blogs were being flagged as "Adult" by Tumblr, or is it possible that people were enabling this flag themselves without realizing its implications?

makomk• 13 years ago

While I don't really follow Tumblr enough to know for sure, it's not that hard to turn up blogs that aren't advertising anything, appear to be incredibly popular, and have been blocked from search. (For example http://damn-hot-gay-porn.tumblr.com/ - NSFW, not advertising anything that I can see, first Google result for "tumblr gay porn" and a huge number of reblogs, now completely blocked by robots.txt. Along with, apparently, most of the equally-unspammy blogs that have reblogged their stuff.)

Edit: Salon.com did a feature on the best porn Tumblrs: http://www.salon.com/2013/05/26/the_best_of_tumblr_porn/ It appears a large proportion of the Tumblrs featured there have also been marked as adult and removed from Google search.

Edit 2: I think they've basically marked all porn-heavy blogs as adult and forcibly delisted them from search, exactly like they originally said they were going to do and regardless of how spammy they are.

tieTYT• 13 years ago

Unless I misunderstood, the article other I read said there was no way to search for the NSFW tumblrs (or however you'd say it) _within_ tumblr. That would be a much bigger deal than not being able to find it from google. If you can't find it within, that means it's nearly impossible to find it in the future.

rpicard2• 13 years ago

The article says that being blocked from searches and search engines was a bug:

As some of you have pointed out, disabling Safe Mode still wasn’t allowing search results from all blogs to appear. This has been fixed.
If your blog contains anything too sexy for the average workplace, simply check "Flag this blog as NSFW" so people in Safe Mode can avoid it. Your blog will still be promoted in third-party search engines.

ojbyrne• 13 years ago

Actually I admit to not knowing much about the topic, but from the original dailydot article, it seems there are 2 levels of flagging involved - NSFW and Adult. The Adult category is the one that's been completely blackholed. This article seems to be deliberately trying to confuse the two types.

ionwake• 13 years ago

Wait I think your wrong - it says

"Flag this blog as NSFW" so people in Safe Mode can avoid it. Your blog will still be promoted in third-party search engines."

...which implies you CAN search for NSFW tumblr blogs, with google?

Or am I wrong/confused?

vilhelm_s• 13 years ago

There are two different classifications, NSFW and Adult. NSFW is opt-in by the creator of the blog, and still allows the blog to be indexed by search engines. Adult is an automatic classification applied by Tumblr (previously the blog creator could also opt in to it, but in this announcement they say that will no longer be the case), and prevents the blog from being indexed by search engines.

See this table for details: http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw

davidu• 13 years ago

Searching for NSFW tags is working fine now on the web app. It wasn't this morning. That was the bug they fixed.

werid2• 13 years ago

instagram blocks certain hashtags. will just silently return zero results.

alanh2• 13 years ago

Yes: Anything pornographic or even possibly-pornographic (#instahot is banned), and politically incorrect/harmful hashtags such as #thispo.

anigbrowl7• 13 years ago

They admit to having a Adult flag which removes the blog from all site listings and from google searches. This effectively kills the blog.

So what? nobody owes you a free search engine listing.

zaidf• 13 years ago

By your line of argument, tumblr doesn't owe any user anything.

jlgreco5• 13 years ago

What does "owing" have to do with anything?

Microsoft doesn't "owe" you a start bar. If your mother complained about it missing in the initial Windows 8 release would you tell her "So what? nobody owes you a start bar."?

Would you tell people in the 80s "So what? nobody owes you classic Coca-Cola."?

tolmasky• 13 years ago

No one is saying that its their right to have their blog indexed, they are simply expressing dissatisfaction with a change in service, which is a completely fair way for consumers of a product to interact with its creators. Tumblr has every right to not grant it, users have every right to be upset. Tumblr also has the right to remove EVERY blog of theirs from indexing, that's not the point.

mietek• 13 years ago

So what?

A fine example of a thought-terminating cliché. You should add it to the list!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_cliché

johnpowell• 13 years ago

These blogs are mostly posting pics from porn sites and slapping ads on them. Search is irrelevant. There isn't really any context.

So this doesn't kill the blog as long as people spam links to the site on Reddit. They were never going to be found by (or linked to) google in the first place.

hrktb2• 13 years ago

The reason you see innocent tags like #gay being blocked on certain platforms is that they are still frequently returning adult content which our entire app was close to being banned for.

I guess it's about Apple's no porn policy, but I thought results returned by search were OK with a 17+ years warning. Or is it for pure browsing clients only, and platform owners' official app don't get the same privilege ? Am I missing something ? (not that Apple's policies are consistent or evenly applied, but still...)

king_jester2• 13 years ago

Apple review policies and reviewers are really inconsistent. Their process isn't transparent in any way and who reviews your app has a lot of leeway for rejecting your submission, even if its the reviewers mistake.

csense2• 13 years ago

Which is a great reason for developers to say "screw Apple" and develop exclusively for Android.

I don't get why so many developers care so much about iOS.

threeseed• 13 years ago

Apple's policy is completely consistent here. If you are a browser then you don't control the data that the user is accessing. But with all other apps especially Tumblr you do control the data.

hrktb2• 13 years ago

Not really. In the meantime I've been wondering about their past stance for twitter for example, and it seems twitter got away with just marking the app 17+ [ http://allthingsd.com/20130206/nudged-by-apple-twitters-porn... ]

With such a clear prior case, it feels like tumblr tried to play it safer than necessary for some reason (the app is 17+ anyway)

werid2• 13 years ago

The logical thing to do in this situation would be to block those search terms when they come from ios-devices.

scott_o• 13 years ago

While I think its really cool from a programming perspective, from a web design perspective, that logo was annoying the shit out of me. If you want me to read your blog, let me read it and stop distracting me.

wavesounds• 13 years ago

I was gona come comment how cool I thought it was - perhaps because I lost interest in the actual article though :-)

olog-hai• 13 years ago

You have many options for improving your reading experience, among them:

Evernote Clearly

Readability's Read Now feature

InstaRead

viewtext.org (always extremely slow for me)

MrFoof• 13 years ago

Yahoo, this is porn we're talking about. Porn on the internet. Yahoo, porn finds a way.

This is like buying Starbucks and then getting the "brilliant idea" to stop selling coffee and to instead focus on selling coffee cakes.

mullingitover• 13 years ago

I'm holding out for the tumblr userbase to protest by marking all their blogs as nsfw, and watching tumblr completely disappear from web searches.

norswap• 13 years ago

The article explicitly states NSFW blogs are still searchable.

eksith• 13 years ago

Well, it seems it was a glitch + some misinformation (not helped by the said glitch), but I already see two problems with that :

1) As with Facebook, people who will hate it will still hang on because a lot of existing content they've subscribed/favorited/bookmarked etc...

2) Getting the Tumblr userbase to do anything other than whine is like herding cats into dancing Gangnam Style (I mean real cats, not Psy with superimposed kitty faces).

If you're unhappy with whatever they're doing, a better option (IMO)would be to complain even louder until Tumbler actually changes things. Unlike FB, which is pretty deaf to complaints to begin with and is run by Satan-lite (Zuckerberg), Tumblr was only recently acquired and Yahoo investors don't want to sink the boat.

littletables• 13 years ago

The complaints are not about censorship, they are about being de-indexed. "Adult" blogs are a separate category of NSFW, so this response doesn't address the issue - which is specifically regarding "adult" blogs.

In addition to disabling search for adult blogs, Tumblr has enabled robots.txt (Disallow: /) for all "adult" blogs so they're not findable from the outside any more either. On top of all this, Tumblr removed its Erotica category, which was formerly released in January 2010 with much pride on their part.

This all changed sometime early this year, and began to be noticed by sex bloggers both on and off of Tumblr in mid-May.

dmoney• 13 years ago

From a friend: "They seem to have rescinded a lot of it, albeit with a shitty nonapology blaming users: <link to this post>. Some of the tags in question could never [have] brought up porn, like 'depression'. I call at least partial bullshit."

elliottcarlson3• 13 years ago

Not sure what the 'depression' tag has to do with any of this - it is not filtered, it returns results, and it has a PSA at the top of the page as with other specific keywords due to the nature of the search query.

TazeTSchnitzel• 13 years ago

Depression probably returns self-harm images, which Apple would obviously block.

cientifico• 13 years ago

Reject to read anything that have a logo in the left side moving all the time.

tehwalrus• 13 years ago

I'm still waiting for a real porn filter for my tumblr. These changes screw authors over without letting me actually have the browsing experience I want.

I follow a bunch of blogs which, very occasionally, post something NSFW, which they tag #NSFW. I want to see most of their posts, but filter out those tagged ones from my dashboard, whether I view it from my PC or phone. (in a web browser, it's possible to do this with an unofficial extension, which tumblr breaks every couple of weeks and then has to be patched. on your phone, you're stuck seeing the porn on the subway, with people looking over your shoulder.)

this is simple; a text field of blocked tags for each user, and then filter the input to their dashboard table (or whatever). There is no way to do this at present. (I've just checked my settings page, and still not there.)

(this doesn't just work for porn; it also lets people filter out stuff on a topic that they aren't interested in, but see the other stuff from those users. Twitter also lacks this feature, although many twitter clients do implement a "tag mute" setting.)

Tumblr responds to complaints about censorship

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