
Tumblr’s anti-porn algorithm is flagging basically everything as NSFW - imartin2k
https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/tumblr-nsfw-algorithm-flagging-2018/
======
keypusher
Oath is desperate to put more ads on Tumblr, because they massively overpaid
for it ($1 billion) and have been throwing money at it ever since (100s of
millions). I guess because of the way the content is displayed they can't just
segregate nsfw stuff into a demonetized stream, but if they think they can
turn Tumblr into a mainstream site that shows family-centric ads, they clearly
don't understand what they bought.

~~~
AJ007
This is clearly Tumblr's Digg moment. They are going to have a 100% write down
on this one.

It is also worth adding Twitter has built a reasonable ad business and they
are full of just as much porn as Tumblr. Google actually shows ads for porn
and other adult services on their platform. If any of the higher ups at
Verizon are reading this:

\- Fire everyone involved in the NSFW filtering. Clearly this wasn't even
tested.

\- Fire everyone who thought NSFW material had to be purged from your
platform.

There is a short window where you can reverse the decision and benefit from
all of the people who were reminded Tumblr existed. After that window closes,
your business is dead.

~~~
jamesholden
\- Fire everyone who thought NSFW material had to be purged from your
platform.

I mean, can't they see that a lot of traffic flows through tumblr via those
interests? Do they not know how much of a loss of usage that this will cause?
I legitimately have zero other reason to use tumblr.

~~~
JulianMorrison
On the contrary, it's probably a small part of their service. The nature of
Tumblr is to make it easy to find like minded people, and construct a subset
of the site that's full of what you're into. So it's very easy to feel "Tumblr
is all left-wing teens" or "Tumblr is all porn" depending on what you go
looking for. But Tumblr is a galaxy of niches and I doubt porn was their
mainstay. This fact probably caused them to underestimate the disruptive
effect of banning it.

~~~
soundwave106
Actually, I more tend to agree with this article
([https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/18/tumblr-is-not-what-you-
thi...](https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/18/tumblr-is-not-what-you-think/)) that
a big part of the appeal of Tumblr was a bit more the opposite of this: Tumblr
could act as a personal microblog of sorts, where you could put up a page that
wasn't very easily discoverable, and share with a few friends interests and
memes that you didn't want to necessarily broadcast to the world in full
Facebook fashion. That includes people's porn stashes, as well as NSFW kinks
and other quirks. Other stuff too (memes etc.), but the NSFW was a significant
part of Tumblr.

Furthermore, my impression of Tumblr was that it had quite a bit of artists.
Most artist-oriented platforms have policies that aim at banning the more
overt commercial pornography, while allowing artistic nudity or erotica with
appropriate tags (see DeviantArt, Vimeo, etc.) I was actually quite surprised
that Tumblr didn't try this route at first to be honest. From what I can tell
the "adult content ban" Tumblr implemented is way overly broad-based, not to
mention very US-moral attitude centric (eg "female presenting nipples" is less
of a big deal in many countries).

~~~
thetricia
I'm not a big fan of this meme of porn being bigger than what it is. Tumblr
was never about that and Snapchat wasn't and isn't a sexting app.

The adult content that showed up was pretty annoying, especially on some tags
that were seemingly less censored. Like, most LGBT tags were clean, but some
would have a lot for whatever reason. I'd welcome the change back then (which
was around acquisition time). But even then it was apparent Tumblr's odds of
becoming anything other than another diary/blog graveyard weren't great.

Tumblr occasionally banning thinspo blogs was probably much more of an
"attack" on the core user base. Not by numbers but in spirit.

edit: and for the record I'm not especially talking about parent's comment,
not sure why i picked this one, mostly agree with it

~~~
gmmeyer
Last time Tumblr broke out the numbers porn was 11% of the biggest blogs. More
than 1 out of 10 blogs is a porn blog. That's a huge portion of their user
base and will likely cause it to totally crash.

~~~
thetricia
As long as the overlap with regular users is small there's no reason for why
that would cascade [0].

That kind of content is usually banned/censored on most mainstream services,
just letting it be will get you a non-insignificant number. I've seen people
claim 3% for twitter, no clue if true or not, but few would say that about
Twitter here. Too many people in tech are in the core user-base to fall for
this.

[0] unless shut down this will be a loooong slow death no matter what happens.
I still have a semi popular account on one of the dead sites of the era.
Everybody knows it's dead but these communities are a bit like families, hard
to completely ghost them.

------
cabalamat
While Tumblr have every right to have whatever terms of service they like,
this feels like a bait-and-switch to me. People and communities have become
accustomed to allowing NSFW stuff on Tumblr, and if Tumblr had forbidden this
from the get go these people who have set up somewhere else and not on Tumblr.

What we need[1] is for social networks to be interoperable, with open data and
protocols, so that a user can up sticks, move to a different site, and take
their existing data (posts, images etc) with them and _keep their followers_.

1\. As I have argued before, see
[https://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2018/08/30/dont-
nationalise-...](https://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2018/08/30/dont-nationalise-
facebook-mandate-open-data-and-protocols/)

~~~
Waterluvian
I think you're pretty much describing Solid

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_pr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_\(web_decentralization_project\))

Though I could be wrong. I never fully grokked Solid last time I read about
it.

~~~
cabalamat
That and Mastodon, ActivityPub and IPFS are examples of the sort of thing I
have in mind.

Also the decentralised flood-fill model of Usenet.

~~~
rspeer
You can't move between Mastodon instances and keep your followers.

~~~
dcbadacd
And that's a poor design decision. Why should it matter.

------
netcan
"it’s often hard to see why LGBTQ content gets flagged as NSFW – although the
underlying reason is, of course, homophobia and transphobia.*

I think you need to start with the impossible, define porn/nsfw.

Why is lingerie provacative and bikinis aren't? Why is nudity even a problem?
Why nipples and not elbows... Ultimately, this stuff is the very definition of
subjective... something that is entirely determined by perception. What is and
isn't "safe for work" is constantly changing. Taboos allow dishonesty to
continue.

Call it homophobia if you like, but I call the whole thing conservatism.

Personally, I think our rapidly changed attitudes about homophobia and
transgenderism is closely related to sexual liberalism generally. Without
online porn, gay culture could easily have stayed closeted.

~~~
Waterluvian
When I was a teen my favourite joke was, "people with foot fetishes are lucky.
To them, every beach is a nude beach."

Really does apply here. It's increasingly absurd to define what's sexually
explicit as our society becomes increasingly liberal about our sexuality.

It was easier back when there was a very narrow definition of heterosexuality,
leaving everything else to be homosexuality and/or some form of "perversion".
We're basically dealing with the propagation of those attitudes forwards
through time.

------
furicane
I wouldn't label the algorithm as anti-porn. I'd label it "how to lose user
base and drive the company to a hole" algorithm. It's not likely that it
detects actual porn, it's basically failing miserably and the result is
abandonment. That's what you get when you want to be PC and yet another "me
too, I do cool stuff too" company. There are lessons to be learned here, and
for that - thank you Tumblr :)

~~~
DavidVoid
> That's what you get when you want to be PC

I'd hardly consider this "trying to be PC".

[https://i.imgur.com/cgGx4JR.png](https://i.imgur.com/cgGx4JR.png)

This is more about bowing down to America's backwards views on sex and nudity,
most likely in order to appease advertisers and/or Apple.

~~~
KozmoNau7
I can't imagine the advertisers being too hot on literal nazism and white
supremacism, though. At least I hope not.

~~~
danaris
Well, you wouldn’t think so, but a lot of the anger on Tumblr the past few
days has been that they’re destroying major communities (more than just NSFW;
they deleted everything tagged with “chronic pain”, for goodness sake, and how
is that relevant?), but leaving all the Nazis alone.

~~~
skymt
Deleting "chronic pain" posts makes sense if Tumblr is trying to eliminate
drug-related posts with as much cleverness and grace as the porn purge.
(Chronic is uncommon slang for marijuana.)

~~~
fjsolwmv
Chronic pain is also closely link with opiod abuse.

------
dpwm
It would be quite humorous, and also quite telling of the experience of those
implementing this, if it turned out to be classic class imbalance during
training.

If 90% of the training dataset is nsfw, and you train a classifier naively on
that dataset, and your test and validation data is 90% nsfw, then 90% accuracy
is very easy.

~~~
AJ007
I would really, really like to know what they are doing. Was it an in-house
solution, something from a startup, or something from an established
enterprise tech company?

One of the things I’ve been saying repeatedly is that companies are going to
implement machine learning incorrectly, and there will be obvious failures and
blow ups, but the most dangerous and catastrophic failures will be a cascade
of things that look like they work correctly. In this case, Tumblr implemented
something that was blatantly obviously broken. That’s just pathetically poor
management.

In the next 10 years, I would give high odds of least 1 company in the s&p 500
will fail due to bad machine learning implementation(s.)

~~~
lmkg

      > from an established enterprise tech company
    

My first guess, based on basically nothing at all, was that this was an IBM
Watson project. 0.3 seconds of Googling found that IBM has already published a
case study on their website about Verizon using Watson. So, I'm going to go
with that.

[https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/verizon](https://www.ibm.com/case-
studies/verizon)

------
jonathanstrange
Tumblr is dead. I give it three months before it's forgotten by the majority
of its former user base.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
So the question is where will that userbase go, now might be the time to
position yourself to accept them if you're a similar site .. I probably
wouldn't be here [on HN] if Slashdot/Digg/etc. hadn't screwed up in the past.

~~~
LaikaF
It seems that most people are going:

\- Twitter \- Pillowfort \- Wordpress \- Mastodon

depends a lot on what the user was into posting.

I'm also seeing quite a few more people operating on multiple sites at once
now, even SFW blogs. So they'll post Tumblr, Pillowfort, and Wordpress at the
same time so their former users can still see them.

------
xte
I do never used Tumblr but AFAICT porn is the most common contents, so i bet
the major source of revenue...

BTW the neovittorian movement against sex in general (disguised in many form
to health things, anti-pornography for pedagogic things, anti-prostitution
because of racket, ...) it's a clear sign of our degradation as society.

~~~
ineedasername
I'm not sure it's a degradation of society. I think it's unhealthy, but the
original Victorian era taboos didn't result in a degradation of society. In
fact it appears to have given rise to something of a backlash against that
kind of thinking culminating in the roaring 20's. Then the depression hit, and
WWII, and in the aftermath of WWII female empowerment (women in the industrial
workplace) there was a backlash movement against women to "put them back" in
the home. But then the counter backlash of the 60's and 70's hit. We've spent
the last ~120 years swinging the pendulum back and forth, I'm not sure this is
anything else but a part of that same pattern.

------
cabalamat
I'm sure the upload filters the EU wants to mandate will be every bit as
successful as this, in terms of the number of false positives.

------
intralizee
Why not just make ads show on SFW content and have some sort agreement with
advertisers. It's not like google has to block everything or maybe they have
privilege.

------
benmmurphy
I'm not sure how this proves the algorithm is doing a poor job. Any NSFW
classifier is going to have a non-trivial error rate. Tumblr hosts LOTS of
images. So if you have a non-trivial error rate and multiply it by LOTS of
images you are going to get LOTS of images being misclassified incorrectly.
It's not surprising someone was able to write a story about a bunch of images
being misclassified. This doesn't seem to tell us anything about whether the
algorithm has a high error rate or not.

~~~
int_19h
In this case, the ultimate arbiters are the users of the service. Judging by
their feedback so far, it is doing a poor job (and it doesn't matter if it's
state of the art etc - that just means that our state of the art algorithms
are that bad).

~~~
kkarakk
tumblr's announcemnt about removing nsfw content got flagged,i'd say the algo
is trash

------
jillesvangurp
Artificial stupidity combined with corporate stupidity, it's predictably not
going to end well.

------
shiburizu
I feel like the discourse might be missing the point, starting at why we are
here: Tumblr was removed from the App Store. Tumblr is a website but without a
doubt it thrives on being a mobile app on iPhones and iPads. This ended up
happening because of course the NSFW content on Tumblr is _notable_ , even if
we don't know the actual scale. Lots of pornbots and what not.

What concerns is this: Well and good that Apple says "we don't host
pornographic communities on our app store" and Oath immediately sacrificed the
lamb to appease Apple. How is this a problem after so long? What if I told an
Apple executive the exact same content manifests in Twitter and Reddit?

Evidently the app stores have no interest in hosting NSFW artists and the open
web should step up.

------
loudmax
I read a lot of posts on Reddit bemoaning Tumblr's decision to stop carrying
adult content. A lot of people there and here feel that this decision spells
the end of the company. That may be the case, but I never understood how
Tumblr was profiting from hosting all that adult content to begin with. I
presume they're selling ads, in which case disassociating themselves from
anything that could be considered pornographic seems like reasonable business
logic.

I'm not questioning whether Tumblr's decision is fair, or morally right or
wrong. I just don't see how Tumblr was generating enough revenue to cover
their costs to begin with. Is image hosting really that cheap?

~~~
shaklee3
Keep in mind Reddit users also predicted the death of Reddit during the
pao/banning fiasco. It's only grown since then.

~~~
superkuh
False. That was the beginning of the end.
[https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com](https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com)

~~~
shaklee3
Your link only goes back to the beginning of 2018. Pao left in 2015.and your
link is comparing overall rankings of websites. That in no way tells you
anything about redditt's traffic growth.

[https://www.statista.com/chart/11882/number-of-subreddits-
on...](https://www.statista.com/chart/11882/number-of-subreddits-on-reddit/)

~~~
superkuh
The banning of completely legal and non-controversial content didn't stop with
Pao. That was the start. It's only accelerated. And that's what you see in the
stats. Reddit is down in popularity since 2015.

They abandoned their userbase and are attempting to bootstrap up into a
gentrified facebook clone with new emphasis on personal identity (ie, having
people post to their user profile pages instead of subreddits, and the
implementation of commercial ad "personal" profiles like u/washingtonpost).

And luckily for them in 2016 a partisan political issue finally provided
motivation for people to leave Facebook for other sites. This explains your
observations about number of subs.

~~~
shaklee3
If you make that assertion please provide data in the form of graphs or
tables. All I said was pao left in 2015, and during that time I remember
Reddit users predicting it would go there way of digg. It didn't.

------
JulianMorrison
My feeling is that this may be the breakthrough moment for Mastodon.

~~~
criddell
Is there an example where a centralized commercial service was successfully
replaced by a more open, federated service?

~~~
JulianMorrison
The electronic mail that came before SMTP would be a good example.

~~~
criddell
Email is a good example and somebody else mentioned the web in general.

I think the big difference there is that there are game changing advantages to
end users being able to send email anywhere and to access all of the web
rather than what was essentially one web site.

Federating Tumblr (and Twitter with Mastodon) seems like a lateral move at
best. The worst case is that it makes it harder to use and so it might even be
a step backwards.

------
pndy
This "article" was clearly done only to gain page views using the ongoing
tumblr topic regarding adult content removal. The implication that company
decision was done to oppress the LGBT community by algorithm automated actions
is ridiculously sad but again, helps pumping the hype and virtual anger.
Author didn't take the effort of thinking about possible reasons why algorithm
works around NSFW content in such way but instead already judged that tumblr
is going after LGBT (+ whatever else comes in that string of characters; I
couldn't care less - it's enough that I'm somehow a part of that community but
it's like with least liked family member - you really don't wanna see it or
interact with) community and we should all care because this is an
"problematic" issue. The victim card is being placed on the table.

After seeing around what topics the author revolves the overall tone of this
"journalism" example is not surprising.

I did back-up my tumblr, I'm waiting for reliable platform to emerge where I
could post cat pictures, funny and not always politically correct images and
whatever else.

------
Kye
There was another post here a week or two ago about an image processing
algorithm that turned everything into blurry genitalia. Could it be related?

edit: Found it. I'm not the only one who wondered if this was the case! New
comment in that thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18601287](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18601287)

------
izzydata
Why are or why can advertisers be so inflexible with the concept of the
internet containing nsfw content?

~~~
forgottenpass
Because society hasn't wised up to the fact bloggers and news are doing to
social media the equivalent of what parent- and religous groups did to box TV
and movies into well-defined bounds for allowed content.

------
aussieguy1234
My Tumblr blog of 2 years (future-tech) with 20K followers was summarily
terminated today. There is no NSFW content on it. The termination happened
shortly after I started protesting Tumblrs new policy. I did notice, however
that some benign posts were incorrectly flagged as NSFW.

------
ryanlol
Why does the author seem to suggest that the nazis are less affected by this
than pictures of furniture?

~~~
DavidVoid
I'd argue that they are since searches for some "adult" terms are now censored
but searches for nazi terms are not.

For example:

[https://www.tumblr.com/search/breast/recent](https://www.tumblr.com/search/breast/recent)

[https://www.tumblr.com/search/nsfw/recent](https://www.tumblr.com/search/nsfw/recent)

vs.

[https://www.tumblr.com/search/1488/recent](https://www.tumblr.com/search/1488/recent)

[https://www.tumblr.com/search/heil+hitler/recent](https://www.tumblr.com/search/heil+hitler/recent)

[https://www.tumblr.com/search/sieg+heil/recent](https://www.tumblr.com/search/sieg+heil/recent)

edit: Image of other examples in case you don't want to actually go to
tumblr's website.

[https://i.imgur.com/cgGx4JR.png](https://i.imgur.com/cgGx4JR.png)

~~~
ryanlol
Tumblr also allows me to search for raygold and PTHC does that mean they
approve of child pornography now?

I don't believe that the fact that they've restricted a pretty small set of
porn-related keywords suggests that furniture is more likely to be caught by
tumblrs filters than nazi content, which is the claim the article appears to
make.

~~~
int_19h
I think the point is to highlight the "sex is worse than Nazis" logic behind
this prioritization.

~~~
beaconstudios
I think the reality is that someone important somewhere went on tumblr and
said "hey we can't advertise on this, there's porn everywhere!", rather than
them trying to filter things out in order of unpleasantness.

~~~
culot
Didn't they just have their app removed from Google's Play Store for the
presence child porn on their platform? I think the point might be that they
cannot reasonably be expected police their platform to determine what porn is
and is not acceptable. Surely there is going to be _a lot_ of porn posted that
is crazy unacceptable, and I'm sure they don't want to have to sift through it
all to discern what is what.

I am actually surprised porn is a big thing they are known for, considering
their platform is aimed at kids/adolescents?

------
joshstrange
I'm glad Tumblr existed (not just for porn) but I hope this kills them. What a
huge stab in the back to their community, it should not go unpunished.

------
coldtea
Tumblr is truly dead without NSFW stuff. Nobody cares for anything else in it
(except you and 10 others, outlier, to pre-empt your reaction).

~~~
coldtea
Not sure what's the controversy here. Here's a Medium post on the same idea:
[https://medium.com/futuresin/tumblrs-porn-ban-could-kill-
it-...](https://medium.com/futuresin/tumblrs-porn-ban-could-kill-
it-85b31c76a470)

------
bryanrasmussen
well, looks like my old automated tumblr works fine
[http://apologiseinsincerely.tumblr.com/](http://apologiseinsincerely.tumblr.com/)
\- I was worried some of the robots carrying women would look bad, or some
image manipulations might resemble something they weren't.

