CW: Brief child sexual abuse mention.
Is anyone else worried about this? Tumblr banned porn in 2018, and recently they’ve begun to restrict content even further. GFYCat banned porn. Imgur is also banning porn. Reddit doesn’t allow you to use it to host images on NSFW subs, and I’ll bet you anything they ban porn entirely within a year or so.
Where does that leave people who even just want to discuss adult content? Even if you think porn should disappear from society–and I would hardcore disagree with that–that’s not the only thing that’s getting caught up in this wave of censorship. On Tumblr, if you were sexually abused by an adult as a minor, you can no longer discuss this. Literally any reference to child sexual abuse by an adult is now banned on Tumblr. Even if you’re recounting something that happened to you. Hell, even if it’s fictional.
Where are you supposed to go now to discuss adult topics? Twitter is a fascist hellhole, but soon it’s going to be one of your only options, at least social media-wise. And even outright porn is getting harder to find. Your options now are basically the mainstream porn sites and the shit you have to do deep googling for, with nothing in between.
I find this very worrying. Even the vilest, most no-redeeming-social-value porn doesn’t deserve to be banished from the internet entirely. As long as someone gets something out of it and no one is harmed in its creation, porn has its place. But while decentralized alternatives are cropping up to replace social media, nobody seems to want to step up and make a place where we can all be horny without corporate influence.
Or maybe I’m just bitching that I don’t know where to find the good porn on Mastodon. Who knows. Regardless, I think there’s a worthwhile discussion to be had about the scouring of the internet of too risque for advertisers.
Edit: You know what, this person articulates it better than I ever could: https://devonprice.medium.com/mourning-porn-on-imgur-mourning-trans-kinky-history-64de2eaaa6ce
Is anyone else worried about this? Tumblr banned porn in 2018, and recently they’ve begun to restrict content even further. GFYCat banned porn. Imgur is also banning porn. Reddit doesn’t allow you to use it to host images on NSFW subs, and I’ll bet you anything they ban porn entirely within a year or so.
yeah, in broad strokes. i don’t think porn is at any risk of being completely eradicated—actually, i don’t think it’ll ever even really suffer. it’s a big constant of the internet and too many people have an interest in it because most humans have an appreciation for sex.
what i do think is at risk is anything that isn’t, for lack of better wording, “normie” and NSFW. queer NSFW spaces, weird porn communities, sex work, and other stuff like that? that’s the stuff i’m really worried about; which gets disproportionately policed; and which doesn’t have the institutional backing of porn websites or ordinary people to fight back when they’re threatened.
sex workers, for example, have had it really bad since SESTA/FOSTA. Apple (and the payment processors behind them) have made it basically impossible for a website wanting to accommodate NSFW content to have an app. my main social media site of choice, Cohost, doesn’t have one specifically because it would otherwise be subject to this issue, since it allows a lot of queer content, porn, and sex workers. that really sucks in a lot of ways! and unfortunately, i’m not sure what can really be done about that short of the exceptional step of building payment processors which aren’t so puritanical.
That’s a good point about the payment processors. :(
Sex work should have been fully legalized years ago, imo. And destigmatized. I hope the future is brighter, eventually.
That’s a big part of what I’m worried about too. Normie shit will always exist, even if it has to go underground. But what about the rest of us? We should be allowed to enjoy being horny too, dammit. And sex workers should be allowed to make a living in peace.
CW: mentions of child sexual exploitation in this bit
You mention Cohost, but I actually left in disgust after they announced they were banning porn of underage fictional characters. I don’t even really consume that content, but I will die on the hill that pretending fictional characters have the same rights as real people is puritanical nonsense. Drawing or writing any porn, no matter how morally reprehensible the content, harms no one (assuming you aren’t referencing real people in your art). Even indie sites that should really know better fall prey to this nonsense. And comparing sexualizing heavily stylized pixel characters to real-world child sexual abuse is incredibly insulting to survivors.
You mention Cohost, but I actually left in disgust after they announced they were banning porn of underage fictional characters. I don’t even really consume that content, but I will die on the hill that pretending fictional characters have the same rights as real people is puritanical nonsense.
funny enough they’re going through this row again because they revised their guidelines today and they now allow for non-human, underage porn (“cub art”, for the furries in the audience) and a lot of people are really mad they’re even allowing that. hilariously, i can now draw on my experience moderating this place to explain to people how hard it is to write rules like that and why i appreciate them trying to allow some of that content with coherent rules, instead of just blanket banning it and being done.
also as an aside, you can use spoilers in markdown to hide the mentions of sexual exploitation. lemmy doesn’t use markdown, but commonmark, so they’re done like this here:
::: spoiler hidden or nsfw stuff a bunch of spoilers here :::on here.
hidden or nsfw stuff
woo!
Oh, thank you, that’s very useful! I’ll edit.
And lol. I find it incredibly silly that people get so worked up over shit that’s literally not real, especially people who would otherwise consider themselves sex-positive and don’t realize they’ve ingested Christian “impure thoughts are bad even though they don’t hurt anyone” propaganda.
Oh, thank you, that’s very useful! I’ll edit.
oh oops, i ambiguously did the formatting, so your heading is the whole thing you tried to spoil. here’s a better formatting of it:
::: [heading] [spoiled stuff, one space after the part you want to be the heading] :::I can’t seem to make this work. Not sure what I’m doing wrong.
Edit: Never mind. Had to refresh to see it.
Thank you so much for that spoiler tag explainer, I’ve been wondering about that this whole time since I joined a few days ago. I wish there was an interface button for in jerboa (maybe there is on the website?) like there is for bold and italics and so on.
Edit: I think possibly the spoiler tags may just not work in jerboa at all, actually. Mayhap I will have to abandon this app for the website until it’s improved or another app appears.
on desktop lemmy, they have this link on each post which explains the variant of markdown they use. furthest button on the right, the (?) button.
Oh, thank you! That is handy. Guess I missed it by virtue of applying via mobile, then switching to jerboa. I’ve not touched the desktop site yet at all! I shall though, sooner or later.
There are a few sites still supporting it. I’m glad Patreon still supports creators creating porn, for example. Also porn games are becoming more accessible on places like Steam now.
Overall I agree with you though that most sites are banning or degrading in quality.
GFYCat banned porn.
I feel they handled it best. They banned it but moved existing content to another domain (redgifs) and allowed it to operate separately (before ultimately selling it).
Well, guess my first comment on this site is going to be about porn.
My thinking, beyond any of it, is that pornography drives a lot of media. If you can’t get porn on it, then it’s not going to be as popular. Imgur is big enough that it doesn’t need porn, but I’d be interested to see some statistics from before and after that policy change. Tumblr, well I’m pretty sure 75% of Tumblr’s usage was porn, ban that and self-destruct. GFYCat never seemed like a good place for porn anyway, so I’m not sure what to think about that.
So, what I mean is these platforms are cutting off a portion of their userbase. In this respect I’m less concerned about accessibility to pornography, but the engagement on the platform.
Also, indeed I have observed things migrating to paid services. Lot of things are moving that way, gotta pay another subscription (and have that all over your credit card statement).
I heard a joke when I was younger. “The internet is 99% porn, if we got rid of it, the only site left would be bringbackporn.com”
I’ve heard the idea that one of the biggest issues of the web is the homogenization of user spaces. When I was a kid, I could get on Club Penguin, Webkinz, Disney and Nick’s websites for games. I think AOL even had a kid’s oriented network I might’ve used once or twice when dial was still around. When I got into my teen years, I started joining user forums and message boards where I knew that it was mainly adults, so I did my best to act mature (and failed, lol), and if I got called out for being too young and not fitting in, I either got ran off or banned. Now that I’m an adult, even in non-NSFW internet spaces, I don’t really want to interact with kids, but rules and culture are dictated by the need not to expose children to unsavory content because we just let them run around.
I’m sure it’s the responsible thing to do, because I saw stuff I never should have, browsing 4chan, adult content, and other really nasty stuff as a kid. I definitely don’t want kids to be subject to that, but damn I hate that the presumption that kids might see something be a strike against users when adults want to discuss mature topics.
I’ve heard the idea that one of the biggest issues of the web is the homogenization of user spaces.
this is another big one yeah. both for children and adults the net has “constricted”, in many senses. even i–with my extensive bookmarks and media diet–still get most of my news, interaction, and discussion from exactly four sites: discord, twitter, cohost, and beehaw. sometimes i check tumblr, and i watch plenty of youtube but often in the background of other stuff. when i was 10, i had probably double the spaces i checked out that i do now (and was a regular on a bunch of forums that i probably shouldn’t have been lol).
I miss when the internet had rabbitholes. Stumbleupon and personal web pages wasted so much of my time. It’s like the internet was changed by urban sprawl. Instead of having different communities, some busy, some slow, some with broad interests, others with niche, there is only one shade of grey for the entire web: clean, monetize, and lowest common denominator.
I don’t know. Aggregator sites are closing shop in that respect, but, sex workers are workers, and they deserve to be paid for their work. What we have had for a long time is a situation of rampant and normalized pirate streaming of a genre of media, while the people who make that media are disaparaged to high heaven and back again. And it’s a situation, further, that obscures or even distributes child sexual abuse materials, revenge porn, videos of sexual assaults passed off as consensual (including videos of otherwise consenting people, who did NOT consent to filming, that were filmed with hidden cameras), stolen nudes and sex tapes, and the like.
Small porn sites, run by the people who make the legitimate porn, still exist. People could, perhaps, consider paying the sex workers for the thing that they make.
Amateur porn might be harder to come by, but, with that, it seems a lot harder if not impossible to guarantee that all parties are consenting to it, anyway.
Too many sites banning NSFW discussion, including discussion like you say of peoples’ own experiences of abuse, is a bridge too far, but I’m not seeing that as a general trend, like video porn bans. If nothing else, it’s far easier to discuss sex or abuse via text here than it is to ask instances to take on the risks associated with trying to host and moderate video or image porn.
Also, erotica is absolutely thriving, especially ever since the invention and adoption of e-readers. There is no shortage of it, nor difficulty with accessing it, except on a few specific sites (e.g. Tumblr).
“And even outright porn is getting harder to find”
Haha. What? It’s never been easier to access free porn since the Internet began. There are tons of free porn sites on the net. Why do you need social media sites for that kind of content? Don’t those sites have their own forums and comment sections too?
Do you know how goddamn hard it is to find anything more specific than “straight, BDSM” on those websites? There’s barely any way to filter or save shit, and certainly not both at once. And god forbid you want to create porn and post it yourself, especially of any variety other than “two real people having sex on video.” Plus there’s no equivalent to the common thing on Twitter/Tumblr where people will collaborate on porn, often by one person giving another a prompt. Also, their comments and forums are dogshit, and allow you minimal curation of your identity and interactions. You can no longer, say, have a blog that sometimes posts porn and other times posts different things.
Basically, if you prefer your interaction with porn to be anything other than “watch a video of two real people fucking,” the internet sucks right now.
For the amateur content, of course!
I mean honestly this is it right here for me. I don’t like porn where people are getting paid. Sorry. I just don’t. Mixing money and sex feels really gross to me, even if I’m not the one actually paying.
Outside of Reddit, I’m entirely unaware of any amateur porn communities. Everything else I’m aware of is revenge porn, which is very not okay.
I agree with you on many points… a lot of the ‘reddit amateur’ stuff isn’t, anymore… but there’s still some people that are present only because they want to be - its just more and more for the dollar. :(
And agreed; anything cringy is just… abuse. Period.
I agree partially, you could say that porn and nsfw stuff are leaving social media platforms that are trying to appeal to advertisers and shareholders. I know that major porn subreddits are disappearing taking out a big repository of it along with Imgur’s takedown. The CombatFootage subreddit is the only one that I might personally miss from a shutdown. I believe high quality documentation of war is important to highlight the dangers and tragedy of war/conflict at a closeup level.
There is still a lot of it across the internet if you know where to look. After all, the internet is for porn.
I don’t care for porn pretty much at all, but I recognize people have needs. I think it’s fine to have those communities but within their own time and place. It’s hard if not impossible to have a nuanced, intelligent conversation with people in horny mode. It would be like having a town hall where participants rub their genitals while speaking.
I’m sure a group will come up something once porn gets banned.
It does sound like people are more concerned about ‘Free’ porn disappearing more than all porn imo.
There’s still a tonne out there for all sorts of kinks. You just have to pay for it (A bit like the old days).
Yup my first comment here will be about porn.
My worry with the increasing hostility against pornography is that queer content is automatically considered as “pornographic”.
Also who knows how long that’ll last with MasterCard, PayPal, Kofi and other payment processing being against porn and using their influence so its less profitable, thus also harming sex workers.
I think you’re blowing things a little out of proportion.
I’m just going to leave this here.
https://devonprice.medium.com/mourning-porn-on-imgur-mourning-trans-kinky-history-64de2eaaa6ce
following this for a friend