There seems to be a growing reluctance to accept that a person or a group being allowed to exist on a platform does not in any way serve as an endorsement of that person or group. I believe that the copyright legislation in Europe, for example, has very little to do with copyright, and very much to do with holding platforms accountable for the content that their users produce. The net result is the platforms necessarily invoke nuance-less strategies for sanitizing the content according to a narrow band of what is acceptable.
Europe's Article 13 and its companion will make sure that NEVER happens.
The EU audience merely has to be willing to tolerate the latency of being served content from outside of the EU.
The only answer that the EU has to that approach, is to institute a Chinese style blockade and limit access to the Internet (it would become something else, the EUnet, with restricted access to the Internet). The question is whether EU citizens will tolerate that next, required step. Without an EU wall, they can't stop the trivial dodging of their laws by setting up services outside of their jurisdiction and serving to EU users. The US market is profitable enough to trivially support serving to EU users without any regard for making money there (Facebook could operate profitably with 2.2 billion global monthly actives with only monetizing the US market; Google could serve its search engine to a global audience profitably by only monetizing the US).
> How is that inconsistent? Both things are a law.
On the one hand, Article 13 compromises the online publishing capability of anyone (either individuals or businesses) who lack the ability to hire both large legal departments and large developer teams who can implement content filters. It entrenches the power of the 800lb media gorillas and kneecaps everyone else. It also enables censorship systems by crippling the capability of individuals and small hosting businesses to publish material at will.
But on the other hand, the GDPR is a law with serious teeth that takes power back from those 800lb gorillas that rely on unethical bulk-surveillance business models. It empowers individuals to regain some privacy should they choose to exercise that power. Businesses with ethical user-fee business models have nothing to fear from the GDPR, because for them, the protection of customer data from advertisers isn't an undue hardship. It's a core feature of their service. And let's not forget that the GDPR actually has quite broad exceptions for news agencies. The GDPR can't be used as a censorship tool in the same way that Article 13 can.
I thought Reddit has never been profitable?
The whole GDPR, Content Filtering thing seems like a massive opportunity for a savvy, unregulated South American, African or Asian company to take advantage of.
Why lump privacy protections together with upload filters as if they're both bad. If you service doesn't abide by the GDPR, I'd try to avoid it. On the other hand, upload filters are a disaster and not at all comparable to GDPR, not in terms of what they do to the end-user, not the burden they place on service providers.
For what it's worth, it would only have to be out side Europe. If a firm has no office in Europe, it would be difficult for Europe to enforce its laws. Extradition requires it be a crime in both countries.
1) a porn site with porn ads which is not a sexy business to be in -- at best it is a lifestyle business.
2) a site providing tools to small porn businesses ( i.e. creators of adult content ) for money which has a very limited growth and is a tough market
3) a site charging users for access to edgy content
None of this so far has been a multi-billion dollar entreprise.
It shouldn't even be difficult for Tumblr to enforce a separation between the two—a hard requirement for any blog that hosts adult content to be marked as such, and blogs with adult content only get ads from advertisers who have explicitly indicated that they're OK with that.
Now, granted, it may still not be a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. I don't know much about the economics of ad impressions. But that doesn't mean it can't be profitable.
Most of the cost and page views on Tumblr came from NSFW. Everything else was a really long tail. It costs more money to monetize the long tail than the long tail can be monetized for.
> It shouldn't even be difficult for Tumblr to enforce a separation between the two—a hard requirement for any blog that hosts adult content to be marked as such, and blogs with adult content only get ads from advertisers who have explicitly indicated that they're OK with that
Advertisers for non-explicit content to not want to be associated with non-clean content whatever that not clean content may be. Tucker Carlson is much cleaner than "daddybeatshisproperty" and there are successful campaigns to pull P&G and its likes ads from Fox News. Now imagine "Dirty Mouth, clean it up!" ad next to ... well... something something in your mouth. The screen caps of that would be on youtube in half and hour and on all TV channels by the evening news. There's no way Mars, Inc would be Ok with that hit and they are rather edgy in their commercials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxmkiy9txBE
> Now, granted, it may still not be a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. I don't know much about the economics of ad impressions. But that doesn't mean it can't be profitable.
Right. So it at most a lifestyle business, not a multi hundred million dollar operation.
P.S. Reality does not care about downvotes. Tumblr lost money since its inception because it cannot get enough ad money to coverts its costs. And it cannot get enough ad money because of its content, not because there's no ad money.
Do you have sources for that? Because from what I know, I think that's unlikely.
Based on what's happened since December, it seems like the number is closer to 30%. Now, that's still quite significant, but it's a long way from "most".
> The screen caps of that would be on youtube in half and hour and on all TV channels by the evening news.
That also seems quite unlikely. It might make it to YouTube, but it's unlikely that it would make much of a stir; certainly not enough to get on the evening news.
> So it at most a lifestyle business, not a multi hundred million dollar operation.
Does that mean that it doesn't deserve to exist?
Hired a couple of their SREs
> Based on what's happened since December, it seems like the number is closer to 30%. Now, that's still quite significant, but it's a long way from "most".
Tumblr has a boatload of porn. They barely killed half of it if based on random samples some of their competitors did before and after the great purge. The biggest change is that they started to kill ability to re-share old porn content but re-uploaded copies of the same old porn still show up.
> That also seems quite unlikely. It might make it to YouTube, but it's unlikely that it would make much of a stir; certainly not enough to get on the evening news.
We see the outrage playing out daily in the news. If Pepsi ends up in a hot water with the ad featuring Kandall giving a soda to a cop one does not need to be a genius to predict what happens in a case of Orbits ad next to a porn video.
> Does that mean that it doesn't deserve to exist?
It deserving to exist is irrelevant. Someone needs to fund it or make enough money to make it worth to them.
Those users probably consume some safe content.
* Tumblrs that weren't marked adult got marked as such by their new algorithm. This included the text-only official announcement post itself.
* The actual block was done by turning on safe mode for all users, and removing the toggle from the settings page. For a short time, some people were supposedly able to turn in back off by adding that setting back to the POST manually.
* The setting doesn't affect your dashboard, so you can still see new posts by those you follow, even though there's no way to browse to their page directly.
> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/pornh...
However, the porn spambots still keep popping up periodically, and there are still loads of Nazi/alt-right blogs that Tumblr doesn't seem to have any intention of doing anything about.
Unprofitable eyeballs leaving decreases the losses, making a business more valuable.
A savvy enterprise that acquired it should re-allow adult content with however many filters they like to make amends with the community and devote a while to redo UX and quality of life. Content creators will absolutely come back, as no proper competitor ever rose in the current vacuum yet. After that it could turn into a unicorn in less than a year.