Are these the same safety standards that cause apple predictive text to refuse to recognise the cuss words I a grown adult use and have to go back and fix over and over again. Ducking stupid if you ask me.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104366/tumblr-ios-app-...
Safari works amazingly for small websites, but for websites with infinite scrolling like Tumblr and Twitter, it becomes unbearably slow after the first hundred or so posts. Historically, Safari is slow to adopt new web features, and it STILL doesn't have web push notifications (and more).
You can run these same websites on Android Chrome just fine, even on a lower-powered Android phone. I'm not sure if they're using APIs that need to be polyfilled on Safari, or if Safari is just trash.
At this time, I'm convinced that if Apple allowed other browser engines on the App Store, this would not be a problem at all, not that I can test it out anyways.
So, yes, Apple still has a say.
Once I’m down about 50ish posts on my feed, hitting back from a post to get back to the feed seems to have around a 25% chance to quickly throw a “Safari has detected a problem” error and force a refresh - sending me back to the top of the feed. And this is on an iPhone 12 Pro Max so it’s not like the hardware is out of date.
I primarily blame Safari, but on some level I think Twitter is aware of the problem and has no intentions of fixing it. The mobile Twitter site is purposely designed to make it nearly impossible to open a tweet in a background tab if it doesn’t have an image (the browser tries to select text on a long press). That’s clearly something Twitter could fix if they wanted to.
(I've got an oldish phone, but it performs fine on every website I ever visit except Twitter.)
Tested in Android Firefox on https://mobile.twitter.com/home.
Good. These features need to be supported by browsers for an extremely long time and Google is trying to force garbage under the guise of "standards." I hope Apple continues to fight against the ridiculous power hungry feature creep.
However, curiosity requires that I ask what/how/why does any of that affect mobile-first web deployment in away that it is not addressed when a large chunk of that mobile use is broken? If you program yourself into a dead end, back up and take another turn.
Oh, it is easier in a mobile native where you get the benefit of hoovering up personal data on all of your users? Gee, let's not expend effort to make something work universally, let's instead take the easy route and make money on the side too. The fact that losing this large share of users because of one type of content is not enough of a decision to go the other route shows just how much money there is in the hoovering of data.
Still putting the blame on Tumblr.
So, to me, Tumblr's website is already the main point of access, and these performance problems don't exist on Firefox or Chrome. I'm not talking about server-side response times, I'm talking about the time to render posts on the client. I find that a lot of times, after scrolling, you have to wait a few seconds before you see anything but the blue background that Tumblr has.
So, no, I'm going to pin it on Safari if (even) Firefox can deal with it.
Yahoo runs one of the biggest ad networks in the world, and you need to register to use Tumblr. They as already have everything they need to track you right there.
A mobile app in many circumstances reduces the data tracking (see this whole discussion about how effective Apple's do not track is because of their monopoly powers).
Just because Apple made it harder doesn't mean they made it impossible. There's a reason so many places work on making apps for multiple platforms (at least 2) rather than a unified web experience. There are benefits beyond serving a webpage in a native app, and they all want those benefits. Stick your head in the sand and deny it all you want, but it still happens.
That's absolutely not true, even if the web developer implements this in the Dumbest Possible Way. Please point me to an example page and prove me wrong.
You'll be able to see it take seconds to render at a time. This is true on an M1 Mac, as it is true on an A15 iPhone and M1 iPad.
I scrolled through 300+ stories (or whatever they're called on Tumblr) and it still hasn't slowed at all. Not sure what you're seeing.
On M1 Max with Safari 15.5, it took me about 40 seconds of fast scrolling to get it to start stuttering occasionally. Then, another 30 seconds to get it to start blanking out for a second at a time. And finally, another 30 seconds to get it to start taking seconds to render. I won't give the number of posts before it started lagging because I don't know the exact number.
On my phone (iPhone 13 Pro Max, albeit on the iOS 16 beta), it takes Safari about 15 seconds of scrolling before the scrolling drops to around 40fps from what looked close to 120fps. Then, another 20 seconds to start seeing things rendering halfway before jumping around and then rendering the correct post. This isn't necessarily a fair comparison due to the usage of beta software, but even on an M1 on production OS software it doesn't seem to be much better. Chrome 102 on macOS handles the exact thing that I did without any problem at all.
It's especially bad when you have a lot of videos on your dashboard. If you only have image posts, it might take a bit longer to start stuttering.
This has been the case for years, so it's nothing new. I remember this being a problem almost a decade ago, on an 4th generation iPad with the A6X SoC. Things have improved since then for sure, but those it's probably mostly hardware improvements that's helping.
I'll accept blaming Twitter's horrible performance on its use of React Native Web, but not Tumblr.
This really sounds like one of those issues a dedicated person finds where the devs look at it and say no reasonable user would ever do this. The issue if not closed as "won't fix" gets deprioritized so low that it never gets looked at again. Even as a dev, I'd not have the patience to recreate the problem. It's just such an outside edge case from expected behavior/usage that I don't even know what to say in response.
I don't think you're in the target audience of Tumblr, which is fine.
I honestly worry for people that do. There's something sad to me about people that do.
Is it a memory leak in Safari? Is it a framework issue? You've started us down the path to a thing, but then you didn't finish telling us the thing.
You mean Gecko or Blink? WebKit is really not the problem. Web Developers' strict compliance to only make sure their site works on Windows may be part of it.
Strange. This is exactly how I use Twitter on my i-devices, and it's perfectly smooth.
Seems pretty simple.
So yes, Apple may only have required Tumblr to more effectively moderate to prevent child porn, but from a business feasibility point of view the practical way to do that was ban all porn.
Or you do what Tumblr did, and just ban all porn.
The more accurate word might be "categorize" or "filter".
It was obvious what was meant by "sort" when reading the full text, but I think the counter-point was more of a tongue-in-cheek retort regarding the above than an actual complaint.
It's nothing more than ammo that corporations use against each other in the fight for dominance, or sometimes, with the help of cooperative media, against politically disfavored sites like 4chan. In all my time browsing 4chan, I have not once seen child porn, though I did see posts 404'd for having contained child porn. Yet despite their efforts, any time the media talks about 4chan, they will introduce it in the same breath as child porn.
In short, child porn has become nothing but a tool for corporations fighting for dominance, or a fnord to tell the masses to stay away. And in all of this no-one gives a crap about the children, since they rarely spend even a word talking about tracking down the uploaders or creators of said porn (i.e. they say a site "has child porn", but not how fast it is removed, or if the site gives the IP of child-porn uploaders to the police, or anything beyond trying to establish in the viewer a bad site <-> child porn association).
Aren't there legal requirements in place for this stuff, at least in the US?
But they're not normal words. They're expletives. If they have their own category, they're not "normal words."
iOS doesn't know a lot of the medical words I use for work, either. But I don't moan about it on social media.
The idea that expletives are not normal words is wrong. Common people have always spoken plainly. They would not have called their asses "bottoms" etc.
Given that auto-correct is a function of software then yes, word selection is part of Apple's business. There are two parts to the solution. The technical aspect is probably not at issue. The socio-political component is going to reflect mainstream corporate culture and probably not meet many corner cases. The significant choices aren't Apple's to make sense they will bow to the anathema dictates of social and political power: such as Winnie the Poo in certain Chinese contexts or Swastikas in German ones.
Like adjectives, nouns, verbs, adverbs, or any other of many word categories?
They are normal words understood by everybody, if not used by everybody, unlike your medical jargon.
It's no way to treat adults.
The question is "as a parent, would you buy an {x} phone for a young family member that suggests profanity?"
As an adult, you can go in and add the words that you want to use yourself... however, do you want profanity to be a default suggested word for children in your household?
Realizing that the demographics of HN tends to the more technically literate, removing the all the words you don't want your children accidentally sending to their teachers wouldn't be a big issue, however as most of the population isn't as technically literate the "it just works" mentality for digital appliances would mean that most of the population that has a child who may use the phone would likely opt to one that is more proper and correct in its limited word choice.
Kids have Android phones, so yes, it is clearly the case that most parents have no problem with this.
Not "can you go in and unblock profanity suggestions" ( https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/disable-android-offensive... ) but rather "is this the default"?
That seems eminently reasonable to me, without being "safety standards".
Yes, modern English is certainly saltier than what people pretended it was for the last century or so, but the line that Apple took seems to be the right line (allow offence without correction, do not suggest offence by default).
There are many things on which I disagree with Apple’s stance (I think that Apple should allow pornographic apps in the store, but that those apps should have tighter controls on them to prevent some of the scammiest behaviours reported against pornographic sites; I also think that Apple should be doing a lot more to prevent abuse of the pricing tools that it does have).
The soft keyboard is always using some heuristics to identify which characters you intended to type. In most cases it's quite accurate, but in this case it seems like it's over-counting the probability you would have typed "duck" or "ducking" by a fairly wide margin.
You can of course install any keyboard you want with basically any behavior you want here.
Edit: Never mind, it's "Block offensive words" under "Text Correction". Easy to find, strange I never noticed it. Thanks!
And it ALWAYS refuses to type "fuck" when you do glide / swipe typing.
Only related in the sense that Apple takes steps to prevent surprise adult content. Just as porn is obviously trivial to consume with Apple devices, autocomplete can happily suggest your favorite salty language.
https://www.macworld.com/article/673861/how-to-stop-an-iphon...
Sometimes the agenda goes a bit too far.
https://www.macworld.com/article/673861/how-to-stop-an-iphon...
wait a minute, that's only because Tumblr wanted to be on the App Store. they've could've just as easily provided a web app and easily instructed their users to have a link on the ios home screen. but they wanted to be on the App Store, so of course they had to follow Apple's rules.
there is no “evidence”. it’s a 17+ app with sexual accounts actively banned all of the time which you can’t even access if you’re not logged in, NSFW is disabled by default etc etc
> There is absolutely no reason that Apple should have the power to do that.
actually there’s a huge reason: they built it, they own it.
> Apple has the power to control what software you can download and run on YOUR device
the device is meaningless, it’s all about the software. and you don’t own that. so you can’t impose your own rules.
Well we built our society, and we own it, so they can fucking deal if they want to sell stuff in our society and we set some rules about what they can do.
I think you'd be surprised at how many of those ~330m (or ~8b) people would be perfectly okay with what Apple has done, and generally how much more important property rights are to what "we" have built than some esoteric fight about how you don't want to allow me the right to sell my privacy for a price I deem appropriate.
"We" don't want you to tell us what we can and can't do with our own data. Maybe we are perfectly happy to let Apple have some of our data, and are honestly tired of hearing you talk about how we don't know any better.
The "we" that is currently going through the Democratic process of passing laws which are almost certainly going to pass.
> "We" don't want you to tell us
Feel free to vote for a different lawmaker then. Or that is what you should have done, because it is too late in Europe already. They are going to pass the digital markets act.
Go participate in democracy if you disagree.
Thanks - this actually inspired me to write to my senator and congressional rep at the federal level in the US to not regulate Apple or its ability to decide what content goes on the iOS App Store. I love the iPhone and App Store, and Apple has earned my trust with their stewardship of it, and there is no logical reason that they should be regulated differently than any other marketplace. Any proposed changes or regulations that I've seen that target the iOS App Store are bad for me personally. I'd actually like to see us pass a digital markets act or similar that guarantees Apple (and Google, etc.) stewardship over their products and platforms.
Certainly I'm one of many voices (honestly outside of a place like HN or tech journals nobody gives even the slightest shit about what Apple does on the App Store) here, but I'll make sure my voice is heard to the extent that it makes sense to engage here.
You could do this yes. But I think efforts to fights these laws will fail.
The digital markets act is already almost guaranteed to pass in Europe, and once Europe has a law on this, the effects will go global.
Whats Apple going to do? Pull out of all of Europe? Do a failed attempt to segregate the market, by making an unlocked EU phone, and a locked USA one (What happens when people import the phones? Sounds pretty easy to get around...)?
Once the floodgates are open, you aren't going to be able to prevent people from installing whatever app store they want on their own phone.
> that I've seen that target the iOS App Store are bad for me personally.
Fortunately, you'll still have the choice to only install the iOS app store if you want. You just won't be able to prevent other people from installing whatever app store they want on their phone.
Sort of. I think you are underestimating Apple's ability to get around these laws, or at least section off the worst aspects of them so that using an iPhone sucks only in Europe and not elsewhere. In the US we may see laws introduced, but such laws (thankfully!) will be neutered as they're bad for citizens anyway.
> Fortunately, you'll still have the choice to only install the iOS app store if you want.
Yes, but I'm not sure you understand how this affects the ecosystem. The benefits you think you will incur, will not come to fruition. Instead, everyone will just be worse off except other multi-national American and Chinese internet companies. Privacy benefits are the first that come to mind, and such benefits that Apple has effectively collectively bargained for on behalf of users will be lost. Unfortunately, this will disproportionately affect the less well-off too because they won't be able to afford to pay to avoid cryptoscams, OnlyFans, and insidious adware.
> You just won't be able to prevent other people from installing whatever app store they want on their phone.
That's a product feature. If you want multiple app stores you can already do that on Android. It's like buying an Android phone and asking where your iCloud subscription is and then demanding that Apple offer it. Totally different product.
Sure they could try. At which point they would be fined billions of dollars. Just like how they tried to get around the recent app store dating apps law that was in a small country in the EU, and they got lost in court and kept getting fined.
Europe isn't really a country that just lets people break their laws. If you break them, you'll be fined.
> Apple has effectively collectively bargained
What you are describing is called "using significant market power", and is specifically what anti-trust law is designed to prevent.
If your argument is that "monopoly power is a good thing, and I want companies to use their significant market power, in a way that anti trust laws are designed to prevent" I guess you could make that argument.
But I hope you also are consistent and want to repeal common carrier laws, and any other laws that prevent companies from using their significant market power.
Just say it loud and clear, that you think that anti-trust laws are bad, and that using significant market power to anti-competitive control a market is a good thing, if thats what you believe.
Europe isn't really that much better than the US in this regard. See Volkswagen, FIFA, etc.
> What you are describing is called "using significant market power", and is specifically what anti-trust law is designed to prevent.
Sure if you specifically want to interpret it in the most negative possible light. On the other hand, Apple's position in the market acts as a company who can negotiate on behalf of users (kind of a quasi-union). On our own, no individual can leverage a company like, say, Facebook to have to change how they track users.
> Just say it loud and clear, that you think that anti-trust laws are bad, and that using significant market power to anti-competitive control a market is a good thing, if thats what you believe.
No, because that's a very naive and unrealistic thing to say or think.
Let's actually call this what it is, which is gigantic corporations like Epic and Facebook suing Apple (also a gigantic corporation) because Apple made their predatory business models less profitable. That's all this really is. In every capitalist economy ranging from Norway to Australia to Japan, companies are allowed to create platforms and then engage in business with who they see fit based on rules that they create and enforce on their platform. Facebook and Epic both have rules that they enforce on their platforms. To suggest that the Apple App Store is an anti-competitive marketplace is in the same breath to suggest that Wal-Mart is an anti-competitive marketplace because they won't allow me to sell pornography and Dogecoin. This is made all the more silly when iOS has less market share than Android and you can go and buy an Android phone and install whatever app store you want.
If you are actually interested in anti-competitive behavior, take a look at schemes like the MLS (Multiple Listing System) in the US, or various other internet companies.
I'd use my one vote and my voice to try and avoid that situation, but I accept that in a democracy my vote is not meant to have a significant impact.
For something like "data privacy" I'd go with what the country wants (not that I really have a choice), but I doubt the country would vote that way considering what we've built is largely based on the concepts of freedom and private ownership.
It seems antithetical to those ideas to prohibit people from selling what we tend to agree is rightfully theirs.
At least in Europe it is pretty clear that this is what people want. And they are almost certainly going to pass a law that regulates Apple.
> to prohibit people from selling what we tend to agree is rightfully theirs.
The phone belongs to the user once they buy it. That phone is rightfully theirs, and these new laws will allow a user to do what they want with that phone.
Apple also has the protection of patent and copyright laws. Those are government regulation that prevent other people from selling software.
If we really want to go full "people should be allowed to do what they want, with things that they own", then perhaps we should allow everyone to manufacture iPhones, and sell modified versions of that software. (as in literally, people should be allowed to steal Apple's, and make actual iPhones)
I am sure that there are some factories that already have access to iPhone manufacturing plans that would be happy to do what they want with their own property, and sell iPhones themselves.
Microsoft also built IE6 and they also built Windows. Should they have kept the power to bundle IE and to make it difficult for other browser developers?
Ps I still don't understand how "now copied from Google so it's better than that crappy earlier version we built ourselves" can be viewed in any kind of positive light :) It's basically an admission of incompetence. I mean, for a software company that's pretty bad. I just don't understand how they make it a selling point that they didn't write it themselves anymore.
Also, I don't think the actual engine was why people didn't like the old Edge. It was more the UI for me. I never had issues with the rendering engine. The could have done the same overhaul with their own engine and it would have been fine too. An extra engine would have been better for the web as an ecosystem, we're now seeing too much of the "IE Effect" with chromium.
I also didn't say they could do "whatever they want". Could you please be a good faith conversationalist and reply only to what was actually said, as opposed to your misinterpretation of what was said?
> they built it therefore they should be able to choose how to distribute it
Tied selling is against the law. No matter who makes it, no matter if its free, if you make the acquisition of a product conditional on the acquisition of another one, it is illegal.
You are correct - that is the problem.
Imagine if your car manufacturer prevented you from using Spotify or Deez or whatever music service you wanted and REQUIRED you to listen to SiriusXM at a significantly marked up cost.
That's the issue.
Actually, we can. We can make a law and enforce it. And there are literally laws being considered to do this.
If you don't like democracy, then feel free to move to a different country.
AOC won the primary in a safe district against the 4th most powerful Democrat in the federal government.
She was the most prominent upset result, but that's because of how powerful who she defeated was. There isn't much room above what she did.
Except that if Tumblr had chosen to take responsibility for the moderation of their platform then it would still be on the store. Twitter, Reddit etc are heavily moderated hence why they are still there.
> Apple has the power to control what software you can download and run on YOUR device
iPhone has been around for 15 years. We know. That's why we bought it in the first place.
Exactly right. It's amazing to me that with these global platforms we are seeing exactly why the legal system evolved the way it did, and why we have things like appeals, precendents, the judges, and levels of courts.
Getting rules and regulations right is not easy. Relying on these platforms to do it is basically reinventing the wheel, except they don't seem to be reinventing it correctly. They are creating kafkaesque impossible to communicate with bureaucracies.
And the funny thing is, due to their focus on profits, they don't really care if 5-10% of the population find it impossible to use their platforms of get banned, because it just doesn't matter to their bottom line if courts and appeals are more expensive to run than just banning them.
And then we basically see why equality before the law evolved, and why its to fucking important.
That seems a strong claim—why do you think Apple doesn’t like Tumblr? They’re not a competitor in any space.
> Sure they could have "provided a web app" that gave a really really shitty experience to everyone compared to an actual app
Tumblr is an actual web site, right?
Yeah, because the iOS ecosystem is well known for allowing competition, especially competing stores.
Many of the issues that Apple create wouldn't exist if competing stores were allowed to exist.
You're missing the forest for the trees. The issue is not building an app specifically with Electron, but building an app which requires a browser. The browser is expensive in terms of resource usage, which results in less battery life.
Using a browser is OK for an app intended for a light usage session (like booking a flight). But not OK for an app which is intended for heavy usage sessions (like browsing pictures in an infinite timeline).
There's a reason Slack (which already has a reputation of impacting your battery life) decided to create a native app for mobile instead of using an Electron-like framework like Capacitor[1].
> Apple’s restrictions on third-party browsers, and the limitations it puts on Safari/WebKit (its own browser tools) have hobbled “web apps,”
Though I'm sure you can also ask many product managers how well native apps on iOS perform due to web apps (many companies have data on both). For whatever reason, users prefer native apps
Plus most of those website "apps" are just a bunch of webviews anyway, so you're not going to save battery by using them. Just like Electron.
Answer: Well obviously, since landlines are missing the biggest feature mobiles phones have: portability.
Point I'm trying to make: 1. Apps are smoother than web experience 2. Have a much native-er feel, etc.
If app is available, I'd rather use an app.
A big thing would be notifications, which at the time of writing is still an issue but slated to be corrected next year.
But Apple gets a free pass?
For all intents and purposes Apple's iphone is the Windows equivalent in many parts of the world. If you are not on it, you do not exist. So Apple needs to be treated like the monopoly/duopoly they are.
macOS exclusive apps, linux exclusive apps, FreeBSD exclusive apps, z/OS exclusive apps, etc..
And considering the state of the art of Linux GPU Drivers, maybe using Windows will be the only feasible way to actually run Linux apps.
There is a technical / physical aspect to interoperability. If you want to swap your engine, the new engine needs to fit and mate up with your transmission (though, this is easier than you might think). If you want to run an app on your phone, it needs to be in a format the OS can use.
Then there is an extra, unnecessary, layer of political control. I absolutely can, with a bit of work, swap in a Chevy LS engine into a Ford F150. I don't have to ask Ford's permission. Chevy doesn't have to ask Fords permission. I, as a person with free will, can buy this engine and that car and combine them.
Apple totally prevents this. They do not allow you to do what you want with the device you own. For good or bad, they absolutely operate differently than other industries. At least from the consumers perspective.
But in your analogy, your VW would only allow VW gas sold by VW at VW filling stations. And the only two types of cars on the road are VWs and Fords, and each have their own filling station.
Now imagine you live in an area where only VW owns gas stations, they lobby the government and explain for the safety of the citizens they can't allow you to use any gas from anyone else, and the closest Ford station is 100 miles away, and you already own a VW.
I could tell you, "hey, you bought into the ecosystem, and you can leave any time".
And you would tell me I'm being unreasonable, and fight your local government to allow 3rd party gas stations.
There's a whole subculture of engine swaps, afaik, they tend not to use vw engines as the donors, but whatevs. You've got to have or make room, probably adapt the connection to the transmission, plus any engine control, cooling, and air/fuel. It's really not that hard, as long as there is room.
On a blog with heavy video, you could manage to freeze your desktop browser within minutes.
2. Safari had and still has some pretty gnarly bugs that require special workarounds.
3. You could not put a link to a website on the homescreen of iOS
Tumblr is perfectly fine on the web, but they want people to download the app so they can use push notifications to juice engagement.
As of Aug 2021, PWA support basically didn't exist except for some parts of the manifest file. No background tasks, none of the major APIs were implemented, and you got nothing but an app tile on your homescreen.. even navigating back and forth from the PWA to another app caused the PWA to lose state. Data storage was basically a nightmare.
There are STILL basic fundamental things missing.
When the tumblr saga was going on, I still don't think you could even read PWA manifests or add them to your homescreen!
None of those things are necessary to create a very full featured Tumblr web application. E.g. twitter works quite well on mobile web.
Tumblr wants people to download the app for engagement purposes.
This was also an issue with Discord - Discord still doesn't (by Apple didact) permit some servers with adult content in the iOS app, because Apple said there was no way to do so and remain in the store.
Given that the problem with Tumblr was the accessibility of CSAM, I think Apple are probably on the right side here saying "just marking it 18+ is not ok" since, y'know, the issue wasn't that "CSAM is available to minors" but "CSAM is available to anyone".
I think Tumblr was singled out and made an example of because they had a narrower user demographic spread, particularly popular with young women. In cynical business logic, this made them a safer target for bullying than a site with broader appeal like reddit, facebook or twitter.
"Additionally, a subset of age-restricted servers that are specifically focused on explicit pornographic content will be blocked entirely on iOS. "
The Javascript ecosystem today is far more diverse, complex and multi-faceted than in the past. It's hard to put together a simple to develop stack that will be supported and maintainable in the future.
And what's the new acronym to refer to those companies?
What is Alphabet then? It's Google, which is a long list of well known customer-facing products, plus a bunch of obscure or experimental companies the public largely doesn't care about.
Apple's actual policy for the bog-standard, consenting-adults kind of porn is that you can't put it on the App Store, and if you are a social network you need to filter for it. This isn't a full ban; reddit is able to get away with having an off-app NSFW toggle that turns off filtering on the app.
A better example might be Discord, which also had a spat with Apple over NSFW servers. Apple wanted specific communities banned from the app; the actual guidance[0] provide by Discord is vague as to why they were banned, but suggests that there's an extra level of NSFW-ness to which the "off-app toggle" solution isn't good enough for Apple.
As far as I'm aware there's no appetite at Apple for an "adult tax" - it's specifically that they don't want the brand association[1] that comes with "porn on iPhone". If it was just a matter of the higher chargeback rates of porn, they could have a separate payment processor and commission rate structure for that.
[0] https://i.redd.it/shpi09y71lt61.png
[1] Casual reminder that people are absolutely terrible at separating the product, the OS, and the app vendor from one another when they are very mad at it. Or when a news outfit is trying to sell them anger.
To be honest I think Apple deciding users shouldn't have regular porn on their own iPhone because Apple doesn't want to be associated with it, is plenty reason to be angry at them. Especially because the app store has a monopoly on iOS. If it was like Android there would be no problem.
They're a supplier, not the moral police. And they shouldn't have a say in how we use their products.
"Over the course of the pandemic, Gen Z flocked to Tumblr; as of early 2022, 61% of its new users, and nearly half of its active users, are under 24. Tumblr today has more daily active users than WordPress, its professional sibling, has per month, according to a spokesperson."
https://qz.com/emails/quartz-company/2139456/tumblr-making-c...
If you want access to Apple's user. You have to play by their rules. Remember even if those users are Tumblr's reader or members, they are ultimately accessing it via iPhone, whether that is through Safari or Apps. And Apple dictate the rules.
Since Apple is a force of Good. Apple are righteous. Their fellow evangelist will tell you everything else are by their definition are Evil. Such as Ads. And banning whatever it is, whether that is porn, news that does not adhere to their political views, or music that doesn't fits certain requirement. And they are fighting all these evil for you, an act of love.
This ownership wording is the wrong thinking when it comes to platforms.
What a scary way to phrase that relationship.
Is Twitter powerful enough to stand up to Apple and Tumblr was not?
No idea though if Tumblr had the same option back then.
In 2017, Twitter had dedicated ML resources driving their recommendation engine + human moderators on fallback duty. You need to explicitly opt-in via web app before you can see NSFW using their app.
In comparison, Tumblr struggled with NSFW content as they relied heavily on users to police content.
Without opting-in, pornograhic posts regularly bled into standard content. With the demographics, CSAM content quickly started to do the same.
We've also seen third party Reddit app developers not allowed to feature content that the main Reddit app is despite toggles, and Discord not allowed to feature content that Twitter is.
The policy is badly written and not even Apple's own reviewers understand it, and they overreact to complaints from religious groups.
They also have the opposite - the ability to create entire social media platforms.
> Apple gave tumblr unreasonable "safety standards" that almost single-handedly killed a gigantic site for the vast majority of users.
> Maybe they used it for good with Facebook
Devil's advocate - maybe what you think is good isn't good for the rest of society.
> Maybe the only thing preventing them from doing so is regulatory pressure.
Agreed. So what type for regulations need to be in place?
Maybe Tumblr should have taken a page out of Apple's book and had reviewers.
1) The definition of porn is fluid - adhering to an external third party's guidelines (Apple's) will always mean adopting an overly strict definition to ensure confidence in compliance
2) Moderation is a hard problem - false positives will always happen, and given point (1) above will happen a LOT in the case of Tumblr
However, calling tumblr "dead" as a result of it does seem to imply such a problem. Their business model was ads, that doesn't inherently exempt porn in any way.
traffic measured in visitors or bytes downloaded? any source?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/20/the-fight-to-h...
Regardless, you're totally right that their numbers are relatively impressive and indeed "Google-scale" if we interpret that as within an order of magnitude. If the metric they used was "unique visitors per employee," then even with official source numbers they would be around 10x as successful as Google!!
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1201889/most-visited-web...
Even as someone who really doesn't have a problem with porn, I'm not going to spend 3 hours watching it, while I definitely have spent 3 hours watching youtube on many many occasions. There's also only one of the two that's going to be serving as background noise during working hours... Or that someone is going to put on to entertain their kids.
I suspect it's bullshit.
Where? Which app?!?
The app I believed is called “the internet.”
Wrong and naive. They have no direct way. Plenty of indirect ways.
> How did Apple ruin the Tumblr site?
Taleb's minority rule. Also read tumblr insiders' accounts of the porn ban that lay the blame much more on Apple than mainstream reporting does.
> Why hasn’t pornhub met the same
If Twitter/tumblr/reddit had no app, their mobile engagement would halve or worse. Not true for Pornhub.
This fails at even cursory inspection. Reddit thrived for many years without an app. In fact Reddit has ruined their own website so that they can push/force people to their mobile app. The website is so popular that Reddit considers it a problem. A problem because it’s harder to monetize a website than a mobile app.
>Taleb's minority rule. Also read tumblr insiders' accounts of the porn ban that lay the blame much more on Apple than mainstream reporting does.
I’m sure the insiders at a failed business have everyone to blame but themselves.
That isn’t true. Not allowing the tumblr app doesn’t remove all users.
> A group called “jailbait” — it contained provocative images of teenagers — led to a ban of “suggestive or sexual content featuring minors” in 2011. The company also shut down a group called “beatingwomen,” which glorified violence against women. Last year Reddit banned two so-called alt-right subreddits for repeatedly posting personal information that could lead to harassment. It took no action, though, against a subreddit organized around gun sales, which drew scrutiny after a 2014 Mother Jones article suggested that some arms dealers sought to exploit a federal background check loophole.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the... also goes into it.
> In September of 2011, Anderson Cooper discussed the subreddit on CNN. “It’s pretty amazing that a big corporation would have something like this, which reflects badly on it,” he said. Traffic to Jailbait quadrupled overnight. Twelve days later, after someone in the group apparently shared a nude photo of a fourteen-year-old girl, the community was banned.
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The Apple / Tumblr issue is much more recent (did Reddit even have an App Store app in 2011 - the version history doesn't go back that far).
Apple doesn't.
Those customers were free to use Tumblr on Android, Symbian, whatever.
I don't think iphone market shares are large enough to make a company like tumblr die.
You can think what you like but they literally did so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Never before. Not with oil, cars, industrial products, pharma etc.
Apple should not have this type of power. Maybe they used it for good with Facebook, but I wouldn't count on it always being the case. Apple can kill entire social media platforms if they want to. IMO, it's a matter of time before they start charging an "adult tax" (that just so happens to be barely below the profits a company makes from adult content via Apple users). Maybe the only thing preventing them from doing so is regulatory pressure.