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Tumblr’s anti-porn algorithm is flagging basically everything as NSFW

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Re: Tumblr’s anti-porn algorithm is flagging basically everything as NSFW

#41
post #38

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 pornographi…

Static content is extremely cheap to host. I would compare it to S3 costs.

Re: Tumblr’s anti-porn algorithm is flagging basically everything as NSFW

#42
post #38

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 pornographi…

AT&T carries way more of it than any individual website serves, but nobody complains because they're generally thought of as a pipe that is at worst absent. If a social platform can get the coveted "at worst absent," perception in place, nobody will blame them, and by extension nobody will blame the advertisers. That's why it was against the rules (so to speak) for the media to hop on YouTube for the "Nazi" videos: the only reason any of these platforms can get by at all is because we agree not to blame them for what they host. If we stopped doing that we would end up with three or four sanitised news websites, and at most eight mainstream entertainment websites. jokes.com would make a killing.

Re: Tumblr’s anti-porn algorithm is flagging basically everything as NSFW

#43
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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?

Re: Tumblr’s anti-porn algorithm is flagging basically everything as NSFW

#44
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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.)

Re: Tumblr’s anti-porn algorithm is flagging basically everything as NSFW

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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.

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

It seems to me that boards are way more sensitive on female breasts then on white supremacism.

Re: Tumblr’s anti-porn algorithm is flagging basically everything as NSFW

#46
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

Re: Tumblr’s anti-porn algorithm is flagging basically everything as NSFW

#48
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.

Re: Tumblr’s anti-porn algorithm is flagging basically everything as NSFW

#49
post #30

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.

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 teste…

>This is clearly Tumblr's Digg moment.

Hit the nail on the head with that one. Digg and Tumblr should get together and write a blog "How to lose your entire user base in 1 day."

Re: Tumblr’s anti-porn algorithm is flagging basically everything as NSFW

#50
post #38

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 pornographi…

disassociating themselves from anything that could be considered pornographic seems like reasonable business logic

We will see if their revenue and profit go up or down. Then we'll know if it's the right decision or not.

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