Sex censorship killed the internet we love • Hacker News Board

Re: Sex censorship killed the internet we love

#401

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

kgwxd wrote: post #280

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the superstition, if it were "you should say 'black door' every time you see one [and you'll have good luck]" then it would make no difference. It would neither inhibit nor encourage those of the out-group. Let's look at religion: if my religion says "give money to orphans" then you don't need to fight it, it doesn't harm you, if it says "make everyone who's not part of our group subservient or dead" then…

"give money to orphans" is harmful to you when the target is your 90 year old mother for her social security check that would otherwise allow her to be financially independant. Doubly harmful when a very small percent, if any, actually goes to helping orphans and instead supports the continuation of the predetory practice.

So you mean when it means something entirely different?

If it were "force others to give money to orphans" or "steal money that's set aside for orphans" then you'd perhaps have a point.

Unless, you're trying to say it's impossible to have someone hold a [superstitious] belief that doesn't impact others negatively?

Re: Sex censorship killed the internet we love

#402

Post by bleb » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

StevePerkins wrote: post #294

coldtea wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the Americanization of the world. If most of one's movies, songs, tv shows, social media control, search engine biases, etc, come from a single country, with its cultural stickups, that's what you get.

There is almost too much ridiculousness in these two sentences to unpack. From the notion that American hegemony suddenly began post-9/11, rather than 70 years ago. To the assertion that Google is deliberately biased toward violence over sex. The " America == bad, anything I don't like about my country == also America " mindset is a disingenuous rejection of agency. There are a lot of things going on the world today.…

did they say american hegemony began post-9/11 or that google's biases are deliberate? those claims would certainly be ridiculous.

i think you may have a point but i'm not clear on it. you're saying that there are other factors besides US cultural hegemony which would've contributed to the shift in sweden's media norms?

Re: Sex censorship killed the internet we love

#403

Post by losvedir » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #365

losvedir wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, that's ignorant. Nobody is saying that.

I went to a Catholic secondary school. Some people definitely were saying that.

I did, too, and never heard it. Maybe you're confusing the idea that you shouldn't have sex not for procreation (ie the stance against birth control) with the idea that sex is only for procreation? IOW the Catholic teaching is that procreation is a necessary but not sufficient reason for sex.

Re: Sex censorship killed the internet we love

#404

Post by lou1306 » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 4:27 PM UTC

klez wrote: post #257

thaumasiotes wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is also the birthplace of commedia sexy [1] > [1]: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commedia_sexy_all%27italiana Sure enough, the Italian genre name is commedia sexy . I'm always interested in phrases like this -- sexy is obviously an English word. It's very common for foreign words to be borrowed when the speaker feels that the concept they express doesn't have a good match in his own language. I'm pretty confiden…

In Italian we use "sexy" in a way that roughly means "erotic" or "sexually exciting".

I would like to add that Italians tend to borrow English words a lot. (In the 19th century it was the same, but with French; ancient Romans were similarly fascinated by Greek).

There may be multiple reasons for that. In IT, English terms (kernel, firmware, bootloader, driver, etc.) are usually preferred because translations might be more ambiguous. In other cases, English just sounds more exotic/sophisticated to the average listener.

Re: Sex censorship killed the internet we love

#405

Post by darkpuma » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 4:30 PM UTC

apo wrote: post #368

What happened was we failed to consider the consequences of centralization: - Google with its search - Tumblr (or Medium) with its blogging platform - Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram with their connection to friends, family, and news - Starbucks with its roaming internet access - Youtube with its ubiquitous video distribution - PayPal with its payment network - Apple with its walled garden App Store It's no accident…

It's not just American sensibilities that are in play. When you allow people to upload pornographic material you have to deal with the risk that they'll upload illegal material (shit that's illegal in Europe too, it should be pointed out. And we could dive into a tangent to discuss the topic of ISP-level content blocking in America and the UK if you wish..)

If you're unable to effectively filter that stuff out the next pragmatic option is often to ban all pornographic content categorically. That's what happened to tumblr. For years they were an American company that allowed pornography, but they were unable to deal with the burden imposed by their users uploading illegal pornography.

If I had to guess, reddit is probably next. Does reddit check the ID of every user who decides to upload a nude of themselves? I doubt it. It's probably only a matter of time before reddit finds themselves in hot water too and decides to axe all their NSFW subreddits.

Re: Sex censorship killed the internet we love

#406

Post by brobdingnagians » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 4:31 PM UTC

klmr wrote: post #399

brobdingnagians wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

definition of prudish: `having or revealing a tendency to be easily shocked by matters relating to sex or nudity; excessively concerned with sexual propriety.` Having a belief that a loved one would be happier if they do not take drugs and acting on that to attempt to persuade them is love and concern (and they are free to disagree with me). Having a belief that a loved one would be happier if refrained from using se…

The “excessively concerned with sexual propriety” part of the definition applies to what you’ve written. You’ve got some very clear and quite restrictive ideas about how sex is to be enjoyed, and you view other ways as harmful. And, to reiterate, that’s totally fine. But most people with differing opinions about sex will recognise yours as prudish.

Sometimes restricting something can make it more powerful. Using a scalpel on everything would render it less useful when you needed it most.

But "excessively" is up to interpretation, and our interpretations disagree, and that's okay :)

Re: Sex censorship killed the internet we love

#407

Post by krapp » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 4:32 PM UTC

Riverheart wrote: post #388

readingnews wrote: post #311

The author seems to equate facebook, google, twitter, etc with "the internet". I agree, those are some major heavy hitting players on the network, but it seems the author wants the internet of yore, where it was the wild wild west. That internet still exists, you just can not get there from facebook, google, twitter. So why do we continue to use those services?

Too be fair, these silos are the internet for a vast swathe of people. Google has always been a gateway to discovering new places on the internet and as she pointed out, they are actively suppressing search results they don't like. They don't know there are or can't find the places outside the silos.

Is that really true enough to be considered axiomatic, or is it just an expression of the tendency of technical people to assume the typical user is little smarter than a ham sandwich?

Using a small number of sites doesn't mean you don't know other sites exist. Consider the olden days of the web when discovery was, arguably, more difficult than today (the problem search engines emerged to solve.) Did people not comprehend that the web existed outside of Geocities or Yahoo? No, they still knew it was there. They may not have been able to find it, or cared to find it, but they still understood there was more "internet" out there.

Nowadays, meanwhile, almost every business has a website. Authors have websites. Political leaders, countries, movements and offices have websites. Celebrities have websites. Fandoms and communities have websites. Have you ever paid attention to just how many URLS you encounter outside of the silos, in real life, throughout the day? People are inundated with them. And, those silos tend to be content aggregators which let people post content from third party websites.

There may be some truth to the premise, but I suspect the extend is overstated in order to sell the narrative that the web is existentially under threat of corporate control and political censorship.

Re: Sex censorship killed the internet we love

#408

Post by nine_k » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 4:34 PM UTC

khalilravanna wrote: post #392

crazygringo wrote: post #329

Again and again I see the comments of how crazy it is that we allow violence in films/TV/anywhere, but not sex which is peaceful and harmless -- as if this were some kind of idiocy or hypocrisy. There's a good reason we try to draw lines between areas where sex is "allowed" and "not allowed" -- because it's arousing and has the potential to be greatly embarrassing . It's private , in a way that violence isn't. I seri…

My knee jerk reaction is actually to agree with you wholeheartedly: sex is arousing and violence isn't. But if I can play devil's advocate, isn't it possible that if sex was more commonplace and less censored it would be less arousing? Sure there's a biological aspect, but I think a lot of sex is psychological. And if our threshold for what was considered "exciting" was brought down by a complete normalization of nud…

If visuals of sex became more commonplace and less arousing, won't it make real sex less enjoyable?

This is a testable hypothesis. We have a wide variety of cultures on Earth, from highly wrapped-up to those where almost complete nudity is seen as a norm. We could research and compare. It doesn't even take traveling away from the Western civilization; just compare the US and, say, Germany, with their vastly different sensitivity to depicted or real-life nudity.

Re: Sex censorship killed the internet we love

#409

Post by progval » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 4:36 PM UTC

aussieguy1234 wrote: post #226

marcus_holmes wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same idea :) But to make it sustainable, it needs to generate money. Advertisers don't like seeing their brands next to pr0n, so they won't come to your site. Unless, of course, you open it to adverts from people selling sexeh stuff, who can't get an ad to appear anywhere normally. Of course, you could charge for it... but people have been trained to expect internet services for free. Hopefully that's chang…

I have a plan for this. I know of an ad network that will let me run ads on Libr that supports both SFW and NSFW ads. When you sign up for Libr you have to say if your blog is NSFW or not. Then Libr flags all content you post as NSFW or SFW depending on what you choose. I can detect what content is on a page, then run SFW ads around SFW content and relevant NSFW ads around NSFW content. Google used to do the same thi…

> I know of an ad network that will let me run ads on Libr

Be careful of depending on a single company for your income

Re: Sex censorship killed the internet we love

#410

Post by LifeLiverTransp » Sat, Feb 02, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

microcolonel wrote: post #317

beobab wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enjoying sex isn’t a sin. Sex is supposed to be held in the highest regard. It’s a wonderful and joyous thing. The point is, I believe, to avoid cheapening it, making it less than the truly awesome thing it is. It’s supposed to be a priceless gift shared with your true love. Packaging it and selling it makes it less valuable. I believe that if you approach the subject with that mindset, a lot of the decisions that so…

Well, while not a sin, it also isn't a panacea. We get it, you like sex, you think it's great. Lots of people who agree with that also think that having quite so much of it everywhere cheapens it and gives it outsize control of people's desires.

I always thought that the whole filtering bubble would allow for customizinng your world to what you want to see. Like a prudish men/woman can go to a nude beach, and not see a naked person, because the glasses paint over. And we even have the technology for that by now. The problem is, that is not even what that demographic wants. They want to control what others think, others feel and how others live there lifes.