8 ms·

X has new rules that officially allow porn

41 points by nehagup 2y ago

nehagup 2y ago
So, are states like Texas, which need age verification, gonna ask for it for X too? This could get pretty wild considering the whole bot situation and the way Red States are handling adult content these days...
- freedomben 2y ago
  This could be a fascinating development to watch actually. Made much more interesting too by the fact that Elon has a lot of business in states like Texas and Florida. X is also increasingly viewed as a "right wing"[1] place, which might make states like Texas a lot more sympathetic to their "free speech" position because they won't feel like it's a "left wing" tactic to poison minds. [1]: I'm not saying it is a right wing place, I have no idea as I have no data (not even anecdata because I don't really use it), but I've certainly noticed an uptick in people sharing that view on sites like HN since Elon took over. Have also heard that there is a decent balance of viewpoints on X. My guess is that both are probably true (and are not mutually exclusive), but again I have no data.
  - pavlov 2y ago
    Are dedicated porn sites like PornHub and friends considered somehow left wing? Or is it just that their NSFW freedom of speech isn't significant because it's not to the benefit of a billionaire that these politicians happen to like.
    - freedomben 2y ago
      Yes I think a little of both: > Are dedicated porn sites like PornHub and friends considered somehow left wing? Not directly no, but since the overlap between right-wing and religious (mostly Christian) are so significant, and many right-wing Christians believe that there is a spritual war going on and that porn is a sin/evil, and it can lead to atheism, and atheism is so frequently associated with left-wing, I think there's some consideration there. > Or is it just that their NSFW freedom of speech isn't significant because it's not to the benefit of a billionaire that these politicians happen to like. I'm sure that's a factor as well. No (or very, very few) politican of any ilk is going to stand up for Big Porn and risk becoming the porn candidate. Personally I'd sure love to see them at least stand up for Big Porn in the name of free speech, but I'm not expecting it anytime soon.
    - dotnet00 2y ago
      Dedicated sites have the issue of being targeted from all sides, right wing hates them for porn, left wing hates them for not being able to filter out exploitation, revenge porn etc and then they also have to fight payment processors who, for some ridiculous reason, are still allowed to screw with any business with zero accountability. I think all those factors combine to make them have to be kind of politically neutral.
      - seadan83 2y ago
        I think you might be drawing a false equivalence. Left wing solutions to things like porn, gambling, drugs, sex work, abortion - is to regulate them so that they are "safe" (harm-reduced) & then find ways to reduce those activities in first place & provide support for people to get out of those activities. Left wing considers these as social problems - not legal. In contrast, right wing views these as problems to be solved also with the legal system. Ban entirely and enforce with police and criminal sentences. Thus the "hates" I don't think is quite equal between the two. I will concede for sure though that if you go far enough left the degree of 'hate' levels out between right & left, but the number of people on the two sides is different. The "silent majority" part of the right wing, the old Reagan coalition for a long time was a pretty sizable part of the Republican party. Meanwhile, the twitter left progressive wing of the Democratic party is not as large compared to the republican religious-conservative right. If we think to the OG far-left hatred of porn - that was there before revenge-porn etc were even concerns. Those OG left-wing concerns that did want to ban porn - were concerned about how porn disempowers women, can glorify violence, further genders inequality, etc.. As a general left/right difference, the approach is not equal. In the cases where the approach is to ban entirely - there are just different numbers of people in the far left "porn should be banned" camp compared to the "porn is sin" camp.
        dotnet00 2y ago
        I'm mainly going off of the story of how IIRC a couple of years ago, PH was forced to wipe most of their site due to left-wing activists pressuring payment processors into threatening to block PH's basic means of doing business if they didn't meet the somewhat absurd demand of filtering out all harmful/unethical material. Sure, they technically didn't use the legal system, they just used the technicality that payment processors hold the same power over internet-dependent companies as a government.
    - seadan83 2y ago
      I think the arrow of causality is perhaps the other way. Recall the "moral majority", Jerry Fallwell, etc. It was a big right-leaning effort to ban porn starting in perhaps the 70s. Probably earlier. The republican party used to have religion as the main ideological component, and immoral porn was a plank in that platform - the party of "family values." That campaign to ban porn never really ended AFAIK, but my impression is the priorities of the party really shifted about 10 years ago to the point it's no longer an open policy (the word pornography no longer appears anywhere in the Republican party platform [1]) Remnants of the anti-porn part of the party can certainlystill be seen in the republican party, eg: Mike Johnson extolling his use of "covenant eyes" Thus the arrow is flipped. The anti-porn cause was very active against printed pornograpghy and continued into the internet age. A right-wing/conservative movement and efforts both predating the internet. [1] https://prod-static.gop.com/media/Resolution_Platform.pdf https://prod-static.gop.com/media/Resolution_Platform.pdf
  - GeneralMayhem 2y ago
    Past research ([1]) has shown that Twitter disproportionately boosts right-wing political content. Qualitatively, you can find whatever you want there, but Elon Musk's personal connection with and admiration for a number of right-wing individuals makes them stand out. In particular, Twitter under Musk has a clear pattern of not applying its moderation policies to high-profile accounts; in the current year, it is right-wing politicians who most frequently post hateful or blatantly false information, so failing to hold them to a normal standard amounts to a tacit approval of what they're posting. [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2025334119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
    - freedomben 2y ago
      Interesting, thanks! It looks like that's going to take at least 30 minutes to read through, and probably much longer to really understand, so I'll have to bookmark it for later, but it sounds intriguing!
    - shrimp_emoji 2y ago
      Please. More like the Internet (i.e., most of humanity) "disproportionately boosts right-wing political content". Before Elon, Twitter was an Orwellian algorithmic police state where everything right of Marx got shadowbanned and suppressed. (Like every other major social platform.)
- tzs 2y ago
  > So, are states like Texas, which need age verification, gonna ask for it for X too? I believe that the Texas law applies to sites where more than 1/3 of their content is sexual material harmful to minors. I don't know exactly how it defines "sexual material" and "harmful to minors", but I suspect that Twitter does not qualify as such a site.
  - WWWMMMWWW 2y ago
    For Texas just have 2 gun pics per porn pic ... then you're OK.
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      You joke, but depending on how the law is written, I could totally see content hosting companies implementing a system where, for every minute of new footage that gets uploaded, they automatically generate 2 minutes of a bald eagle flying across an American flag or something.
MadVikingGod 2y ago
Well, I expect that Twitter will now be banned by every corporate filter in existence.
- unstatusthequo 2y ago
  And possibly the Apple App Store?
  - SassyBird 2y ago
    App Store allows and contains plenty apps with NSFW content.
    - freedomben 2y ago
      Are you sure about that? Is it a recent rule change? I know a person whose app got permanently denied because it had "adult content" in it. It's definitely possible that there is more nuance that I'm not aware of, or that they changed the rules
      - dotnet00 2y ago
        IIRC Discord gets around this by having a setting that needs to be enabled from another device/browser to be able to access NSFW servers on iOS. I think Pixiv (maybe Reddit too?) has something similar. So I'm going to guess the workaround is that Apple requires NSFW content to not be accessible as a default, but does not get in the way for the content being accessible via some form of external switch. The 'external' requirement makes me think that maybe it's about shifting some sort of perceived liability? X might have to add a similar option I guess.
      - SassyBird 2y ago
        You just need a toggle to comply with the rules, so that the user decides what they’ll see. One example is Flickr. Another is Tumblr. They both have toggles for explicit content.
- wkat4242 2y ago
consumer451 2y ago
Wow, that seems like a sign of desperation, doesn't it? I wonder how the other backers of the Twitter deal feel about financing pornography. This includes Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, MUFG, Société Générale, Mizuho Bank, BNP Paribas, and the KSA.
- SassyBird 2y ago
  What a world we live in that allowing NSFW content is seen as desperation, while monetisation through ads isn’t.
  - atonse 2y ago
    But it does change the whole feel of a site and make it not palatable to large swaths of users. Because it's one thing if you can say "I just won't follow porn accounts" – it's a whole other thing if the feed is also algorithmic. So now there's a non-zero chance that scrolling through will result in something pornographic? For the record, I have no issue with that type of content, but there's a sense of "time and place" and having it separated. If not properly gated (via special accounts that can be filtered out, etc, or profiles that have ratings baked in), this can become a mess very quickly.
    - joseda-hg 2y ago
      You have to specifically show NSFW on twitter, assuming the filter works, at worst you get the blurred edges of an image
  - bcrosby95 2y ago
    Yes, a world we've lived in for the past 100+ years.
    - Zambyte 2y ago
      What was fully funded with ads 100 years ago?
labster 2y ago
First Twitter Blue, next Twitter Pink?
- personality1 2y ago
  [dead]
wkat4242 2y ago
Kinda nice actually. This is like the one thing Musk has done at Twitter that I agree with. I think sexuality is a normal part of life, we shouldn't be so fussy about it (within consent obviously). It's not even always for money, many people just enjoy it sharing their content. However it should be behind a filter of course. Just like reddit does. So those who are interested can view it and the rest can avoid it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- arandomusername 2y ago
  Pornography is damaging to society/to those that view it. https://news.byu.edu/intellect/pornography-use-at-any-level-harms-romantic-relationships-says-new-byu-study https://news.byu.edu/intellect/pornography-use-at-any-level-... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9922938/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9922938/
  - pavel_lishin 2y ago
    Any studies from non-religious sources?
    - arandomusername 2y ago
      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6571756/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6571756/ https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/1874574 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/... https://extension.usu.edu/relationships/research/effects-of-pornography-on-relationships https://extension.usu.edu/relationships/research/effects-of-... https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/is-pornography-harmful https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/is-pornography-h... Also those only focus on the user. The pornography business itself is a lot more horrible as it's closely linked with sex trafficking.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
      Is nih.gov a religious source, or was the comment edited after yours?
verticalscaler 2y ago
Every Musk thread smacks of desperation since the histrionics on here the day he took over and fired all those indispensables. The site will go down imminently! Traffic is cratering! Everyone I know have switched to mylittlepony tooting on mastodon! I get it, you don’t like him, by all means. But stop manifesting reality. Edit: awww you guys, sorry if I hurt your feelings. Twitter is down, tooting ftw! musk bad, I conform with all your pet issues and hatreds, please don’t shun me!
- coolbreezetft24 2y ago
  I don't recall anyone on here saying the site will just go down forever. The general consensus here was that there'd be more bugs/glitches and a general degradation in quality. This seems to have panned out
  - verticalscaler 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - seadan83 2y ago
      Can you provide citations/links and references? Though, I'm afraid this will be hard to quantify for you. You will also need to satisfy the burden of proof that those links/citations are prevalent ideas and constitute a representative sample of more than just a few individuals. What's more though, such a representative sample only just informs us about the population of HN commentators. I don't think that is a particularly interesting sub-population, very little (if anything) can be extrapolated other than: "there were a lot of comments on HN stating Y." Doesn't really mean much for me - to be blunt, nobody really cares what random groups of HN commentators think. It doesn't represent very much. On the other hand, perhaps we can look at actual studies that use statistical techniques to in fact make somewhat more interesting inferences, eg: - https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2023/06/07/17-studies-plus-advertising-data-map-out-twitters-decline/ https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2023/06/07/17-studies-plus-...
      - 2y ago
next_xibalba 2y ago
Isn't this just the codification of the long standing status quo? X has allowed nudity for as long as I've been a user.
- jandrese 2y ago
  Maybe they want people to stop reporting the "nudes in bio" Thot Bots? They are explicitly allowed now so you can't complain.
- joseda-hg 2y ago
  I view it as a shift from implictly not forbidden to explictly allowed Some NSFW based accounts regularly complain of shadowbanning and weird behaviours compared to SFW accounts
perihelions 2y ago
This is rather misleading: as the article explains, porn was always permitted on Twitter—it was never prohibited by Twitter's ToS. Actually, I'm rather confused what the substance of this story is. Is it just a finer sub-classification of the NSFW label system?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
burnished 2y ago
Sounds reasonable enough.
kazinator 2y ago
Nude photos of Musk can't be far behind.
throwaway5752 2y ago
What X does or does not do is increasingly irrelevant. They have a CEO who is good at creating attention for himself, but Twitter/X has substantially less active users than Pinterest now. I am almost surprised there is time to make this change while working on board vote politics on his $50B compensation package controversy at his other CEO job. With all the downvote this clearly triggered some people in bad ways, but it is true. Twitter is about 250M, Pinterest is about 500M. Twitter is down substantially in all publicly disclosed metrics / investor writedowns since the go private transaction. I don't know what it is about them that makes some people treat the company with deference it doesn't deserve, but it's a shrinking, niche social network.
TheChaplain 2y ago
Wish they could do something about the bot accounts. :/
dotnet00 2y ago
I like this, they never had rules explicitly against NSFW, but tech companies love their unstated rules and boundaries and it's nice to have somewhat of a reversal on that, as small as it is. YouTube, Twitch etc all have such vague standards on NSFW that it's pretty common for streamers to be completely unsure if something that could be perceived as NSFW would be considered as NSFW by the platform. It leads to all sorts of disappointing self-censoring for no logical reason. Edit: I wonder if the idea behind this is to make it so legitimate accounts feel comfortable labeling their NSFW media properly, so that X can deal with the bot problem by detecting unmarked NSFW media.
tennisflyi 2y ago
It wasn’t official before!? lol

41 points by nehagup 2y ago

So, are states like Texas, which need age verification, gonna ask for it for X too? This could get pretty wild considering the whole bot situation and the way Red States are handling adult content these days...

freedomben 2y ago
This could be a fascinating development to watch actually. Made much more interesting too by the fact that Elon has a lot of business in states like Texas and Florida. X is also increasingly viewed as a "right wing"[1] place, which might make states like Texas a lot more sympathetic to their "free speech" position because they won't feel like it's a "left wing" tactic to poison minds. [1]: I'm not saying it is a right wing place, I have no idea as I have no data (not even anecdata because I don't really use it), but I've certainly noticed an uptick in people sharing that view on sites like HN since Elon took over. Have also heard that there is a decent balance of viewpoints on X. My guess is that both are probably true (and are not mutually exclusive), but again I have no data.
- pavlov 2y ago
  Are dedicated porn sites like PornHub and friends considered somehow left wing? Or is it just that their NSFW freedom of speech isn't significant because it's not to the benefit of a billionaire that these politicians happen to like.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    Yes I think a little of both: > Are dedicated porn sites like PornHub and friends considered somehow left wing? Not directly no, but since the overlap between right-wing and religious (mostly Christian) are so significant, and many right-wing Christians believe that there is a spritual war going on and that porn is a sin/evil, and it can lead to atheism, and atheism is so frequently associated with left-wing, I think there's some consideration there. > Or is it just that their NSFW freedom of speech isn't significant because it's not to the benefit of a billionaire that these politicians happen to like. I'm sure that's a factor as well. No (or very, very few) politican of any ilk is going to stand up for Big Porn and risk becoming the porn candidate. Personally I'd sure love to see them at least stand up for Big Porn in the name of free speech, but I'm not expecting it anytime soon.
  - dotnet00 2y ago
    Dedicated sites have the issue of being targeted from all sides, right wing hates them for porn, left wing hates them for not being able to filter out exploitation, revenge porn etc and then they also have to fight payment processors who, for some ridiculous reason, are still allowed to screw with any business with zero accountability. I think all those factors combine to make them have to be kind of politically neutral.
    - seadan83 2y ago
      I think you might be drawing a false equivalence. Left wing solutions to things like porn, gambling, drugs, sex work, abortion - is to regulate them so that they are "safe" (harm-reduced) & then find ways to reduce those activities in first place & provide support for people to get out of those activities. Left wing considers these as social problems - not legal. In contrast, right wing views these as problems to be solved also with the legal system. Ban entirely and enforce with police and criminal sentences. Thus the "hates" I don't think is quite equal between the two. I will concede for sure though that if you go far enough left the degree of 'hate' levels out between right & left, but the number of people on the two sides is different. The "silent majority" part of the right wing, the old Reagan coalition for a long time was a pretty sizable part of the Republican party. Meanwhile, the twitter left progressive wing of the Democratic party is not as large compared to the republican religious-conservative right. If we think to the OG far-left hatred of porn - that was there before revenge-porn etc were even concerns. Those OG left-wing concerns that did want to ban porn - were concerned about how porn disempowers women, can glorify violence, further genders inequality, etc.. As a general left/right difference, the approach is not equal. In the cases where the approach is to ban entirely - there are just different numbers of people in the far left "porn should be banned" camp compared to the "porn is sin" camp.
      - dotnet00 2y ago
        I'm mainly going off of the story of how IIRC a couple of years ago, PH was forced to wipe most of their site due to left-wing activists pressuring payment processors into threatening to block PH's basic means of doing business if they didn't meet the somewhat absurd demand of filtering out all harmful/unethical material. Sure, they technically didn't use the legal system, they just used the technicality that payment processors hold the same power over internet-dependent companies as a government.
  - seadan83 2y ago
    I think the arrow of causality is perhaps the other way. Recall the "moral majority", Jerry Fallwell, etc. It was a big right-leaning effort to ban porn starting in perhaps the 70s. Probably earlier. The republican party used to have religion as the main ideological component, and immoral porn was a plank in that platform - the party of "family values." That campaign to ban porn never really ended AFAIK, but my impression is the priorities of the party really shifted about 10 years ago to the point it's no longer an open policy (the word pornography no longer appears anywhere in the Republican party platform [1]) Remnants of the anti-porn part of the party can certainlystill be seen in the republican party, eg: Mike Johnson extolling his use of "covenant eyes" Thus the arrow is flipped. The anti-porn cause was very active against printed pornograpghy and continued into the internet age. A right-wing/conservative movement and efforts both predating the internet. [1] https://prod-static.gop.com/media/Resolution_Platform.pdf https://prod-static.gop.com/media/Resolution_Platform.pdf
- GeneralMayhem 2y ago
  Past research ([1]) has shown that Twitter disproportionately boosts right-wing political content. Qualitatively, you can find whatever you want there, but Elon Musk's personal connection with and admiration for a number of right-wing individuals makes them stand out. In particular, Twitter under Musk has a clear pattern of not applying its moderation policies to high-profile accounts; in the current year, it is right-wing politicians who most frequently post hateful or blatantly false information, so failing to hold them to a normal standard amounts to a tacit approval of what they're posting. [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2025334119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
  - freedomben 2y ago
    Interesting, thanks! It looks like that's going to take at least 30 minutes to read through, and probably much longer to really understand, so I'll have to bookmark it for later, but it sounds intriguing!
  - shrimp_emoji 2y ago
    Please. More like the Internet (i.e., most of humanity) "disproportionately boosts right-wing political content". Before Elon, Twitter was an Orwellian algorithmic police state where everything right of Marx got shadowbanned and suppressed. (Like every other major social platform.)
tzs 2y ago
> So, are states like Texas, which need age verification, gonna ask for it for X too? I believe that the Texas law applies to sites where more than 1/3 of their content is sexual material harmful to minors. I don't know exactly how it defines "sexual material" and "harmful to minors", but I suspect that Twitter does not qualify as such a site.
- WWWMMMWWW 2y ago
  For Texas just have 2 gun pics per porn pic ... then you're OK.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    You joke, but depending on how the law is written, I could totally see content hosting companies implementing a system where, for every minute of new footage that gets uploaded, they automatically generate 2 minutes of a bald eagle flying across an American flag or something.

MadVikingGod 2y ago

Well, I expect that Twitter will now be banned by every corporate filter in existence.

unstatusthequo 2y ago
And possibly the Apple App Store?
- SassyBird 2y ago
  App Store allows and contains plenty apps with NSFW content.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    Are you sure about that? Is it a recent rule change? I know a person whose app got permanently denied because it had "adult content" in it. It's definitely possible that there is more nuance that I'm not aware of, or that they changed the rules
    - dotnet00 2y ago
      IIRC Discord gets around this by having a setting that needs to be enabled from another device/browser to be able to access NSFW servers on iOS. I think Pixiv (maybe Reddit too?) has something similar. So I'm going to guess the workaround is that Apple requires NSFW content to not be accessible as a default, but does not get in the way for the content being accessible via some form of external switch. The 'external' requirement makes me think that maybe it's about shifting some sort of perceived liability? X might have to add a similar option I guess.
    - SassyBird 2y ago
      You just need a toggle to comply with the rules, so that the user decides what they’ll see. One example is Flickr. Another is Tumblr. They both have toggles for explicit content.
wkat4242 2y ago

consumer451 2y ago

Wow, that seems like a sign of desperation, doesn't it? I wonder how the other backers of the Twitter deal feel about financing pornography. This includes Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, MUFG, Société Générale, Mizuho Bank, BNP Paribas, and the KSA.

SassyBird 2y ago
What a world we live in that allowing NSFW content is seen as desperation, while monetisation through ads isn’t.
- atonse 2y ago
  But it does change the whole feel of a site and make it not palatable to large swaths of users. Because it's one thing if you can say "I just won't follow porn accounts" – it's a whole other thing if the feed is also algorithmic. So now there's a non-zero chance that scrolling through will result in something pornographic? For the record, I have no issue with that type of content, but there's a sense of "time and place" and having it separated. If not properly gated (via special accounts that can be filtered out, etc, or profiles that have ratings baked in), this can become a mess very quickly.
  - joseda-hg 2y ago
    You have to specifically show NSFW on twitter, assuming the filter works, at worst you get the blurred edges of an image
- bcrosby95 2y ago
  Yes, a world we've lived in for the past 100+ years.
  - Zambyte 2y ago
    What was fully funded with ads 100 years ago?

labster 2y ago

First Twitter Blue, next Twitter Pink?

personality1 2y ago
[dead]

wkat4242 2y ago

Kinda nice actually. This is like the one thing Musk has done at Twitter that I agree with. I think sexuality is a normal part of life, we shouldn't be so fussy about it (within consent obviously). It's not even always for money, many people just enjoy it sharing their content. However it should be behind a filter of course. Just like reddit does. So those who are interested can view it and the rest can avoid it.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
arandomusername 2y ago
Pornography is damaging to society/to those that view it. https://news.byu.edu/intellect/pornography-use-at-any-level-harms-romantic-relationships-says-new-byu-study https://news.byu.edu/intellect/pornography-use-at-any-level-... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9922938/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9922938/
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  Any studies from non-religious sources?
  - arandomusername 2y ago
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6571756/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6571756/ https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/1874574 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/... https://extension.usu.edu/relationships/research/effects-of-pornography-on-relationships https://extension.usu.edu/relationships/research/effects-of-... https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/is-pornography-harmful https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/is-pornography-h... Also those only focus on the user. The pornography business itself is a lot more horrible as it's closely linked with sex trafficking.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    Is nih.gov a religious source, or was the comment edited after yours?

verticalscaler 2y ago

Every Musk thread smacks of desperation since the histrionics on here the day he took over and fired all those indispensables. The site will go down imminently! Traffic is cratering! Everyone I know have switched to mylittlepony tooting on mastodon! I get it, you don’t like him, by all means. But stop manifesting reality. Edit: awww you guys, sorry if I hurt your feelings. Twitter is down, tooting ftw! musk bad, I conform with all your pet issues and hatreds, please don’t shun me!

coolbreezetft24 2y ago
I don't recall anyone on here saying the site will just go down forever. The general consensus here was that there'd be more bugs/glitches and a general degradation in quality. This seems to have panned out
- verticalscaler 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - seadan83 2y ago
    Can you provide citations/links and references? Though, I'm afraid this will be hard to quantify for you. You will also need to satisfy the burden of proof that those links/citations are prevalent ideas and constitute a representative sample of more than just a few individuals. What's more though, such a representative sample only just informs us about the population of HN commentators. I don't think that is a particularly interesting sub-population, very little (if anything) can be extrapolated other than: "there were a lot of comments on HN stating Y." Doesn't really mean much for me - to be blunt, nobody really cares what random groups of HN commentators think. It doesn't represent very much. On the other hand, perhaps we can look at actual studies that use statistical techniques to in fact make somewhat more interesting inferences, eg: - https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2023/06/07/17-studies-plus-advertising-data-map-out-twitters-decline/ https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2023/06/07/17-studies-plus-...
    - 2y ago

next_xibalba 2y ago

Isn't this just the codification of the long standing status quo? X has allowed nudity for as long as I've been a user.

jandrese 2y ago
Maybe they want people to stop reporting the "nudes in bio" Thot Bots? They are explicitly allowed now so you can't complain.
joseda-hg 2y ago
I view it as a shift from implictly not forbidden to explictly allowed Some NSFW based accounts regularly complain of shadowbanning and weird behaviours compared to SFW accounts

perihelions 2y ago

This is rather misleading: as the article explains, porn was always permitted on Twitter—it was never prohibited by Twitter's ToS. Actually, I'm rather confused what the substance of this story is. Is it just a finer sub-classification of the NSFW label system?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

burnished 2y ago

Sounds reasonable enough.

kazinator 2y ago

Nude photos of Musk can't be far behind.

throwaway5752 2y ago

What X does or does not do is increasingly irrelevant. They have a CEO who is good at creating attention for himself, but Twitter/X has substantially less active users than Pinterest now. I am almost surprised there is time to make this change while working on board vote politics on his $50B compensation package controversy at his other CEO job. With all the downvote this clearly triggered some people in bad ways, but it is true. Twitter is about 250M, Pinterest is about 500M. Twitter is down substantially in all publicly disclosed metrics / investor writedowns since the go private transaction. I don't know what it is about them that makes some people treat the company with deference it doesn't deserve, but it's a shrinking, niche social network.

TheChaplain 2y ago

Wish they could do something about the bot accounts. :/

dotnet00 2y ago

I like this, they never had rules explicitly against NSFW, but tech companies love their unstated rules and boundaries and it's nice to have somewhat of a reversal on that, as small as it is. YouTube, Twitch etc all have such vague standards on NSFW that it's pretty common for streamers to be completely unsure if something that could be perceived as NSFW would be considered as NSFW by the platform. It leads to all sorts of disappointing self-censoring for no logical reason. Edit: I wonder if the idea behind this is to make it so legitimate accounts feel comfortable labeling their NSFW media properly, so that X can deal with the bot problem by detecting unmarked NSFW media.

tennisflyi 2y ago

It wasn’t official before!? lol