Yahoo Censors Tumblr Porn

coolnumbr12 writes "When Yahoo purchased Tumblr in May, Tumblr founder David Karp said Tumblr wouldn't be changing, and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said, 'Part of our strategy here is to let Tumblr be Tumblr.' But a new search policy went into effect Thursday that excludes all adult blogs from Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines by disabling indexing of anything it tags as 'adult.' The policy effectively makes the content and 10 percent of Tumblr users completely invisible."

Re:Unsearchable != Censored

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like if I took something of yours that I didn't like, and welded into a box, then buried it in concrete. It's not as if I was censoring or stealing from you, right?

Re:Not really...

[ron_ivi]

Someone should make a search engine that *only* indexes the stuff that robots.txt suggests against.

I imagine a lot more interesting content is on that part of the network.

I'm shocked!

[SeaFox]

"When Yahoo purchased Tumblr in May, Tumblr founder David Karp said Tumblr wouldn't be changing, and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said, 'Part of our strategy here is to let Tumblr be Tumblr.'

Yeah, and when an independent website gets purchased by a large corporation the executives never lie to the users of a new acquisition to keep them from doing a mass exodus. After all, the users themselves are a part of the deal.

Re:Not really...

[Anonymous Coward]

my robots.txt contains one item which doesn't exist.
If you try to access that item your IP is added to the firewall drop list. (until the next reboot)

I don't even have much hosted, just some pictures I don't want to give to flikr.

Re:So just download wordpress

[Dixie_Flatline]

Well, first of all, there's the question of who determines whether or not it's 'Adult' or merely 'NSFW', since they're treated differently. Since the barrier for 'adult' appears to be that you post nudity often, there are some non-pornographic photographers that are being caught in the net.

Secondly, as of right now, #gay is a verbatim search term. This affects not just porn, but posts about LGBT politics.

Thirdly, lots of artists were migrating to tumblr BECAUSE it was a way to join a network where you could be discovered by fans. Painters and cartoon artists that post pornographic art also can't be found anymore. I know more than one artist that stopped hosting their own portfolio site because it was easier to post on tumblr and provide a DNS redirect. It was a good system, and now the rug has been pulled out from under them.

This isn't just about hardcore porn; most (all?) of that stuff is discoverable through google, even if it's not packaged up as nicely. There's a lot of fandom and art going on that counts as 'adult' content, and it seems to me that it's being unfairly punished.

Plus, honestly, it's nice for users like me to be able to follow some of these people and discover new things that I like and have it all mixed in with my goofy fandom gifs and gender politics and whatnot. I LIKE how tumblr works right now. To me, this is just the puritanical nature of North American culture and law rearing its ugly head.

Re:Bad Idea?

[hazah]

Self expression need not be limited to original content. Self expression is completely satisfied by the following statement: "I like X" (or XXX, or whatever). Publishing is no longer a profession in of itself (types of publishing may be). Furthermore, you don't really get a say whether their point was worth making, it's subjective and irrelevant to the discussion.

More than 10% traffic

[slashkitty]

While 10% of the blogs are estimated to be tagged adult.. It's actually closer to 25% of their traffic. I'm guessing internally they knew that tumblr's adult content was rising faster than the rest of the site, and they certainly don't want it to be primarily adult. It might be better for them long term, but there should be some brushback over this.

Third-party opportunity

[PapayaSF]

The people with porn Tumblrs don't need to move, they just need an easy way to be found. Why not a retro, Yahoo-style directory? That's how lots of us found things before search engines got so good. Just start tumblrporn.com (lawyers permitting) and list all the blogs Yahoo doesn't want indexed, in categories. Sell ads. Profit!