CW: Brief child sexual abuse mention.
Is anyone else worried about this? Tumblr banned porn in 2018, and recently they’ve begun to restrict content even further. GFYCat banned porn. Imgur is also banning porn. Reddit doesn’t allow you to use it to host images on NSFW subs, and I’ll bet you anything they ban porn entirely within a year or so.
Where does that leave people who even just want to discuss adult content? Even if you think porn should disappear from society–and I would hardcore disagree with that–that’s not the only thing that’s getting caught up in this wave of censorship. On Tumblr, if you were sexually abused by an adult as a minor, you can no longer discuss this. Literally any reference to child sexual abuse by an adult is now banned on Tumblr. Even if you’re recounting something that happened to you. Hell, even if it’s fictional.
Where are you supposed to go now to discuss adult topics? Twitter is a fascist hellhole, but soon it’s going to be one of your only options, at least social media-wise. And even outright porn is getting harder to find. Your options now are basically the mainstream porn sites and the shit you have to do deep googling for, with nothing in between.
I find this very worrying. Even the vilest, most no-redeeming-social-value porn doesn’t deserve to be banished from the internet entirely. As long as someone gets something out of it and no one is harmed in its creation, porn has its place. But while decentralized alternatives are cropping up to replace social media, nobody seems to want to step up and make a place where we can all be horny without corporate influence.
Or maybe I’m just bitching that I don’t know where to find the good porn on Mastodon. Who knows. Regardless, I think there’s a worthwhile discussion to be had about the scouring of the internet of too risque for advertisers.
Edit: You know what, this person articulates it better than I ever could: https://devonprice.medium.com/mourning-porn-on-imgur-mourning-trans-kinky-history-64de2eaaa6ce
I’ve heard the idea that one of the biggest issues of the web is the homogenization of user spaces. When I was a kid, I could get on Club Penguin, Webkinz, Disney and Nick’s websites for games. I think AOL even had a kid’s oriented network I might’ve used once or twice when dial was still around. When I got into my teen years, I started joining user forums and message boards where I knew that it was mainly adults, so I did my best to act mature (and failed, lol), and if I got called out for being too young and not fitting in, I either got ran off or banned. Now that I’m an adult, even in non-NSFW internet spaces, I don’t really want to interact with kids, but rules and culture are dictated by the need not to expose children to unsavory content because we just let them run around.
I’m sure it’s the responsible thing to do, because I saw stuff I never should have, browsing 4chan, adult content, and other really nasty stuff as a kid. I definitely don’t want kids to be subject to that, but damn I hate that the presumption that kids might see something be a strike against users when adults want to discuss mature topics.
this is another big one yeah. both for children and adults the net has “constricted”, in many senses. even i–with my extensive bookmarks and media diet–still get most of my news, interaction, and discussion from exactly four sites: discord, twitter, cohost, and beehaw. sometimes i check tumblr, and i watch plenty of youtube but often in the background of other stuff. when i was 10, i had probably double the spaces i checked out that i do now (and was a regular on a bunch of forums that i probably shouldn’t have been lol).
I miss when the internet had rabbitholes. Stumbleupon and personal web pages wasted so much of my time. It’s like the internet was changed by urban sprawl. Instead of having different communities, some busy, some slow, some with broad interests, others with niche, there is only one shade of grey for the entire web: clean, monetize, and lowest common denominator.