It’s been a #pornocalypse kind of week here at ErosBlog central, between the Patreon news (and there have been further developments I haven’t updated, but nothing that changes the essential core of the story) and the unwelcome but unsurprising news that the ErosBlog twitter account is shadowbanned. For them as don’t know, that latter thing means I’ve been partially stealth-muted; my tweets no longer show up in any twitter searches (even for people who have found the hidden default hide-the-porn settings and turned them off) and when I address people by @name who don’t already follow me, they can’t hear me. So, yeah, I’m now in the same category as nazi bots and people who yell fuck at verified accounts all day, woot go me. Why? Fuck if I know, call it pornocalypse and move on, I have better things to worry about.

Such as: worrying about how the free and independent open web (which means, those of us whose stuff is on our own domains and servers, not on some “free” social media site or blogging/picture service that can change the rules without notice) are going to survive long enough that we’ll still be here when the rubble stops bouncing. Because this shit cannot last. Blockchain tech and peer-to-peer and strong crypto and supercomputers in every pocket and software radios strong enough to bounce streaming video off of hobbyist drone balloons in the jet stream and more awesome cryptoanarchist shit of that sort that I’m too old and slow to understand: it’s not just coming, it’s already here, it’s just not been patched together properly yet. And when that happens, Facebook is dead. PayPal, Visa, Mastercard? Dead. Patreon and all the other crowdfunding middlemen? Dead. Twitter and Google? Dead. Oh, we’ll have things that look like social media and payments and search and crowdfunding, but they won’t be gatekeepers, they won’t be censors, and they won’t suck more than a microfraction out of any transaction. Because if they try, they’ll be ignored and replaced in real time.

The trick, as it’s always been, is to survive in the meanwhile. Head down, shoulder to the harness because the mules are dead, do the work. If you can’t rely on social media, don’t trust it and don’t invest in it; but use it for what it’s still good for, and be ready to skip briskly to shore (or to the next boat) when the party barge you’re on today gives its final gurgle. And above all, keep your home island solid.

Girl On The Net, always brilliant, made a very smart post about this a few days ago in response to the unhappy Patreon news. In Sex Blogger SOS: Share Our Shit, she points out first the problem:

Patreon is not the first — and it definitely won’t be the last — company to try and purge adult content from its platform. Tumblr has done it, Twitter does it in drips and drabs (stripping adult content from search, banning accounts with adult avatars and headers, etcetera), Facebook has always been a giant prick about adult content so no change there. Payment providers are usually clear from the outset that they don’t want our money. Ad platforms like Google Ads and Amazon Affiliates don’t want our traffic or money either. No one likes us. We’re just too goddamn sexy.

Alongside being really fucking difficult to make a living from, adult content is also really difficult to market.

And then she offers a solution:

However, when platforms like this strip ‘adult’ from their services, they are banking on the fact that you won’t care. That it won’t make a difference to you because adult content is embarrassing and shameful: no one’s going to share a link to their favourite porn site, or their favourite bit of erotic writing, so really who’s going to notice if all that shit disappears?

I’ll notice, gang. I will notice. And I hope you will too.

So here’s my SOS: share our shit. Share your favourite posts, images, videos, tweets, facebook updates. Links to porn sites where people can pay for amazing stuff. Recommend great erotica to your friends. Make it clear to large platforms that the consumers who click on Amazon and Google ads, who buy clothes and books and video games: these consumers also enjoy porn! And erotica! And other forms of sex! It is not utter fantasy, just a boring and simple truth, that the venn diagram of ‘consumers’ and ‘adult consumers’ is a circle. This is important because when platforms push sex content into a silo they’re effectively telling people that sex is different to anything else that humans do. It should be separate. We should take a surgical blade to our brains and our lives and neatly slice sex from the rest of it.

So find your favourite sex content, and share that shit. Retweet it, promote it, email it to your friends. While we’re getting stripped from search results and pulled from Patreon and told that we can only do our thing on Facebook if we shroud it in censor bars and euphemism… we’ll see you sharing our shit, and it will help us keep going. It will bring more people to our websites, and perhaps help us either make more money or build more traffic and that in turn will keep us going too.

She’s aiming this plea outward, rhetorically speaking, from the sex blogger community, and I think that’s smart. But I think it makes almost as much sense internally. We who have our own websites could stand to do a better job of strengthening our internal networking, not just with the passive and outdated “blogrolls” that are becoming rare (with good reason, since few read or click them anymore) but by means of more active engagement with each other’s writing and work. To that end, I am proposing a new blog meme.

I’m going to call this one “Saturday Share Our Shit” (#SSoS) and I imagine it as something like the old link roundups that used to be popular. But I want this one to be optional, occasional, fun, and easy, much like Follow Friday in its heyday. So you don’t have to do it every Saturday, it isn’t mandatory, there’s no set amount of links or set amount of discussion for each one. I’m thinking maybe three links with a sentence or two about each, but here’s the core notion: you put this on your own website, not on a tumblr or a blogspot or facebook or any other social media. And the content you share and promote? Should likewise be content that’s on the independent web, not on anybody’s “free” social media server anywhere. Once your #SSoS post is up on any given Saturday, then, sure: promote the shit out of it on any social media that will allow the promotion. That’s a given. But this meme is all about promoting what’s left of the open web, on what’s left of the open web. And then we use social media to promote our content, instead of using our media to promote their content. Capiche?

I’ll see you tomorrow!

Update: In honor of the fact that I haven’t been able to keep the hashtag straight twice in a row yet, which bodes poorly for the notion that anybody else will either, I have uttered a lordly proclamation:

I hereby further declare in my capacity as Bacchus, Lord of Drunken Misrule, that hashtags #SSoS or #SoSS are both and each perfectly fine.

— ErosBlog Bacchus (@ErosBlogBacchus) October 28, 2017

See also:

This revolution has room for two hashtags!

— ErosBlog Bacchus (@ErosBlogBacchus) October 28, 2017

In short, don’t worry about it!

Fifteen years ago today, I posted the first post on ErosBlog. I am, frankly, amazed to still be at it. I hope you’ll forgive some of today’s wordy indulgences, as I complain about stuff that has gotten difficult and gush about the things I’ve grown passionate about that weren’t even on my radar fifteen years ago.

But first, it’s a birthday! There’s supposed to be cake. I ordered plenty for everybody by clicking on a social media recommended-for-me advertisement. Big Data knows exactly what we want and need these days, right? The cake should be awesome! But when the cake actually got here…

On second thought, maybe we should move rapidly along from birthday cake. Let’s start with a look into my earlier predictions and expectations, shall we?

10 years ago, I was pretty damn upbeat about sex blogging:

I love doing this blog and I can’t imagine stopping voluntarily. Five years ago it was still possible to claim that blogs were a fad. Five years from now, it’s possible we’ll all be considered impossibly old-fashioned, like paper magazines and network television and phones that plug into the wall. But this is about the sex, baby! And people don’t get bored with that, so I should still have an audience.

Five years ago, and five years after I wrote that, I was just a little bit less sanguine:

Where in all this do sex blogs fit it, in the waning month of 2012? Well, people still like reading about sex and viewing dirty pictures, and they all have these miraculous and awesome (I think so anyway; that’s how you can tell I’m old) little always-connected internet devices in their pockets now. Even if “blogs” finish going away and “surfing the web” has become hopelessly quaint, there’s got to be some way to keep on doing what we do (find sexy stuff, pull it together, make a few wise-ass remarks about it, entertain the folk). Our challenge as sex bloggers (or whatever we become when blogging is as dead as carriage racing) is the same as it always was: to do it well enough to be valued, to earn and maintain the attention of our readers in an overstimulated world where attention is the scarcest currency.

In 2007 I asked “Will there be a Ten Candles post on October 3, 2012?” In my secret heart, I was pretty damned sure the answer was “yes”. I’m delighted to have been right. But what about the future? Will ErosBlog still be here in 2017? I’m less confident than I was in 2007; I grow older and move more slowly, while the world speeds up and accelerates into the future. But I’m persistent, and I’m stubborn. Unless I stop being entertained by porn (which seems unlikely) I can’t imagine not having bits of it that need pointed at and talked about. So, just as I did in 2007, I’ll say “I truly do hope so!”

Well, friends, here we are in 2017, and we fuckin’ made it. But blogs in general and sex blogs in particular are not just quaint by this point, they’re positively obsolete. I don’t mind saying that 2022 is starting to look like it might be a serious reach for ErosBlog. More on that later. Let’s talk statistics and history for a minute.

In fifteen years, ErosBlog has published 5,358 posts (5,026 by me, the rest by my several guest bloggers). That’s just under (.98) one post per day — a pretty decent 15-year average if I say so myself! Those posts have attracted 20,499 approved comments, although it must be said that most of those were in the first seven or eight years; since the rise of social media, comment frequency has plunged through the floor, fallen off a cliff, choose your own plummeting metaphor. Only the most loyal blog readers comment any more. Once social media came along, people took their comments there for the most part — and thanks to the #pornocalypse, sex bloggers aren’t welcome on most social media platforms. Or, to be more precise, we may be welcome there in our own persons under our true names, but except on Twitter (the final holdout, for whom the death knell of the #pornocalypse has yet to toll) we aren’t reliably welcome on any major social media under our porn-industry pseudonyms and the adult content of our blogs isn’t welcome there at all.

As for traffic, I don’t have any sort of meaningful long-term traffic numbers I can share. Web traffic is notoriously difficult to measure in any objective way. It’s going down, though, and has been for at least half a decade. I’ve stripped the numbers from this three-year line graph because they aren’t very illuminating, but the trend is clear:

There are many factors that are taking traffic away from independent sex bloggers. They include:

• The decline of the open web and its replacement by closed and adult-hostile social media and app-based ecosystems such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and others;
• Decline in desktop computing and rise of mobile computing generally, feeding the app-based replacement open-web activities noted above;
• Google’s algorithm changes that display virtually all adult websites (except for select popular tubesites) at locations that are buried many pages deep in the search results;
• Deterioration of the paid-subscription porn model that (through affiliate sales) used to support independent adult websites;
• App-based dating software replacement of subscription-model dating sites that (again through affiliate sales) used to help support independent adult websites;
• Rise of video-based “tube” sites based predominantly on free (stolen or promotional) video clips, undermining the paid-porn model and sucking up adult-internet surfer time and attention.

Changes in the porn business and the steady decline in traffic have meant a lot of alterations in the business of sex blogging over the last decade, too. Five years into this gig, it was going really well; I was making more money as a sex blogger (mostly from porn subscription sales) than I ever made at a square job (and I used to work in an office with a tie and a 401k and an eye-watering mortgage). Ten years in, not so much; porn sales were fading fast, but I was making up some of the difference selling ads against my traffic to people who were still making sales on offers that weren’t available to me (stuff that didn’t have affiliate programs). Now? That’s all gone, or nearly so. At these traffic levels I can’t sell a traditional display ad on ErosBlog to save my life, not at least for a price that’s worth having the ugly on my pages. (And the ads that are available are awfully sleazy.) The blog no longer makes me anything that could be considered a living. Such income as does come in is from my generous and much-appreciated Patreon patrons, from sporadic sponsored posts, and from the faded and tattered remnants of the once-mighty affiliate sales ecosystem. Other web projects, freelance writing and research (adult and otherwise), and custom web work take up the bulk of my time, and ErosBlog visibly suffers for it; but it is, as they say these days, what it is.

If you’ve wondered, sometimes, why day after day the new ErosBlog post is just another obscure bit of pulp cover art, that’s why. I am awash in art that I’d like to share, but I simply don’t have enough free time to spend two or four hours busting out a detailed post for the blog every day. A time-consuming post doesn’t pay any more than an image post, things are financially lean chez Bacchus, and it makes more sense to focus on paying work. So, instead, in my free time I use the blog to indulge my passions, which lately have been:

• Surfacing outstanding vintage pulp art from scans that may be online, but are in formats (.pdf and such) that aren’t easily image-searchable and that folks haven’t seen before;
• Tracking and documenting the #Pornocalypse, which is my word and hashtag for the process that social media platforms go through of imposing censorship on their users at that stage in their development when they come under the scrutiny of the moneyed Wall Street and banking interests, who are inevitably more prudish than the Silicon Valley techies who have typically been willing to allow porn on their platforms while they are trying to achieve user volume and “liftoff”;
• Performing curatorial work of all kinds on interesting porn (typically vintage) that exists online in a condition of scandalous disorganization and degraded metadata;
• As resources allow, procure and digitize actual offline porn resources like this, bringing them to the digital world and finding them a secure home here;

Will I still be doing these things in 2022? Well, if we still have a technological society and a more-or-less free country and a somewhat uncensored internet and a functioning economy and a power grid and if I still have access to all those things: probably. I’m pushing fifty, folks; what I enjoy doing seems to change more and more slowly as the years pass.

But will I still be doing all that at ErosBlog?

Cautiously, hopefully, nervously… I think so. Maybe not on the gold-plated, managed-hosting, all-services-provided commercial-grade server that I’ve been using since 2004; the economics are starting to seem highly questionable, although I treasure the rock-solid uptime and the professional support. But I’d hate to abandon my archives (even if Google mostly won’t show them to any but the most dedicated searchers) and I still believe in Bacchus’s first rule. I might get pushed to discount hosting somewhere, but I can’t imagine not keeping up a self-hosted WordPress blog (although five more years of technological change could easily make this sound like a silly thing to have said.)

It’s possible I’ll have to give up on my near-daily posting schedule. The posts I truly value are the lengthy and meaty curatorial ones; and I’m only managing a few of those every month as it is. There’s not much indication, in the traffic numbers or the comments or in any other feedback, that anybody but me would miss the daily pulp art posts, so if I have to cut back to focus more time on making a living, those will be the first to go. The “post every day” rule is a discipline from another blogging era, when (among other virtues) it was thought to help deliver a high volume of Google traffic. If it ever did (and it seemed to) it surely no longer does now!

Reading this over, it “feels” a bit like I’m whining about how ErosBlog used to be a business and has now become a hobby I don’t have sufficient time for. Perhaps I am whining, but if so, please accept my apologies; such is not my true intent. Fifteen years of sex blogging have given me a great deal to be thankful for, including:

• A long list of online sex-blogger friends who, though I may never meet them, I feel I know as well as if we were siblings, and whose good will and ready wit I treasure daily (even if I usually now have to go to Twitter for it);
• An huge visual vocabulary of vintage erotic art and contemporary porn that, although typically it isn’t a thing that’s easy to get paid for having, is ridiculously convenient when undertaking one of my curatorial or provenance-research projects;
• A unique (as far as I know) set of skills for researching the provenance of visual erotica, along with unusual amounts of image-searching skills generally;
• A growing passion for reversing (by means of reconstructive curation and preservation of imagery together with its metadata) the erosive, destructive, entropic destruction of metadata that social media sharing wreaks on internet erotic visual media; and
• A long term ambition to find and digitize “lost porn” that’s still stuck in the analog world — especially rare and vintage specimens thereof — to provide it with a secure digital home and the best possible accompanying metadata.

These are are all fine things to be passionate about, even if I never imagined any of them back in 2002 when I first started this blog. If the last two are the passions that I would still like to find a way to spend more time on than I can currently afford, I shan’t apologize for that; I plan to keep trying to find a way. With any luck at all, by 2022 I’ll be having more success than presently, and it is to be hoped that ErosBlog will still be a part of whatever scheme is working.

The WordPress word count meter tells me I’ve already spent 2,000 words on “me me me” navel-gazing, so let me close with a post-script directed to you, my treasured audience of loyal readers. There’s still a thousand-plus-a-few of you who stop by to view and read on any given day, which is a trust and a responsibility that sometimes weighs heavily when I am being lazy or self-indulgent. I’d like to know a lot more about what brings you, and what keeps you, and what would keep you coming back for the next five years. Even if you don’t normally comment, please consider leaving a comment today. Tell me what you like, tell me what you ignore, tell me what you’d like to see more of. All feedback gratefully accepted!

Similar Sex Blogging:

• Movie Club Guild 8mm Nudie Films: An ErosBlog Project?
• Vintage Erotic Medical Exam
• Please Support The ErosBlog Patreon
• Twelve Years A Blogger
• Ellen Fapper's Pedigree
• Ten Candles
• Forensic Photoarcheology, Vintage Blowjob Edition
• Five Candles

Back in June when Tumblr announced that blogs containing “primarily explicit content” would no longer be visible on the open web (but only to logged-in Tumblr users), I wrote:

Although the email does not say so, I predict that explicit-content blogs will go back to flying that involuntary robots.txt that makes them invisible to the search engines, too. No more outside search-discovery for Tumblr porn!

That day is here, and it gives me no pleasure to announce that I was right. A reader forwarded the email they got from Tumblr:

We’re contacting you to let you know that your Tumblr has been marked as containing explicit content. This means it won’t be visible to minors, people who are using Tumblr in Safe Mode, and people who aren’t logged into Tumblr.

No mention of search, but when I went to check the robots.txt on their Tumblr, sure enough:

As I explained in Thou Shalt Not Search Adult Tumblr Blogs back in 2013 when Tumblr first tried to sneakily hide all the porn blogs:

In robot, that means, roughly “All robots: stay out!” No search spiders allowed. No Internet Archive crawler. The tumblr is there, but you have to know about it, or you have to be linked to it. You won’t find it in Google, you won’t find it in any other search engine that honors robots.txt, and when Tumblr decides to stop hosting it, you won’t find the pages in the Wayback Machine – it will be gone for good, lost to humanity unless somebody with the technical chops and outlaw sensibilities of Archive Team finds a way to archive it anyway, robots.txt be damned.

So it is now official. The ghetto walls are up and the gates are closed. The adult-Tumblr community is no longer part of the open web. The #pornocalypse has claimed another social media victim.

Image credit: the graphic at the top of the post has been adapted from part of a panel that appeared in Action Comics #292 (1962).

Similar Sex Blogging:

• #Pornocalypse Comes For The Porn Tumblrs (Again)
• Tumblr To Bury Adult Blogs Even Deeper, Begins Vilifying Them
• Thou Shalt Not Search Adult Tumblr Blogs
• The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All

I am possessed of a very bad habit. Sometimes I write hectoring letters of advice to complete strangers, in which I tell them how to run (or how not to run) their businesses. Do I actually know how internet strangers should run their businesses? Probably not. Thus, the people who get these letters of mine may conclude that I am a complete crank and net-loon. It’s possible they’re right.

In my defense: I’m getting better! Decades ago, I needed less provocation. Once in the early 1990s, the owner of a small dialup ISP sent me a polite email asking me not to be dialed-in from work and from home simultaneously. (I was in fact running multiple “news robots” against his company’s NNTP server, downloading lots of porn from Usenet.) I apologized, and with the apology sent him many paragraphs of enthusiastic opinion about his business and how it could (from my perspective as a happy power user) be improved. He took my feedback positively, wrote back in good humor, and we maintained a friendly email correspondence for some years, until he sold out to a telecoms giant and went off to Silicon Valley to play startup games with the big boys.

Before the internet, I had a job where I would sometimes write a “micro memo” on a single sheet of paper to summarize and transmit an important press clipping to my bosses, along with a couple of sentences about why it was important to our business. Sometimes I would write these opinionated little micro memos as fax cover sheets and then fax them to random members of my local business community who I thought might need the clippings (and my opinions). They might respond with gratitude, or with confusion; mostly they didn’t respond at all. I justified the effort as “business development” but mostly it was just a cranky hobby. My joke with my friends and colleagues was that I was running a charity business consultancy. Free business advice! (That you never asked for — uh, sorry.)

I told you: I’m getting better. These days, it’s mostly people who write to me first who are at risk of getting an unsolicited session of free business consulting. Usually they are asking for something like marketing help or free exposure, but they make the mistake of pretending they are asking for my advice or feedback because “Please have a look at my stuff and tell me what you think” sounds better than “Please have a look at my stuff and then blog about it for free.”

On the list of recent victims: the perfectly nice folks who run Mikandi, the adult app store for Android devices. Several of you have asked me why I did not blog about the excellent article in Wired magazine last month called The Porn Business Isn’t Anything Like You Think It Is. That article featured, among much other excellent stuff, profiles of Mikandi’s Chris O’Connell (chief architect) and its founders, Jesse Adams and Jen McEwen.

Porn and smartphones are a natural mix. I called Steve Jobs an asshole (until I had to transition to metaphorical spitting on his grave) for inventing the smartphone and then for locking it up so tight that porn apps can’t practically be installed on it by a typical user. Android looked better to me when it came along (this was back when Google still took a stand against being evil) but when Google entered its modern “fuck it, evil pays better” phase, they locked porn out of the default Android app store too. Mikandi (“the app store that treats you like an adult”) stands against all that, and runs what everyone says is a fine adult app store for Android. I want to like them for that, indeed I do like them for that, and I’ve been saying positive things about them for awhile.

I am not, however, a Mikandi customer. The reason for this is embarrassing and economic. I get free iPhones from a family member who wound up on the “Oooh, shiny!” Apple early-adopter treadmill, and so they give me free barely-used phones on a regular basis. I’ve never owned an Android device because of my endless supply of free IOS ones. It’s OK. I get plenty of porn on my desktop, I guess I don’t really need it on my phone, too.

But still. In theory I’d rather be an Android user, and if I were one, I’d be a Mikandi customer too.

Back in June I got a nice email (a real letter, not just a form template) from Jennifer McEwen at Mikandi. She identified herself as co-founder and VP of Product Development at Mikandi, she reminded me that we’d chatted on Twitter via their company account (@mikandistore), and she wanted to “share with me” that Mikandi had officially released its feature supporting the sale of adult comics as apps in the Mikandi store. She invited me to take “take the comic reader for spin” and offered to set me up with some free Mikandi Gold (presumably Gold is their app-store currency) to facilitate that.

She didn’t expressly ask me to write about the new Mikandi product line here on ErosBlog, nor did she explicitly ask me to tell her what I thought of her new offering. Nonetheless I assume she wanted at least one of those. My guess is that she wanted something like what Violet Blue gave her over at Tiny Nibbles: an enthusiastic and visually-appealing blog post saying nice things about the Mikandi comics publishing platform and about the hot dirty sex comics you can enjoy there.

Surprise, dear reader: Jennifer McEwan from Mikandi did not get that from me.

Nope, she got the detailed feedback on why I don’t think her business model is a good one for adult comics publishers. Whoopsie…

Y’see, I have issues with the media-packaged-in-an-app business model. I also have issues with simplistic policies about depictions of consent in porn, and it turns out that Mikandi’s policy is cartoonishly simplistic:

“MiKandi does not accept any non-consensual material, actual or implied. Consent is sexy!”

Reader, I shared my issues with Jennifer. I totally did. Here is an edited-down (yes, really!) version of what I wrote to poor Jen:

Hi, Jen. I’m actually quite glad to hear from you! I’ve become rather a big fan of Mikandi based on your fundamental market positioning and blog postings. (Although I am in theory a big fan of the more-open Android platform and its potential to allow adult products and services that Apple bans from the IOS world, the sorry truth is that I am an IOS user. Thus I don’t actually have an Android device in the house, which means I don’t have the familiarity with your platform and business processes that I would like.)

Sadly that means I’m afraid I have to decline your kind offer of some test Gold — an offer which I would otherwise accept with alacrity.

I must confess I find myself less than excited about your new comic book publishing platform, although I expect a great many comic book publishers will find benefit in it. My concerns with it are at least
partly philosophical: I see a distinction between software (like games and such) and media (like comics). Although I’m not happy buying software that has the potential to get DRM-bricked upon failure of the platform (years pass, the platform gets acquired, the servers stop responding, the app phones home, no answer, so sorry, you lose) I’ve mostly resigned myself to it. But when it comes to media, I am extremely old-school about my purchases. Basically if I can’t load it into my Calibre library (as I do with ebooks), convert it to whatever device-specific format I’m using this week, and then side-load it onto my devices, I’m not going to shell out good money for it. I realize this makes me a crusty curmudgeon. Nonetheless I have all good wishes for your venture; I’m just not excited about this specific business model of shoving media into app-wrappers that need to phone home periodically.

I’ve also got concerns about your Terms Of Service regarding non-consent content, as you were discussing on Twitter yesterday with @eroticawriter. I fundamentally understand that your interface with the banking system leaves you very constrained, but a 10-word policy from 2011 is simply way too vague. If you can’t get more certainty out of your CC processor, you’re not ready to release the platform; and if you HAVE gotten more specific terms regarding what the CC processor will tolerate, those terms ought to be revealed to potential developers.

We all know you don’t want (and the banks won’t process for) endless reams of rape manga, but I am imagining some comics producer like my friend Dr. Faustus who publishes his Tales of Gnosis College comics in old-fashioned comic-book-sized segments, where a plot-essential rape scene might theoretically show up for the first time across four panels in the middle of the seventh book. Indeed, Dr. Faustus does have several sex scenes scattered throughout his comic books, some of them featuring bondage, wrestling, complicated inducements, complicated risk environments, and other complex circumstances that might call consent into question. He avoids the squeamish-publisher problem (and many others) by releasing everything under GPL for free, but I feel like a for-profit publisher trying to distribute an ongoing series via your platform would be put in a terrible bind. Either they have to abandon your platform or they have to decide that artistically, they can’t go where the series otherwise needs to go.

Asking publishers to work in that sort of chilling-effect environment, it seems to me, requires offering them more than ten words of guidance about what is and is not allowed. This is especially so in the case of comics. What does consent even mean in the context of brightly-colored line drawings? It would be fairly easy to exclude material where the fact of rape was the deliberately-titillating fetish element; you could exclude material that advertises rape in titles or summaries, contains dialog or visual elements making the lack of consent explicit, and so forth. But you can’t do it in ten words, and it’s not fair to do it at all without also including some sort of guarantee that a publisher will get a warning or a pre-review process or an opportunity to discover where the line is without being summarily ejected from the platform.

I assume Mikandi is good to developers and publishers because that’s the impression I get about your overall approach to business; but so many #pornocalypse-ready platforms have burned so many people with irregular bannings and subsequent refusal to engage or explain! I would advise any would-be publisher of adult comics not to adopt or invest resources into building out on a new platform or marketplace unless the people running the platform make a public and contractual commitment to providing what is called “due process” in the legal realm. No arbitrary bannings, no unexplained bannings, no loss of ongoing access to the platform because of a transgression that is deemed to exist at the platform’s discretion based on policies not fully disclosed or not even fully-defined internally. It may be (and I hope!) that your internal process incorporates all of these publisher protections, but if so, your documentation doesn’t hint at them. We know you’re adult-friendly, but if the underlying reality is that you have to completely dump some long-running publisher without notice or warning because you got an unhappy phone call from a banking executive, all your good intentions are not so useful. If all of the app-wrapped comics that publisher has sold then suddenly stop working (I have no idea if this risk exists, another “reassurance opportunity” not yet seized by your documentation) it becomes a calamity for readers as well as publishers.

I apologize for turning this into another one of my #pornocalypse rants. I know from your twitter responses yesterday that you’re sensitive to at least some of these issues, and that you’re operating under billing constraints that you can’t do anything about. But I’m very passionate about advising adult-industry people not to get invested in platforms that don’t have their backs. I’m pretty sure you WANT to have the backs of the people who publish through you, but it’s unclear from the TOS whether you’ve got the necessary procedures in place, or the necessary freedom negotiated with your billers, to actually offer publishers what they need: clarity, certainty, and security from arbitrary business disruption when the limits of clarity and certainty have been reached or passed.

Finally, consent issues are at the emotional heart of a lot of BDSM fantasy literature, including in adult comic books. Ambiguity about consent is part of that, whether the ambiguity arises from the limited information available to a third-party viewer (if the opening panel is a handcuffed character fucking, we just don’t have facts to answer the consent question) or whether it arises in the notional mind of the character. (Are they undecided? Have they changed their mind since inviting the handcuffing, but not said anything? How do we know? How would we ever know? Since the mind we are interrogating doesn’t exist, what do these questions even mean?) It seems to me that there’s just a huge realm of adult “comics” literature that is just INCOMPATIBLE with your current ten-word policy on consent. It’s not because non-consensual themes are predominant, but simply because there’s no way to evaluate the work against the 10-word policy and reach any kind of sensible, predictable, or reproducible answer.

Oops! Ranting again. I’ll stop now. Please believe me when I say that I love what I can see of what y’all have been doing, and I’m delighted that your platform exists to challenge the prudishness of Apple and Google. Whatever my reservations about the current offering, I want to see Mikandi thrive and grow and prosper.

Thanks again for getting in touch!

She never wrote me back, poor woman. And what’s more, I don’t blame her. In her shoes, I would have have carefully closed the email from the internet crazyman and gingerly deleted it from my inbox.

How not to be an e-commerce business consultant? I am totally your dude for that!

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#Pornocalypse. It comes for us all, yadda yadda. But what is it, really?

When I first started talking about #pornocalypse, I had a very specific observation to share about the corporate/financial life cycle of internet companies. In the typical cases, internet ventures are adult-friendly when their service is new, and so they enjoy a robust pulse of early traffic from people playing with porn on their platform. Then, as a service/company grows, there comes an irresistible financial pressure to “sanitize” the product, kicking off all the porn so that nobody in corporate management has to confront their own hypocrisy or the squeamishness of financial counterparties when the company seeks to go public, get acquired, or raise additional capital.

Although I first used #pornocalypse to talk about the distinctive pulse of porn bans and adult-industry user purges that we see at the “cashing in” stage of an internet venture’s corporate life cycle, I’ve come to realize that that’s not the whole story. For instance, it’s growing more common for companies to plan their “cashing in” phase from day one, so they may ban all the porn ab initio, giving up the helpful porn influence on the early growth phase in exchange for less hassle during the cashing-out phase. Nowadays it’s harder to tie porn-hostile corporate behavior to the formerly-notorious moment when prudish investment bankers would start looking aghast at all the porny traffic. So I’ve come to use #pornocalypse more loosely, as a handy shorthand for any porn-hostile moves by internet companies.

All that’s by way of preface. This post is about a particular pornocalyptic dodge that we’re seeing more frequently in recent years. Along with content deletions and user bans, a growing trend is to fuck with discovery. The porn is there — and the terms of service may even allow it to stay there — but the search and discovery tools won’t show it to anybody. Welcome to invisibility, you porny motherfuckers.

For a early example, consider this post from 2011, in which I visually documented how Google’s then-new(ish) autocomplete service (sometimes called Google Instant) considered Violet Blue too porny to suggest when suggesting searches on the fly:

I was unaware when I posted that back in 2011 that 2600.com had already sussed out and published a long list of the keywords that Google Instant was blocking. It turns out that Violet was in astonishingly good company! Here are the names of actual humans I was able to identify on the list:

• Betty Dodson
• Bianca Beauchamp
• Carol Queen
• Courtney Trouble
• Ducky Doolittle
• Ginger Lynne (probably typo for Ginger Lynn)
• Jackie Strano
• Jenna Jameson
• Jesse Jane
• Jordan Capri
• Linda Lovelace
• Madison Young
• Miki Sawguchi
• Nina Hartley
• Pamela Anderson
• Paris Hilton
• Sadie Lune
• Shanna Katz
• Shar Rednour
• Shauna Grant
• Shay Lauren (typo for Shay Laren?)
• Traci Lords
• Violet Blue

How did Violet Blue get on this Google blue list? Well, it’s not clear; but it might become clearer if you take out all of the porn performers and the pop-culture celebrities. Ogle this shorter list:

• Betty Dodson
• Carol Queen
• Ducky Doolittle
• Jackie Strano
• Sadie Lune
• Shanna Katz
• Shar Rednour
• Violet Blue

I don’t know everything about all of the people on that list, but I see a lot of sex educators, and I know that at least three of them (four, with Violet) have been in the past or remain to this day closely associated with Good Vibrations, the famous female-friendly San Francisco sex store with the educational mission at goodvibes.com. Hey, do you suppose Good Vibrations was also on the ban list? Well, duh; as surely as bears shit in woods, there they are:

My theory: at some point, an anonymous blue-list technician decided to give Good Vibrations and its whole crew the naughty words treatment. Why? I doubt we’ll ever know. But it may have been well before Google acquired and implemented this particular blue list; after all, Violet was gone from Good Vibrations after 2006. (The short selection of megafamous porn performers also seemed curiously dated even in 2010, suggesting again that the list may have been in circulation for a long time before Google got it.)

By now we understand that there’s a long-established ecosystem of blue list sharing among tech companies and blue-list technicians. More evidence: in 2012 the CEO of Shutterstock (a stock photography site) posted to GitHub a list of 342 “dirty, naughty, obscene, and otherwise bad words” that starred Violet’s name as the only person on the blue list. Although by then the vintage porn stars and Violet’s compatriots in the Good Vibrations San Francisco sex mafia had been scrubbed, the list shares clear ancestry with the Google list as exposed by 2600.com. Consider the persistence of “leather straight jacket” on both lists. Not only is this an oddly specific item for a naughty words list, it’s doubly erroneous; the item in question is most often written as “straitjacket” (one word, no “g”). How likely is it that “leather straight jacket” got put on both lists without those lists having a common source?

The only conclusion is that blue-list engineers have been passing around and sharing their blue lists for a long time, and likely were were already doing so back when Google grabbed and implemented the list with Violet’s name on it. This process continues; the Shutterstock list at GitHub has been forked 112 times since 2012, which emphasizes to me that tech companies continue to seek, modify, and implement these blue lists in their products, sharing their efforts as they go.

Unfortunately for prudish tech companies, no such blue lists long survive contact with the enemy. (That would be us.) In the age of the hashtag, users get very creative about tagging the adult goodies they want to share and see. Thus did Instagram, which is famously porn-hostile, came in for a lot of ridicule this summer when its Long Guerrilla War On Porn got featured on Talking Points Memo:

But as many porn hashtags as there are, many more have been quietly erased by Instagram, revealing nothing when you search for them. Pop in #sex and you’re told “No posts found.” Ditto #adult, #stripper, #vagina, #penis, #cleavage. Even the Internet’s ultimate innuendo, the eggplant, wasn’t safe. You can still tag your posts with banned hashtags and emojis, but good luck finding your community within. Typo-laden tags have popped up to accommodate these arbitrary bans: #boobs is gone, but as I write this, #boobss has well over 600,000 posts; #adult’s spinoff #adule is quickly closing in on 100,000. The tag for #seduce may now be useless, but variants like #seduced and #seductivsaturday cropped up in its place–though it’s worth noting that in the weeks since I’ve been writing this article, #seductiv, the tag that brought me into this world to begin with, has vanished entirely, as has #boobss, #adule, and #eggplantparm, after BuzzFeed caught wind of the fact that the eggplant emoji was not searchable on the app. The goalposts on these hashtags have moved considerably: In 2012, Huffington Post reporter Bianca Bosker wrote about Instagram’s early porn community, but back then, the banned hashtags were far more intuitive: #instaporn, for instance, or #fuckme.

Some more light was shed on Instagram’s evolving war on hashtags after they caught a ton of flak from the body-positive community for banning #curvy from their search results. Of course they claimed it was an automated mistake, and later unblocked the #curvy hashtag after giving it an intensive human-driven curatorial scrubbing:

After a week of controversy, Instagram is unblocking the #curvy hashtag, effective Thursday afternoon.

Instagram first prevented users from searching for photos with the term last week, prompting a huge backlash from users and women’s advocacy groups who were outraged to see a term normally associated with body-positive messages removed from the site. A spate of replacement hashtags, including “curvee,” “bringcurvyback” sprang up to fill in the gap.

The problem was that the #curvy hashtag was being used for other reasons, said Nicky Jackson Colaco, Instagram’s director of public policy. Namely, pornography.

And the tag was overrun, she said. Instagram has protocols in place to flag when any term is being consistently associated with content that breaks the company’s terms of service. Jackson Colaco said that Instagram removes several tags every day when analysis from the company’s automated and human content filtering systems get reports from users that they’ve become a problem. And at some point last week, #curvy hit the tipping point.

…

As Instagram moves to restore the hashtag, it’s also taken the time to find new tools to help it better parse through the photos that its 300 million users post to the site every day. That means stepping up curation of the hashtag, particularly on sections of the service that highlight the “top posts” and “most recent” posts using the marker to make sure that no one looking at #curvy pictures gets an obscene surprise.

The discovery pornocalypse is also highly visible at Tumblr. Do they seriously think anybody will believe this negative search result?

Now, in Tumblr’s case, there’s a workaround. They’ll let you turn off the filtering. But study that page. Click the graphic for the full-sized version. Do you see a “These results are filtered” link that you can click to turn off the filter? You will look in vain for that. If you were sufficiently credulous, you might even come to believe that there’s no anal sex on Tumblr at all. That would seem to be the impression Tumblr wants to convey to the naive searcher. If you’re willing to believe that, Tumblr is delighted to let you believe it.

But what if you’re not quite that stupid? What if you’re looking at that screen and mumbling “Fuckers! I know you’ve got some anal in here somewhere! What do I have to do to see it?”

Well, look closely. Look double closely. Somewhere on that page there’s an icon, nine pixels wide by twelve pixels high. If you can find those 108 pixels, and and if you can guess what they mean, causing you to click upon them, then (and only then) Tumblr’s anal floodgates will open for you. Good luck!

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Wow. I just got the new video iPod. Of course I didn’t get it just for viewing porn, but I’ve got a sex blog thing going on here, so I had to try that out.

Unfortunately, the iTunes store doesn’t sell any worthy porn. No worries; like lots of folks, I’ve got a ton of accumulated little porn clips on my hard drive that I’ve downloaded over the years. Lots of it is 320×240 (the dreaded “postage stamp” size) and doesn’t look like much on a computer screen viewed from twenty-four inches away, but on the stunningly vivid iPod screen held a comfortable distance in front of your face, it ought to look real good. So I’ll just bung my video clips into my iTunes library and get busy viewing, right?

Alas, no. There’s a slight flaw in that plan — video formats. The iPod accepts only two formats; video on the PC comes in many different flavors, virtually none of which match what the iPod wants. You want a good explanation for that, talk to a video geek; I don’t pretend to understand it. There are ways to convert, but they don’t sound easy. I Googled the problem and the “best” solution seemed to be to buy expensive conversion software and then expect to wait a long time as each bit of video gets converted properly. Sorry, but I don’t want it that bad.

So how am I gonna get porn for my iPod?

Fortunately, inspiration struck. You’ll have noticed I’m always posting pictures here that I downloaded from the alt.binaries erotica newsgroups on Usenet; the service I use for that is GUBA, a cheap and friendly sort of search appliance for the Usenet visual content that’s otherwise very difficult to find and download. (If you know how to download dirty movies from Usenet without GUBA, you probably already know how to convert all your files into iPod-friendly formats too, while baking a savory peach pie with your other hand.) Maybe GUBA (I thought hopefully) would have some iPod-friendly dirty movies?

Ding ding ding ding ding! Jackpot. It turns out that GUBA is riding the crest of the iPod porn wave; they have recently added a filter that converts almost all of the video on Usenet into iPod-friendly format, so if it’s been posted to Usenet in the last couple of weeks, you can download it iPod-ready. That’s a LOT of porn, folks; the bigger groups (like alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica) can have 2,500 or more video clips (or even whole movies) at any one time. And there are a metric buttload of different porn groups — one for every imaginable fetish.

When it comes to finding and downloading, nothing could be easier. Just pick your flavor (say, nude celebrities from alt.binaries.multimedia.nude.celebrities) and browse the videos — they make it easy with full-screen “contact sheet” style previews, or you can watch online with a nifty streaming Flash application. Here’s a clip of Halle Berry getting naked and nasty (in a good way) in Monster’s Ball (members-only link, will expire in a couple of weeks):

All you have to do is hit the “iPod Download” button. Once the file’s on your hard drive, import it into iTunes and it will be added to your iPod the next time you synch up. Easy as pie!

Better still, every newsgroup on GUBA has a nifty “subscribe to Feed in iTunes” button at the top of the page: When I clicked that, I downloaded a .pcast file that loads into iTunes and sets it up to download new movies from the selected group as fast as they appear (bandwidth permitting, and you can eat a lot of it this way). An endless gusher of porn, shooting from the hose faster than you could ever hope to consume it. (I could dirty up that metaphor if you liked.)

None of which would matter much, except for the fact that (just like everyone says) watching video on the iPod is an unexpectedly pleasurable experience. The screen is bright and vivid, the details are sharp, and when the iPod’s in your hand, it naturally gravitates to your most comfortable viewing distance. In many cases, it’s actually quite a lot better than watching the same movies on your computer screen. Plus, you can take the iPod somewhere more comfortable (or more private) than your computer desk, if you are so inclined….

I bought my video iPod to have an iPod, thinking the video would be a mostly-worthless gimmick. Boy, was I wrong. The Nymph (who loves music videos) took one look over my shoulder and began pleading with me to let her play with it — the video is that pretty. At this rate, I may have to buy her a second one!

Update from the future: Apple invented smartphones, killing video iPods deader than the Dodo bird. Meanwhile GUBA pulled a #pornocalypse and got rid of all its porn, trying to compete with YouTube; it was dead and gone in eighteen months. Now this post is nothing but a quaint historical artifact. But The Nymph enjoyed that video iPod for many years, in truth.