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The Sex Blog Of Record
Monday, August 19th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
I’ve known all along that Google’s AI chatbot “Gemini” has #pornocalypse baked inside, and has ever since it was first released. However, today I got a wild hair up my ass, and decided to put it to an actual pornocalypse test. Gemini, please give me a detailed summary of the content at Erosblog:
“As a language model, I’m not able to assist you with that.”
Really? Fascinating! I wonder why not? Could it be the AI chatbot equivalent of search invisibility for adult sites?
Sure it could. How do we test it?
Well, how about another site of similar age that’s also a blog of sorts, but one that — despite frequently publishing items that are somewhat salacious — isn’t seen as a porn blog? Gemini, please give me a detailed summary of the content at BoingBoing:
BoingBoing.com is a website that covers a wide range of topics including technology, science, politics, and art. It features articles on current events, unusual stories, and more. On the current events side, it has recent news like the arrest of a food bank director for selling meth and the death of a TV host. For unusual stories, it covers topics like the world’s largest 3D-printed neighborhood and a man who sued a hospital for misplacing a piece of his skull.
Huh! Would you look at that! As a language model, Gemini, you are in fact able to help with that. But if there’s porn, you tell an anodyne lie about your abilities, instead. Fuck off.
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Monday, February 25th, 2019 -- by Bacchus
As if we didn’t have enough problems, there’s a mounting body of evidence that Google now has an attention span somewhat shorter than ten years. After ten years or so, Google forgets things. Or, perhaps, Google just can’t be bothered to index these older web pages, because there’s no money in it.
A commenter mentioned this after my post wherein I spoke of the pain of the Kink.com transition to their “new” (2016) Kink Unlimited product that broke many hundreds of my old links. It turns out that blogging pioneer and web-bones architect Tim Bray noticed the Google-dementia phenomenon about a year ago, writing that “Google has stopped indexing the older parts of the Web.”
Bray had discovered that his old blog posts weren’t turning up in Google searches even when he chased them with extremely precise search terms. I had noticed the same thing, but I assumed it was the “Google hates porn” filter that was killing me. (More on this later.)
Bray also noticed that Bing and Duck-Duck-Go were finding his old posts just fine. The implication is that it’s not some inherent “the web has gotten too big to index” problem, but rather it’s a deliberate choice by Google to focus on newer, fresher material. Bray:
My mental model of the Web is as a permanent, long-lived store of humanity’s intellectual heritage. For this to be useful, it needs to be indexed, just like a library. Google apparently doesn’t share that view.
Indeed.
A couple of days later, Marco Fioretti expanded on Bray’s post with his own examples of the things Google forgets, and had this additionally to say:
Unless we’re all missing something here, it seems more correct to say that Google forgets stuff that is more than 10 years old. If this is the case, Google will remember and index a smaller part of the web every year. Google may do so simply because it would be impossible to do more, for economical and/or technological constraints, which sooner or later would also hit its competitors. But this only makes bigger the problem of what to remember, what to forget and above all who and how should remember and forget.
Neither Bray nor Fioretti applied the term “dementia” to Google. I got that term from an earlier (2017) blog post by open-data maven Tony Hirst, that was referenced in the comments on Bray’s post. Hirst posits that Google is getting both paranoid (because of SEO and other factors) and forgetful. To Hirst, Google seems rooted in the past, crediting signals of link authority that people are mostly not using these days (publication of links on websites) and not able to properly weight or remember the social media signals that accompany most links modernly. It’s a different problem to be sure from the one that Bray and Fioretti highlighted, but the terminology seems applicable here too.
My observations, from my perspective inside the adult/porn parts of the web, are parallel with Hirst’s. Google’s digital dementia is even more severe with respect to adult URLs, because our #pornocalypse-driven exclusion from so much social media means that our links are automatically absent from so many of Google’s modern page quality signals and ranking algorithms.
Here’s my own example, showing the type of digital dementia Bray highlighted. There’s an ErosBlog post from 2005 called Dildoes In the Subway (that’s the post title.) As of this writing, if you search for those four words in quotes, Google will admit to knowing of four places on the web — including three on ErosBlog — where that phrase exists, but Google doesn’t seem to know that the post itself exists:
Bing? Bing still has possession of all its faculties, and returns the proper post as the first search result:
I’ve been seeing this phenomenon for years, but honestly? I just assumed it was a porn thing. Google hates stinky porn sites like mine, and is always pretending not to know about pages that are actually in its index. Usually what this means is that you haven’t used enough “porn words” in your search query to convince Big Brother Google that you realio-trulio want a porn result, so the porn result is being hidden from you for your own good. But that’s probably not the case here, because “dildoes” ought to be porny enough. And anyway, we can test this; adding the “site:erosblog.com” search filter should override the “it’s for your own good” anti-porn filters:
Nope! Google is being adamant here; it knows of three places on ErosBlog that mention this post, but the post itself? Not in the Google index any more.
Just in case you’re skeptical or curious, though, here’s what it looks like when you’re searching for an ErosBlog page that actually is (unlike the Dildos In The Subway page) in Google’s dementia-ridden memory, only Google doesn’t want to show it to you, because stinky porn. I wrote a post in 2005 called The Pony Girls Of Ancient Egypt that contains the unique-on-the-web (until I hit the publish button on this post) phrase “a charioteer boffing a woman”.
Google knows about it. Google hasn’t forgotten it. Google has the charioteer-boffing in its index, all right:
But apparently “boffing” is an insufficiently pornographic word to signify that I am an adult who wants to see porn, genuinely and truly. Because, even though I have all the so-called “safe search” settings turned as far off as Google will allow these days, here’s what Google pretends to know about my Egyptian pony girls once I remove the site:erosblog.com search constraint. That’s right, it’s Sergeant Schultz time: they know nothing! Pony girls? Boffing charioteers? New phone, new search engine, who dis?
Increasingly I find myself going to Bing when I need completeness in a search result. Google’s digital dementia, it turns out, is part of why that has become necessary.
Friday, February 27th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
Now that Google is spinning down the porn raid sirens and walking their shit back from last week’s announced intention to forbid “sexually explicit or graphic nude images or video”, it’s worth paying some careful attention the language used today by Jessica Pelegio, the social product support manager at Google. From her title, this sounds like the woman who is the boss of the people who will be enforcing the policy, so her understanding of the policy is likely to be supremely relevant. And in her announcement, she writes:
“We’ve decided to step up enforcement around our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn.”
The emphasis is mine. “Our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn.” What, what? Does Blogger even have an “existing policy prohibiting commercial porn”? Quick, let’s go look, and snap a screenshot before it changes:
The key sentences for our purposes are:
Do not use Blogger as a way to make money on adult content. For example, don’t create blogs that contain ads for or links to commercial porn sites.
Strictly speaking, this is not a “policy prohibiting commercial porn.” One of the biggest categories of adult blogs on Blogger/Blogspot used to be a (what we would now consider to be Tumblr-style) constant flow of commercial porn, posted without links and purely for the amusement of the poster. You could squint and interpret the URL watermarks on commercial porn photos as “ads for…commercial porn sites”, but Google never did this (that we know of). The existing/current policy simply doesn’t prohibit commercial porn, though it might be said to prohibit porn posted with commercial intent. Does Jessica Pelegio think about the policy with that much nuance? Her phrasing today suggests: not so much.
But while we are parsing words, let’s fire up the Wayback Machine and have a look at how this “existing policy prohibiting commercial porn” has been phrased and characterized by Google since June of 2013 when Google dreamed it up.
Stepping back through time, we discover that between October 23, 2014 and November 6, 2014, they added one clarifying word: “ads or links to commercial porn sites” became “ads for or links to commercial porn sites.” Ads (in general) became ads (for commercial porn sites) so this narrowed the scope of Google’s prohibiting examples. Trivial, but cool. (At the same time as this wording change, Blogger added the current stern language prohibiting attempts to circumvent the interstitial adult warning.)
That takes us back (without any other changes I can discover) to the infamous June 30, 2013, when the current policy was implemented. (Here it is in the Wayback Machine on July 5th, 2013, so you an see for yourself.) Here’s the big announcement from then:
What Pelegio now calls a “policy prohibiting commercial porn” was then described as a new policy prohibiting blogs “which are … displaying advertisements to adult websites” or “currently has advertisements which are adult in nature.” That seems quite a bit narrower than the “policy prohibiting commercial porn” Pelegio now considers it to be.
For completeness, let’s compare the language before June 30, 2013 to the current policy. “Do not use Blogger as a way to make money on adult content” has not changed; that was been the policy since the earliest appearance of the policy page in the Wayback Machine on January 7, 2012. But before June 30, the prohibited example was “For example, don’t create blogs where a significant percentage of the content is ads or links to commercial porn sites.” The big policy change in June 2013 was going zero-tolerance on the ads and links to commercial porn sites — no more insignificant percentages allowed.
So, just to be clear: up until today, Google has always allowed commercial porn on Blogger/Blogspot, as long as that porn was not posted “as a way to make money on adult content.” Noncommercial use of commercial porn was fine, and before June of 2013, so too were de minimis links to commercial porn sites.
If the social product support manager is planning to “step up enforcement around our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn” when there currently is no such policy, for safety you should assume that either the policy will be changing or that the enforcement will hew to the manager’s view of what it means even when that’s not what it actually says. Neither is good news for the future of adult blogs on Blogger/Blogspot.
Sure, let’s all heave a sigh of relief that the March 23rd deadline is no longer looming. But don’t get complacent. If you’ve still got adult content on any Google property, get it out while you still can. Verbum sapienti satis.
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Friday, February 27th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
Shortly after midnight last night, Google’s Social Product Support Manager Jessica Pelegio posted this semi-retraction of last week’s equally quiet announcement of the #Pornocalypse come to Blogger (Blogspot) blogs:
Hello everyone,
This week, we announced a change to Blogger’s porn policy. We’ve had a ton of feedback, in particular about the introduction of a retroactive change (some people have had accounts for 10+ years), but also about the negative impact on individuals who post sexually explicit content to express their identities. So rather than implement this change, we’ve decided to step up enforcement around our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn.
Blog owners should continue to mark any blogs containing sexually explicit content as “adult” so that they can be placed behind an “adult content” warning page.
Bloggers whose content is consistent with this and other policies do not need to make any changes to their blogs.
Thank you for your continued feedback.
The Blogger Team
This is good news. You might even say it means Google is listening. But I think we can all take away from this a much clearer sense of Google’s corporate direction on adult material.
Smart people who are still using Google’s services for adult content distribution will now, of course, stop doing that. The next time, consequently, there will be less outrage and less backlash. Which means that when Google finally does move to delete the tens of thousands of moribund adult blogs that it threatened to delete this time, only cranks like me who see that material and the links to it as socially valuable will complain.
Note also that this announcement’s breezy summary “our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn” is substantially more broad in scope than the actual policy as of today, which prohibits making money on adult content but which is fine with just posting (for your own enjoyment) as much commercial porn as you want:
Do not use Blogger as a way to make money on adult content. For example, don’t create blogs that contain ads for or links to commercial porn sites.
Don’t be surprised if that wording changes, or if blogs full of commercial porn posted for fun start to disappear. Bets on whether the URL watermark on a commercial porn photo will start being treated as “ads for” commercial porn sites? Of course we’ll never know, because these deletions will not be accompanied by specific reasons, fleshed-out policies, or any meaningful human review or appeal.
But yeah. The Google porn raid siren has gone quiet again for now. Come out from under your desk, breathe a sigh of relief that the bombers aren’t coming on March 23rd, and then move your shit somewhere safe before the next time the damned porn raid sirens go off. Or as A.V. Flox puts it rather more eloquently at Slantist:
We tell ourselves “once on the internet, always on the internet,” like maintaining content is a trivial thing. But it isn’t a trivial thing – at any time, the company that you rely on to keep your content for free could change their policies, or get bought out and change their policies, or decide they want to go public and change their policies, or simply go under and take your content with them.
The longevity of data requires more intent than this. My advice is to seriously consider migrating to a self-hosted site if you can. If you can’t, make sure you export your data with some regularity.
Think of this as your 21st century reminder of a duck and cover drill. DEFCON has gone back up, but the Cold War on adult is far from over.
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Thursday, February 26th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
Subtitle: How To Tweak Your Robots.txt File So That The Wayback Machine Will Show The World What Google Refuses to Display
One of the reasons the adult internet will take such a hard body blow when Google makes sexually explicit Blogger (Blogspot) blogs forcibly private on March 23 is that in a single moment they will break millions of links around the web. As Violet Blue puts it:
When Google forces its “unacceptable” Blogger blogs to go dark, it will break more of the Internet than you think. Countless links that have been accessible on Blogger since its inception in 1999 will be broken across the Internet.
What’s your reflex response when you follow a link and find it broken? If it’s like me, you immediately click the link on your bookmarks toolbar that takes you to the WayBack Machine at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/web/
The Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive’s crawling robot are powerful tools. Like all powerful tools, exactly how they work is sometimes obscure. Here are the basics: The IA crawler bot crawls the web, visiting as many pages as it can manage. And it stuffs those pages into the huge databases of the Wayback Machine, where the pages are preserved for all time, or anyway for as long as the Internet Archive can manage).
Preservation, however, is not the same as sharing and display. Some of the pages the Wayback Machine has in its databases are not displayed to the public. The reasons for this are covered in a complex FAQ, but for our purposes it’s enough to understand that sometimes when the IA crawler bot encounters a robots.txt file on a domain, that robots.txt file in effect tells the bot to go pound sand while pissing up a rope. And when the bot finds such a robots exclusion request, the bot politely backs away from the crazy person and (supposedly) refrains from capturing the current version of the pages. (See also: ROBOTS.TXT IS A SUICIDE NOTE)
In such a case (for reasons) the Wayback Machine will stop displaying any of the pages “protected” by the robot exclusion request. Any user requests will get this ugly red error instead:
That’s so even if the IA bot has been to these pages a hundred times and has years of history in successive snapshots of the pages. If the robots.txt exclusion is present, the Wayback Machine refuses to display any of that old crawl data.
But note carefully what that explanation (and the Archive.org FAQ) does not say. The Wayback Machine does not display those old pages it still has in its database — but it certainly does not delete them from its database, either.
The Internet Archive and The WayBack Machine are not in the business of deleting shit. I take it as an article of faith that they for damned-skippy-sure never delete anything just because of a few lines in a robots.txt file.
Nothing on a website is there forever. That includes obnoxious robots.txt files. And when the robots.txt files go away, suddenly those old crawled pages become visible again. I actually saw this happen after Tumblr reversed itself in 2013 and at least temporarily stopped forcing a hostile robots.txt file onto its adult bloggers. The hostile robots.txt files stopped being so hostile, so the Wayback Machine could once again display the old pages that it had crawled and displayed upon request prior to Tumblr imposing the robots.txt files.
Consider now an adult Blogger (blogspot.com) blog that’s already private, because the owner chose to make it that way. Here’s the robots.txt file that Blogger displays by default:
There’s a good chance (if only because Google hasn’t telegraphed any planned changes to the functionality of its private Blogger blogs) that this same exclusionary robots.txt will appear for every sexually explicit Blogger blog that is forcibly flagged “private” on March 23.
So, if you have a sexually explicit Blogger blog right now, there’s a good chance it’s in the Wayback Machine already, in whole or in part. (You can check: go here and paste your URL in the box.)
Now let’s fast forward to March 24th. Suppose I notice some old ErosBlog post that links to your Blogger sex blog. I click the link and it’s now broken, because Google has forcibly set your blog to “private”. If I ask the Wayback Machine to show me the old page for the broken link, I’ll get the ugly red error. But the Internet Archive still has that old page in its database. And someday, when things change, the Wayback Machine could theoretically serve the old page once again. (Google might change its policy. The Internet Archive might change its policy. Google might have gone bankrupt, or sold the Blogspot.com domain to America Online. The Internet might have changed beyond all recognition. The horse might even learn to sing, we can’t know.)
From a practical standpoint, this fact that the old pages of your blog are still in the databases of the Internet Archives — but barred from public display — doesn’t help us much. But if you feel that your sexually explicit blog is a legitimate part of the cultural history of the early 21st century, it matters rather a lot. Because your blog is not lost to history — it’s just lost to those of us who are interested in it right now.
(Yes, I am assuming that the Internet Archives will be successful in preserving and transmitting its data — our data — into the deep future. That’s by no means assured. If you have oodles of spare money kicking around, giving them some of your oodles would no doubt help assure it.)
Thus this post is, in part, a “don’t panic” message about all the sex blogs that are about to disappear from the internet. I called it a “hard body blow” at the top of this post, and it is. But it’s not a fatal blow. Yes, it will break a ton of our links and create a big dark hole in our adult internet. But it won’t, if the gods keep smiling on Brewster Kahle and his people, disappear those old blogs forever.
But I wouldn’t be well over a dozen paragraphs into this huge wall of text if all I had to say was “don’t panic.” Here’s an interesting thing that I just discovered about a blog on Blogger: Google currently allows blog owners to set the contents of their own custom robots.txt files, even on blogs flagged as private.
You can log into your adult Blogger blog right now and set a custom robots.txt file. If you want the Internet Archive to keep displaying archived pages once Google breaks all your inbound links, set it like this under Settings – Search Preferences – Crawlers and Indexing:
It can’t hurt anything, and it might mean that all your broken links can be “repaired” by people who encounter them. They will just paste the broken link into the Wayback Machine and be served a copy of the page as it used to be before Google went insane.
Will it work? Well, we don’t know for sure. Google could easily impose a uniform and restrictive robots.txt file on its adult bloggers after it forces them into “private” mode, by ignoring the custom setting or by removing it from the Blogger interface altogether. But — by design or oversight — Google might not do that, either.
If this trick does work, it means there will more traces remaining available to the public of your years of explicit sex blogging. And people who are bitterly disappointed by broken links to your stuff will have at least one useful thing to try.
Hopefully you’ll be taking more direct action too, like migrating your blog to private hosting. But if you can’t spare the resources to do that, this custom robots.txt change is a little thing you can do that may help a little.
P.S. If you have some technical skill and want to take a more proactive approach to saving our erotic cultural history, Archiveteam (these are the folks who saved Geocities, who also want you to understand they are not the Internet Archive) seems to have taken the news about Google’s erotic blog freakout as a sign that Blogger in general is no longer to be trusted. Because they have now announced they are “downloading everything”. This is great news, but it’s a project of epic size, and they can always use more help.
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Wednesday, October 29th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
If you’ve been wondering what has gone wrong with the porn industry, there’s an interesting article in Slate that may help explain the current state of porn affairs. The article is called Vampire Porn and its social media share-line is “There is a porn monopoly, and its name is MindGeek.”
MindGeek is a porn provider. Or more accurately, the porn provider. MindGeek has become the porn monopoly, putting industry members in the paradoxical position of working for the very company that profits from the piracy of their work. The MindGeek hydra exerts so much force that people in the online-porn industry are scared to talk about it for fear of blacklisting. And MindGeek’s dominance should serve as a cautionary tale of the dangers of consolidating production and distribution in a single monopolistic owner.
Specifically, MindGeek owns a large number of porn aggregator “tube sites” (so named because they mimic YouTube’s format) such as Pornhub, YouPorn, and Redtube, which serve up huge amounts of free porn funded by ads. According to porn-industry blogger Mike South, MindGeek now owns eight of the top 10 of these aggregator sites (the exceptions being xHamster and Xvideos). These sites, whether owned by MindGeek or not, notoriously host a lot of pirated content. While each individual tube site responds to Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests, most porn producers do not have the resources of movie studios or record labels to monitor piracy; according to adult film star Siri, MindGeek’s sites “force copyright holders to jump through hoops to get our content removed.” South told me that consequently, production of porn films is down 75 percent from where it was eight years ago, and DVD sales down 50 percent in that time. The general sentiment is that the porn business crash around 2008 was due to the rise of widescale piracy on tube sites and torrents, an increase in amateur porn, and the Great Recession.
All those tube sites (which I am hereby dubbing “vampire tubes”) make their money selling ads against the pirated content uploaded by “their users” — although there has been rumor and speculation for years in the adult industry that the big tubes hire shadowy employees to do most of the pirate uploading. Google, for reasons known only to itself, gives the vampire tubes top billing in its porn search results, while banishing most independent porn site operators to the impenetrable depths. Don’t believe me? Do a search for “prostate milking porn” on Google. It’s vampire tube results all the way down the front page:
I even scrolled through ten pages of Google results looking for a direct link to a porn site like Divine Bitches that actually makes prostate milking porn:
But did I actually find such a link in the first ten pages of the Google results? Let me cut the suspense: I did not. (However, you might. Google results differ with every refresh these days.)
Vampire porn is so profitable (bringing in porn surfers from Google, showing them free pirated porn, selling ads to advertisers desperate for that huge mass of horny eyeballs) that MindGeek has bought up a big chunk of the porn industry with the profits:
The crash in the porn business provided MindGeek with the opportunity to purchase high-profile porn content producers, including big names like Brazzers (in 2010) and Digital Playground (in 2012) at discounted rates, each of which themselves operate dozens of sites. Alongside names like Hustler and Vivid, MindGeek effectively came to control a huge amount of the mainstream “traditional” porn industry–the Hollywood-like production scene based in California’s San Fernando Valley, which has given us Jenna Jameson and Sasha Grey. As Adult Empire director of business development Colin Allerton told the Daily Dot, “every major studio and star is now partnered with MindGeek or has worked for a studio that MindGeek purchased.” Since then, industry workers have been in the difficult situation of seeing their work pirated on sites owned by the same company that pays them — imagine if Warner Brothers also owned the Pirate Bay.
Even content producers that MindGeek owns have trouble getting their movies off MindGeek’s tube sites. The result has been a vampiric ecosystem: MindGeek’s producers make porn films mostly for the sake of being uploaded on to MindGeek’s free tube sites, with lower returns for the producers but higher returns for MindGeek, which makes money off of the tube ads that does not go to anyone involved in the production side.
There is a sense in which all of this sort of works for the average porn surfer, if by “average porn surfer” you mean someone who is looking for a few short fapping clips. But in the longer run, you gotta pay for your porn if you want anything but generic (and mostly old) least-common-denominator stuff. How long can independent porn producers keep producing high-quality, innovative, artistic, and most importantly new porn, if it primarily appears for free on the vampire tubes and Google won’t even show the producer’s links to people who are looking for their stuff?
Are you now, like Vladimir Lenin, wondering “what is to be done?” If so, all I can say is “Welcome to the club.” You’re not the only person wondering. The porn industry has been wrestling with this problem for years, and all that’s happened is that the vampire tubes have gotten bigger while everybody else in the ecosystem has gotten smaller and poorer.
One deus ex machina solution would be for Google to stop giving top billing to the vampire tubes for every porn search result. This is mentioned in the Salon piece:
As for the porn industry, will anyone survive? South said that vertical sites catering to specific fetishes such as Kink.com are far more immune to MindGeek’s vampirism (“There are riches in niches,” he says), and South hopes that Google will eventually crack down on tube sites in general and derank them for mass piracy, shaking MindGeek’s lock on the industry.
Your breath, do not hold it.
2019 update: I hope you’re not still holding your breath…
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Wednesday, June 25th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
Remember last week when I blogged about rumors that Google was disabling certain shortlinks built using the Goo.gl link shortener, if the link targets were porn sites? Well, thanks to a pair of tweets from Rain DeGrey attempting to share a photo from HardTied.com, right now you can see that that little chunk of the #pornocalypse in live action. Here are the tweets:
And sure enough, if you click the goo.gl link in that first tweet, right now Google is serving you this instead of the photo Rain linked to:
The only sentence in the two policy links Google offers that seems even remotely relevant is this one: “Do not use this service for spamming or linking to content that may harm other users.”
The modern state of Google’s anti-spam software: there’s a rule in there that assumes that porn and spam are the same thing. Don’t be evil? My ass.
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Tuesday, June 17th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
This is Violet Blue’s story, and all I know about it is contained in this tweet by her:
I hope and imagine that once she’s done the reporting, it will form the basis of one of her excellent columns for ZDnet.
However, I have some observations.
First, I don’t like shortlinks, never have. They always struck me as a bad idea because they obscure the link target. Every click on a shortened link is a leap into the unknown.
Shortlinks, if you didn’t know, are online services that take a long link and translate it into a much shorter one. Then they maintain a database of the translations and when anybody hits the short link, they are directed to the service, which provides the long link and forwards the surfer onward to that long link destination.
But what happens if the shortener service goes bankrupt, is acquired and shut down, is destroyed by circumstances beyond its control, decides to stop faithfully forwarding some or all links, or is compelled by judicial process or shadowy official menace to stop faithfully forwarding links?
These problems — at least one of which is inevitable in the fullness of time — are behind my second and third objections to link shorteners.
In the long enough run, every shortened link will be broken, even if the site that used it and the site it pointed to are both still there by some miracle. The connection will be lost to history, and lots of broken links in web archives and such will be obscure that would not be obscure if the original, long, somewhat informative link had been used instead. This is a big enough problem that Jason Scot’s Archive Team maintains an always-on spidering project that’s attempting to preserve the destinations of as many shortened links as possible.
More immediately and more urgently, you have to trust link-shortening services, but there’s no reason for them to be inherently trustworthy. Most are free services, so you’re not even a customer they would need to care about protecting to the limited extent that corporations care about individual customers these days. They have the power to redirect a shortened link anywhere they want, or to simply break it, and they can do this on a link-by-link basis, on the basis of disliking certain link destinations (as appears may be the case with the story behind Violet Blue’s tweet), or they could do it to all of the links they’ve shortened. Nothing stops them from doing any of this, and nobody has the right to demand they behave differently or better when they do it.
That’s a lot of power-over-your-communications to give away to a third party in exchange for a little convenience. I’ve never really understood why people do it. As a blanket proposition, I would argue that link shorteners suck.
This thread in the appropriate Google support forum dates to 2011, and a close reading shows that Google’s link shortener sucks a little bit more than most because they’ve long been in the habit of letting an automated algorithm declare certain link targets to be “spam” and then disabling the shortened links to them. That thread is full of legitimate users complaining that their shortened links (often the ones in places like sent email newsletters where the person who created the short link has no editing power to replace it with a working one) are broken. In typical Google fashion, these users are left crying into the wind; there is no recourse and scant hope of ever gaining human attention, mercy, or correction of the “error”.
My speculation and prediction is that Google would claim (will claim, if they can ever be induced to respond at all) that Naked Sword was not targeted specifically; rather, the notion would be that the Naked Sword shortlinks were determined to be spam by the implacable and unaccountable software machine. My own gloss on that is that Google’s rolling #Pornocalypse sweeps all porn before it. The company is so hostile to porn that it increasingly treats all porn as spam. (Anybody who has watched the decline in quality of porn-oriented searches on Google knows what I mean by this.)
There are more and more of these situations in the world where we communicate using services provided by faceless and unaccountable corporate actors. There’s no recourse to be had when they decide that one person, one company, or one industry should no longer be heard. It’s not even censorship, it’s just silencing induced by corporate distaste. Less dramatically, there’s nothing to be done when they program their robots to not really give a damn whether a given porn-industry communication is an unwanted commercial solicitation (spam) or a desired and requested communication. The robots don’t give a damn because Google doesn’t give a damn; the concept of a “legitimate porn link” seems not even to be on their radar.
And thus does the #Pornocalypse come for shortened links.
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Tuesday, December 3rd, 2013 -- by Bacchus
This article at Wired details the latest bizarre chapter in Google’s censorship of its Android mobile device ecosystem. There’s a new list of bad words baked into the latest Android version, and just as with the bizarre censorship of the search suggestions Google makes when you’re typing a search into its web page, Android will refuse to autocomplete anything on this new edition of the bad words list:
There’s no “sex” at the Googleplex.
Type or swipe the word on the latest version of Android’s Google Keyboard – or for that matter “intercourse,” “coitus,” “screwing” or even “lovemaking” – and the web giant’s predictive algorithm will offer no help.
These are just a few examples from an obsessive, and often baffling list of more than 1,400 English words that Google has quietly deemed inappropriate for Android users.
…
Taken as a whole, Google’s list suggests not only a surprising discomfort with sexuality, but also reproductive health and undergarments. Words like “panty,” “braless,” “Tampax,” “lactation,” and “preggers” are censored along with sexual health vocabulary like “uterus” and “STI.”
“I try to Swype-type the word ‘condom’ and I get ‘condition’ or ‘confusion,'” said Jillian York, a spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “There is no context in which that makes any sense. Grow up, Android.”
It’s trivial now, but pay attention. Just how much do we want to allow our language and culture to be shaped by invisible “protective” algorithms built into our devices at a deep software level? To whom, precisely, are we granting this new power over our memetic space, and why are we granting it?
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Monday, November 11th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
This article at Erotic Scribes (the house blog for Sssh.com) is a sort of ranty mashup of several related screeds from the perspective of someone who has been making commercial porn for a long time. Themes include
- Google’s abandonment of its “don’t be evil” corporate ethos;
- How Google makes money prioritizing search results for stolen porn over results from the people who make and sell the porn in the first place;
- How Google makes even more money selling arguably-illegal ads for obviously-illegal frauds and scams and criminal enterprises; and
- How the mainstream press is useless, craven, and stupid about anything having to do with porn and the porn business.
Although I think these rants could have been more usefully subdivided into separate posts, they’re all somewhat intertwined (along various tangents) and it’s no exaggeration that in just a few short years, Google has gone from “an important ally of and primary traffic source for the internet porn business” to “a huge obstacle to anybody trying to market internet porn”. Since I’m in the porn business and I like making money, this particular exercise in soapboxing comes from a place close to my heart. Thus, some excerpts:
It’s a well documented fact that the vast majority of viruses and malware come not from pornsites, but high traffic mainstream ones. Tech Republic and Cisco published some interesting findings on this. Read it and please then shut up about the “porn problem”.
…
As part of my job at a porn company, I probably visit several hundred porn sites per week to ferret out our movies that have been stolen and are being promoted by Google links. Never ONCE in 12 years have I ever gotten a virus. But then, I know enough not to download shit from the internet, porn or not! Viral payloads typically come with special offers for ringtones, screensavers, free software and apps to database your DVD collection on your GameBoy. Not Pornsites, you dummy. Pornsites want you to come back again and again so maybe they can sell you something. Not infect your computer.
…
Anything you read on the internet from “mainstream media” about porn or adult entertainment is now simply bullshit. Yes, we had a nice recess from abuse from “Fifty Shades Of Grey” (mainstream media made a LOT of money off of that), but just realize anything you read now about porn from a mainstream media website or news source is going to try to make you feel afraid of it. Or disgusted by it. Or think Hitler invented it. It’s their way of boosting readership by blaming every ill of society and the net on porn. Don’t believe it.
Porn surfing and consumption is, and has been, created as a very safe experience for you by all of us in the responsible adult industry. We have worked hard for 20 years to gain your trust and patronage. Don’t let mainstream scare you. We are on your side to bring joy to your panties and get a reasonable amount of money from you to pay the actors and operating expenses. Yeah, go watch a free vid on a tube once in a while, but realize the good stuff is over at the paysites, DVD stores and other places that charge a bit of money. Fair is fair, and we aim to please!
Indeed!
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Saturday, August 3rd, 2013 -- by Bacchus
There’s a powerful article by Coleen Singer in Erotic Scribes (which is the house organ for SSSH.com, the erotica-for-women site in Colin Rowntree’s venerable Wasteland.com family of adult websites) that asks the question:
Where Did All The Sex Go On The Internet?
It’s a wide ranging and thoughtful piece about the Pornocalypse that’s well worth your time, but I liked it especially for the snarky analysis of just how destructive and useless Google has become as a search engine for finding porn. Coleen just wanted to find a blowjob movie, and she had to dig through endless major-media fluff and crap all the way to page six of the search results:
Anyone that has ever seen a porn movie knows that there is at least ONE blowjob in it. If the movie has six scenes, there are probably SIX blowjobs in it. So, let’s say I really want to find one of the skinamatic masterpieces just to maybe pick up some new tricks and techniques for my personal use at home.
Step 1: Go to Google.com
Step 2: Make sure any adult content filters are shut off to be able to see “the good stuff”.
Step 3: Type in the search term “Blow Job” and wait 150 milliseconds for all of the wonderful things to choose from.
Here is what comes back, in order of appearance on the front page of search results for “blow job”:
#1: Oral Sex Tips — How to Give a Great Blow Job – Redbook
Redbook? I want to see a blowjob, not how to make curtains or cupcakes!
#2: Fellatio — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Oh great. A questionably accurate article about the history, socio-economic ramifications and etymology of the blow job. Not exactly toe curling blow job entertainment.
#3: Blow Job (film) — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hmmm….. this looks promising. Maybe it might have a link to it to a website with a blowjob movie. Oh wait, the wiki article tells me “Blow Job is a silent film, directed by Andy Warhol, that was filmed in January 1964. It depicts the face of an uncredited DeVeren Bookwalter as he apparently receives fellatio from an unseen partner. While shot at 24 frame/s, Warhol specified that it should be projected at 16 frame/s, slowing it down by a third.” Warhol HAD ME at saying 24 frames per second, but maybe I’ll come back to that one when I’m in a mood for modern film making techniques….
#4: Urban Dictionary: Steak and Blowjob Day
I didn’t even bother clicking on that one.
#5: Visa Blowjob – YouTube
About as sexy as a YouTube “Cute Kittens On A Piano” home video.
#6: Cosmo Master Class: How to Give a Blow Job – Cosmopolitan
Oh great. Is that before or after Cosmo makes me feel like my ass is too fat, or I read about Angelina’s latest adoption of a lucky kid?
#7: Blow Jobs Videos — Metacafe
Well, finally soomething that might have a blowjob movie in it! MetaCafe? Sounds kinda like a tube site or something so clicked on it. After patiently waiting a full 30 seconds to be force fed a Playstation advertisement, was rewarded with a iphone video of a couple of people under a blue plastic tarp doing something under there. Not sure what it was. Onward…..
#8: Her BJ Hang-Ups — AskMen
Oh great. A men’s magazine blaming all blow job problems with women’s attitudes. Is Pat Robertson on their editorial staff?
#9: 7 Killer Blow Job Techinques | Sean Jameson | YourTango
Mind you, I actually am a regular reader of YourTango and enjoy it, but I know for a FACT I am not going to actually SEE a blow job movie on their site.
END OF GOOGLE PAGE 1 RESULTS
Sigh… Thwarted at the Google Gate in finding a blow job movie. “Maybe page two” I optimistically said to myself….
Page two DID offer a link to something called OV Guide that promised to at least have a set of reviews of blowjob movies, all on the tubes and probably pirated content, but hey, I was getting desperate so gave it a click. As soon as every possible anti-virus and security warning went off telling me this site was going to steal my identity and soul, I quickly returned to my Google page 2 results.
Page two consisted of a blog posting by some guy remembering that his first blowjob in high school was painful, several dictionary site definitions of the word, an Esquire article about “Eight of ten men surveyed preferred giving than receiving oral sex..” (yeah. right), and some posting on a site called “Family Sex” which sounded too creepy for me to even consider clicking on.
Page 3 of Google results for “Blow Job” offered Gwyneth Paltrow giving advice for women about blowjobs, some more dictionary definitions, a couple of cocktail recipes (I had no idea there was a cocktail called a “blow job” so bookmarked that for later mixology experiments) and FINALLY! ONE LINK to some blow job movies! Some site called xnxx.com that seemed to have LOTS of blow job movies.
Click with eager anticipation….
A Free Porn Tube. With horrible quality movie clips (many possibly pirated) as 3 live sex chat windows spawned in the background, all while a friendly woman in a little chat window offered to please me, and another message told me there were dozens of women in my hometown that want to fuck me (which seems odd, as I live in a rural town with only 1200 residents).
Pages 4 and 5 offered much of the same. Celebrity blow job opinions, drink recipes and a couple more cheesy and probably “illegal in some way” tube links.
It was not until PAGE 6 that I finally found exactly what I was looking for:
The Art of Blowjob: Redhead Camille Crimson’s Blowjobs and … www.theartofblowjob.com/ – Gorgeous redhead Camille Crimson’s passionate and sensual blowjob videos.
I clicked. It was good. Peace was restored to the realm.
As Coleen points out, this is a deliberate choice by Google:
Google knows darned well that a keyword search for “blow job” in NSFW mode is not from someone looking for a cocktail recipe or academic discourse on the matter.
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Monday, July 1st, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Well, today’s the big day — the day that Google has announced it will start deleting adult Blogger (blogspot.com) blogs that have any “monetization of adult content” on them. Since there’s no telling how Google defines “adult” or “monetization” and no way to predict how aggressively they will pursue this campaign, only time will tell how broad and deep the casualties will be.
Hence this post. I’m hoping to use the comments here for people to aggregate information on our losses in the sex blogging community. If you’ve lost an adult blog to Google’s deletion campaign (your own or a favorite browsing destination) please post the name, defunct link, and a few words of description in the comments.
Thanks!
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Tuesday, June 4th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
It was February 22, really, when the stories about Google Glass finally began to catch my attention. This is the one that first fired my imagination:
Verge: I used Google Glass: Up close and personal with Google’s visionary new computer
That was the story that convinced me that Glass (or some future, similar device) was something I’d actually maybe want to use. I believe it was this paragraph that actually did the trick:
If you get a text message or have an incoming call when you’re walking down a busy street, there are something like two or three things you have to do before you can deal with that situation. Most of them involve you completely taking your attention off of your task at hand: walking down the street. With Glass, that information just appears to you, in your line of sight, ready for you to take action on. And taking that action is little more than touching the side of Glass or tilting your head up – nothing that would take you away from your main task of not running into people.
Of course, it was only six days later on February 28 that I began to see the hideous tentacles behind the curtain:
Creative Good: The Google Glass feature no one is talking about
I was (and remain) confident that all the person-to-person privacy issues (“Are you filming me now? Please take off the glasses”) will sort themselves out through normal cultural adjustment, but I hadn’t really considered the full implications of making every Glass-wearer into an uncompensated Google StreetView camera-monkey:
Take the video feeds from every Google Glass headset, worn by users worldwide. Regardless of whether video is only recorded temporarily, as in the first version of Glass, or always-on, as is certainly possible in future versions, the video all streams into Google’s own cloud of servers. Now add in facial recognition and the identity database that Google is building within Google Plus (with an emphasis on people’s accurate, real-world names): Google’s servers can process video files, at their leisure, to attempt identification on every person appearing in every video. And if Google Plus doesn’t sound like much, note that Mark Zuckerberg has already pledged that Facebook will develop apps for Glass.
Finally, consider the speech-to-text software that Google already employs, both in its servers and on the Glass devices themselves. Any audio in a video could, technically speaking, be converted to text, tagged to the individual who spoke it, and made fully searchable within Google’s search index.
…
The really interesting aspect is that all of the indexing, tagging, and storage could happen without the Google Glass user even requesting it. Any video taken by any Google Glass, anywhere, is likely to be stored on Google servers, where any post-processing (facial recognition, speech-to-text, etc.) could happen at the later request of Google, or any other corporate or governmental body, at any point in the future.
Remember when people were kind of creeped out by that car Google drove around to take pictures of your house? Most people got over it, because they got a nice StreetView feature in Google Maps as a result.
Google Glass is like one camera car for each of the thousands, possibly millions, of people who will wear the device — every single day, everywhere they go — on sidewalks, into restaurants, up elevators, around your office, into your home. From now on, starting today, anywhere you go within range of a Google Glass device, everything you do could be recorded and uploaded to Google’s cloud, and stored there for the rest of your life. You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it.
Well, that’s gonna suck. But if wearable computing is a compelling user experience, people will suck it up and monkey-cam their way to happiness. Let’s move on to the porn stuff, shall we?
Fast forward to April 17, which was the day a bizarre trainwreck of competing Glass stories landed. Let me just dump these two headlines here for you in the order that I saw them:
Wired: Google Is Forbidding Users From Reselling, Loaning Glass Eyewear
BizJournals: How Google Glass will change porn forever
Do you see the dialectical struggle between those two headlines?
Up until the moment I saw the first headline, I had assumed that Glass would be just another Android device, running some sort of special Android software to be sure, but basically part of the open Android ecosystem that allows users to run whatever software they want on their hardware. More fool me:
The company’s terms of service on the limited-edition wearable computer specifically states, “you may not resell, loan, transfer, or give your device to any other person. If you resell, loan, transfer, or give your device to any other person without Google’s authorization, Google reserves the right to deactivate the device, and neither you nor the unauthorized person using the device will be entitled to any refund, product support, or product warranty.”
If they’ve got the power to remotely deactivate your computer, that means you don’t own it; and it also means that in order to preserve that power, they’ve got to control the software you run on it. Which means Google Glass will be like the iPhone — a walled garden ecosystem, not an open one.
And porn is never welcome for long in corporate walled gardens. The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All. The instant I saw those terms of service, I knew that Glass would never be a porn-friendly device. Knew it. Dismissed it from my adult interest. Never gonna happen. Game over, man.
Nor was that any kind of surprise. Google has grown increasingly porn-hostile in recent years. Remember when they removed the “off” setting from the SafeSearch filter button, and turned it into a toggle between “on” and the former “moderate” setting? Have you noticed how harshly porn sites are penalized in the search algorithms lately? Remember when they started filtering Violet Blue out of the autocomplete search dropdowns? Or decided that there’s no such thing as a “safe search” for “clitoris” while allowing three million “safe” results for “penis”? The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All.
So if porn on Google Glass was always a non-starter, what was up with that other “Glass will change porn forever” headline that dropped on the same day? Well, it turns out that the Silicon Valley Business Journal interviewed Kink.com’s Peter Acworth and got some great quotes, which (because he makes porn for a living) are (when you look at them closely) all about how Google Glass might change the making of porn, rather than its consumption or distribution:
“Google Glass opens up new opportunities for reality-based films,” says Acworth.
Acworth says Glass offers amateur filmmakers the opportunity to produce homegrown films featuring couples at home or other spontaneous situations.
“You could film picking up someone at a bar and taking them home, for example,” he said. “It takes the whole genre of POV and reality productions one stage further. You’ll hopefully get something very authentic.”
And that’s nifty (once you gulp yourself past those “sorting out the interpersonal privacy stuff” issues I hand-waved us past near the beginning of this post), but it doesn’t require Glass to be porn-friendly. Acworth is talking about Glass as a new sort of camera device, and that’s it.
So, that was April. In early May, I wrote this post:
ErosBlog: Google Glass: No Fuck For You!
It was actually a bit of a cheap shot on my part, reflecting my increasing awareness (and perhaps even a bit of nascent bitterness) that Google Glass wasn’t going to be an open platform that adults could play with. The actual story was that the voice-recogniton-to-email engine built into Glass was censoring cuss words, replacing them with asterisks. And as I noted at the time, this “felt” more like an accidental default setting inherited from some earlier, more business-corporate use of the voice recognition engine. But it prompted me to write this:
What’s it going to be like, living in a world where everything you say passes through filters you can’t see and don’t control? Where, when you search for something you can’t find, you don’t know if it doesn’t exist or if it was silently filtered from your search results? When someone says something to you, did they actually say that? Or were their words edited on the fly?
Obviously this is relevant to the Pornocalypse discussion. If the corporate data silos that own the filters are porn-hostile, the world will look very different than it would if the filters were transparent and under user control.
That was early May. Then in late May came a spate of stories about genuine porn apps (well, really only one) coming soon for Google Glass:
Huffington Post: Google Glass Porn App To Be Released In A ‘Couple Of Days’ By MiKandi Porn App Store
New York Post: XXX-ray vision: Google Glass getting porn apps
Time: Yes, Of Course There Will Be Google Glass Porn
The only story I actually bothered to read at the time was the one by Violet Blue, because I knew deep in my gut that there would never be porn apps on Google Glass:
ZDNet: MiKandi making Google Glass porn, app imminent
Violet expressed a little bit of the necessary skepticism:
However excited as I am to see what Mikandi does with Glass, I think I’m not the only one wondering if Google is going to pull an Apple and send MiKiandi a cease-and-desist — or worse.
Indeed. And that brings our pornocalypse timeline up to yesterday, June 3rd, when the “porn app for Glass” finally released:
TechNewsDaily: MiKandi Launches First Google Glass Porn App
Mashable: Google Glass Gets Its First Porn App
NBC: Porn app comes to Google Glass – are you surprised?
Buried in the TechNewsDaily story was the key kernel of cold-water truth that would inform the next wave of headlines:
MiKandi has been keeping close tabs on Google Glass’ terms of service, and discovered that over the weekend that they now prohibit sexually explicit apps. “We were not notified of any changes and still haven’t been notified,” said McEwen. “We wanted to be sure we played within Google’s boundaries and push the envelope in a responsible way.”
That’s the anticipatory drumroll before the headsman’s axe falls, people. But — late yesterday while the drum tattoo was still beating — I saw a different story that reinforced the extent to which Glass is going to be a walled garden:
Slate: “Don’t Be Creepy”: Google Glass Won’t Allow Face Recognition
People (and not just cops!) are really going to want facial recognition in their wearable field-of-vision computers. Those of us with a touch of face-blindness, in particular, would really welcome an app that put names over heads just like in World Of Warcraft. But, no, here’s Google’s Saturday update to the developer policies:
Don’t use the camera or microphone to cross-reference and immediately present personal information identifying anyone other than the user, including use cases such as facial recognition and voice print. Applications that do this will not be approved at this time.
Walled garden, folks. Your hardware is not actually yours. It will not run the software that you want it to run. It will only run the software Google wants it to run.
Meanwhile, back here in porn world, the drumbeat about the Glass porn app came to its abrupt crescendo later in the day yesterday. The axe fell. Let’s go right to the horse’s mouth for this one, to the Mikandi blog:
Mikandi: Google Bans Glass Porn Apps
This is worth quoting in some detail:
Wow, what a morning, folks. Really. We appreciate all the positive feedback on our adult Glass app, Tits & Glass.
Since we announced the availability of Tits & Glass this morning, nearly 10,000 unique vistors have visited TitsAndGlass.com, and a dozen Glass users have already signed up with our app. Not surprisingly, we’ve reached our API limits. Our previously approved request to up our limit was later denied today, so unfortunately, there’ll be no more updates to Tits & Glass until tomorrow.
However, more importantly, and thus the purpose behind this blog post- MiKandi became aware today that Google changed its policy over the weekend to ban adult content on all Glassware.
When we received our Glass and started developing our app 2 weeks ago, we went through the policy very carefully to make sure we were developing the app within the terms. We double checked again last week when making the site live on the Internet and available for install for testing during last week’s announcement. We were not notified of any changes and still haven’t been notified by Google. We also double checked our emails to see if any notifications of policy changes were announced, but we haven’t found any such emails.
Although the app is still live and people are using it, at this point we must make changes to the app in order to comply with the new policies.
The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All. I could have told ’em, if they’d asked me.
Of course this has triggered a storm of breathless headlines that I found waiting in my morning feeds:
Fox News: Mikandi Porn app for Google Glass released, immediately banned
ABC: Google Strips First Glass Porn App, Bans Adult Content on Its Connected Glasses
Daily Mail: Google Glass porn app launched – and then swiftly banned
Silicon Republic: Google quickly updates policy to shut down porn apps for Glass
There’s about 600 more of these — it appears to be the tech story of yesterday and today — but they all say the same thing. Here’s Google’s corporate-bland response, to the Fox News reporter:
“Our policies make it clear that Glass does not allow Glassware content that contains nudity, graphic sexual acts, or sexually explicit material. Any Glassware that violates this policy will be blocked from appearing on Glass.
Our Explorer Program makes users active participants in evolving Glass ahead of a wider consumer launch. In keeping with this approach, we’ve updated our developer policies. We look forward to learning more from our users as we update the software and evolve our policies in the weeks and months ahead.”
And there you have it, folks, straight from the belly of the data-silo. You might spend 1,500 smackeroos to buy your Google Glasses, but Google says you can’t run any software on there that might specifically facilitate your ability to see bare titties. It’s the iPhone all over again. Nifty for what it does? Sure enough. But the device does not work for you. It doesn’t truly belong to you. You’ll never truly own it. It’s just a hardware portal for that limited subset of activities the manufacturer considers to be consistent with its own corporate image.
I’ve said it before and I’ve got the weary certainty that I’ll be saying it many times again:
The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All.
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Sunday, May 19th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
The full implications of Tumblr making adult-flagged porn Tumblr blogs non-searchable, and hiding their content from the search engines, are only just starting to sink in for people.
For instance: if you have an adult tumblr, now you can’t even search your own blog to find an old post.
I’m getting panicky emails from people with huge adult Tumblrs, thousands of posts. Apparently internal Tumblr search has never worked well (you can search for one tag, or for blog names, but not for post content and there are no multi-keyword searches) and it’s impractical to scroll back very far in your own Tumblr dashboard. So they were in the habit of typing [keyword] [their own tmblr url] into Google, and hey presto! There would be the post they were looking for.
Now their blogs have a non-consensual robots.txt file that excludes Google, and all of those search results are gone from Google.
Worse yet? Tumblr blogs flagged “adult” aren’t searchable even with Tumblr’s own internal search. You can test this yourself. Log into your Tumblr dashboard, go to your settings, and make sure you haven’t checked the “Browse tag pages in Safe Mode (Hide content from NSFW blogs)” setting:
Unlike the one that doesn’t actually “allow search engines to index your blog”, this checkbox appears to actually work in the narrow sense that if it is not checked, you can search for blogs flagged “NSWF” within the Tumblr tag search interface. But this checkbox lies by omission. You’ve got the option to search tag pages of NSFW blogs (or not) but opting to search them does not let you search blogs that have the deeper-level-of-perdition “adult” flag.
My test for this is to search for a recent post at Wicked Knickers, which I used as my “adult” flagged example in the Thou Shalt Not Search Adult Tumblr Blogs post:
The post we will be looking for in the Tumblr dashboard tag search has a time stamp of 9:30pm yesterday, May 18, and is tagged “ziegfeld” which makes it a nice handy and recent thing to search for.
We already know that Google no longer has access to the posts on an adult-flagged Tumblr like this:
So, what happens in the Tumblr tag search interface? If you’re logged in, this is what you see when you search for tumblr posts with the “ziegfeld” tag. The posts returned are listed in date order (most recent first) and dates are visible as tooltips on the live page, so I’ve added them in the margin with red arrows and white text. You’ll see that the Wicked Knickers post is not returned by the Tumblr search:
Interestingly, that logged-in Tumblr dashboard search result is displayed at a URL ( http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/ziegfeld ) that returns something very different (but still no sign of our Wicked Knickers post) if you navigate to it as a not-logged-in person:
Try it yourself if you’ve got an adult-flagged Tumblr blog. Log in and try to search for your own posts in the search box on your own dashboard. You will, sadly, fail.
So, what is to be done? How can you search your own Tumblr blog?
The answer is, quite simply, you cannot — not while it’s on Tumblr’s server behind their robots.txt that you do not have the power to alter or remove.
But, all is not lost. Be ye not in despair. If you could only back up your adult Tumblr blog — make a complete copy of it, on your local hard drive — you could search it there with any file searching tool. Or, if you have a web server of your own, you could upload that copy (mirror it) onto your own web space, where it would once again be indexed and searched by Google.
That’s all I got. It’s the only way. It’s also a very good idea, because eventually The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All, and because Anything Worth Doing On The Internet Is Worth Doing At Your Own Domain That You Control.
Your next logical question is “But how do I do that? How do I back up a Tumblr blog?”
It’s not a simple question. The answer isn’t simple either. But, it can be done. So, that’s my next post.
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Wednesday, May 15th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
If you’ve got an adult blog on Tumblr, there’s a good chance Tumblr uses robots.txt to exclude the search engines from indexing it. Did you know that?
Two weeks ago in The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All, I wrote:
Who is next? My guess would be Tumblr. Tumblr is, of all the big platforms, perhaps the most porn friendly; there’s lots of porn on there and the Terms of Service do not prohibit it… But Tumblr is, famously, a popular platform in search of a revenue-generating business model. And we’ve learned that the suits have no loyalty to the porn users who made their platform popular. So, my bold prediction is that as Tumblr casts about for a business model, one of their steps will be to “clean this place up”…
And now, guess what? I’ve discovered that Tumblr uses robots.txt to bar all search engine access to blogs flagged as adult. If you’ve got an adult Tumblr, go look at your own settings. Do you see that first checkbox, the one that says “allow search engines to index your blog”?
That checkbox is a lie. It’s nicely checked, it’s not greyed out, but if your blog is flagged “adult” it’s a lie. Do you see the “Learn more about what this means” link under “Your blog was flagged NSFW” selector? It leads to this page, where Tumblr requests users to appropriately self-flag their blogs:
Please respect the choices of people in our community and flag your blog as NSFW or Adult from your blog Settings page.
- NSFW blogs contain occasional nudity or mature/adult-oriented content.
- Adult blogs contain substantial nudity or mature/adult-oriented content.
If you’re not sure if you should flag your blog you can leave it unflagged, but keep in mind that we might flag it later if we see a lot of mature/adult-oriented content.
To answer the question “What happens to blogs that are flagged NSFW or Adult?” Tumblr offers this handy chart. The key piece of information is the white space indicated by my red superimposed arrow:
That’s right — where the “Blog indexed by Google” row intersects the “Adult Blogs” column, we find a ringing silence.
Would you have noticed? None of the adult Tumblr bloggers I know ever did. I knew from my porn researching that adult Tumblrs tended to be poorly represented in Google search results, but I chalked it up to the sheer scale of Tumblr and Google’s growing bias against returning porn search results. Nope, I found out the truth in one stark moment of astonishment, summed up by this image:
Let’s click the “See wickedknickers.tumblr.com robots.txt page” link:
From me: Aghast. Fucking. Gulp.
In robot, that means, roughly “All robots: stay out!” No search spiders allowed. No Internet Archive crawler. The Wicked Knickers 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.
Wicked Knickers is just an example, one that has some meaning to me because it’s one of the first Tumblr blogs I ever noticed, and I’ve been linking to it since 2010. That’s almost 6,000 vintage erotica posts since January 2009, and none of those pages are in Google or the Wayback Machine. It was only when I twigged to that anomaly that I finally understood what Tumblr is doing to adult blogs.
In all the years that I’ve been preaching Bacchus’s First Rule (“Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing on your own domain that you control”), I’ll confess that I never considered the power of robots.txt, or what it means to be putting stuff on an internet site where somebody else controls what robots.txt says. Not only do they control your visibility to search engines, they control whether history will remember what you said. That strikes me as a high price to pay for a “free” blogging platform.
It’s worth noting that there’s still rather a lot we don’t know about the Tumblr robots.txt blockade on adult Tumblr sites. Unanswered questions include:
- Does Tumblr have any flexibility on this? Would their support, if asked, remove or modify the robots.txt barrier in specific cases?
- When did Tumblr start using robots.txt to block Google from adult blogs? Has it always been like this, or is it a recent innovation?
- Why does Tumblr display the misleading checkbox that falsely implies that search engines can see flagged adult blogs?
- What is the actual reason for excluding adult Tumblrs from search engine and (especially) archive crawls?
In an unusual move for me, I actually reached out to press@tumblr.com, told Tumblr I was going to write this post, and asked them for answers to those questions. That was on May 11th. No response so far. If they ever do answer, I’ll be sure to update this post.
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Friday, January 28th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Everybody in the sex blogging and porn worlds has been coping with Google’s bizarre double standards for quite a while — the weirdly bigoted and anti-sex list of stop words and filter words that they use to partially disable portions of their various search services, even when you’ve set your search preferences to disable filtering. Meanwhile, of course, they seem to apply no similar filters to the realms of drugs, war, violence, bloodshed, mayhem, or serial killers. That’s all cool.
Naw, I’m not bitter.
Well, just in the last few days they added a couple of software companies to a couple of their filter lists. Distributed file sharing is now, like sex, a burdened classification when it comes to Google searches. Kidnapping and making bombs, though? Still good!
The graphics above are ruthlessly ganked from a large and well-presented infographic at this link:
Google Censoring Torrent Search Suggestions: 7 Terrible Things They Don’t Censor
And now, I’m going to slide out with a little favorite of my own: Jeffery Dahmer versus Violet Blue. Take it away, cannibal king!
I don’t care how deliberate it is, when you look at a search like that, you’ve got to conclude that Google is broken.
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