Is Your Instagram Wife Hotter Than Your Wife?

A few days ago I watched a short YouTube comedy clip called “I want to be married to my Instagram wife.” No link because it wasn’t very funny — just a lackluster and predictable comedian/performance — but that title! It makes me laugh every time I think about it.

Probably our — everybody’s — social media presentation is more attractive than we ourselves are in real life, because we work hard to present the best of our best selves on social media. That somebody might genuinely yearn to be married to their social media wife instead of their actual life-wife is a reminder and a warning. Presenting our best selves to our IRL loved ones might be an unexpectedly good idea! Perhaps even more rewarding than whatever we get from social media?

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Did Tumblr Blink And Un-Pornocalypse? TLDR: No

I’m sorry to report that recent news of “mature subject matter” returning to Tumblr is pretty much totally a scam. I mean, you can post it, but nobody can see it. Search invisibility is near total, even for logged-in Tumblr users. So you’re posting into a black hole of non-discoverability. What’s the point?

Let’s get into it. There’s a lot of ground to cover.

September: Rumors Of The Tumblr Un-Pornocalypse

In late September Tumblr issued a sort-of-sideways announcement about their intention to relax the anti-porn rules by introducing new community labels for mature content. However, the announcement was at pains to explain that the actual content policies were not changing at that time. Specifically: “We haven’t updated the official content policies yet.”

I didn’t blog about it, although I did Tweet. As far as I was concerned, it was a nothing-burger. Wake me up when you can show me the fine print about what’s allowed. I also wanted to wait and see if any new adult-content flexibility extends to search discovery both internally and externally. I’ve seen parts of this movie before…

Tumblr Speaks A Truth: Social Media Porn Is A Hard Problem

At roughly the same time as the nothingburger announcement, Tumblr’s Matt Mullenweg posted, to his eternal credit, the single most-honest explanation from a social media platform perspective about why porn-friendly social media is essentially impossible in 2022. In Why “Go Nuts, Show Nuts” Doesn’t Work in 2022 Mullenweg said all the quiet parts out loud and with his full chest:

In 2018, when Tumblr was owned by Verizon, they swung in the other direction and instituted an adult content ban that took out not only porn but also a ton of art and artists – including a ban on what must have been fun for a lawyer to write, female presenting nipples. This policy is currently still in place, though the Tumblr and Automattic teams are working to make it more open and common-sense, and the community labels launch is a first step toward that.

That said, no modern internet service in 2022 can have the rules that Tumblr did in 2007. I am personally extremely libertarian in terms of what consenting adults should be able to share, and I agree with “go nuts, show nuts” in principle, but the casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible. Here’s why.

He went on to list, in detail, the barriers imposed by credit card companies, app stores, age and consent verification, and the pornocalyptic reluctance of other companies to provide the necessary service stacks modern websites rely upon. Matt’s essay is a good essay. You go read. I’ll just share part of his conclusion:

If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you’d need to be web-only on iOS and side load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don’t dox your users, and make a ton of money [to cover costs].

November: “Bruh! Tumblr Allows Noods Again!”

Nah. Not really. Allow me to explain.

Yesterday was the big day. Tumblr’s new nudity-friendlier community guidelines dropped. They… aren’t completely terrible, if your expectations were as low as mine:

Hardcore porn (“sexually explicit acts”) is still off limits, but the dreaded and mysterious “female-presenting nipple” is back on the menu, everybody!

But… what’s a “sexually explicit act”, you may well wonder? Ha! That’s not defined. Who wants to bet that “gay sexually explicit” and “straight sexually explicit” turn out to be two different things? Or, what about sex education? Demonstrating how to roll condoms onto a banana with your mouth, say? Or… wait! Breaking news from our field reporter on Twitter: sucking a dildo has already been flagged under the new rules, and the appeal apparently rejected. I guess “sextoyly explicit” is the same as “sexually explicit” now?

But wait! There’s more… and it’s worse. The above is Mullenweg’s summary of the new community guidelines. The actual text of the guidelines is rather more crabbed. Specifically, the forbidden “sexually explicit acts” are joined in the naughty booth by “content with an overt focus on genitalia.” What does “overt” mean, do you suppose? Guess! See if you get lucky! Would you have guessed that it included sucking on a sex toy?

So, have I got this right? Nudity is allowed, but if it shows too much pussy and cock, it’s not allowed. Or maybe — we’re guessing here — it’s not too much pussy and cock that gets you in trouble. Perhaps it’s a question of how closely the camera zooms in, or how brashly the genitals in question are displayed. “Overt focus” leaves a lot of room for interpretation, doesn’t it?

Search Invisibility And Your Tumblr Nudes

So, nope. I wasn’t too excited by the nothingburger news in September. But you want to know the real reason for my skepticism? It’s search invisibility. I wanted to see whether the newly-allowable adult content would be searchable, taggable, findable. Because if you can’t search for a thing, or link to it, it might as well not exist.

You all know this routine by now. We’ve written about search invisibility before. The way this scam works is that you can post stuff, but nobody can find it. Your tags don’t work; tag search results don’t have your stuff in it. Your keyword searches don’t work; the results don’t have your stuff. I’ve called this totalitarian in the past, because it’s creepy: people who don’t understand the game just assume your stuff doesn’t exist. “I just don’t understand why nothing comes back when I search for Jenna Jameson nude!” (See next link for answer.)

I first wrote about this happening to Google search suggestions back in 2008. In 2015 or before, Instagram started banning hashtags, sometimes silently and sometimes not. Likewise Pinterest and, yes, Tumblr, although Tumblr in those days had an easter egg pixel-hunt you could do to turn banned searches back on. In 2019, I caught Twitter putting adult stars in search invisibility; their names wouldn’t pop up in the @-name autocomplete function, and the one I tested back then still won’t. These are far from the only examples. I would hazard the proposition that search invisibility is the preferred treatment for grudgingly-allowed adult content on most social media platforms these days.

So what about Tumblr? Yeah, you know it.

To test, I set up an ErosBlog-themed outpost on the new more-lenient Tumblr. (Look for an update when my outpost Tumblr-blog gets inevitably banned, perhaps because of the general porn-hostile social media principle that “if you have an off-platform porn destination/brand they will ban you no matter what content you post.”)

So, yeah, it’s here: tumblr.com/erosblogbacchus. I started with one post, which is a link back to this recent comic/vintage/upskirt post on ErosBlog. Here’s what the Tumblr post looks like to me, logged into Tumblr:

Note the Community Label: Mature flag at the top, which I dutifully set per the new rules because I am such a good social media citizen, and even though this image is not even nude, it is mildly racy and shows a fringe of petticoats.

So, who will find and see that post? Presumably, logged-in Tumblr Users who have their mature content filters set properly in the non-default position, if they also know about my Tumblr blog and have chosen to follow it. That’s gonna be “zero” if nobody can see my posts to ever find out my new blog exists, though. No problem, I’ll just grab the URL and share it elsewhere, because that’s totally how well-functioning social media is supposed to work. Here, look at my post!

Again, if you’re logged into Tumblr and your settings are right, perhaps you see that. But if you’re just a random person coming in from the web (right here!) without an adult-verified settings-optimized Tumbler account, this is what you’ll see:

Woo, exciting! “Mature subject matter” is totally back, boyz! Still, I shouldn’t be too negative. Just click that big easy “Show Post” button, right?

If you listen carefully, you can hear the sepulchral laughter echoing from the crypt underneath Tumblr headquarters. Because guess what? Cock-blocked! Yes, my “Community Label: Mature” post is not visible from the open web. Members only:

Tut-tut! “Ah, now, you need clearance for that.”

But wait a minute! Back up. What about all those hashtags? What about keyword searches? Surely…

If you’re on Tumblr, try the exercise. Type “Balloon Crash” into the “Search Tumblr” box. You will find a lot of posts, but not mine. Or search the #petticoats hashtag. You’ll get lots of petticoats, some of them pretty sexy, but you won’t find my “Mature”-flagged post. It is thoroughly invisible on this social media platform, for any reasonable definition of “social”. The “mature subject matter returns to Tumblr” storyline is at least 85% pure scam, because of search invisibility.

I had to poke at all of this, so I posted one more post. This one has an actual nude — a vintage nude — in it. Female-presenting nipple! Hashtag: “Vintage Nude”. When I typed in that tag, a little “popular tag” badge popped into view. Awesome! Then I clicked the tag. Not much there. Not my post, for sure! Half a dozen old posts, carefully chosen to avoid the dreaded female nipples. Popular tag? Sure! But only among friends. Only in the dark.

In Conclusion: Tumblr Can Suck My “Overt Focus” Dick

So yeah. That’s where we are. Maybe you can post some stuff on Tumblr today that you couldn’t post last week. But nobody can find it by accident. Nobody can find it by looking for it. Nobody can find it socially. You can’t show it to your off-platform friends. Time will tell if Google can see it, but I’m betting against, and what good would a Google Search result even do you?

Within Tumblr, if people already know you, are following you, have given Tumblr their date-of-birth info, and managed to set the right settings correctly, then sure, those people can now see your mature-subject-matter posts. That’s… not really very much. It’s not social media. At best, it’s in-your-bubble media. Fuck that. Just fuck it. I’m not impressed. Bacchus verdict: Tumblr is NOT back.

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Social Media #Pornocalypse Is Why We Can’t Have Nudes In Playboy

It’s no secret that since 2005 or so, I have attempted to make a living at sex blogging. What may be news (if hardly surprising) is that I am no longer succeeding. The single biggest reason (and what I currently perceive as my largest business challenge) is that in 2015 there is no hope of growth in web traffic without social media, and social media companies are (predominantly) hostile to adult content. Generalizing: you can’t put (or link to) smut on social media, you can’t grow or even maintain your web traffic without social media, and so it’s very hard to make money on the adult web. Traffic and revenue decline, and there’s no way to chase it where it is. Back in 2012 at ErosBlog’s 10 anniversary, I wrote:

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!”

I still hope so, yes I do. But it’s no longer clear that ErosBlog can survive as a profit-making enterprise. One of these days it may become a hobby, and a hobby with a much cheaper and less reliable server at that. I sometimes flatter myself that crowdfunding might offer a way forward, but it’s not immune from #pornocalypse either.

Enough about ErosBlog. Icons of the adult industry much bigger than me are struggling with the same dynamic. When your problems are also Hugh Hefner’s problems, you’re at least in good company. When I drunkenly posted the other night about the then-breaking news that Playboy was going to be putting panties on all of its Playmates going forward, commenter André adroitly identified the story as a #pornocalypse situation:

Pornocalypse comes to Playboy. Of all places. It was a common sense business decision, apparently. Porn is everywhere, so Playboy had long lost their edge, and in an age of sanitized social media, their only way to make it into mainstream platforms (Facebook et at) to — in their mind — secure a viable future (doubtful!) was to clean their act up and hide the nudity that offends the terms of service of those platforms.

André should write for Wired magazine. Here’s Wired:

Times have changed. Nudity and pornography are ubiquitous on the Internet. And people are buying fewer magazines overall, choosing instead to read online. Meanwhile, those same readers increasingly come to stories through third-party platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Those platforms have their own rules, and often prohibit or limit nudity. For Playboy to survive in a platform-driven world, the pressure to conform to those standards is immense–so much so that the publication is abandoning the core of its brand’s identity.

This isn’t really a new thing for Playboy. The company already transitioned its website away from full nudity, for the same reason:

Playboy’s shift isn’t completely new. The magazine re-launched Playboy.com last year “as a safe-for-work site,” and has seen significant success. “Tens of millions of readers come to our non-nude website and app every month for, yes, photos of beautiful women, but also for articles and videos from our humor, sex and culture, style, nightlife, entertainment and video game sections,” the magazine says.

The company’s chief executive, Scott Flanders [says] that some content was made SFW “in order to be allowed on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.” The Times also reports that following the website’s shift away from nudity traffic to the site increased “to about 16 million from about four million uniques users per month” as “the average age of its reader dropped from 47 to just over 30″–in other words, a demographic totally at home on social media.

Here’s the Wired summary of social media’s hostility to adult content:

On many social media platforms, the so-called community standards barring explicit content aren’t that different from what Hefner felt he was rebelling against when he famously published Marilyn Monroe’s nude centerfold back in 1953. Facebook, the company says, “restricts the display of nudity because some audiences within our global community may be sensitive to this type of content.” Twitter requires that sensitive content like nudity be marked as such so it can be hidden behind a warning. Celebrities and activists have had little luck in their campaign to have Instagram “free the nipple.” Apple’s App Store guidelines, meanwhile, warn that “apps containing pornographic material… will be rejected.”

This, my friends, is why we can’t have nice adult things. Discovery is no longer via search. (Google killed search for adult sites several years back anyway.) Discovery is via social media. And social media is hostile to adult. It’s not just me. Maybe “Bacchus” at a dumb little 13-year-old sex blog just doesn’t “get” how to market on the modern platforms-and-silos internet. But when freakin’ Hugh Hefner himself abandons the core of his venerable brand, which is models wearing no panties, because the social media platforms are hostile to ladies without panties? It’s not just me. It’s a thing.

I think I shall call it #Pornocalypse.

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Network Effects Are Why #Pornocalypse Is Bad News

Here is a Guardian article that’s all about the trouble Big Data is having with its primary business model. Supposedly the model is to track (spy on) users, then use what Big Data learns about us to do better advertising (and then charge a lot of money for that). The article says this model’s not going so well (for reasons). But I was rather more interested in a tidbit about the other business model that is working rather better for Facebook:

The other profitable line for Facebook is sneakier, and possibly longer-lived. The company can easily see which of the commercial/brand/business pages on its service are growing fastest. These correspond to the businesses that are exerting the most energy to get their customers to follow them on Facebook and making Facebook most integral to their daily business.

When Facebook’s algorithms predict that a business is well and truly reliant upon Facebook to reach its customers, it simply switches off the business’s ability to reach those customers, so that new updates only go to a small fraction of the company’s followers. Thereafter, a Facebook salesperson gives the business a call and offer to turn the tap back on — for a price. That’s not the surveillance business-model. It’s a much older one: the drug-dealer business-model, where the first taste is free.

What’s going on here is that instead of spying on consumers to sell more and better ads, Facebook is instead monetizing its own network effects. Businesses have to pay up; they can’t just “go somewhere else” because all the people they need to reach are (for the time being) stuck on Facebook too. It’s one big sticky wad of flypaper, and the glue is Metcalfe’s Law (basically, networks are more valuable the more people who use them).

This is somewhat related to my #Pornocalypse ranting because access to social media is so difficult for people doing adult business. Big Face says “we don’t want your stinky porn on our network” and an entire industry is locked out of one of the most useful networks on the planet. Multiply that by basically every other social network of size except Tumblr and Twitter, and it’s a serious problem. That’s why we are so sensitive to #Pornocalypse rumblings at Tumblr and Twitter and on any other more minor social networks where adult content is still welcome: it’s far too easy to imagine a world where marketing absolutely requires access to social media, and in which adult businesses are completely excluded from those networks.

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