NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Yahoo's Big Tumble Into Big Porn, Big Sleaze, and Perhaps, Big Trouble
Yahoo's Big Tumble Into Big Porn, Big Sleaze, and Perhaps, Big Trouble
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001032.html
By now you've likely heard that Tumblr is selling itself to Yahoo for
just over a billion bucks in cash. Oh wait, excuse me, that's
Tumblr. -- officially, there's a period after Tumblr, a flourish added
to the current vogue of purpsly drpping leters frm yor nme.
Yahoo wants to be "cool" again -- young, hip, bad, fresh, sick,
tight -- or whatever your favorite current euphemism for youth
monetization might be.
In furtherance of this worthy end, Yahoo will be providing Tumblr's
(insert the periods yourself if you must) 26-year-old, high school
dropout founder with a payday of something on the order of a quarter
of a billion dollars -- and each Tumblr employee something like a
paltry six meg each.
To which I say -- more power to them! Man, if you can get it, take
it! While it appears that P.T. Barnum never actually uttered the
phrase usually attributed to him -- concerning the birth rate of
suckers -- it's true nonetheless.
In the last couple of days, I've realized that a surprising number of
folks have either never heard of Tumblr, or purport to know virtually
nothing about its content and user policies. The old echo chamber
strikes again -- it's easy for us to forget that not everyone spends
their days thinking about the Net.
The fact is that Tumblr brings to Yahoo a rather fascinating dilemma.
It would be unfair to call Tumblr a sleaze site per se -- because they
do host a wide variety of utterly un-sleazy materials posted by their
freewheeling users on a virtually endless series of "microblogs."
But, truth be told, Tumblr is also an almost bottomless pit of seamy,
gross, and in some cases borderline illicit postings of all sorts.
The topic range in these particular categories is both broad and deep,
and of the sort to make your creepy Uncle Ernie both pant and vomit
with joy.
We're not talking here simply about happy adult pornography, but
bestiality, self-mutilation, racism, anorexia fan sites, near c-porn,
and so, so much more.
Certainly it's true that other major sites are not necessarily
entirely devoid of such goodies. But the Tumblr terms of use have
tended to either implicitly or explicitly condone -- and so attract --
this sort of content.
Which brings us back to Yahoo.
I'm a first amendment, free speech guy, and so my concern in this
context is not with that Tumblr content itself -- however disgusting I
personally find much of it to be. Like I say all the time, censorship
on the Internet doesn't work and just makes things worse -- don't even
try it.
But seeming corporate hypocrisy related to a billion dollar
acquisition really bugs me.
Yahoo is claiming that it's going to be "hands off" Tumblr -- that (at
least for now) Tumblr will operate separately with no changes to their
usage terms.
"Tumblr and Yahoo will be independent," said Yahoo today -- on the
same day they moved (with considerable fanfare) the Yahoo official
blog to a tumbler.com address. Hmm.
But sooner or later, Yahoo is going to want to monetize the Tumbler
throngs, and therein awaits the advertising trap.
Pretty much the worst thing that could happen to most major
advertisers is to have their products pitched in conjunction with
serious sleaze, especially in this age of flash boycotts.
What to do? Well, obviously Yahoo will be pushing for Tumbler users
to be rigorous about accurately labeling their sites -- e.g. as "Not
Safe For Pretty Much Anyone" -- but just like right now, many users
will ignore this, and likely others will begin purposely mislabeling
as a form of protest against Yahoo's takeover.
Algorithms can try to ferret out some of this automatically --
"Running Procedure sicko_seek-pns49300A.3" -- but a lot will still
slip through, so to speak.
All told, it's almost impossible to visualize anything beyond a
relatively near-term future where the existing full content range on
Tumblr will be tolerable to Yahoo.
My guess is that Yahoo will be subtly working to drive out those
"troublesome" aspects of the Tumblr user base over time -- one way or
another -- ideally before the first big public blowup in the "Yahoo
era" over Tumblr content.
This won't happen overnight. It's in Yahoo's interests right now to
try make Tumblr users of all stripes feel that they're wanted, valued,
and cherished. Welcome to the joyful embrace of Yahoo!
But if I were a Tumblr user with content that was, shall we say,
considerably divergent from the mainstream, I'd be starting to look
around right now for a different place to host my stuff, and some new
URLs to forward over to good ol' Uncle Ernie.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info
Founder:
- Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
- Data Wisdom Explorers League: http://www.dwel.org
- Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance: http://www.gctip.org
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Google+: http://vortex.com/g+lauren / Twitter: http://vortex.com/t-lauren
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com
_______________________________________________
nnsquad mailing list
http://lists.nnsquad.org/mailman/listinfo/nnsquad