NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Yahoo's Sneaky Strike to Tumble Tumblr's Adult Artifacts
Yahoo's Sneaky Strike to Tumble Tumblr's Adult Artifacts
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001060.html
Exactly two months ago, when we heard that Yahoo was buying Tumblr for
over a billion dollars in cash, I posed a somewhat provocative
question.
To wit: What was Yahoo gonna do with all that porn on Tumblr?
Despite the continuing insistence of senior Yahoos and Tumblr's now
very wealthy and apparently very pliable young creator that "nothing
would change" -- that never seemed like a probability worth really
considering.
After all, the adult-themed sites on Tumblr range from soft-core to
stunningly serious sleaze, and one would assume that Yahoo wouldn't
want to upset their advertisers (whom young Mr. Tumblr has recently
been praising profusely) with such riffraff.
I'm not an aficionado of this stuff myself, but back in May I made a
prediction and offered a suggestion.
The prediction: "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."
The suggestion: "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."
It now appears that Yahoo and Mr. Tumblr have validated both of these
statements.
Rather than explicitly banning adult materials per se, Yahoo is in the
midst of a full court press to bury them all in a "red light district"
in the deepest, darkest corner of their data centers, ideally in
locations where cooling unit condensation will drip directly onto the
servers and render associated data unreadable as soon as possible.
OK, they haven't gone the condensation route yet, but Yahoo wants
Tumblr adult content out of sight, out of mind, and out of search
engines.
They're taking a number of approaches, none of which have an obvious
equivalence with the promised "nothing will change."
Perhaps of most concern, Yahoo is using the robots.txt convention to
tell external search engines like Google not to index any sites that
Yahoo/Tumblr now considers to be "adult content." This is despite the
fact that a check box still apparently exists through which adult
Tumblr sites can indicate that they do want to be indexed by search
engines. Apparently, this is now a no-op -- a lie.
And now Yahoo has dropped the hammer on tags and internal Yahoo/Tumblr
search, reportedly cutting these sites off from these as well.
The upshot of all this is that for most practical purposes, if you
don't already know the URL of an associated site in the Yahoo/Tumblr
dripping water red light district, you're unlikely to find the site at
all.
Yeah, "nothing will change ..."
Now, none of this is to suggest that Yahoo doesn't have the right to
determine what sorts of material it wants to host, even though their
ongoing actions appear to fly in the face of their previous public
assurances.
But playing fast and loose by blocking access by outside search
engines seems particularly insidious and hypocritical.
If you don't want to host the sites at all, fine. Tell them to leave
and send your advertisers some "mission accomplished" cupcakes.
But it's basically evil to say that you'll host the sites and then
refuse to let those sites be indexed by outside search systems. They
should be permitted to be indexed as normal, and users of those search
engines who do not wish to see adult results can avail themselves of
the adult content controls offered by those search engines themselves.
Yahoo and Mr. Tumblr appear to want it both ways. That's pretty
sleazy in a way that makes even most hardcore porn sites look pretty
tame by comparison.
So, yep, like I said before, I'm not a fan, but if you have an adult
site on Tumblr, you need to be looking for a new home as soon as
possible -- if not yesterday.
In the meantime, it might be interesting to see what Yahoo/Tumblr
would do if you started posting summary information and links to your
Tumblr sites at other locations that are not blocked from search
engine indexing. Perhaps a bunch of Tumblr site owners affected by
Yahoo's cleansing could get together and create a meta-site
specifically for this purpose -- just a place for search engines to
find you and pick up the URLs users need to reach your Tumblr sites
directly.
Appropriately label your content of course -- the idea is to be
indexed, not to force anyone uninterested in your materials to view
them.
Naturally, if something like this started happening on a large scale,
Yahoo and Mr. Tumblr probably wouldn't take it sitting down.
I wonder what "nothing will change" they'd try next?
--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
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