Yahoo should allow freer access to adult content
This post is in response to this article which I saw today:
Well, here's a specific: porn. Yahoo used to be a great place to find porn. Between auctions featuring pornographic content of every type, to well-classified and easily findable adult groups (adult groups are now impossible to find without a direct link), Yahoo was actually pretty cool in that area. That ended several years ago, for reasons that were never very clear. One could speculate that the switch was primarily due to shareholder distaste at the idea of peddling porn on the internet, however, that's just one idea. There may have been practical reasons, such as not wanting to have to worry about ridiculous 2257 verification laws. Or they may have just noticed how much flat-out illegal stuff was being sold or promulgated through their site (it wasn't hard to find beast porn or Traci Lords videos on Yahoo Auctions, for example, both of which are pretty illegal in the United States). Or perhaps there was lots of worried handwringing and pearl clutching about minors accessing adult content (an idea which seems almost ridiculous today, when teenagers with cameraphones or webcams are perfectly capable of making their own).
Well, I suggest if Yahoo wants to increase profitability, they should get back into porn. Yahoo Auctions is now defunct, a fact I became aware of only just now (when they banned adult-content auctions years ago, I immediately left and never looked back). But at the very least, they could bring back the publicly accessible listings of "adult" Yahoo Groups [see footnote]. They could also add an "Adult Search" to their search page. Hell, porn is a vast business, I'm sure there are dozens of ways they could make money off of it. Why they don't bother is beyond me.
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Footnote
I had to add this in here--one Yahoo group that I subscribe to was forced to relegate itself to the "adult" section of Yahoo groups when Yahoo staff stumbled across some pictures one of the members had posted of his topless girlfriend. They deleted the pictures, and sent a message to the admin of the group telling him that if anyone posted anything like that again, they would delete the group without warning. He could either keep the "nudity" out, or agree to move the group over into the adult section. After some discussion with the members, it was agreed to move the group over into the adult section. The irony of this is that, since then, there has been absolutely no further nudity in the pictures section. So here we have a group that's stuck behind the wall of "adult content", just because somebody screwed up one time.
Of course, on Yahoo's site Flickr.com, things tend to be even worse--there, accounts are deleted with no warning at all. Well, there are claims (made by Flickr staff, I believe) that people receive one warning, but does this actually happen? Not that I know of. The only "warning" I've ever heard of is when word gets around that accounts are being deleted, that another pogrom is in progress. Refer to my earlier post about a friend who got her account nuked one day--she received no warning at all. Sure, she's got another account now, but, as someone else wrote on Flickr (in a group that was deleted within the last 24 hours, ironically), you can come back, but now that you know you can be busted at any time, with no warning and no explanation, you've lost your edge, you've lost your mojo. I think that is entirely the intention of the Flickr gestapo, to keep people scared. They're borrowing a technique from the U.S. federal government. In the United States, obscenity is illegal, but there is no definition of obscenity for porn producers to follow, making it impossible for them to tell if they are obeying the law or not. The real-world effect of this is to keep people from taking risks with their content. It's even worse on Flickr--since Flickr users have no constitutional right to their accounts, there is no inconvenient messing around with due process, just summary execution.
And now I see that my footnote is longer than the main part of this post. Oops.
Yahoo promises change as profit slipsThe gist of the article is that Yahoo isn't making as much of a profit as its shareholders would like, and so one of Yahoo's co-founders, Jerry Yang, is promising to make more money. He's apparently long on ideas, but short on specifics.
Well, here's a specific: porn. Yahoo used to be a great place to find porn. Between auctions featuring pornographic content of every type, to well-classified and easily findable adult groups (adult groups are now impossible to find without a direct link), Yahoo was actually pretty cool in that area. That ended several years ago, for reasons that were never very clear. One could speculate that the switch was primarily due to shareholder distaste at the idea of peddling porn on the internet, however, that's just one idea. There may have been practical reasons, such as not wanting to have to worry about ridiculous 2257 verification laws. Or they may have just noticed how much flat-out illegal stuff was being sold or promulgated through their site (it wasn't hard to find beast porn or Traci Lords videos on Yahoo Auctions, for example, both of which are pretty illegal in the United States). Or perhaps there was lots of worried handwringing and pearl clutching about minors accessing adult content (an idea which seems almost ridiculous today, when teenagers with cameraphones or webcams are perfectly capable of making their own).
Well, I suggest if Yahoo wants to increase profitability, they should get back into porn. Yahoo Auctions is now defunct, a fact I became aware of only just now (when they banned adult-content auctions years ago, I immediately left and never looked back). But at the very least, they could bring back the publicly accessible listings of "adult" Yahoo Groups [see footnote]. They could also add an "Adult Search" to their search page. Hell, porn is a vast business, I'm sure there are dozens of ways they could make money off of it. Why they don't bother is beyond me.
------
Footnote
I had to add this in here--one Yahoo group that I subscribe to was forced to relegate itself to the "adult" section of Yahoo groups when Yahoo staff stumbled across some pictures one of the members had posted of his topless girlfriend. They deleted the pictures, and sent a message to the admin of the group telling him that if anyone posted anything like that again, they would delete the group without warning. He could either keep the "nudity" out, or agree to move the group over into the adult section. After some discussion with the members, it was agreed to move the group over into the adult section. The irony of this is that, since then, there has been absolutely no further nudity in the pictures section. So here we have a group that's stuck behind the wall of "adult content", just because somebody screwed up one time.
Of course, on Yahoo's site Flickr.com, things tend to be even worse--there, accounts are deleted with no warning at all. Well, there are claims (made by Flickr staff, I believe) that people receive one warning, but does this actually happen? Not that I know of. The only "warning" I've ever heard of is when word gets around that accounts are being deleted, that another pogrom is in progress. Refer to my earlier post about a friend who got her account nuked one day--she received no warning at all. Sure, she's got another account now, but, as someone else wrote on Flickr (in a group that was deleted within the last 24 hours, ironically), you can come back, but now that you know you can be busted at any time, with no warning and no explanation, you've lost your edge, you've lost your mojo. I think that is entirely the intention of the Flickr gestapo, to keep people scared. They're borrowing a technique from the U.S. federal government. In the United States, obscenity is illegal, but there is no definition of obscenity for porn producers to follow, making it impossible for them to tell if they are obeying the law or not. The real-world effect of this is to keep people from taking risks with their content. It's even worse on Flickr--since Flickr users have no constitutional right to their accounts, there is no inconvenient messing around with due process, just summary execution.
And now I see that my footnote is longer than the main part of this post. Oops.
posted by cke at 9:16 AM
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