Search ErosBlog:

Support:

Contact Bacchus:

Sex Information:

Sexy Images:

Nymphs And Satyrs:

Science Fiction Blogs:

Other Sexy Links:

ErosBlog RSS Feed:

cupid
 

ErosBlog: The Sex Blog

Sex Blogging, Gratuitous Nudity, Kinky Sex, Sundry Sensuality
 
 
March 16th, 2024 -- by Bacchus

Go Nuts, Show Nuts, Hide Nuts

In 2022 y’all may remember that I gave a poor review to Tumblr’s so-called unbanning of porn. While they did jettison the ludicrous prohibition on female-presenting nipples they inherited from Verizon/Yahoo, my conclusion was that the overall changes in 2022 were “pretty much totally a scam” because of near-total search invisibility for adult material.

At the time, however, I gave Tumbler’s Matt Mullenweg credit for writing the single most-honest explanation from a social media platform perspective about why porn-friendly social media was, in his opinion, essentially impossible in 2022. I linked and quoted extensively from Matt’s Tumblr post Why “Go Nuts, Show Nuts” Doesn’t Work in 2022. Well, now, guess what? I just tried to follow that link to revisit his essay, and look what I got!

tumblr says go away

As it happens, I think that Matt’s unusually-open essay from the perspective of a social media owner/operator is an important document in the history of censorship battles, the pornocalypse, and the contest between closed social media silos and the open web. So here’s an open link (no login required) to his essay in the Internet Archive:

Why “Go Nuts, Show Nuts” Doesn’t Work in 2022

And here, because diversity in archiving is good, is another copy:

Why “Go Nuts, Show Nuts” Doesn’t Work in 2022

For those who don’t know or remember, Tumblr used to have a policy around porn that was literally “Go nuts, show nuts. Whatever.” That was memorable and hilarious, and for many people, Tumblr both hosted and helped with the discovery of a unique type of adult content.

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:

  1. Credit card companies are anti-porn. You’ve probably heard how Pornhub can’t accept credit cards anymore. Or seen the new rules from Mastercard. Whatever crypto-utopia might come in the coming decades, today if you are blocked from banks, credit card processing, and financial services, you’re blocked from the modern economy. The vast majority of Automattic’s revenue comes from people buying our services and auto-renewing on credit cards, including the ads-free browsing upgrade that Tumblr recently launched. If we lost the ability to process credit cards, it wouldn’t just threaten Tumblr, but also the 2,000+ people in 97 countries that work at Automattic across all our products.
  2. App stores, particularly Apple’s, are anti-porn. Tumblr started in 2007, the same year the iPhone was released. Originally, the iPhone didn’t have an App Store, and the speed of connectivity and quality of the screen meant that people didn’t use their smartphone very much and mostly interacted with Tumblr on the web, using desktop and laptop computers (really). Today 40% of our signups and 85% of our page views come from people on mobile apps, not on the web. Apple has its own rules for what’s allowed in their App Store, and the interpretation of those rules can vary depending on who is reviewing your app on any given day. Previous decisions on what’s allowed can be reversed any time you submit an app update, which we do several times a month. If Apple permanently banned Tumblr from the App Store, we’d probably have to shut the service down. If you want apps to allow more adult content, please lobby Apple. No one in the App Store has any effective power, even multi-hundred-billion companies like Facebook/Meta can be devastated when Apple changes its policies. Aside: Why do Twitter and Reddit get away with tons of super hardcore content? Ask Apple, because I don’t know. My guess is that Twitter and Reddit are too big for Apple to block so they decided to make an example out of Tumblr, which has “only” 102 million monthly visitors. Maybe Twitter gets blocked by Apple sometimes too but can’t talk about it because they’re a public company and it would scare investors.
  3. There are lots of new rules around verifying consent and age in adult content. The rise of smartphones also means that everyone has a camera that can capture pictures and video at any time. Non-consensual sharing has grown exponentially and has been a huge problem on dedicated porn sites like Pornhub – and governments have rightly been expanding laws and regulations to make sure everyone being shown in online adult content is of legal age and has consented to the material being shared. Tumblr has no way to go back and identify the featured persons or the legality of every piece of adult content that was shared on the platform and taken down in 2018, nor does it have the resources or expertise to do that for new uploads.
  4. Porn requires different service providers up and down the stack. In addition to a company primarily serving adult content not having access to normal financial services and being blocked by app stores, they also need specialized service providers – for example, for their bandwidth and network connections. Most traditional investors won’t fund primarily adult businesses, and may not even be allowed to by their LP agreements. (When Starbucks started selling alcohol at select stores, some investors were forced to sell their stock.)

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. I estimate you’d need at least $7 million a year for every 1 million daily active users to support server storage and bandwidth (the GIFs and videos shared on Tumblr use a ton of both) in addition to hosting, moderation, compliance, and developer costs.

I do hope that a dedicated service or company is started that will replace what people used to get from porn on Tumblr. It may already exist and I don’t know about it. They’ll have an uphill battle under current regimes, and if you think that’s a bad thing please try to change the regimes. Don’t attack companies following legal and business realities as they exist.

It’s an important snapshot of a moment in adult social media history, and it needs to be publicly viewable for future scholars, researchers, and commentators.

Similar Sex Blogging:

 
March 16th, 2024 -- by Bacchus

If The Dick Won’t Fit? Try It In Your Ass!

This is not a suggestion I’ve heard before, but it makes a lot of sense when you think about it. From Delilah, on Mastodon:

I received the most satisfying ass fucking last week, for the first time in a while. Partner shot a lovely, very large, hot load directly into my colon. I fell a sleep a happy girl.

Also, fun fact:

The average rectum (that’s the part of your intestine directly inside your sphincter) is several inches longer than the average vagina. YMMV.

My fellow vagina owners may be asking themselves, why is this notable? Well, if you’re struggling with that enormous cock in your life, you may find that your properly lubed asshole will accommodate it much better.

It is a solution I may employ for the fucking huge dick I occasionally play with. It’s much more satisfying for both of us if he can go balls deep with every thrust, without me feeling like I’m re-enacting the dinner scene from Alien.

Of course, if you’re not accustomed to things in your ass, it’s always advisable to start off small. No need to go full-on horse cock right out of the starting gate.

Similar Sex Blogging:

 
March 15th, 2024 -- by Bacchus

The Pornocalypse Comes For Gumroad

Gumroad, which for those who don’t know it is an online sales platform that lets people sell a wide variety of digital content, has just gone full #pornocalypse, barring all sexually explicit content, defined extremely broadly. Like Patreon and for some of the same reasons (credit card processors) Gumroad’s adult content policies have always been a little bit incoherent. Nonetheless a lot of erotic artists were using the platform to sell things that weren’t welcome at Patreon, and that’s now over.

gumroad bans explicit content

There seems not to have been an announcement; the only link being bandied about is to their adult content policy page. Here’s what it looked like two days ago, and below is a side-by-side graphic (which expands slightly on clicking) of the changes. Porn featuring real people had already been banned, but as you can see the new prohibitions are much more sweeping, and touch on a wider universe of art, animation, comics, et cetera:

gumroad porn-hostile TOS comparison

Whenever we lose another adult-tolerant platform you’ll see people all over social media asking “What’s a good alternative?” There’s never a “good news” answer to that question. The squeeze on commercial erotic expression continues. Until we find a way to break the moralistic chokehold of the credit card companies, it’s not going to get better. The pornocalypse comes for us all.

Similar Sex Blogging:

 
March 14th, 2024 -- by Bacchus

Cocaine With Katya

There is a delightful scene in Corey Doctorow’s new novel The Bezzle where our hero, a formidable forensic accountant, has been dragged to a party of the super-rich and is making friends with one of the only other people at the party who works for a living:

I tapped my left nostril. “You missed a spot,” I whispered.

She bared her teeth even more and wiped away the white powder from her own left nostril, rubbed it on her gums and then wiped her hand off on her dress, looked down to make sure she hadn’t left a streak, then back at me.

“I have some to share, if you’d like,” she said. “JK gets lots of it.”

I let her lead me to the powder room.

In the enclosed space, she smelled of expensive perfume, floral and fresh and outdoorsy. It was a good Catalina Island smell. As soon as she closed the door, I became uncomfortably, overpoweringly aware of her position relative to mine, the inches between her bare arm and mine feeling electrically charged. I was not the kind of guy who found himself in the bathroom with beautiful younger women who wanted to share their cocaine.

“Let’s do this,” she said. She bared those perfect teeth again, then dug a little bottle out of her clutch and held it up so I could see that it was nearly full of white powder.

“JK gets good drugs.” Draaghs. I loved that accent.

“Have you two been together for very long?”

She gave me a searching look, like she was trying to figure out if I was pulling her leg. “I see JK when he books me,” she said. “He likes variety, so only every month or so. But yes, for a year, I think.” She watched me absorb that and her smile got wider. “You’re a nice man,” she said.

She produced a small, silver coke spoon and held it so it caught the light. She mounded it high with coke and held it up to my face. She took my chin with long, cool fingers and tilted my head, brought the spoon up to one nostril and pinched the other, her fingers resting on my lips. “Cheers,” she said, and I took a deep sniff.

She stared into my eyes as the coke came on. My skin felt all-over tight. My pulse thudded in my throat, where her thumb still had my jaw, and in my lips, where her fingers rested. She looked at me this way and that, chin tilting, staring into my eyes like a jeweler assessing a gemstone. Finally, she gave the tiniest nod and withdrew her hand. My skin tingled where her fingertips had been.

She held my gaze for another minute. “My turn,” she said, and scooped out her own mound. She sniffed it daintily, wrinkled her nose, closed her eyes and turned her head to the ceiling, giving me a long look at her long neck, the vein in her throat, her collarbones and the top of her cleavage.

Then she shivered from top to toe and looked me back in the eyes. “I don’t think you’re rich, Marty,” she said.

“No,” I said. “Not like our host.”

“Not like JK.”

“No,” I said.

“At first, I thought you might be. You’re not one of these people, and sometimes that means you’re from a higher level. But you’re just someone’s friend, aren’t you?”

“I am,” I said. I looked at her cocaine vial, now noticeably depleted. That was a business-development asset, and she’d wasted it on me. I wanted to apologize, but I didn’t want to offend her.

She followed my gaze. “It’s okay,” she said. “I knew you weren’t rich before I gave it to you. You seem interesting. Not boring, the way those rich ones are. It’s nice to chat with someone who I’m not doing business with.”

There it was. I’d passed by an uncountable number of sex workers who were soliciting on the street, and objectively, I must have passed an equally uncountable number of sex workers who were just out shopping or going to the movies or the doctor’s office or the daycare center. I’d even learned to recognize the telltale signs of a man’s sex-worker habit from his financials, after a couple of divorce jobs where I got hired to audit the family books (big cash withdrawals, obviously, but that could also be drugs; for sex workers you also needed to look for regular charges from certain anything-goes payment processors, the kinds of places that host reviews or make arrangements).

But I had never (knowingly) conversed with a sex worker up until that moment. I was worldly enough to suppose that questions about the job, or how she got into it, would not be welcome.

Clearly she was good at what she did: not only was she carrying a two-thousand-dollar handbag and accompanying a very rich—if very dull—man, but she’d smoothly flirted with me in a way that had left me tongue-tied and disoriented. If I’d had the same kind of money as Tommy Bahama—JK—and she’d named a price, I’d have been very, very tempted.

But I was just someone’s friend. Thankfully.

Similar Sex Blogging:

 
March 13th, 2024 -- by Bacchus

A Kiss Through The Bars

I always love the ambiguity of these “divided by prison bars” images, because each one tells two different stories, depending on who you imagine is inside the bars versus who is outside them:

nipple kissing through the bars of a jail cell

From the cover of a Terror fumetto magazine.

Similar Sex Blogging:

 
March 11th, 2024 -- by Bacchus

Monster Fucker Monday #6

 
March 9th, 2024 -- by Bacchus

Moment Of Joy #8

Today’s moment of joy:

The most joyous thing I’ve seen today was a sweet young thing on TikTok saying “If you can’t afford therapy, just go fuck a 45 year old man. It’ll do the job, and it’s much cheaper.”

Similar Sex Blogging:

 
 
cupid