Can Threads survive without porn?
It's not a party on the Internet without adult content in Naughty List News #97
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This week, we saw yet another hopeful contender enter the ring to knock Twitter’s crown as “The World’s Town Square” off its head, with Mark Zuckerberg encouraging the 500 million active users on Instagram to try Threads (an Instagram product). According to him, 30 million people did on its first day. (Threads is currently unavailable in the EU due to non-compliance with regulations about tracking users.)
There’s only one problem: The content produced on the platform so far is completely sterile. And it has everything to do with trying to be as advertiser-friendly as possible out of the gate.
You can’t even post ass
The main advantage of Threads over Twitter is that users with a sizable Instagram following don’t have to start from scratch. The products are seamlessly integrated, so the followers transfer as well.
This also means that posts on Threads must follow Instagram’s guidelines on nudity or sexual activity, which means there is absolutely no adult content on the platform. Sex workers have complained for years about Instagram’s discriminatory policy against sex-positive accounts, and now Threads users are operating under those same terms and conditions.
But there’s no party on the Internet without porn, and this shows in the type of content that was popular on Threads’ first day: The most boring and asinine posts you can think of rose to the top. That these posts happened to be completely “advertiser safe” as well was surely a happy coincidence.
But a platform will never be engaging if users aren’t allowed to be dirty, get into mud fights, and, well, act a little bit unhinged. And I’m not the only one to make this observation. Vox writes in “Threads won’t kill Twitter if it’s boring”:
Logging onto Threads is like logging on to the internet roughly a decade ago. I have now seen two strangers share their “hot take” that actually, pineapple on pizza is good, a sentiment copied and pasted from all the world’s most boring Hinge profiles.
TechCrunch put it even more poignantly in "You can’t post ass, Threads is doomed":
Casual ass posting was paramount to shaping Twitter culture, as were the unhinged shitposters, the hordes of stans and the discourse stirrers. Even when platform was rife with conflict, the chaotic brand of posting made users want to come back to Twitter.
Mark Zuckerberg can force all Instagram users into his Twitter clone if he wants, but that doesn’t mean those users will actually stick around in the long term if the posts aren’t any good.
Follow the youths
Culture columnist Taylor Lorenz argues in The Washington Post that figuring out which platform is poised to replace Twitter doesn’t matter anyway because TikTok has already won (paywalled):
Daniel, 17, a rising senior in a Philadelphia high school who asked to be referred to by only his first name because he’s underage, said Twitter is simply “not the spot” anymore. “People my age are going to Instagram and TikTok before they go to Twitter,” he said.
She also argues (correctly) that Twitter, as a concept, is starting to feel like a relic of a bygone era. TikTok works with a purely algorithmic feed that shows your video creations to anyone interested, irrespective of how many followers you have. You can go viral on TikTok with your first-ever video if it happens to find an audience immediately. Conversely, it takes a lot of hard work to build up a following on Twitter or its many clones, and if your tweet happens to go viral, that can almost always be traced back to an account with an outsized following giving you the light of day. If those posters don’t outright steal your content, that is.
But TikTok is even worse than other platforms regarding adult content, where sex workers and other adult content creators can’t talk about their work candidly. To avoid being deranked or even delisted by the almighty algorithm, creators must refer to “spicy eggplant” (vibrator), “nip nops” (nipples), and “le dollar bean” (lesbian). Otherwise, their content might be deemed advertiser-unfriendly, which is what TikTok wants to avoid at all costs. Ms. Lorenz wrote a great piece in April 2022 on how so-called “algospeak” is affecting our ability to express ourselves, but sex workers especially:
Sex workers, who have long been censored by moderation systems, refer to themselves on TikTok as “accountants” and use the corn emoji as a substitute for the word “porn.”
And it’s really not very sophisticated tech under the hood:
“The reality is that tech companies have been using automated tools to moderate content for a really long time and while it’s touted as this sophisticated machine learning, it’s often just a list of words they think are problematic,” said Ángel Díaz, a lecturer at the UCLA School of Law who studies technology and racial discrimination.
It’s concerning how much human expression we’re willing to trade in for a little piece of mind. Because it always starts with sex work before they come for the rest of us.
Go where the sex workers are
Every platform struggles with what to do with sex workers broadly and adult content creators specifically. Most start out with lofty ideals about “free speech,” only to run headfirst into the reality of laws like FOSTA-SESTA. This American legislation has made platforms criminally liable for adult content if it has been found that it depicts underage persons or non-consensual activity. In response, many platforms overshoot and simply don’t allow any adult content at all. But this doesn't make sense if you think about it for more than a minute. Adult content is raucous, fiery, engaging, and interesting. Banning it from your platform leaves you with, well, whatever Threads is offering right now.
And that’s precisely why I’m not putting money down that Threads, BlueSky, or even Substack Notes will end up replacing Twitter. None of these Twitter alternatives have an active community of sex workers, not because of a lack of users but most likely because sex workers don’t feel safe there. But many adult content creators are congregating on Cohost, even if the platform is comparatively tiny right now with a confirmed 12,000 active monthly users. Check out Bigg’s Cohost Porn Creator Masterpost to see the platform's breadth of adult content on offer. I’ve got a horse in this race myself as I’m paying for Cohost Plus, which gives you some nice bonus features, but mainly helps to keep the website afloat as it’s completely funded by subscriptions, with no ads on the platform.
I strongly believe that listening to sex workers is not just the morally right thing to do but also the best way to keep the party going. To close you off, I will leave you with the wise words of Mistress Olivia Snow:
Calling sex workers “the canary in the coal mine” is almost a cliché at this point. I myself have used the metaphor in my own writing to discuss algorithmic surveillance of sex workers. But here is where the metaphor falls apart: The canary is only effective if the miner listens to it. Put plainly, due to societal stigma against sex workers, the general population is more likely to perceive our silence as making their world safer, not less so.
(Emphasis mine)
Writing Wrap-Up 📖
Mystery visual novel NULL [Remastered] is now available on Steam. Eight people have been kidnapped and imprisoned in an old mansion, and forced to play a game with deadly consequences.
Action RPG Last Town: Fall of Felixia is now available on Itch.io. After a succubus takes over a kingdom with her demonic charms, a fearless female knight risks her life to strike her down.
Erotic otome Speakeasy is looking for funding on Kickstarter. During the Prohibition era in the 1920s, a young woman runs away from home and into the arms of the owner of an underground bar filled with jazz, illegal liquor, and general debauchery.
Apocalyptic puzzle adventure NOIR:NOAH is out now on DLSite. A young girl wakes up in a laboratory and struggles to remember anything but her name.
NookGaming reviews Queen Of The Otaku: There Can Only Be One. “[It] puts forward an interesting idea, takes it to a dark place, and caters well to certain fetishes.”
PCGamer writes about deep-faked AI voices used in NSFW mods angering the voice actor community. A member of the Skyrim modding community painstakingly put together a list of voice actors who had their voices copied without their consent in fan-made adult content for the game.
French senate approves rules to “complicate the lives” of adult content producers. The lawmakers added provisions that would mandate warnings if adult content simulates an illegal act.
Artist spotlight 💡
Thanks for reading this far!
-Mr. Hands