I was talking about the content above mine, where @Nanoroar says “and I know there’s plenty of objectionable content hidden away on there”. I don’t think any queer stuff is actually hidden on Neocities!
4 Likes
Oh I didn’t necessarily mean anything specific here to be honest, though I’ve seen plenty of stuff which could raise eyebrows (I can’t recall ever seeing anything actually illegal, besides stuff like piracy discussions and druguse– but only to the same level as sides like reddit). I mostly meant that it’d be really hard to stop stuff from slipping through the cracks on a site like neocities, I think realistically the best they can do is vet new sites and then respond to reports when people make them, so there will definitely be areas that could be considered problematic to a company like microsoft.
But raising eyebrows is like . . . what does that mean?
Found via KoHoSo: Ars Technica released an article about this today.
Microsoft would not identify which sites were problematic or directly connect with Neocities to resolve a seemingly significant amount of ongoing site blocks that do not appear to be linked to violations. Instead, Microsoft recommended that Neocities find a way to work directly with Microsoft, despite Ars confirming that Microsoft is currently ignoring an open ticket.
For Drake, “the current state of things is unknown.” It’s hard to tell if popular Neocities sites are still being blocked or if possibly Bing’s reindexing process is slow. Microsoft declined to clarify.
2 Likes
There’s content which is borderline sexual or at least adult in nature (which matters now that so many countries are doing age verification laws), there’s politically divisive content on both political extremes (or at least, enough outgoing links to it), there’s stuff which is simply ‘weird’, those all raise eyebrows for someone even if that’s not me.
It’s also borderline-social in how it operates (creating accounts under the same system, and leaving comments for each other), but to my knowledge lacks the usual metrics and checks present on social media sites (how old is a given neocities site operator?, what kind of content are they hosting and how are user groups segregated and managed?).
Bearing in mind I still don’t see any justification for a blanket ban. But if I have to imagine why someone else would see justification, I guess this is what I think of. That being said, I’m really keen to know if any other sites were blocked around the same time, because I’m not sure Neocities is really that much of a special case here.
Isn’t this how the internet used to be, and imo, how it should be? Are you listing these as genuinely bad things about Neocities, or just what corpos don’t like? Genuine question.
It’s not too different at all. X is filled to the brim with IRL gore and NSFW of unknown sources, often not spoilered or flagged. You can just scroll and wander onto that stuff. So is tumblr (ironically it got worse after the NSFW ban–mostly artists were and still are targeted–irl is thriving in a very shady way). So is TikTok. Reddit has entire subreddits dedicated to specific extreme fetishes, and specific drugs, and inane things like conspiracies and gang stalking.
There is no actual justification just as there wasn’t for the tumblr NSFW ban. It’s about control over the masses. Neocities is returning the internet back to the users, not faceless social medias, and faceless corpos don’t like it. I’m convinced.
1 Like
I agree. The powers that be don’t want the rest of us to have the voice the internet gave us because when they venture onto that same internet they find out exactly what we think of them, and they hate it.
However, I think that if commercial search engines like Google and Bing refuse to index non-corporate, non-commercial websites they’d actually be performing a service to the real, personal web by leaving us alone.
4 Likes
Totally agree! I think virality is a bit of an anti-feature in the big web / social media. I wrote a page on my thoughts on the topic in my digital garden.
4 Likes