So for over a year (if not longer), I’ve had issues with random blogs full of hardcore pornography follow my account. At one time, I had ten follow me in a week, and on average, I’ll get two to three a week. They come in spurts, with some weeks seeing zero follows, and others seeing one to two a day. These blogs seem to contain either banners with pornographic images, pornographic names, descriptions with Snapchat information, or a combination of these things. Overall, these are things I DO NOT want to see, and many times I get disgusted at the material on these blogs despite being into sexual material myself. Just because I like porn doesn’t mean I want to see a pic of people screwing or getting rimmed or whatever appears on them. It’s enraging, sometimes to the point where I want to leave Tumblr altogether over the frustration of these blogs coming nonstop.
I’m not alone in getting plagued with these bots. Many other Tumblrs talk about them. My friends on Tumblr mention them. The question of “Why do porn bots keep following me?” keeps getting asked on other sites. It’s a pandemic. It’s a plague. It’s a problem that Tumblr staff seemingly has zero interest in resolving for some reason or another despite it being one of the largest issues on their website.
So why do these porn bots exist? Simple. They exist to exploit the site to drum up traffic for their content. Instead of getting people to follow them, they use automated scripts to mass-follow blogs in the hopes that some will follow back. These script sometimes look at likes, reblogs, and tags, so what you do on the site might increase your chances of getting seen and followed by these blogs. Evidence of this fact can be found in this post from Quora, which has made the rounds on the site. To quote from it directly:
These kind of authors own hundreds of blogs. They also use click farms to get fake fans and all of that. Still, it’s users like yourself that may make a difference. After all, you’re real. So they follow users to get followers back.
Another user theorizes these bots exist courtesy of SEO companies trying to promote content they’re paid to promote:
Nah, the people you want to point a finger at here is actually a third/fourth (I’ll expand on that in a second) party: SEO Companies that handle social media for other companies/corporations…
…Anyway, at some point in this process Aetna has hired a person or persons who has promised to grow their brand on tumblr. The thing is, most SEO is complete bullshit. They make promises that they really can’t fulfill because the truth is that MOST corporations running social media accounts can’t actually provide any kind of content that a real human being would ever give a shit about. Everyone who is a real human knows Aetna is a soulless corporation producing garbage social media posts hoping that someone will somehow relate to that, so of course they don’t bother.
But the SEO guys need to get paid and to get paid they need to provide stats that make it look like they’re doing shit. So THEY are the ones running the spam blogs, or even hiring out to a fourth party, probably based somewhere in a developing country with a strong tech base (the SEO company I used to work for sourced their shit in the Philipines because they could get a well educated labor force for really fucking cheap - it’s just as scummy as you think). There’s an elaborate web there, which I don’t fully know the details of how it operates, but my point is that this is where those spam blogs are coming from…
In fact, this is such an issue, porn bots have their own Know Your Meme entry.
So what’s the solution? Well, the most popular one is “Just block them.” Well, blocking porn bots is equivalent to killing a nest of ants by squishing them one at a time. Blocking porn bots has not stopped the overall problem, and I can argue that it even has a negligible effect on the problem. Ending porn bots becomes a war of attrition that many people I feel are sick of. Personally, I’m sick of them, and I’m sick of how I fear promoting anything even mildly sexual over the fear of more porn bots full of highly-explicit material tainting my follower count and exposing me to more graphic material when I have to block and report them. In short, blocking them doesn’t work, and it gets tedious.
The only other option is to ignore them, but not everyone wants to be associated with graphic pornography in any way nor have their follower count made meaningless with bots that don’t care about the material someone posted. I imagine its frustrating for those that use Tumblr to promote their creative works and consider a follower count a measure of popularity and skill. To them, 1000 followers is meaningless when 25% of them are blogs of smut from some sleazy person looking to get their anal sex blog hits. It can even be an insult to them as it seem to them like the only people who care about Tumblr are those looking for fap material or to promote it. Even people who like mild pornography don’t want to see graphic sex. I’m personally someone that likes NSFW in some forms but can’t stand graphic real-life pornography. Drawn or written sexual content isn’t the same as real-life sexual content. They illicit different responses and thus can’t be compared.
What has Tumblr done to address and resolve the porn bot problem? Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all. The best you get from @staff is a generic “Thank you for being vigilant” letter from them if you talk about the problem to them. Either @staff doesn’t care, they don’t have time, they don’t want to ban NSFW to stop the bots, they don’t know what to do, or they’re just too incompetent. I don’t see this problem being addressed by Tumblr or Yahoo! any time soon, or if they do, they could very well ban NSFW or do something draconian not knowing any better solution and make things worse.
I guess the only solution is for users to find a solution, such as XKit plugins to detect and automatically block porn bots, a tool to block and report blogs without having to look at their contents, or create ways to hide your blog from porn bot programs. Porn bots are programs, and programs run on predictable patterns. Once someone finds these patterns, or better yet knows what programs these bots use, it’s potentially trivial to find a solution to stop them without punishing users legitimate that post NSFW content or banning NSFW altogether.
I hope a solution is found soon because my tolerance for porn bots is pretty low, and it only gets lower as this problem continues without resolve. I know I’m not alone, so something has to be done.
Heck, maybe I’ll end up writing the anti-porn bot script one day soon.
