What's going on at XHamster
Deleting stories, disabling the downloading of videos and preventing the uploading of photos as well as the partial deletion of photos and deactivation of videos are probably steps to avoid the consequences of other platforms such as X*Tube and Porn*Hub.
As a result of an article in the New York Times on 4 December, VISA and MasterCard terminated their contracts, effectively taking away the basis for their business. In a sudden action, Porn*Hub deleted the more than 10 million videos of all users who had not verified their address. X*Tube followed this example and also terminated all accounts and withdrew all upload rights.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/19/pornhub-abuse-videos-new-york-times-mastercard-visa
On our platform here, there is only one statement about the changes:
We are currently reviewing our internal processes to make sure that xHamster provides a safe and pleasant experience. While this process is underway, certain functions have been disabled for the time being. We will keep you updated on the progress.
https://xhamster.com/users/xhamster
In an article published by VICE, however, the vice-president of XHamster is quoted as follows:
However, this is not a technical error, as xHamster vice-president Hawkins confirms to VICE. Instead, it's one of several measures to better vet content on xHamster. "We're taking the time to pause and re-evaluate," Hawkins writes. "This means completely shutting down certain features until we find a better solution." (...) "I don't want to go into too much detail," Hawkins writes. The more xHamster talked about the restrictions, he said, the more people would try to work around them. "I think once we are able to determine what is effective, maybe we can talk a little more."
https://www.vice.com/de/article/93wdvz/nach-vice-recherchen-xhamster-stoppt-anonyme-foto-uploads
Why photos are partially deleted and can no longer be uploaded
In the case of photos, the review process appears to be insufficiently organised. There are said to be only 100 non-paid reviewers worldwide, who are also told that in case of doubt they should prefer to approve rather than block.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/akdzdp/inside-xhamsters-unpaid-content-moderation-team
My guess: because it is not manageable to visually check 5.5 million photos again within a very short time with so few manpower, entire galleries were filtered out and deleted on the basis of contents of their title if certain words give an increased probability that there are e.g. pictures of minors or secretly filmed persons in the gallery.
In my case, (only) one collection of photos of former public toilets was affected. The titles contained the word "toilet". Try it yourself: if you search for photos with "toilet" in the title, you will find nothing but a blank space.
https://xhamster.com/photos/search/toilet#search
How poorly targeted and thus ultimately pointless the deletion was on the basis of words like "toilet" (also affected were, for example, "teen" and "spy") can also be seen clearly in the favourites of another user. In his sub-collection "Toilet & Urinal Fun" he has favoured 126 videos of third parties. All very similar content, many of them even secretly recorded. But only the videos that had "toilet" in the title or tag were deactivated. The other half, many of which were inappropriate because they were secretly filmed, remained and are still online:
https://xhamster.com/users/hape15/favorites/videos/5f7861bc88ae21221d5c6736-collection
And the uploading of photos has probably been suspended because the review process seems to be ineffective at the moment. After all, not only is there a lack of quality, but the review - unlike with videos - only took place after publication. In the time between uploading, which led to immediate publication, and the more or less good review afterwards, the worst stuff could therefore be visible worldwide, at least for a manageable period of time, completely uncontrolled. This legally difficult weak point in the review process for the hamster probably caused the admins to completely stop the upload from now on.
Those who still want to publish photos can do so. But then they have to register as creators, which requires them to send in photos, e.g. of their identity card, and to provide bank details. If inappropriate material then goes online, XHamster can pass the blame on to the uploader.
Cave: The photo upload really ONLY works via a creator account! Sending in a face photo to become a "community user" (formerly "verified user") is just as insufficient as creating a paid "premium" account!
Why videos are deleted and can no longer be downloaded
The deletion is probably just as automated as with the photos. The only difference is that they seem to be filtered based on the tags. Of my 23 videos (all self-recorded without violating any rights), six were tagged "gay toilet". Exactly these six were removed and are now "in conversion".
See also here for yourself. If you search for the latest videos with the term "gay toilet", there is already the fifth video from years ago. Everything else has been made invisible.
https://xhamster.com/search/gay+toilet
A review of the content has apparently not been done. But it seems that this is now being done step by step, because I know a user whose blocked videos have gone online again. They then appear as "just added", but retain the old status of the download counter and all previous comments.
Blocking the download is probably intended to prevent lots of copies from being made and uploaded again and again, even if the "original" has already been deleted due to rights violations. Here, too, XHamster does not seem to trust its own review process. However, this procedure cannot really be effective as long as there are software solutions that can easily circumvent the blocking.
Why have the stories gone?
Unfortunately, it's all about guessing here now. I attribute the radical deletion of the stories to the fact that texts are very difficult to check. It simply takes too long to read a text like this from the beginning to the end and examine it for conformity with the rules. And automatic filtering on the basis of certain words is likely to be difficult in view of the countless languages in which the contributions may be written. A filter list for Tibetan? Not likely.
But it seems completely beyond understanding to me that only the story section has been completely deleted. Before the changes, there was the separation into "Posts" and "Stories". There were two differences: on the one hand, "stories" needed a minimum number of characters, and on the other hand, unlike "posts", readers could rate "stories" with a thumbs up/down.
Among my texts, only the one I had accidentally published as a "post" survived. In terms of content and length, it was no difference to the other texts that have now been deleted. And texts can still be uploaded, which are then immediately online when you click on "send". But now under the label "Post" instead of "Story". What can be the logic of deleting the "stories" but not the "posts", and at the same time allowing the new uploading of texts without review?
But we don't need to be hopeful that the texts and photos will be revived, as it seems to be the case with the videos. A user sent me the answer to a support request. They said they regretted not being able to restore deleted content because they don't keep copies. Gone is gone ...
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Update 12th January 2021:
1.) Until now, we got the stamp verified user when we uploaded a video or photo showing our face together with a piece of paper with our username on it. Now the hamster has changed its mind: instead of verified user they now (only) call us community user.
2.) Whenever I added something to my favourites, I had always clicked a thumbs up. But all my votings have been deleted. The interesting thing is that not all the counters have been set to zero. So they must have acted user-based. But why did they delete just my votes? It remains a big mystery what they are doing right now.
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If you can't read the articles written in German, you can get them translated by these websites:
https://www.deepl.com/translator
https://translate.google.com/
3年前
What you write is almost all true, but what is little known is the fact that, while in the beginning, many years ago, we reviewers had many more tools to do our work and the rules were much stricter and more precise, over time we have been stripped of a lot of "powers" and useful tools, complicating our work and making it ineffective, and the rules themselves have been modified and made much milder, almost allowing anything.
We've had video reviews taken away from us for years and one of the results is that they are overflowing with spam, but xHamster seems to like that.
All this has caused our discontent and years of protests that have never led to anything. Many of us have left and those of us who stayed, like me and many others, seem to be a nuisance with our constant remarks about everything that is wrong.
In the last period, before the whole VICE mess broke out, they completely overturned all the rules, making them more and more permissive and making our function almost useless.
Then in the last year everything has changed again, the rules we are supposed to enforce have become even more bungled and incoherent, the review process more and more cumbersome and more power has been given to administrators who are absent most of the time and are totally inadequate to the task assigned to them: all arbitrary deletions of photos, videos, posts and stories are their responsibility. And we reviewers are increasingly marginal and marginalised.
I can assure you that for years many of us have been doing much more than we were asked to, "monitoring and patrolling" the site for illegal content and just to give you a number, the reviewer among us with the most reviewed photographs has reached 25,000,000 and many of us are close to that.
Now the mess is done and this site will never be the same as it once was and all because of greed and organisational inability and believe me, we are upset and disgusted as you are.
"we do not have specific time frame when the upload will be back"
https://xhamster.com/users/xhamster#comment-142616981
However, I don't know what criteria XHamster uses to identify comments as SPAM. This has happened to me several times. Although my comments never contained anything that violated the rules.
The last time when we sent you stories, there was a tech glitch - sorry for that - and we fixed this issue. So here you are: the problem-free story archive!
Yours,
xHamster team