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I'm in the US, and when I went to Renderhub's marketplace, the first thing I saw was fully naked women, breasts and vulva and all. The gallery is showing explicit stuff, too. I didn't use a VPN specifically to test it out, so maybe not everything was purged, or they're still in the process of erasing everything?
I believe (from the discussions on RH) that it's not so much nudity, It's stuff that sexualizes kids or is obscene according to some arbitrary decision. I read their rules and guidelines and they're pretty vague. The forums over there are going hysterical. Deleting content without informing the sellers was just downright ignorant and stupid. They've created a lot of enemies. They must have taken a course in marketing and site management from the clowns at Perverted'Otica.
and having them limit the amount of freebies to 5 per day, just to push users to purchase more, is a sign of desperation since i feel like they don't have long.
It's not a regional thing. They removed their entire adult content section and any of those items sitting in wishlist.
What a poop storm. Apparently it had nothing to do with payment processors (for the first time in recorded human history), but instead some nebulous claim of a crime being investigated, and RH trying to "be proactive" to protect the site.
It sounds like a kneejerk reaction or classic overcompensation because one of their vendors was allowed to sell something that flew too close to the sun.
I think there's something larger going on. At the same time, Sketchfab is mass hiding and removing access in the search function from models not even remotely erotic, like architecture or vehicles. Granted, their reasoning for doing this is supposedly because the site has an End fo Life date before the end of this year, but their actions are heavy heanded to say the least. There's more consolidation across the web of who controls models (or anything you can download for that matter) and who can access them. Making legitimate free download models harder to come by, and in some cases monetizing them on new sites after buyouts. Like when you compare Sketchfab, to Fab, a lot of models that were free before migration, are now $20+. Or in some cases you can only download "free" models if you pay for an access subscription. It's like they want to know exactly who is downloading what, even if it's a crane, by limiting it to those who have linked their bank account and ID to the site account. No more anonymity. Let's call it what it is, blanket surveillance. I can no longer even pay for my VPN from my bank account, I have to use PayPal, since that's not blocked by my bank. And the push is toward more 3d printables in the search results instead of game ready for some weird reason. Not everyone want's to 3d print stuff. Not everyone wants a 1 million poly model for one character. So I don't think it's just based on some purge of explicit content, I think the broader internet industry is clamping down on people sharing things freely, on anonymity, and they want everyone to be miserable because they can. This is why some have had the foresight to open their own websites to host things so the corporate overlords can't control who downloads what, or know their entire personal dossier in exchange for access to something otherwise "free".
@Josie - TY. Someone gets it...
RH had KP issues from what I remember. There were a couple of creators who sold some pretty obvious KP assets. This was discussed here (last year iirc). They also sold a lot of copywrite material (game rips, celebrity wraps, studio characters, etc) which could also cause legal liabilities. But the way this was handled and the schizo posts from ION screams "law enforcement action" and a site owner who is trying to keep his butt out of legal jeopardy. He keeps trying to intimate that this is a money issue (payment processing), but I'm leaning more towards an investigation from some law enforcement agency.
Or.....RH was purchased by Tafi (Daz3D) and they're wrecking the place from the inside to eliminate the competition. Ion's plan to create a direct competitor to Studio (PoserStudio) is what pushed Tafi to take this action.
That's my personal conspiracy theory based on absolutely nothing. @GohanF22 and @josiebethlewis2019 are welcome to take this and blow it waaaay out of proportion. One...two...three...GO!
That doesn't make much sense. DAZ has outsourced most of the 3d adult content to other stores and has since the beginning. And the majority of what is available at RH isn't adult content. But I don't hang out there, so I wouldn't know all the particulars of what's going on.
Or.....RH was purchased by Tafi (Daz3D) and they're wrecking the place from the inside to eliminate the competition
I don't think so, and here's why: Money and their own history w/ acquisitions.
See, they didn't do that when they bought-up the old PoserPros site 20 years ago - in that case PP still ran as a semi-independent entity, with DAZ transferring the best products from it to their flagship site (if the affected vendors were okay with it) and letting the rest operate for a couple of years w/ no site updates or new vendors, before finally letting the site die once traffic fell below a certain point. That way you maximize the return on investment; harvest the cream-of-crop products and vendors, and the rest can either toodle along, leave, or step up their game and become DAZ-worthy (in DAZ' eyes.)
I mean, yeah, Dan Farr and Chris Creek sold off DAZ to Tafi years ago, but it makes no sense to buy something without harvesting the maximum value out of it, even if your goal is to squash the thing.
DAZ has outsourced most of the 3d adult content to other stores and has since the beginning.
This is largely because DAZ HQ was (is still?) in the city of Draper, Utah. Mormon-as-Hell. They didn't (and don't) want to attract any sort of legal attention in a place (Utah) where pornography is probably still very illegal.
"That's my personal conspiracy theory based on absolutely nothing."
Hey gents, it's an attempt at being light hearted and poking fun at any conspiracy theorists here. Don't take it seriously. There's enough of that over at RH.RH launched in 2017, a year after DAZ bought RuntimeDNA and year before the closure of Content Paradise. i don't remember clearly, but i believe that RH was created to have sellers that were banned or wanting to have better visibility from other sites (Renderosity, DAZ, Renderotica, etc). that would explain their "hands off" and little rules on what's allowed and what's not for so many years. but after bad actors like "Range-Of-MotionFX/3DUnitedKingdom" (you know who) as well as the influx of copyrighted assets, this was like the last straw and RH lost control of these sellers (thanks to them being "hands off"), they tried to control everyone, but failed since the sellers just created new accounts, they most likely were getting sued by major copyright groups/companies, and a possible KP investigation that they HAD to do this so suddenly. RH was screwed from the start and now they're suffering the consequences.
I ran into a problem today with ordinary free replacement icons, the old icon websites no longer exist, don't work right (pages wont load), or they redirect you to some paid site. As a result I had to stop what I was doing and whip up an icon to replace one that was deleted when Krita decided to delete it from my old install during an update. It's like they have to make everything inconvenient now. And I've also noticed all the free image sites were bought up by the giant stock image companies, making them all subject to a paid service when just a few years ago, you could find the same images for free. Now they want you to pay something like $5-$10 per image. The reason is not just greedy corporations trying to suck up everyone's money, although that is one motive, it's an effort to identify everyone on the web no matter how benign your activity is and force everyone to link their account to some identifying service. Why would they ALL want to know who is doing what on the internet at all times? Think about that for a minute. It's not for your safety. It's for control. We all got along just fine for years without all the unnecessary obstacles. Now, if you change just a word or two in a search engine, it has to check whether or not you're a bot before letting you continue. AI and Captcha have thrown up unnecessary wrenches into the free flow of digital information. This is more of the same when you look at the bigger picture and all the different sites being effected in the same ways. The restrictions are too similar to ignore. They are clamping down on the entire internet, not just this tiny sphere.
The typical business model of a tech startup is to offer a free service/product, attract as many users as possible, and then sell the company to someone who hopes to make their money back by monetizing the user base. That's not a government conspiracy, it's the result of capitalism and the "invisible hand" of the free market at work.
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