Needless to say, we're not totally convinced by Tancer's super compelling argument. Granted, we haven't seen his data, but the simple claim that searches for porn have dropped from 20% of all searches to 10%, and that social networks are now the dominant search theme, isn't enough to get us preparing for a grand ol' porno funeral. Allow us to explain ...

There's more of the internet than there used to be. As the internet grows, matures, and spreads into homes across America, it's only natural that porn would become a smaller percentage of all the content out there — not because porn is less popular, but because it's gone from being a big fish in a small pond to a big fish in a very, very large pond.

Social networks are work friendly. You (probably) can look at Facebook while you're slacking off at work. You (probably) can't look at Fleshbot. Does that mean that you like Facebook better than Fleshbot? We'll let you think on that one.

Social networks are kid friendly. We hear the kids are big into the internet these days — and they also really like the MySpace. Chances are, their parents are going to be more okay with them looking at MySpace or Facebook rather than porn. And the more that kids become heavy internet users, the more these numbers are going to get skewed.

Adult sites are vastly more profitable than social networks. Unlike Facebook, most porn sites have figured out some decent ways to monetize their traffic (even with smaller users bases). Somehow, we think the money is going to have the final word on this one.

· "Facebook and MySpace are Killing Porn?" (mashable.com)
· "Porn passed over as Web users become social" (reuters.com)

# Recordings of women experiencing orgasms
# Videos of nude men participating in "ejaculation educational demonstrations"
# Detailed photographs of men and women masturbating
# Images of mammary intercourse
# Close-up images of topless women and male and female sexual anatomy
# Large-scale photos of men performing oral sex on one another (and performing oral sex on themselves)
# An illustrated list of sex positions
# Threesomes
# Photos of nude strippers
# An image called "Virgin Killer" depicting a naked prepubescent girl from the 1976 cover of a Scorpions album (banned in the U.S.)

Our first thought upon reading this was that we are not spending enough time on Wikipedia. Our second was that we'd like to see some examples of this salacious content, because we had trouble finding any: those "nude" strippers are actually mostly* covered up, the sexual positions and anatomy photos are no worse than what you would find in a (really cool) biology textbook or on the Discovery Channel, and the gay fluffer pictures are tastefully non-explicit (at least by our standards*). What a ripoff!

Not only is this an unusually misguided display of anti-porn hysteria—anyone looking for free unblocked smut can do a lot better than Wikipedia—but their complaints show a shocking misunderstanding of how Wikipedia actually works. It's completely created, edited and policed by its users —i.e. anyone and everyone—and if there's a problem the users are the ones who fix it.

Take that infamous 1976 Scorpions album cover, which could be considered child pornography: it might have been banned, but one could also argue that it has some sort of historical relevance. If the community doesn't agree, then the community of Wikipedia users can remove it ... which they did are still debating**. (Here's the ongoing discussion about it, which predates the WND article by almost three years.)

Tattling to the FBI about nudie pics on the internet is like complaining to Congress about evolution. Hating it enough won't make it go away. Besides, one way or another people have to learn about strippers—so it's either on Wikipedia or in a strip club. Take your pick.

· "Is Wikipedia wicked porn?" + "Naked young girl photo troubles 'Wikipedophilia'" (wnd.com)
· Fluffing (Wikipedia)
· Wikipedia T-Shirt (bustedtees.com)

* Updated to reflect some specific photos which a reader bought to our attention after we posted this entry; however, we still don't think they're anywhere near as bad as the WND article makes them out to be.

** Update (5/9): Another reader has informed us that the banned Scorpions album cover has been restored to the Wikipedia post in question since we first posted about the issue, and the debate about it among Wikipedia users continues.

That fact alone wouldn't bother us so much if we didn't then have to sit on our hands as Diggers bestow link love on all kinds of racy material from more "respectable" sites. For example, recent front page winners on Digg included a link to Terminator fuckbots that we featured here a while back (before it became a traffic bonanza for our geeky brothers at Gizmodo—and don't even get us started on that doggie sex toy post .) The point is that we often engage in some good, relatively harmless fun that the Digg community obviously enjoys, yet we aren't allowed in the the front door because we're "one of those" sites.

Now, we don't expect folks to start linking to our daily hardcore Flesh Flicks videos or anything ... but surely there must be some middle ground where porn lovers and folks with generous workplace filters can live in harmony. True, there have been several attempts to emulate the Digg model for adult sites, but they've all come up short.

Still, people love Digg and Digg lovers like sexy stuff. They helped earn a reprieve for that Fox News Porn parody after it was famously banned, other links submitted with "porn" or "extremely NSFW" in the headline do just fine ... and if you check out the "Best Of" lists from any of our sister sites, the most popular items (with or without Digging) are frequently sex related. So why can't we play along too?

Of course, cynics might say that this very post is just another shameless attempt to bait Digg and score some sweet hot pageview love of our very own. (And they'd be right—too bad we can't Digg this link.) Just don't tell us that you didn't want to share that Jesus fuck doll ad with all your friends in the 2.0 world. Even if stuff like that is probably what got us banned in the first place.

· Digg Terms of Use (digg.com)

Update: Those techie suck ups at Valleywag respond to our reasonable request.

Related (sorta):
· "Hotdoll: The Sex Doll for Dogs" (the most popular story of 2007 @ Gizmodo)
· In SF, Third Breast Is More Common Than Third Eye (io9)
· "The Top Five Reasons Digg Is Completely Useless For Finding Anything Related To Music" (Idolator)
· "All You Need to Know About Digg" (Gawker)
· "Denton to pay bloggers based on traffic" (Valleywag)

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Previously: Is Fox News Too Hot For TV?, Hot Hexadecimal Dildo Porn: Digg This!, Dig for Porn, MoSexIndex, Splutr: More Social Porn, Fantasti.cc Videos: Community Rated Smut, Porn 2.0: Haven't We Been Here Before?