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Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?

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Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?

#12
On the topic of getting a new job after leaving the adult industry:

It will generally have little impact on future jobs; especially if you get hands on experience with massively scalable architectures and high traffic volumes. The problems you solve outweigh the environment you worked in. From my experience, adult companies keep things professional due to the nature of the business and the risks of being sued.

I have a buddy that was in the industry for awhile, and there are a number of forums they all troll on. Here's a couple:

http://iq69.com http://gfy.com (nsfw)

Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?

#13
I've always wondered if sysadmin work for adult sites was a niche due to moral objections or the perception that employment at a "normal" place would be difficult afterwards. I don't often see many admin job postings for such sites, so I assume the industry is somewhat incestuous (no pun intended) and/or nepotist, resulting in more word-of-mouth job prospects than through the usual channels. Discretion and all that.

Anyone know where a freelance admin could find such jobs? The smaller the shop, the better.

Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?

#14
I worked in porn years ago... ah the memories. I worked for one of the first companies doing live interactive video streaming from girls living at home, though "live" in the late 90's was a still image every 1-2 seconds and no audio. The girls were rolling full sized PCs with camcorders around on rolling carts in their houses. I learned a lot about managing high traffic, server push methods, etc. I know I came out of it with a lot of things I wouldn't have picked up elsewhere. I never found it to be a hindrance to getting work later.

Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?

#16

Probably should create a throwaway for this :) but way back in college I did a bit of contract front-end web work for some guys in that area, email me (in profile) and I can send you the URL of the message board they were all on.

Do you need a secret handshake or something?

Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?

#17
I work for Gamma Entertainment up here in Montreal. I handle the credit card processing side of things (TrustCharge). I won't rehash the places I've mentioned in other comments, but don't neglect actually meeting people. The trade shows are a great place to meet people, even if you don't get a booth.

Just keep in mind that the adult business is a business. The people involved are interested in making money.

On a side note, we are hiring programmers! Shoot me off an email if you're interested.

Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?

#19
I have worked in adult for 9+ years and sold 2 sites. aebn.com / stockroom.com / domme.com etc... One of the sites i sold was called cameraphoneporn.com; sold it 8 years ago before mobile was big.

IMHO the best thing about working in adult is that you gain a good understanding of affiliates and seo / marketing / conversion rates etc... and that is information that has helped me with my mainstream clients as well.

Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?

#20
So for those of you that have worked on porn sites- why are they generally so poorly done (or at least, from the perspective that most HN coders would view as poorly).

Many have parts that are broken, they are slow, have really messy HTML, rely super heavily on flash, and just lack most modern features that most sites would have.

I've been dreaming of 'porn for geeks', where the content is the same, but there's nice RSS feeds, everything has strong semantic meaning, HTML5 is everywhere, they use jquery for consistent javascript rendering, the pages scale properly when you size them up, and hell... maybe even try for some user accessibility.

I just have yet to run across a good porn site that looks technically as impressive as someone's 4 hour rails project even. Of course, I wouldn't mind being proven wrong.

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