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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?

#21

Post by borism »

tibbon wrote: post #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…

why are they generally so poorly done (or at least, from the perspective that most HN coders would view as poorly)

because it doesn't make business sense to make them better? concept that most HN readers will probably have hard time understanding.

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

#23

Post by Vivtek »

tibbon wrote: post #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…

I've been dreaming of 'porn for geeks'

Yeah, me, too. Some kind of similarity metric would be nice, wouldn't it? "More like this"? Email me if you want to get serious any time.

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

#24

Post by calloc »

SageRaven wrote: post #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.…

When I got my job in the porn industry they didn't advertise that was what it was for. Instead it was brought up during the interview process.

They asked me a series of questions related to it as well. Like "For your day job you may have to visit bigblackcocks.com to make sure their website is functioning again, how do you feel about that?" and "We host a lot of content that might be offensive, if given root access would feel the urge to delete everything because it didn't fit in with your world view?"

I'm not offended at anything, so it really didn't bother me. I worked on many different aspects of the business. Massively scaling MySQL, handling DDoS attacks, setting up load balancers on the fly, helping figure out how certain websites were attacked and or compromised. It was a fun job, and one of the sites I worked on currently has 600+ live models streaming to over 1 million unique IP addresses.

I don't know how you'd go about finding such a job, I stumbled upon it. No, it is not on my resume since I am a software engineer at heart and not a sys admin, but the knowledge I have gained has allowed me to engineer various different systems in the mean time.

CCBill and Cave Creek located in Phoenix are two of the places where I interviewed before landing the other job, later I found out through a friend who did get the job at Cave Creek that he was doing the same stuff I was doing.

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

#25

Post by evilduck »

pamelafox wrote: post #15

Related to this, I'd love to see developers who work on porn sites speaking at conferences, to hear about your particular experiences in design, marketing, SEO, hosting, and scaling. Seems like you'd have an interesting perspective on all that.

I always got the impression most tech conferences were too thin-skinned about the subject, which is sad considering the porn industry works on a lot of interesting tech problems.

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

#26

Post by Swannie »

I had a dabble a few years ago. There was a strong community on a couple of IRC channels.

I saw the potential for seriously automated stuff, but sadly when I went to Uni it all fell by the wayside. Got back into it a little after, but lost interest: it had got a lot harder to get converting traffic in the 5 years between the first dabble and later.

Now everyone wants video. That's gotta be a killer on your bandwidth bills.

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

#27

Post by d3x »

tibbon wrote: post #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…

They are normally so poorly done because it does not matter. Most porn sites are either traffic sites or membership sites. If its a traffic site then the goal is just to upsell and send the user to another site and if its a membership site then the users care much more about the content than the site.

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

#28

Post by jarin »

I used to be the R&D Director at Naughty America, here's what I built:

http://techcrunch.com/2008/10/08/come-and-get-it-naughty-ame...

http://gofuckyourself.com (NWS) is pretty much the hangout for adult affiliates and webmasters. If you're trying to build traffic, that's where you want to be.

Funny enough, I seem to be at it again. My latest client is a porn startup.

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

#29

Post by tibbon »

d3x wrote: post #27
tibbon wrote: post #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…

They are normally so poorly done because it does not matter. Most porn sites are either traffic sites or membership sites. If its a traffic site then the goal is just to upsell and send the user to another site and if its a membership site then the users care much more about the content than the site.

I think you're right. But at the same time, we know that Google is grading things on speed, and of course search engines love accessible sites (since they can read them easily too).

Maybe I'll just have to make one myself :)

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

#30

Post by martinemde »

tibbon wrote: post #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…

When working for Naughty America, I made a website for the members' area that was attempting to be like hulu for porn. Queueing, favorites, recommendations, subscriptions. We had it ready to go...

Naughty America was very resistant to change. The didn't want to divert all their members to a new site. They continued to work on their old members area so I was always feature chasing.

What it comes down to is that porn companies are not set up to be tech companies. They start out with 1 hacker that throws together some shitty CMS site and starts hacking content into it. Since the site quality isn't driving the money, they never lose the "one guy hacking on the site" mentality. They were basically doing everything as a one-off, without actually trying to make a good quality solution that would serve them long term.

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