Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites? • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by jarin » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 6:34 PM UTC

martinemde wrote: post #30

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 c…

Just wanted to note that this was before anyone knew what Hulu was :)

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

#32

Post by blake8086 » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 6:37 PM UTC

I made http://pix-plz.com . I originally set out to make a site that was easier to use than hotornot.com (a lot of people just rate all photos the same, because they want to see more.)

The site has languished, as I'm not really sure what to do with it, but I'm proud of the features I implemented, the UI, and the things I learned in doing it.

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

#33

Post by fredoliveira » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 6:39 PM UTC

Vivtek wrote: post #23

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.

I would like to add emphasis to this particular sentence:

Email me if you want to get serious any time.

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

#34

Post by davidmathers » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 6:39 PM UTC

jasonlotito wrote: post #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 sid…

Nice. You're about to start doing payment processing (among other things) for Hot House, my best client. Seeing you here gives me great confidence!

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

#35

Post by swish » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 6:41 PM UTC

I was the Director of Technology for Naughty America up until about 7 months ago when I transitioned to a "mainstream" job as those in the industry call it. Was definitely an interesting experience, but as others have said the things you learn about massive traffic, high availability, scalability and TONS of streaming video are hard to get anywhere else, unless you're working for a Google or Yahoo. Naughty America at one point was in the top 800 highest trafficked of all sites on the web, 1M+ uniques a day. I'm now the CTO of a startup and when I was leaving Naughty America everyone I interviewed with viewed that experience as an asset, as most intelligent people will.

www.gfy.com is the most popular adult webmaster forum, but there are others like www.justblowme.com, www.adultwhoswho.com, etc

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

#36

Post by xutopia » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 6:48 PM UTC

My experience with the domain has been less than stellar. I ended up being fired for handing over a petition from all but one employee asking for better treatment. I sued them and they settled out of court.

The best part of it was the "best orgasm faces" contest we had. I was a programmer so I just benefited from it but those working on touch ups would screenshot and save the orgasm faces into a shared network drive and we had new stuff to laugh at every day.

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

#37

Post by sixtofour » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 6:57 PM UTC

ddemchuk wrote: post #10

I'm not kidding here, gofuckyourself.com is generally considered the most popular porn webmaster forum online. I've heard the quality has dropped in recent times though.

The quality is always dropping in recent times, at almost any forum you care to visit.

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

#38

Post by vermontdevil » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 6:58 PM UTC

Long long long time ago back in the days of dial up ISPs, I along with friends created a website called Kandyland. We bought a negative film scanner for about $1500 or so for a photographer in return for a 2 year supply of naked women photos.

About 4 months later we got a cease and deist letter from Hasbro asking us not to use the term Kandyland as it was too similar to Candyland the game.

Being young and not exactly flush with VC money, we simply changed it to California Babes or something like that.

Eventually after about one and half years, our girlfriends asked us if we are going to make this a career or not? We picked our girlfriends and have left the business altogether. The experience did help my web development career though.

Fun times.

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

#39

Post by soult » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 7:00 PM UTC

evilduck wrote: post #25

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.

There was one talk called "Tits Bits" at the Chaos Communication Camp 07 (a rather unconventional but awesome tech conference). It was about the technical challenges of operating a porn streaming website. You can download the recording (number 2041) here: http://dewy.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/CCC/CCCamp07/video/m4v/

The recording includes some pictures which make it not safe for work (depending on your work environment).

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

#40

Post by bottlerocket » Thu, Feb 03, 2011, 7:01 PM UTC

gcb wrote: post #16

bottlerocket wrote: post #3

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?

No, just didn't want to post gofuckyourself.com here, but others already did so why not :D

But speaking of secret handshakes, don't suppose anyone here remembers CFUS by any chance?