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Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

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Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#41
post #21

This might not be so bad for mindgeek. They just cut their storage costs in half, probably mostly cutting out the long tail end of videos that they don't really need. They just made a strong argument for increased regulation that will hurt any newcomers and hurt social media competitors more than them. They just got a whole lot of free press.

I'm not so sure about cutting the storage costs at this point. They likely soft deleted the content in order to preserve it for potential law enforcement needs or whatever else. Moving forward they will absolutely see a decrease in storage needs since uploads are so much more restricted

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#42

Ive watched porn all my life (like most). I dont have a moral vendetta against it. But it seems to be a no-go topic for discussing the serious societal issues from porn. As I've grown older ive realized its really very toxic and probably the most widespread addiction in the US causing real issues. When you watch porn all day or even just a few times per week, your testosterone and hormonal balance as a man changes. Y…

"You do not go after women and start a family."

One of the many benefits I have received from porn and sex positivity in general. Imagine thinking you're supposed to "go after" a woman because of some requirement to start a family? Absolutely dystopian.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#43

Pretty silly what they have to do in order to make the keyholders happy. Should MC and Visa really dictate how people make their business? I don't think so. Sure CP is very, very bad but I have been using Pornhub for many years and I have never seen such content on the platform. This is one big reason why I think decentralized currencies like bitcoin one day could succeed. IMO, this is the golden quote: > Pornhub's a…

I would be interested in having those numbers * view count. Facebook will probably still come out on top, but I expect the difference to narrow. I‘m not sure if that makes it much more harmful but important for the comparison.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#44
post #6

I'm surprised at how much impact the NYT's expose (I would personally consider it more of a hit piece) has had. I naively assumed that PornHub, as a top-10 site on the web would be immune to such a piece, but I guess I was wrong. How many of the members of the NYT and the Visa and Mastercard boards who created on this outcome watched the videos that are now down? Probably a majority of them, but that wasn't enough to…

You seem to admit that the accusations are valid, but are also claiming that this type of reporting is a hit piece. How do you square those two?

Also Reddit has been on the receiving end of this reporting before. That has often resulted in incremental improvements as the worst offending subreddits are banned (there used to be an /r/jailbait for example), but their model often doesn't kill that content or the demand for it and can result in that same content being dispersed among smaller and more niche communities that are able to glide under the radar. Reddit has still thrived throughout all that controversy so I don't think it is as big an existential threat as you claim.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#45
post #21

This might not be so bad for mindgeek. They just cut their storage costs in half, probably mostly cutting out the long tail end of videos that they don't really need. They just made a strong argument for increased regulation that will hurt any newcomers and hurt social media competitors more than them. They just got a whole lot of free press.

But probably kill them as visitors will drop and new sites will popup.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#46
post #6

I'm surprised at how much impact the NYT's expose (I would personally consider it more of a hit piece) has had. I naively assumed that PornHub, as a top-10 site on the web would be immune to such a piece, but I guess I was wrong. How many of the members of the NYT and the Visa and Mastercard boards who created on this outcome watched the videos that are now down? Probably a majority of them, but that wasn't enough to…

To say this is a hit piece against PornHub is to oversimplify the issue. The parent company MindGeek (Revenue: 460 million USD) formerly known as ManWin has been receiving such criticisms for years now. This is not a hit-piece against a small streaming start-up. It's a wake-up call to monitor a tech giant. https://nymag.com/news/features/70985/ 2011 https://www.philosophyforlife.org/blog/porn-corporations-sto... 2012…

Jon Ronson's podcast "The Butterfly Effect" also does a great job of breaking down how damaging MindGeek's practices have been to workers and legitimate players in the industry:

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Butterfly-Effect-with-Jon-Ron...

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#47
I don't have any sympathy for Pornhub here. Their entire business is built on stolen content uploaded by anonymous users, and it wasn't until they hollowed out the rest of the industry through theft that they started looking beyond it.

I would go so far as to say that the reason Pornhub and other tube sites haven't taken problems like child porn and revenge porn seriously is because doing so would undermine the foundation of their business: stolen content.

On the other hand, this might ultimately work in their favor if it has the effect of raising the bridge they've just crossed. If it gets harder host stolen content, Pornhub has to worry less about someone else doing to them what they've done to others now that they are making a switch to paid content.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#48
post #35

Ive watched porn all my life (like most). I dont have a moral vendetta against it. But it seems to be a no-go topic for discussing the serious societal issues from porn. As I've grown older ive realized its really very toxic and probably the most widespread addiction in the US causing real issues. When you watch porn all day or even just a few times per week, your testosterone and hormonal balance as a man changes. Y…

Porn is like the junk-food of sex. McDonald's french fries are engineered to disintegrate on the tongue and deliver that hit of salt and fat. It hijacks our evolved taste buds in a way that's pleasurable - but not healthy. Porn is like that but with sex. A little bit won't hurt you, but too much can ruin your sexual health and distort your ideas of what sex should be.

And who is the arbiter of "what sex should be"? Perhaps porn is providing the much needed service of expanding our definitions of sex, which had been brutally restrained by prudish mores for most of Western civilization.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#49
post #6

I'm surprised at how much impact the NYT's expose (I would personally consider it more of a hit piece) has had. I naively assumed that PornHub, as a top-10 site on the web would be immune to such a piece, but I guess I was wrong. How many of the members of the NYT and the Visa and Mastercard boards who created on this outcome watched the videos that are now down? Probably a majority of them, but that wasn't enough to…

I don't think that the takeaway from this story should be "sites hosting child pornography should be careful of journalists exposing them".

I think the takeaway should be "sites hosting child pornography should stop doing that".

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#50
post #11
post #6

I'm surprised at how much impact the NYT's expose (I would personally consider it more of a hit piece) has had. I naively assumed that PornHub, as a top-10 site on the web would be immune to such a piece, but I guess I was wrong. How many of the members of the NYT and the Visa and Mastercard boards who created on this outcome watched the videos that are now down? Probably a majority of them, but that wasn't enough to…

What’s worse, Reddit disables NSFW/porn content in Incognito on iOS Safari and prompts you to install the app. How that got past Apple is beyond me.

Does Safari have a "use desktop site" option?
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