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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

#151
post #73

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 found…

This is, for better or mostly worse, how a lot of sites bootstrap. Crunchyroll is another example.

Crunchyroll at least needed a team of translators to create subtitles for Naruto (and other anime circa the mid 00s). That is to say: Crunchyroll may have copyrihgt-infringed upon anime, but they added value. Naruto and Shippuden never would have found a subtitled audience without that team of translators. (And the English dub was relatively low quality back then, believe it)

I'm not sure how Youtube or Pornhub adds value to the content.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This question presumes that they have some inalienable right to scale despite not having solved this problem

This. It's not the law's job to cater to an organisation's bottom line. I'm sure someone is going to mention that this is in fact exactly how laws are applied in practice, but that's a separate discussion.

Note that Pornhub was not convicted, or even legally accused of violating any law. They were just financially deplatformed.

People who would like to change the law should certainly feel responsible to weight potential undesirable effects.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#153

This is undoubtedly a positive move, though I do not believe it will be enough to satisfy the likes of the credit card companies. They are requiring ID verification (i.e. that you're 18 or over) to upload content. As much as I am privacy-minded, the idea that someone could upload an explicit video to Pornhub without verifying that they were 18 is mind-boggling. This is also a net positive for content producers on Por…

A service that would allow users to upload their KYC info, and then provide them with unique tokens per site that can be used on 3rd party sites as nonces would be a decent way around having to verify on each site.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#154

Conspiracy theory: there’s a lot of porn and an unhealthy amount of competition to monetize it all. If PH were simply trying to drastically reduce competition against standard studios by removing the amateur stuff, I’m not sure I could blame them.

There really isn’t much competition in porn. PH is actually a company called Mindgeek that has a monopoly on US produced porn; they bought all the studios and all the cam sites.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#155
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…

Mastercard blocked charges from them and VISA signaled they would do the same. Pretty simple.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#156
post #51

I think the decline of moral argument and the rise of this general "anything goes" attitude has been a negative for society. We have to decide to draw a line somewhere. Even porn companies that feature of-age performers are highly exploitative and uncomfortably close to human trafficking - see the case of Girls Do Porn, and they're just the one that got caught doing it. I don't think it's unreasonable to argue that s…

> Even porn companies that feature of-age performers are highly exploitative and uncomfortably close to human trafficking Why? > I don't think it's unreasonable to argue that some sexual behavior should be considered "bad" - voyeurism, selling yourself for money, extreme fringe interests/fetishes, etc. I don't buy the idea that Pornhub is just an innocent business trying to run their website. They have built an empir…

> Why?

The rest of the sentence, which you conveniently left out when quoting, is one why.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#157
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their entire business is built on stolen content uploaded by anonymous users, Not disagreeing with you, but, to be fair, that was exactly Youtube's recipe for success, and still is to some extent. I never understood how Youtube could get away with that.

Section 230 + lack of resources by the owners to sue, right?

The relevant law here is the DMCA, which gives safe harbor to anyone hosting 3rd party content if they respond to timely takedown requests, which YouTube does.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find crazy is that you can't just start your own payment processor. That space is gatekeeped to the extreme and it is what makes me uneasy about the whole electronic money thing. If we want to part with paper money, we should be allowed to issue our own cards tied to our own money reserves.

No one's stopping you issuing your own card. The barrier is in getting your card accepted by zillions of retailers and online merchants. Having built that network is what entrenches Visa and MC. PayPal has attacked this in the online space by offering merchants a credit card checkout flow that also allows you to pay straight from your linked-directly-to-bank-account PayPal account. Square is attacking it in a similar…

The amount of government regulation has led to this payment processing duopoly. Not saying it's a bad thing, just that it's the major reason of how we got here.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#159

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 found…

From the article, Pornhub only had 118 incidences of child porn over the last 3 years whereas Facebook had 84 million incidents of child porn during the same time. So it sounds like Pornhub is taking child porn seriously, and Facebook isn't.
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