Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 549 posts

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#191

Post by alphachloride »

iwasakabukiman wrote: post #183
alphachloride wrote: post #120

I am speaking here as a hypocrite. I think porn is wrong and I don't pay for it on principle. I pirate it instead when I succumb to my baser urges. What I'm saying is that I have mixed feelings.

So you disagree with it morally but watch it anyway? And then don't even pay the people who produced it? Isn't that even worse? I think there's nothing wrong with porn in general and the people who create it - just like other artists, performers, actors, etc - should be paid for it. Just because it's "morally disagreeable" doesn't make it okay to pirate it. Then you've committed two "sins" instead of one.

I said as much in the first 7 words of my comment.

Porn is wrong. Stealing content is wrong. My feelings about porn aside, what I am doing is stealing by the law of the land. Do I feel bad about watching porn? Yes. Do I feel bad about stealing it? No.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#192

Post by serial_dev »

powersnail wrote: post #172
fullshark wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP didn't phrase this elegantly for sure, but the general idea that a life spent alone, consuming pornography all day is unfulfilling should not be controversial, and porn like any addiction / vice can become a trap.

> the general idea that a life spent alone, consuming pornography all day is unfulfilling should not be controversial 1). I don't see why that's not controversial. It doesn't seem self-evident. If a person can fulfill the need by watching porn, then by definition, it is fulfilled. If a person finds it unfulfilling, well, such a person will be motivated to branch out and start doing something else. 2). OP claimed that…

> If a person can fulfill the need by watching porn, then by definition, it is fulfilled. If a person finds it unfulfilling, well, such a person will be motivated to branch out and start doing something else.

Depends on what we are "fulfilling". Just think about an extremely overweight person who cannot stop overeating. Yes, they are fulfilled in terms of food, but (sometimes) they are self-loathing and consider the fact that they cannot stop eating a personal failure, so in that sense they are the farthest from "fulfilled".

Same is true for porn, you might be fulfilled in a sense that you get to orgasm in 10 minutes, but there are other facets of life where regular porn consumption or masturbation might have a negative effect.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#193

Post by freehunter »

DanBC wrote: post #33
tobessebot wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Third-party foundations finding legitimate instances of sexual abuse of children is going to be incredibly rare because how would you ever tell 18 and 17-year-olds apart? Facebook has much more information available to them and they are aggressively checking their platform for it, that's why they find so many instances.

IWF have access to billions of images and video of child sexual abuse and they take reports from law enforcement world wide. They create various filtering databases that can be used by ISPs and companies. https://www.iwf.org.uk/what-we-do/who-we-are

That helps for the cases where someone is abusing a child and the police were involved. Does it help when a 15/16/17 year old uploads their own pictures/videos without anyone knowing their actual age? Or when someone's boyfriend/girlfriend records them and uploads it without the victim knowing?

Like Youtube's filter will catch me uploading a video with a Taylor Swift song in it but not someone uploading a video using one of my independently produced/distributed songs, because their filter doesn't have my music in it.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#194

Post by tomjen3 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #144
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all this talk about various corporations policing copyright, censoring political content, and whatnot, I think it's only a matter of time until someone makes an anonymous blockchain content aggregator that's impossible to censor. Then when it becomes the modern equivalent of Usenet/IRC/Napster/PirateBay, people will just shrug and say "don't blame the protocol". The demand exists and the technology exists, but n…

There's no such thing as 'impossible to censor'. It may eb 'hard to censor', perhaps even 'impractical to censor', but a powerful enough government will be able to censor anything it wants. Do your think that, if people started somehow publishing 'bad' stories about the CCP in the bit coin block chain, the CCP wouldn't act to remove that content or censor any acces to the block chain itself?

CPP might be able to ban access to the block chain, or some part of it, but they wouldn't be able to replace it with their own version that was accepted outside China.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#195

Post by Blikkentrekker »

fullshark wrote: post #145
standardUser wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

The OP didn't phrase this elegantly for sure, but the general idea that a life spent alone, consuming pornography all day is unfulfilling should not be controversial, and porn like any addiction / vice can become a trap.

Perhaps we could let a man decide for himself what he might wish to do with his life.

For me, it's neither pornography nor “going after women”, a practice that thankfully isn't common in my culture, I find having debates on the internet and consuming quality fiction to be more rewarding than either.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#196

Post by manfredo »

Anon1096 wrote: 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…

Reddit's strategy is to shift blame to the moderators of the subreddit in question. This is really their biggest innovation, delegating the burden of moderation to the users. Then the Reddit administrators effectively need to manage a much narrower set of users. They don't need to manage the hundreds of thousands of users in /r/news, just the few active moderators.

If the NYT or another big outlet publishes a hit pieces, Reddit will just ban or quarantine that particular subreddit. We already saw this play out with The_Donald and a few other subreddits (one on hating fat people, and one with a derogatory slur based on racoons come to mind).

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#197

Post by seph-reed »

I'm glad they're doing it, but it kind of feels like we've been in this cycle for a while now.

I mean, the price of freedom is constant diligence, so I guess that's to be expected. But I think the ultimate issue with all of these content hosting sites is that almost no real effort has been put into making moderation a community wide responsibility (and also difficult to abuse).

I really feel like improvements to moderation systems is the thing that keeps failing to happen and eventually kills every form of social media.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#198

Post by mlang23 »

pyrophane wrote: post #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 found…

What you describe sounds alot like YouTube. 12 years ago, some friends of mine were doing their entire home music playback with a playlist of stolen music uploads. I'd even go as far and claim that YT Music wouldn't exist if people were not trained that YouTube has all the music content they are looking for.

And then there are channels like "Netzkino" who have around a million subscribers and a few thousand full movies online. The claim is all that content is supposedly legal. Well, maybe. But it doesn't look like it...

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#199

Post by manquer »

Raphmedia wrote: post #28
Anon1096 wrote: 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…

It is hit piece in the sense, it focused a lot on PornHub while arguably the other players are worse in terms of the standards the article stated this as well.

Was it well deserved ? Certainly, they could have been doing more lot earlier. However there are lot worse players and the focus has been a lot more on Pornhub rather than industry in general.

Self regulation by Pornhub is good step forward, but a model which enables only change from one player after pressure from the payment providers is not reliable model. There has to be regulatory change to really protect the victims.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#200

Post by SkyPuncher »

snowwrestler wrote: post #157
soupson wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My understanding is YouTube technically doesn't deal with many DMCA take downs. Their reporting system is technically a voluntary system in front of DMCA.

Large IP holders are happy to use it because it heavily favors them. Large IP holders also don't have to worry about repercussions for false or incorrect DMCA claims.

Post reply on HN