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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

#201

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…

> Sure CP is very, very bad

I disagree.

If it's evidently legal for a man to view recordings of sports accidents, mass shootings, and the commission of whatever other crime, out of naught but sadistic pleasure or shock value, then I see no problem with it being legal for a man to watch child pornography.

If it were up to me, the same standard for all those other recordings would be employed.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most of what I'm aware of in terms of banking/CC regulations is oriented around consumer protection (without which you don't have acceptance of the system). What are the regulations which have reinforced the duopoly? (honest question)

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Most of the content on Crunchyroll was fansubbed by various IRC and torrent groups and used without permissions of the original copyright holders or of the fansub groups and without credit to the fansubbers. S…

Its been a while since those times.

I remember Dattebayo fansubs, one of those torrent fansub groups you're talking about. I remember when they shutdown and announced support for Crunchyroll, suggesting that legitimate paid streaming was the future for anyone who actually wanted to support the anime subtitle community.

Perhaps I wasn't remembering the full politics of mid 00s subtitle culture... its been a very long time since then. But for Dattebayo at least, they were quite clear on throwing their support behind Crunchyroll, to the point where it was rumored that Dattebayo was probably working with Crunchyroll. (Though I'm not sure if that was ever confirmed)

With hundreds of thousands of torrent hits per week, Dattebayo fansubs probably was one of the largest torrent fansubbers of that time. I tried to search for a history of those groups, but alas, it seems lost to time. I just got my personal memories to guide me.

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You're right in that those early fansubber / torrent / IRC groups were all separate groups with different politics. But from my perspective, the big groups (ie: Dattebayo) were definitely all in on supporting Crunchyroll.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This means lots of casual exhibitionists will be reluctant to upload. It will probably cut uploads to a tiny fraction of what they were. Which could well be a net negative (I'm assuming both the viewers and exhibitionists get something out of it) given how small the positives are.

And that usually creates a vacuum for smaller niche sites to pop up and fill the gap.

"Fill the gap"

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

These seem all very different critiques. The Nick Kristof article is based on the work of Laila Mickelwait, who has for the last couple of years worked tirelessly on her campaign to shutdown Pornhub. I twas her who has surfaced all the victims in the article. Though I doubt she will succeed now, she is very clear that the end-goal is not to monitor Pornhub, but to criminally charge it's owners. This is because a crim…

And a very quick google search confirmed what I suspected: she works for a christian organization.

I thought that we had effectively neutered the religious right.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#206
post #184

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…

you can say this same thing about Airbnb. how many listings are illegal? and yet they don’t proactively purge illegal listings unless some city aggressively goes after them in court.

None of AirBnb listings were likely illegal in the early days, because what they were doing was not regulated.

Also, I’d say there’s a big difference between the homeowner choosing to list their home against a city regulation that the homeowner is choosing to violate, versus users uploading content that they don’t own in the first place.

Even a tenant who is AirBnb’ing their unit against their lease terms is at least listing their own unit / choosing to violate an agreement that they themselves have signed.

AirBnb to me is unique in that their regulations came afterward to combat the monumental rise of short term rentals, whereas Section 230 / DMCA regulations are what enabled the other sites to ultimately growth hack on the back of infringement.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#207
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…

[deleted]

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#208

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…

Both Google and YouTube contain stolen and illegal content. There are lots of full length pirate movies on YT for instance. It doesn’t make it right but I just mean all companies should be equally judged by rules and regulations

YouTube is actively taking that content down. Oftentimes overly zealously.

The case with pornhub was exactly the opposite.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#209

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…

Wouldn’t your blockchain be several PB in size right away, immediately censoring itself because nobody could store it?

What if it was only a directory of torrents? Not hosting the content itself, but indexing it.

(I've never developed anything with blockchain or torrents, so my apologies if there's a technical reason why this sucks.)

If I understand Pirate Bay and other torrent sites correctly, they don't host any content. They just index what's available P2P.

I'm not sure how large that index would become, but I could imagine chunking the index itself out so that it doesn't take much room on any one user's machine.

The chunking of the index could theoretically be done in such a way that no individual chunk would have any useable information, so no individual user could be accused of linking to illegal content. (I think that's conceivable? Again, not sure.)

(Please note: This is pure hypotheticals. I have zero interest in seeing such a system come about.)

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: how do you scale content moderation to millions of posts without hiring millions of workers at astronomical cost (who can make mistakes, like we’ve seen with DMCA take down notices, YouTube censorship when not justified, AppStore censorship,even GitHub made these mistakes, etc... some of these mistakes ruin peoples’ livelihoods). Is there a “right way” to do this that protects everyone?

If a business can't run profitably and legally at scale, then that business model is a bad fit for that scale and shouldn't exist at that scale (presuming the laws in question are reasonable, which I think 'banning child porn' qualifies as.) It's super weird that people seem to constantly start from the premise of, "But their business couldn't possibly [comply with law] profitably at scale! Oh well. I guess until som…

People are going to watch pirated porn. If they can't find it on American sites they'll go to sites that aren't effected by American laws/regulations/journalism. That would probably make trafficking worse as the new site has no reason to take down any videos as their value add is refusal to censor.
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