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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

#291

Post by mskslal »

tmalsburg2 wrote: post #74
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…

> 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.

Legally I'm not sure. But ethically, stolen TV show clips are way more justifiable than stolen porn.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#292

Post by wolco2 »

solumos wrote: post #242
amelius wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stealing is the #1 growth-hack.

It seems somewhat arbitrary where the line is drawn between "growth hack" and "clearly undermining copyrighted content" Thinking specifically about Napster and MegaUpload. Is it because there was no value beyond simply sharing files? If there was a presentation layer + user accounts on top, would they have been spared?

Napster added too much value it woke the bear.

Megaupload poked a bigger bear.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#293

Post by slothtrop »

kodah wrote: post #286
slothtrop wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that copyrighted content on Youtube is often uploaded under the guise of anonymous users, but this is illusory. Unauthorized videos are taken down with vigilance, we see this happening to content creators all the time for no good reason. If these videos get the thumbs up to stay up, they're in cahoots with copyright holders somehow (most likely) or are deliberately ignored for some other reason. O…

Be aware you're comparing Google to a much smaller company. Of course they had the ability to do full DRM search much sooner. I'd look through the lens of technical hurdles much before I'd look through the lens of moralism.

This is a good point. I don't think MindGeek is as sophisticated in detecting and taking down infringing content. However, complaints do get filed and videos do get taken down for infringing.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#294

Post by mskslal »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #71
concordDance wrote: post #36

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.

> This means lots of casual exhibitionists will be reluctant to upload. You're saying it like it's a bad thing. Phub already has a process where content creators can ask their content to be verified directly. No platform should have porn on it without being able to source the origin of that content, period. (US) Studios have to retain a list of performers legally, I don't see why these free pornsites shouldn't. Count…

Absolutely this. The benefits of "casual exhibitionists" absolutely do not outweigh the risks and costs of having unverified and possibly illegal porn on your site.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#295

Post by justinclift »

mskslal wrote: post #291
tmalsburg2 wrote: post #74

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.

Legally I'm not sure. But ethically, stolen TV show clips are way more justifiable than stolen porn.

Why is one more justifiable than the other?

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#296

Post by slothtrop »

bigbubba wrote: post #281
slothtrop wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that copyrighted content on Youtube is often uploaded under the guise of anonymous users, but this is illusory. Unauthorized videos are taken down with vigilance, we see this happening to content creators all the time for no good reason. If these videos get the thumbs up to stay up, they're in cahoots with copyright holders somehow (most likely) or are deliberately ignored for some other reason. O…

If youtube user bigbubba420 uploads a music video for an 80s synthpop song he doesn't own, the copyright owner for that video informs youtube of their ownership claim and revenue from the video an anonymous user uploaded is redirected into their pockets.

This is true, though now bigbubba420 gets a strike on his account for the complaint and inches closer to a ban. And music uploaders throw on a ton of content, so I don't see how it can merely be a case of ad revenues taken over and continuing to do the same with impunity.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#297

Post by makomk »

jchw wrote: post #73
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…

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

As I pointed out the other day in the comments of an article about Crunchyroll, they're actually a much better example than Pornhub. Much like YouTube, sites like Pornhub have the excuse that they ostensibly exist to let people upload their own, often amateur, content - and there was a lot of really good amateur content on there. Which, naturally, the commercial porn industry wanted to eradicate just as much as the pirated stuff because it was their direct competition. Part of the problem was that there's an inherent assymetry to this - it only takes a few really keen exhibitionists wanting to show off to entertain a much larger group of fans across the globe. Another part is that there's all kinds of niche content that, despite being both consensual and legal, isn't well served by mainstream porn (and in some cases can't be due to Masterard and Visa).

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#298

Post by pas »

mindslight wrote: post #257
instakill wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or just let the whole middleman as a service industry keep rotting, and direct your technical energy towards rebuilding services on distributed technologies that won't succumb to the whims of the status quo power structure. What made the Internet great was being an unregulated frontier, and we can see that everywhere the legacy system jams its tentacles ends up turning to commercialized milquetoast shit.

Power is important, but without economics, it's just an academic research project/network.

Yeah, that made the Internet great in the beginning, and there are projects that don't depend on being "monetized", such as the OG hardcore F/OSS ones (GNU, Debian, KDE/Gnome, CCC, Wikipedia) and their ideological offspring (peertube, mastodon, matrix.org, blender).

But the average user doesn't care and doesn't understand the importance of having a free as in "as independent from the powers that be as possible" platforms.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#299

Post by Raphmedia »

miracle2k wrote: post #78
Bootvis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you consider it a hit piece? The main allegation that illegal content was on PornHub is based on facts, right?

Illegal content is on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit. The question is if and when it is removed. There are people accusing all of those sites of irresponsibility when it comes to moderating. But roughly, there seems to be no strong evidence that Pornhub did not remove illegal content they became aware of. More generally, the question is if a porn-site that allows anyone to upload stuff should be legally viable. You may fe…

> But roughly, there seems to be no strong evidence that Pornhub did not remove illegal content they became aware of.

There seem to be no strong evidence that Pornhub did remove illegal content they became aware of.

Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

#300

Post by mytherin »

preinheimer wrote: post #186
Larrikin wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think this is a point that tech folks like to sweep under the rug all too often. All of these sound wrong: - Walmarts are huge! It's impossible to build fire suppression at that scale. - Ford builds an insane number of cars every year, it's not possible to ensure each car is safe at that scale. - The United States burns 20,000 barrels of oil PER DAY. It's simply not possible to ensure a "safe" product at that scale…

Fire suppression systems fail, cars get recalled or malfunction, people get food poisoning in restaurants or from food bought at a supermarket. Any product, not just tech, runs into problems when manufactured at scale. Tech is more visible because it is newer and in the spotlight. Nobody says "stop manufacturing cars" when one manufacturer issues a safety recall because cars have been around so long. The entire premise of producing 100X fewer cars so we can hand-craft cars and hand-check them is ridiculous - we simply accept the occasional manufacturing defect or product recall as the rates at which they happen are so small. These are all rounding errors, and the benefits of scale far outweigh the cons.

The same applies to tech. Content moderation has been ~solved as well. The overwhelming majority of content on social media platforms, websites, etc is regular, legal content. The illegal content that makes it through the filters and stays up for a significant period of time is a rounding error.

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