11–20 of 180 posts
As someone who spent 4 years working for Kink.com (NSFW) building and running their entire IT infrastructure, this guy brings up some valid points. We had to build some extremely complicated systems to handle payments, performance, security, etc. It was a really fun learning experience. We used top of the line equipment. We got lessons in scaling. Even came up with creative ways to tell people where I worked... 'Educ…
Two thoughts about all this pop up. You'd think porn companies would charge with sensible names? And I'm surprised Stripe wouldn't build an off brand company to handle this part of the market. Seems like it's just giving up on a lot of money for 'reasons' Though similar problems exist in business for things like weed companies. Banks don't want to touch em.
There's no way to ascertain how much profit a payment provider makes based on the transaction cost. That 30% fee might be necessary in order to make a profit after covering all the expenses incurred by dealing with vast amounts of fraudulent transactions, chargebacks, lawyers, etc. Maybe Stripe aren't giving up a lot of money; maybe providing payment services to the adult entertainment industry is just really expensive per transaction.
This was a really bad example, as Stripe actually charges more than 30 cents for a $1 charge ;P. More reasonable companies (including PayPal) give you better rates for small receipts; PayPal offers 5%+$0.05 as a "micropayment rate". But yeah: with a better example, this is still clearly a point ;P.
Many adult services providers are burning through hundreds of merchant accounts, getting them closed/actioned, and repeating as long as they aren't prosecuted. The moment they have to deal with any criminal prosecution, however, there are going to be a lot of problems now that the feds have learned to prosecute this as money laundering.
EDIT: Holy shit, the author cops to being an accomplice to wire fraud in the comments: https://i.imgur.com/S5UWBZZ.jpg. He needs to take this post down immediately. This is why programmers need to learn about the world before they do things to it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>You'd think porn companies would charge with sensible names? If they're doing legal business, why should they?
I think margins are going down and there are plenty of stories of women being completely stuck in a world they don't want to be in, some of them actually struggling with mental issues. Sure, some probably like it but I can understand that companies prefer not to be associated with a world that seemingly contains a lot of misery. There are plenty of documentaries about the industry, they don't paint a rosy picture.
Since the Credit Card companies & banks create lots of problems as soon as sex is involved (see FetLife's misadventures in HN previous articles for instance) in addition to the big chargebacks issue, and given that customers lie a lot (because they can), I think that the best solution for pornsites would be something similar to prepaid cards used for Google Play, consoles networks and the like.
You buy a card, this puts a limited amount on your "PornPlayButDontSayItIsForThat" account, it's easy to control, anonymous, limits risks even if the account is compromised or the porn site dodgy (hidden automatic renevals & the like) since at most you'd lose that limited amount, then you can buy porn without the issue of the SO (a big problem it seems) and without any banks (or whatever) knowing about your -still badly perceived- habits.
In fact, I'm surprised such a system (not specific to a porn site/network) is not already widely available. Of course, it would not present itself as "the Porn Prepaid Card" because of the stigma... Note that some sites/networks accept gift cards already (I've checked), but it's not very practical (not fine grained, you must use the whole card) and they don't accept ALL cards, what do you do when you're living in France and they only accept American gift cards? You can also buy "tokens" in many sites (especially Webcams) but they still require a CC, so the problem is not solved. A more general "ePurse" system would be better.
This is much more realistic -IMO- than using Bitcoins or the like (too difficult to use and too volatile).
Of course, to REALLY solve the problem you'd "only" need people to stop seeing sex (and porn) as bad, dirty, taboo, etc. But this won't happen anytime soon :-(((
As someone who spent 4 years working for Kink.com (NSFW) building and running their entire IT infrastructure, this guy brings up some valid points. We had to build some extremely complicated systems to handle payments, performance, security, etc. It was a really fun learning experience. We used top of the line equipment. We got lessons in scaling. Even came up with creative ways to tell people where I worked... 'Educ…
Don't need to be ashamed of working for kink.com, or any adult site in that matter, especially in this day and age. My fiance was upset at this news, to this day she is sad about it: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/jan/25/porn-bdsm-ki... (I'm not really into it, but I fully believe in to each their own!)
People don't have to be ashamed of it in the sense that they didn't choose to get so damaged to be attracted by it, but abuse and it's consequences is a major elephant on the couch of the porn industry, and I also don't feel a shred of shame for not lumping it all together into one giant bag of "it's all fine", just like I can't lump it together as being all bad.
To each his own also means that I see what I see, and judge it as I judge it.
The title of the article is misleading, it's not programming that is the real issue, it's billing (the progamming issues are just a part in the article). Since the Credit Card companies & banks create lots of problems as soon as sex is involved (see FetLife's misadventures in HN previous articles for instance) in addition to the big chargebacks issue, and given that customers lie a lot (because they can), I think tha…
The title of the article is misleading, it's not programming that is the real issue, it's billing (the progamming issues are just a part in the article). Since the Credit Card companies & banks create lots of problems as soon as sex is involved (see FetLife's misadventures in HN previous articles for instance) in addition to the big chargebacks issue, and given that customers lie a lot (because they can), I think tha…
One of the possible issues here is that some of these cards, specially anonymous ones, may take time to validate. Users may not want to wait 24hrs+ for their digital content to arrive.
This should be a solvable problem, though.
