However you feel about this, one thing is clear: MasterCard and Visa have too much power.
This is why they should be regulated as utilities. The bailouts of 2008/9 ended any argument that the banking system is a fully private sector entity.
Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform
241–250 of 549 posts
Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform
#242I 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…
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?
Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform
#243I 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.
> that was exactly Youtube's recipe for success
Disagree. ContentID was a proprietary tech for content recognition that made YouTube not get inundated with copyrighted material. YT is successful because they handled the issue, not because they didn't.
Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Two more likely possibilities: (1) Pornhub wasn't really checking, which is an easy way to get good stats.* (2) Many of Facebook's 84 million incidents took place on private groups or Messenger chats with small numbers of participants, whereas a single PornHub upload (counted as "1 incident") could easily reach hundreds of thousands of people. Fundamentally difficult to compare private communications networks with br…
> Two more likely possibilities: (1) Pornhub wasn't really checking
The article mentions it was not Pornhub doing the checking.
Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform
#245When you talk to Americans about guns or fast food or healthcare or 101 other issues, Freedom is a word you hear a lot. But for porn and alcohol, despite broadly harmless, Americans are all about bans and prohibitions...
America is an incredibly diverse country, painting all of us with broad brushes is almost always doomed to be incorrect.
For what it's worth, I for one absolutely support the inalienable right to keep and bear arms while also supporting the right to create and watch pornography or drink alcohol, even though I understand none of these might be considered "harmless".
Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform
#246Earlier 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.
Content ID and agreements with major publishers?
That only came after quite a while, after Google acquired them.
Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's unreasonable that the stances that most regularly get highly upvoted to the top of the threads are taken as a gestalt 'HN opinion'.
it's a reasonable mistake to make, but it's probably not correct. dang made a good post about this recently. I'm having a hard time finding it now (he posts a lot), so I'll just paraphrase. a lot of (sometimes vile) positions are strongly advocated for by a minority of users, but only weakly opposed by the majority. that vocal minority will upvote any friendly post, while the majority will just shake their heads but…
Edit: Surprised it took almost twenty minutes for the downvotes to start. It also proves my point perfectly. For what it's worth I'm not saying bicycle licenses are good or should be implemented. But it's the most well-understood example of this phenomenon.
This is the argument about why "bicycle licenses" aren't a thing. The number of drivers who aren't cyclists dwarfs the number of cyclists by many orders of magnitude in most US states. In many municipalities, some cyclists regularly break traffic laws and cause (at best) frustration or (at worst) deadly accidents. This leads to drivers-who-aren't-cyclists making the seems-reasonable comment that you should need a license to drive a bike the same way you do for a vehicle.
So let's say a politician supports bicycle license. This isn't enough to get anyone who supports a bike license to vote for them, because it's not a Top Ten issue for anyone on that side. But not only will every cyclist in their district vote against them, they'll campaign and donate to any opponent of that bill. If they even think you support the legislation they're writing checks to your opponent.
I'm not making an argument on bike licenses in particular but I can see a similar effect where a minority percentage of HN feels strongly enough about a given topic that they upvote the articles based on title alone. When an issue is particularly divisive, the odds increase that people feel strongly on both sides so you end up with the #1 posts on two different days expressing diametrically opposed positions, but both very heavily upvoted.
Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't Pornhub's content always public, whereas Facebook's can be segregated to smaller groups of people? If that's the case it seems that illegal content could remain undetected for far longer on FB rather than Pornhub.
> Isn’t Pornhub’s content always public I don’t think so. I’m not an expert on PH, but from what I understand from other sources they have a mix of public content, open-to-all-paid-customers content, and private content that is available only to subscribers to particular channels. I don’t know if they have any content owner (well, submitter, given the level of piracy) controls on who can see content at the specific u…
Content can also be only for 'friends' of the user.
Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform
#249When you talk to Americans about guns or fast food or healthcare or 101 other issues, Freedom is a word you hear a lot. But for porn and alcohol, despite broadly harmless, Americans are all about bans and prohibitions...
I drink alcohol, and I am all for that freedom, but it's not "broadly harmless."
That all depends what you compare it to. 40% of the US population has obesity. I doubt 40% have a drinking problem. Yet any discussion of banning junk food is verboten, and no one seems to care that the US drinking age is way higher than most similar countries...
Re: Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform
#250I’d like to see some kind of platform penalties that are redistributed toward victims. Pornhub has made millions off things like pirated sex work and revenge uploads, while wiping out legitimate players in the industry and driving down wages and working conditions [0] Now, having wrought all that destruction, they’re returning to what? Exactly what a regulated, verified industry looks like. It’s unconscionable that w…
That's pretty much the MO of a lot of SV companies. I remember when Uber came to my city and there were news articles about police officers ordering a ride and ticketing the driver afterwards because unlicensed taxis were against the law. The city claims Uber never petitioned them to change the law, Uber just knowingly broke the law and paid the fines on behalf of their drivers until the city changed the law. Airbnb…
If the government changed the law rather than stepping up enforcement, that means that public support was not behind the law. This is essentially civil disobedience, and I say that is a completely legitimate strategy.