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Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?

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Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?

#61

Post by Mikushi »

citricsquid wrote: post #9

A guy who works for the people who do Pornhub posts here: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2172382 (his comment and subsequent replies)

Yep that's me. I've been working for Manwin for the past 3 years and a half. Worked on almost every projects they've done. For the past 2 years, i've been involved specifically on the tube sites, Pornhub.com and other ones. I am currently Lead Developer, and like my job, like others stated in this thread, it's a great occasion to work on high traffic websites, solving scalability issues, and a lot of interesting stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?

#62

Post by Mikushi »

tibbon wrote: post #20

So for those of you that have worked on porn sites- why are they generally so poorly done (or at least, from the perspective that most HN coders would view as poorly). Many have parts that are broken, they are slow, have really messy HTML, rely super heavily on flash, and just lack most modern features that most sites would have. I've been dreaming of 'porn for geeks', where the content is the same, but there's nice…

I'll speak for the ones i've been dealing with (Pornhub.com, Brazzers.com, Keezmovies.com, XTube.com, and some other small ones).

Since i started at my company, i only did a website from scratch on one occasion (Videobash.com, not porn), and i think it was done right, it scales very well, using a framework we (me and an ex-colleague) designed and coded targeted for high traffic/high load needs. As for the other sites, i think people here summed it up pretty well, very often the decision are made by managers/marketing people, and we just can't spend the time we want to on optimization and good coding.

But, it's a situation that is starting to change, at least at my company, after a year or so of fighting, we finally started to rewrite all of our sites, using the proper technologies, structuring it correctly, using the framework that we did. You still have to keep in mind that the teams are very smalls, for example, Pornhub.com (17Millions visists/day, 3Billions+ pageviews per month) is maintained by 2 Programmers, and from time to time we can get our hands on an integrator, so understand that it's very hard to address all the issues. So even if, in the case of Pornhub, we were able to scale (since i joined this team) from 12Millions to 17Millions users with less hardware and better performance, i'm still far from being satisfied with the current state of the code.

But be sure, that personally i take the performance of my websites at heart. But there is also all the factors i can't control, advertisers to begin with, a lot of heavy crapy Flash/JavaScript.

Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?

#63

Post by grafa »

Personally working in the adult industry is a little awkward in the beginning but after that it's fairly rewarding. Personally I found it really useful to get the high traffic/high scalability experience. I mean you don't get too many job opportunities where you can brag about your app serving around a billion page views/day.

Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?

#64

Post by khafra »

martinemde wrote: post #30
tibbon wrote: post #20

So for those of you that have worked on porn sites- why are they generally so poorly done (or at least, from the perspective that most HN coders would view as poorly). Many have parts that are broken, they are slow, have really messy HTML, rely super heavily on flash, and just lack most modern features that most sites would have. I've been dreaming of 'porn for geeks', where the content is the same, but there's nice…

When working for Naughty America, I made a website for the members' area that was attempting to be like hulu for porn. Queueing, favorites, recommendations, subscriptions. We had it ready to go... Naughty America was very resistant to change. The didn't want to divert all their members to a new site. They continued to work on their old members area so I was always feature chasing. What it comes down to is that porn c…

Is this (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2176038) the guy who wouldn't let you put up the new site? I'm fascinated to hear a dialogue on it, if so.

Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?

#65

Post by khafra »

jholman wrote: post #57
sixtofour wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quality is always dropping in recent times, at almost any forum you care to visit.

I feel a strong non-rational urge to write "hacker news is turning into reddit", and then rush off to reddit to write "reddit is turning into digg" on any-and-every thread, and so on.

After 5 or 10 steps, does that end in "/b/ is turning into hacker news"?

Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?

#66

Post by zwadia »

sixtofour wrote: post #37
ddemchuk wrote: post #10

I'm not kidding here, gofuckyourself.com is generally considered the most popular porn webmaster forum online. I've heard the quality has dropped in recent times though.

The quality is always dropping in recent times, at almost any forum you care to visit.

PornOverflow.com?

Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?

#67

Post by dreamstarcash »

tibbon wrote: post #20

So for those of you that have worked on porn sites- why are they generally so poorly done (or at least, from the perspective that most HN coders would view as poorly). Many have parts that are broken, they are slow, have really messy HTML, rely super heavily on flash, and just lack most modern features that most sites would have. I've been dreaming of 'porn for geeks', where the content is the same, but there's nice…

Hey tibbon, this is my first post on HN, but could not resist the urge to add to the thread.

My current position is Operations Manager at a company called Dreamstar Cash based in Altea (Spain), owned by Steve Matthyssen, a good friend of mine for many years.

Back in the day it all started with a TGP called gals4free.net. In Nov 2008 Dreamstar launched 4tube.com that is now ticking over with around 1.6M visits a day, 9 weeks ago we launched a new project PornTube.com that we're very excited about as we're using our existing tube model on a valuable/trusted/recognized domain that has historically outperformed/converted any other domain we've seen. Steve has built a solid reputation for himself over the years by not ripping off content. PornTube is 100% DMCA compliant, we believe the way forward is to work with, and not against the content producers.

Our current site has been designed with usability best practices in mind, as well as SEO (We're working with a highly reputable firm in the UK), scaleability, information architecture/semantics, MVT/CRO/LPO. Currently in the process of implementing rdf tags for some of our "starlettes" studios and movies, video sitemaps and dynamic rss feeds, social features...

As a small team it can be very hard to stay focused, develop all these features and ensure HA while managing +100k videos, security, performance and the list goes on. One of our goals for Q1 2011 is to review our SCRUM methodology and how we can improve our existing processes to stay on top of the game.

We worked VERY hard on setting ourselves a good foundation for growth, if there is any interest regarding the actual technologies used please forward your questions and I'll get our CTO to reply.

Nonetheless we do realise that their is much room for improvement, so any feedback would be very welcome, we're always looking to improve.

(We're also currently hiring ;-) feel free to pop over to http://www.dreamstarcash.com for more info or send your resume to jobs[at]dreamstarcash.com)

Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?

#68

Post by khanm »

bphogan wrote: post #43
tibbon wrote: post #20

So for those of you that have worked on porn sites- why are they generally so poorly done (or at least, from the perspective that most HN coders would view as poorly). Many have parts that are broken, they are slow, have really messy HTML, rely super heavily on flash, and just lack most modern features that most sites would have. I've been dreaming of 'porn for geeks', where the content is the same, but there's nice…

Really, how often do you see these things on mainstream sites? Most developers who care about those things are fighting other developers or founders who continue to use the "We need to make money, not be standards compliant" argument. When I give talks on accessibility, that's the #1 thing people say. THey can't be bothered to care because they believe that time could be better spent solving their business problems.…

I would like to know what size of the audience of these porn websites are accessible users. Really.

Sometimes people who study accessibility get so harped up about it that it becomes a must for them to implement on almost everything they do regardless if the audience size may be minimal to none.

It's a dangerous thing just like an entrepreneur who is blinded by the fact that his idea is not useful and is not satisfying a need yet he still plugs away at it hoping one day a dollar may be extracted from his beliefs.

Step back and take a look at it realistically. You need to be effective and efficient.

In almost anything we do the majority outway the minority. And it should be.

Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?

#69

Post by purveyor »

Vivtek wrote: post #23
tibbon wrote: post #20

So for those of you that have worked on porn sites- why are they generally so poorly done (or at least, from the perspective that most HN coders would view as poorly). Many have parts that are broken, they are slow, have really messy HTML, rely super heavily on flash, and just lack most modern features that most sites would have. I've been dreaming of 'porn for geeks', where the content is the same, but there's nice…

I've been dreaming of 'porn for geeks' Yeah, me, too. Some kind of similarity metric would be nice, wouldn't it? "More like this"? Email me if you want to get serious any time.

When I think "porn for geeks", I think videos in which the slider is labeled by "act", so you can skip over the stuff that grosses you out (like watching blowjobs), or even avoid videos with that stuff altogether and zero in on videos that have the stuff you like in the largest ratio. I'm not a developer though. Sure, I threw together a tumblr site (http://lookAtThisFuckingSideboob.com), but I think it would be fun to help build and grow a proper [porn for hackers] site.
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