4 ms·

Xoom.com was once a site where, in exchange for free web space (kind of like Geocities), you gave the company permission to spam you. "We Know You'll Love This

by apathy 10y ago

Xoom.com was once a site where, in exchange for free web space (kind of like Geocities), you gave the company permission to spam you. "We Know You'll Love This!" was pretty much our standard line, but we were profitable, in an age where such a thing was practically unheard of. So... We used to have "Porn Whackers"* at Xoom who would go through user sites that had been reported/complained about/whatever and decide whether the shady stuff that people put on their free pages was 1) kiddy porn (freeze the account, send directly to the FBI) 2) legal, but simply in bad taste (do nothing) 3) copyrighted software, PDFs, that sort of thing (delete) 4) copyrighted porn (initially delete, but see below) At some point it dawned on us that we were throwing away money by simply deleting the sites in category 4. I wrote a redirect and we cut a deal with Playboy to display ads for their website instead of a regular 404 page when a visitor landed on a nabbed-for-copyright-infringement freebie site. Needless to say, the pornwhackers were awesome to drink with. When you stare into the abyss for 8 hours a day, you develop some excellent coping mechanisms. Either that or you found something else to do. Plus there's that magical feeling of being one of the first humans ever to see a guy's tied-up nuts being stomped on by a crazy woman in high heels. We never did figure out whether that was a nasty domestic dispute or some sort of fetish thingy. Eventually Xoom got bought by GE, who had the bright idea (pause not) to make the spam emails "opt-in". Way to take a moneymaking idea and turn it into a turd, guys. Eventually they realized that they'd killed the goose that laid the sort-of-golden eggs and we all sought other employment. I miss SF from back then. My apartment in the Mission was $650/month and the 21 Club was still the best dive on Earth. The Excite guys were especially hysterical, they'd show up to the colocation facility so zonked on heroin that servers which were literally on fire gave them pause in terms of how to deal with the situation. Plus the amount of pretty girls around was obscene. Combined with all the free booze, it wasn't a half bad scene. Ah well, nothing good ever lasts. * Yes, the obvious thing occurred to us. Nobody cared. * * There may have been a 5th category, "legal and in good taste", but out of 17 million users and 20TB of sites, I never recalled seeing one that fit this description. There's a reason we talked about categorizing Porn & Warez.

mistersquid 10y ago
(Apologies, in advance, for so long a quotation.) Your comment that the "the pornwhackers were awesome to drink with. When you stare into the abyss for 8 hours a day, you develop some excellent coping mechanisms" reminded me of an amazing article published on The Verge and written by Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly. [0] (The article was featured here on HN 91 days ago.[1]) The article examines the psychological cost of content moderation and reading it helped me appreciate even more the difficult work content moderators perform to make the web a better place. (Hats off to dang, sctb and others whose user handles I don't know.) Anyway, here's a teaser from "The Secret Rules of the Internet" in case you missed it the first time it came around. > Mora-Blanco sat next to Misty Ewing-Davis, who, having been > on the job a few months, counted as an old hand. On the > table before them was a single piece of paper, folded in > half to show a bullet-point list of instructions: Remove > videos of animal abuse. Remove videos showing blood. Remove > visible nudity. Remove pornography. Mora-Blanco recalls her > teammates were a "mish-mash" of men and women; gay and > straight; slightly tipped toward white, but also Indian, > African-American, and Filipino. Most of them were friends, > friends of friends, or family. They talked and made jokes, > trying to make sense of the rules. "You have to find humor," > she remembers. "Otherwise it’s just painful." > > Videos arrived on their screens in a never-ending queue. > After watching a couple seconds apiece, SQUAD members > clicked one of four buttons that appeared in the upper right > hand corner of their screens: "Approve" — let the video > stand; "Racy" — mark video as 18-plus; "Reject" — remove > video without penalty; "Strike" — remove video with a > penalty to the account. Click, click, click. But that day > Mora-Blanco came across something that stopped her in her > tracks. > > "Oh, God," she said. > > Mora-Blanco won’t describe what she saw that morning. For > everyone’s sake, she says, she won’t conjure the > staggeringly violent images which, she recalls, involved a > toddler and a dimly lit hotel room. [0] http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11387934/internet-moderator-history-youtube-facebook-reddit-censorship-free-speech http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11387934/internet-moderato... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11500234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11500234 EDIT: formatting
- apathy 10y ago
  Wow, that's a terrific article. I don't think anyone at Xoom was in a position to make or break a revolution (maybe on Xoom International, but we'd delegated the whacking duties to the Italians on those sites, if memory serves). A lot of Xoomers moved on to Google later, and there it did start to become an issue, but all the pornwhackers had gone elsewhere (I took a detour but ended up at Google eventually anyways). It's crazy to me to think that YouTube was relearning many of the same things the pornwhackers had figured out ten years earlier. I guess there is an underbelly that Silicon Valley really, really doesn't want to talk about. When it mattered, though, YouTube did the right thing, even though it could have cost them the business. Little decisions like those can, in a small way, change the course of history. I don't think that sort of flashpoint ever happened at Xoom, because we didn't have any policies against bad taste. For all I know, Damien and his crew were gleefully promoting protest sites the whole time. If you ever have a chance to read Ted Rall's piece "A Cog In Satan's Bulldozer", do it. He touches on bits of it here and there in http://comiczine-fa.com/interviews/ted-rall http://comiczine-fa.com/interviews/ted-rall, but the real thing is mindbendingly great -- truly, almost all cynics are disillusioned idealists. When I worked for google from 2003-2004, it was as close as I've seen to a corporation with a pervasive conscience (people really did ask whether a purchasing decision was "evil"). It seems like even their ideals have slipped. I went back to school after a while. Now I design clinical trials for kids with cancer. It doesn't pay as much but at least when I die I won't say "gee, I sure sold a lot of ads!"
johan_larson 10y ago
The internet is for porn. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTJvdGcb7Fs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTJvdGcb7Fs I seem to recall that basically all lists of top search terms are filtered. Any raw list would be at least half dirty.
- apathy 10y ago
  Well, yeah. That's why a team of 6-8 people could patrol the sites for 8 hours a day and by morning, there would be plenty of new crap to start all over again. Remember, they were only bothering to whack copyright infringing porn, or at least that's all I remember there being time for. Otherwise it's just Rule 34 in action.
bcjordan 10y ago
Wow, finally someone who remembers Xoom! Here's perhaps a more innocent perspective on the service :)—back when I was 10 or 11 years old I wanted so much to make my own websites using HTML and CSS. Making sites on members.xoom.com and hanging out in the help desk (Java based) chat room trying to solve other people's website issues was how I first learned to make websites back in fifth grade. That room had a super friendly and helpful set of volunteers/staff. From the skills I learned in that chatroom I would wind up making sites for a fee (I think I charged $30, felt like a lot of money but wow must have been a steal for the business folks). Years later I've been working in SF, recognizing the locations you describe and envying the rent. A website on overfishing I hosted on xoom as a project for fifth grade science class got me an A, so there's one site that was legal and in (in my teacher's opinion) good taste! This all reminds me how important free things are to kids who want to learn things but can't spend any money (even $5 for a SquareSpace is prohibitively expensive).
- apathy 10y ago
  That's really cool to hear! The customer service people at Xoom were great ones, many of the more colorful characters I've ever met. Ed went off to start a security firm, Bryan moved to LA to star in gay porn, and I dated a crazy pink haired girl who ended up in SF by hopping trains all the way from North Carolina. It was a good group of people, by and large. As previously noted, many Xoom ops people eventually ended up at Google, and I like to think it was a net positive there, too. Of course we also made mushroom-and-peanut-butter sandwiches in the break room and piped the heat exchanger from the "machine room" into the rest of the building (an old bank building on Montgomery), but overall it was a good group.

by apathy 10y ago

mistersquid 10y ago

(Apologies, in advance, for so long a quotation.) Your comment that the "the pornwhackers were awesome to drink with. When you stare into the abyss for 8 hours a day, you develop some excellent coping mechanisms" reminded me of an amazing article published on The Verge and written by Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly. [0] (The article was featured here on HN 91 days ago.[1]) The article examines the psychological cost of content moderation and reading it helped me appreciate even more the difficult work content moderators perform to make the web a better place. (Hats off to dang, sctb and others whose user handles I don't know.) Anyway, here's a teaser from "The Secret Rules of the Internet" in case you missed it the first time it came around. > Mora-Blanco sat next to Misty Ewing-Davis, who, having been > on the job a few months, counted as an old hand. On the > table before them was a single piece of paper, folded in > half to show a bullet-point list of instructions: Remove > videos of animal abuse. Remove videos showing blood. Remove > visible nudity. Remove pornography. Mora-Blanco recalls her > teammates were a "mish-mash" of men and women; gay and > straight; slightly tipped toward white, but also Indian, > African-American, and Filipino. Most of them were friends, > friends of friends, or family. They talked and made jokes, > trying to make sense of the rules. "You have to find humor," > she remembers. "Otherwise it’s just painful." > > Videos arrived on their screens in a never-ending queue. > After watching a couple seconds apiece, SQUAD members > clicked one of four buttons that appeared in the upper right > hand corner of their screens: "Approve" — let the video > stand; "Racy" — mark video as 18-plus; "Reject" — remove > video without penalty; "Strike" — remove video with a > penalty to the account. Click, click, click. But that day > Mora-Blanco came across something that stopped her in her > tracks. > > "Oh, God," she said. > > Mora-Blanco won’t describe what she saw that morning. For > everyone’s sake, she says, she won’t conjure the > staggeringly violent images which, she recalls, involved a > toddler and a dimly lit hotel room. [0] http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11387934/internet-moderator-history-youtube-facebook-reddit-censorship-free-speech http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11387934/internet-moderato... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11500234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11500234 EDIT: formatting

apathy 10y ago
Wow, that's a terrific article. I don't think anyone at Xoom was in a position to make or break a revolution (maybe on Xoom International, but we'd delegated the whacking duties to the Italians on those sites, if memory serves). A lot of Xoomers moved on to Google later, and there it did start to become an issue, but all the pornwhackers had gone elsewhere (I took a detour but ended up at Google eventually anyways). It's crazy to me to think that YouTube was relearning many of the same things the pornwhackers had figured out ten years earlier. I guess there is an underbelly that Silicon Valley really, really doesn't want to talk about. When it mattered, though, YouTube did the right thing, even though it could have cost them the business. Little decisions like those can, in a small way, change the course of history. I don't think that sort of flashpoint ever happened at Xoom, because we didn't have any policies against bad taste. For all I know, Damien and his crew were gleefully promoting protest sites the whole time. If you ever have a chance to read Ted Rall's piece "A Cog In Satan's Bulldozer", do it. He touches on bits of it here and there in http://comiczine-fa.com/interviews/ted-rall http://comiczine-fa.com/interviews/ted-rall, but the real thing is mindbendingly great -- truly, almost all cynics are disillusioned idealists. When I worked for google from 2003-2004, it was as close as I've seen to a corporation with a pervasive conscience (people really did ask whether a purchasing decision was "evil"). It seems like even their ideals have slipped. I went back to school after a while. Now I design clinical trials for kids with cancer. It doesn't pay as much but at least when I die I won't say "gee, I sure sold a lot of ads!"

johan_larson 10y ago

The internet is for porn. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTJvdGcb7Fs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTJvdGcb7Fs I seem to recall that basically all lists of top search terms are filtered. Any raw list would be at least half dirty.

apathy 10y ago
Well, yeah. That's why a team of 6-8 people could patrol the sites for 8 hours a day and by morning, there would be plenty of new crap to start all over again. Remember, they were only bothering to whack copyright infringing porn, or at least that's all I remember there being time for. Otherwise it's just Rule 34 in action.

bcjordan 10y ago

Wow, finally someone who remembers Xoom! Here's perhaps a more innocent perspective on the service :)—back when I was 10 or 11 years old I wanted so much to make my own websites using HTML and CSS. Making sites on members.xoom.com and hanging out in the help desk (Java based) chat room trying to solve other people's website issues was how I first learned to make websites back in fifth grade. That room had a super friendly and helpful set of volunteers/staff. From the skills I learned in that chatroom I would wind up making sites for a fee (I think I charged $30, felt like a lot of money but wow must have been a steal for the business folks). Years later I've been working in SF, recognizing the locations you describe and envying the rent. A website on overfishing I hosted on xoom as a project for fifth grade science class got me an A, so there's one site that was legal and in (in my teacher's opinion) good taste! This all reminds me how important free things are to kids who want to learn things but can't spend any money (even $5 for a SquareSpace is prohibitively expensive).

apathy 10y ago
That's really cool to hear! The customer service people at Xoom were great ones, many of the more colorful characters I've ever met. Ed went off to start a security firm, Bryan moved to LA to star in gay porn, and I dated a crazy pink haired girl who ended up in SF by hopping trains all the way from North Carolina. It was a good group of people, by and large. As previously noted, many Xoom ops people eventually ended up at Google, and I like to think it was a net positive there, too. Of course we also made mushroom-and-peanut-butter sandwiches in the break room and piped the heat exchanger from the "machine room" into the rest of the building (an old bank building on Montgomery), but overall it was a good group.