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Programming in the Adult Entertainment Industry Is Broken

287 points by gf-nl 8y ago

latchkey 8y ago
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... 'Educational video company'.
- robinduckett 8y ago
  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-kink-armory-closing-san-francisco 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!)
  - latchkey 8y ago
    To be clear, I was never ashamed of working for kink. My ex-wife was worried about her conservative parents. I was ok with respecting that. I wasn't really into it that much either to be honest. It was fun and novel and I got to learn a lot, but I'm like you, to each their own. =)
  - uRreading2slow 8y ago
    I generally agree, but in this day and age, there is also real horrid, vile stuff... just follow banner ads on random free porn sites and you'll find a lot that is more an excessive dehumanization arms race than anything to do with sex. 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.
    - krapp 8y ago
      There is plenty of exploitation and abuse (including sexual abuse) in mainstream media as well... but because there isn't a public stigma attached to that, it's possible for public and political pressures to be arrayed against it. But since we're all supposed to be ashamed of porn and sex outside of marriage in the west, the worst of those industries are just considered par for the course and left to fester.
      - uRreading2slow 8y ago
        > we're all supposed to be ashamed of porn and sex outside of marriage in the west So basically, you're not aware of any of the stuff I'm referring to, and reroute it to what you do know. It isn't the weakest possible interpretation of what I wrote, it's completely out of bounds -- there is no way you honestly think I'm referring to extramarital sex with "horrible, vile stuff" and "excessive dehumanization". And it's pointless and a bit unfair, because I can't show you anything, and even to just describe it in detail would ruin my day. I don't feel anything I'm "supposed to" either -- including this idea that if someone is into X, and it's legal, you can't say bad things about it, but they can say good things about it all day long. Because "it's a thing", and once it's a thing, it's just there in the world as an item to pick off the shelf and consume, and the cardinal sin is to have any opinions on the choices of other consumers. All that matters is that someone wants something, and that it's legal. People are into things because they are into them, end of discussion, and in many cases also end of reflection. That's like one "camp", and anyone who has anything to say about that other than "awesome" has be be conservative, religious, whatever. It's like many conflicts, try to talk sense to hawks on either side and they cannot imagine you as anything but a "supporter of the other side". If you can imagine shame and horror only as response to social conditioning, religious upbringing, and so on, you by necessity cannot understand where I'm coming from. If I had the choice to give an earful to anyone who consumes or makes movies and games and music, as someone who gamed a lot, loves music (but to be honest kinda stopped watching a lot of movies) or to anyone who makes or consumes porn, porn doesn't even enter consideration. But the subject at hand was porn, and while I don't think the person I responded to meant it that way, taken literally they said that any adult site, i.e. all of them, is nothing to be ashamed of. That is the only reason I responded, that's too broad for me to agree.
  - kkop 8y ago
    I wouldn't necessarily hold it against anyone working in porn so much as working in the porn industry. The porn industry is violently against even basic things like condom use (and the list continues). Such resistance tends to mean justifying things with excuses. Since compromising would be to admit to responsibility. So why should I trust that someone working in such an environment isn't going to treat private data, important infrastructure or financial software the same? Random programmers from overall mediocre environments are quite easy to find whether it is porn or something else. Edit: It is always funny how when you claim that people are biased and don't have arguments on Hacker News, they downvote you. People really can't get out of their heads. My point still stands. Good programmers doesn't have to go into controversial industries. They don't need excuses to justify how things "actually really are". The article says that the porn industry is "leading" in technology. That is bullshit. They might be leading in commercialization of certain technologies for a brief second, but that is all. How many programming languages did they invent? Zero. Don't go into mediocre industry where people accept problems as a feature. All the people around will be there because they don't care about certain things and so won't you. You might not like it, that is up to you, but don't come complaining when you can't find a job after 40 because you haven't developed the skills companies are looking for at that age. Like identifying, solving and taking responsibility for larger problems.
    - FlipperBucket 8y ago
      > The porn industry is violently against even basic things like condom use THAT is a matter of profitability, whatever else you may think. SMH I have to wonder what's wrong with people who think there's some other motives.
      - kkop 8y ago
        That is certainly part of it, but it is also about capability. They don't know how to make it work, maybe especially not in their own heads. The same is true for developers. Seniority is largely measured in how good you are at delivering what is fundamentally correct without compromising. While lesser programmers will convince themselves that it is unnecessary or that their own solution is good enough.
- jgh 8y ago
  Ah now everyone who works for Lynda.com are going to be suspicious!
gonzo41 8y ago
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.
- krapp 8y ago
  >You'd think porn companies would charge with sensible names? If they're doing legal business, why should they?
  - teekert 8y ago
    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.
    - lagadu 8y ago
      > I can understand that companies prefer not to be associated with a world that seemingly contains a lot of misery. They're already in the pharma and health business.
      - teekert 8y ago
        I understand the down voting and I also understand your response. But wouldn't it be nice if there were fair-trade porn sites? Where we know people are treated an paid well? It's insane that there is so much for free while there is so much work involved.
        lagadu 8y ago
pjc50 8y ago
The big "legit" payment provider is cc-bill. The "tube" sites are more exploitative than the rest of the industry in that they don't actually pay the performers, they're simply piracy, and because small independent producers don't have the political leverage to impose an equivalent of content-ID on them they stay that way.
- stef25 8y ago
  The tube sites have (official?) channels for all the big porn studios + they have this "verified amateur" feature as well. That's not all piracy afaik.
  - ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
    The problem is its just like Youtube though right? You build a gigantic audience on pirated content, then once you are many people's go-to destination for porn, you can allow the big companies to have official partnerships. They are kind of stuck with that partnership because of the size of the Tube sites audience, which they built illegally. They also CONTINUE to post pirated content everyday, which sustains that audience and prevents those companies from just making their own TUBE site. But because the pirated content posted today will be from users, and the TUBE site will eventually take it down, the TUBE company is not a bad actor in this situation. At the end of the day, I can still watch the newest Netflix Standup special I've been waiting for, for free on Youtube. And I'll still catch the new Adult Avenger's Parody on another TUBE site for free, without the consent of the companies that paid to create those films.
- sincerely 8y ago
  arent the tube sites owned by the same people that own the content production studios?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- neoform 8y ago
  As someone who works for a large tube site, you're entirely wrong. We pay a lot of money to people who upload content.
saurik 8y ago
> Speaking of fees... Stripe charges 2.9% + .30 cents per transaction. Some of the billers in the porn industry charge up to 30% per transaction. Yup, 30% (not cents; percent) PER CHARGE. So if we charge someone $1.00 for a 1 day trial, the biller gets 30 cents off the top. 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.
- lowercased 8y ago
  The paypal route made you choose which type of processing the account would be. "microtransaction" account was indeed the 5% plus 5c, and the 'regular' was the 2.9%. One account didn't process both ways. Would be nicer if paypal just ... adjusted your charges. I used paypal in a situation where some charges would be ~$5, and some would be $50+. The 5% rate applied to a $60 charge was comparatively crazy. I ended up creating 2 paypal accounts, and routed $5 charges to the 'micropayment' account, and others to the regular once. It was against paypal terms of service, technically, but... was also annoying. I was doing enough transactions that the 2% spread was... well... I wasn't raking in millions, but the 2-3k I did some months meant a difference of $50/month or so.
akanet 8y ago
This article is extremely alarming. The process the author is calling "cascade billing" is money laundering. This exact process of disguising the nature of transactions to get banking institutions to transfer funds is literally what the feds took down Backpage for recently. I am very familiar with the details of that case and am surprised to see someone be so cavalier with the details publicly. 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 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.
- caruana 8y ago
  They are selling content through different payment services, this is not money laundering, stop being an alarmist. "the concealment of the origins of illegally obtained money, typically by means of transfers involving foreign banks or legitimate businesses" Illegally obtained money being they key term! > literally what the feds took down Backpage for recently. Also, incorrect. Backpage was taken down because they facilitated human trafficking https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/501214002 https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/501214002
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    I wouldn't say that money needs to be "illegally obtained" to be classified as laundered. There are tax benefits to "laundering" legally obtained money, for example. Although at this point we're just arguing semantics.
    - koboll 8y ago
vesak 8y ago
Something like Stellar should have a great market here, and in the legal cannabis market as well (check out the first commenter on OP's link). Every new innovation in the websphere starts from porn, so why not cryptocurrencies as well. https://www.stellar.org/ https://www.stellar.org/
LarryL 8y ago
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 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 :-(((
- chopin 8y ago
  You're looking for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paysafecard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paysafecard. It's pretty common here in Europe.
- dangom 8y ago
  That's really a nice idea. 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.
PunchTornado 8y ago
I don't understand why these companies don't have normal names and then nobody will suspect anything. Like the video chat company that I worked for was called Telecom. Their website said nothing about this, all general words about what a good company they are with happy employees and nothing specific. Put it on my CV with no issues. Then they have an affiliate website where everything was happening. All charges were direct through this Telecom company. If someone asked about the billing they probably answered something about a phone, extra charges etc.
Rjevski 8y ago
Seems like cryptocurrencies would be the way to go for this.
- lawn 8y ago
  It's a perfect fit for a peer-to-peer electronic cash system (title of Bitcoin's whitepaper) yes. This is the problem with permissioned transactions which cryptocurrencies remove. The only thing missing is adoption. With the fees and issues I don't understand why the porn business isn't pushing harder for cryptocurrency use on their sites. There's huge amount of money to be saved here.
  - mratzloff 8y ago
    It's almost like being paid a salary in an unregulated Internet Buck that landlords and grocery stores won't accept would make things difficult for people. ;-)
    - shabda 8y ago
      That argument might have been valid in 2015. Today converting BTC to USD is nearly automated if you so want.
      - Retric 8y ago
        Bitcoin is not viable due to it’s high transaction fees and low transaction rate. Some random Alt coin might work, but getting PornCoin adopted is difficult.
        swift532 8y ago
        You don't have to have PornCoin, they can use an exchange like Binance which has a lot of different currencies supported, and the customer could pay in any one of these. Or they could use Request Network if that pans out. And lastly, Bitcoin fees currently aren't large and you can get a confirmation with a few cents fee. That might stop being so if it becomes too popular again, but if off chain solutions like Lightning Network pan out, then that'd be sorted out.
philip1209 8y ago
Some questions: - Would ACH solve an issue like this? There are some clean interfaces (e.g. Plaid), and chargebacks are not trivial. - Would 3-D secure solve the chargeback problem? As I understand it, it shifts liability to the consumer, not the business. - Is blockchain being adopted anywhere for micropayments like this?
- lawn 8y ago
  > Is blockchain being adopted anywhere for micropayments like this? These aren't really micropayments, just regular small payments. Cheap cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin Cash work well for these amounts. As a bonus you can stay private enough from your spouse and the chargeback issue basically goes away from the business side.
- kennydude 8y ago
  > Would ACH solve an issue like this? Still doesn't solve the problem of people with shared accounts and then one half pays for porn without telling the other. It happens so often UK banks have ways of looking up subscriptions. People would reverse the transaction, still enjoy porn and the company goes out of business. > Would 3-D secure solve the chargeback problem? As far as I know, that's a European only thing? It shifts it to the consumer, but people get very angry on the phone to the bank causing a higher chargeback rate.
  - mrweasel 8y ago
    One of the points of 3D Secure is that it shifts the responsibility from the sells to the card company or bank, not necessarily the customer. So I don't believe the bank has much incentive to do a chargeback, as they will be the ones covering it. Also I don't believe chargeback on a 3D Secured transaction doesn't count as a strike towards the seller, not to sure about that one though. It would seem reasonable not to count it, seeing as the seller was in good faith, and the card company claims to have verified the buyer... but the rules of online credit card payment are anything but fair.
  - joecot 8y ago
    3-D Secure is not a european only thing. If someone successfully signs up with 3-D Secure, the onus is on the issuing card's bank, not the merchant, so that would be ideal. The problem we ran into was that since the 3-D Secure verification (which is a page you redirect the surfer to, or an iframe or similar) is handled by the credit card issuing bank, each page is different, and since no one actually uses 3-D Secure, when we tried to implement it, it mostly didn't work. Reducing chargebacks is great, but if you lose 30% of your sales by redirecting them to broken pages, it defeats the purpose.
marikio 8y ago
There are a few companies/orgs trying to solve these issues: https://spankchain.com/ https://spankchain.com/ https://www.iliac.io/ https://www.iliac.io/ But porn doesn't have high margins. No one (except the large distributors like Mindgeek - Pornhub, Redtube, YouPorn) is making much money. Especially these small sites that are being built. After you subtract legal, production, performer fees you're left with almost nothing. I worked in the Adult Industry for several years, but building tech for the industry wasn't financially stable for me so I had to leave. Still really passionate about the sex worker community though. Porn performers/activists are the kindest, sweetest, most intelligent group of folks I've ever worked with. Maybe we can start a small group of engineers who want to discuss working through some solutions together. My email is hello@marik.io if anyone is interested.
- rbinv 8y ago
  iliac seems to be your very own venture. A disclaimer would have been nice. In what form exactly hasn't the industry been "financially stable" for you and why? As a contractor? As an employee?
- philtar 8y ago
  > Porn performers/activists are the kindest, sweetest, most intelligent group of folks I've ever worked with. I'm finding it difficult to believe this given that it's known that pornography is known to be an industry riddled with violence, hard drugs, human trafficking and so on and so forth. Edit: As soon as I posted this I see the other commenter outed you as having an inherent benefit from tricking people into believing pornography is a reputable industry.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    They metioned "Porn performers/activists", while the violence and everything else will be from the producers/"pimps" involved.
  - ta230493 8y ago
    From my limited experience talking to people working in this space, the violence / human trafficking portion is not really a problem in the adult entertainment space. At least, many models definitely work voluntarily. I think trafficking is more of a potential issue at the shady ends of prostitution. The downside of the adult entertainment industry is that you did hear of tales of questionable employers... it's less "violence" and more environments and/or tactics that sometimes seemed shady or unethical. There was also tales of drugs, sure. Also the pay is often relatively lousy. IMHO your best bet to avoid shady places is to support models / producers / etc. at an individual level, which is more possible these days thanks to the Internet. (To be honest the industry it reminded me of the most is the music industry. Which has similar bits of shady employers / work environments here and there, similar drug issues, similar lousy pay, and a similar scenario where the best way to avoid the shady parts is directly supporting the non-shady artists and venues as much as possible.)
oliwarner 8y ago
We're what's broken. Our prudish approach to adult entertainment. "Joe" would have a happier life if he and his wife were open about how much money they were each spending on porn. They might learn something about each other. Hiding it in layers of shell billing companies isn't just ridiculous at the technical level described here, it's unhealthy. Also needs to be noted that —as others have said— card processing companies need to get the hell out of the way and just deal with money at a fair risk level. Adult entertainment is higher risk than a card-present or delivered transaction, but absolutely no worse than your Netflix subscription. Considerably less risky than the in-app junk that Adyen happily underwrites ("My toddler bought this without my permission, waaa").
- moneylaundering 8y ago
  Your assertion regarding adult CNP risk is incorrect, they do in fact have much higher levels of fraud and chargebacks. The card networks came down on this category because of chargebacks, not because porn is bad. I would also point out Adult CNP is far from the only category to get this treatment, but they are one of the only high risk categories that have four major banks more than happy to take their business. Travel sites, dating sites, and other high risk CNP merchants don’t have the same benefit. The techniques described in this article are exactly why issuers block transactions. Merchants are trying to force transactions that are likely to be charged back by engaging in increasingly elaborate, and likely illegal, schemes. If you’re operating a legitimate adult CNP site, there are plenty of options available to you and the adult-focused processors will hold your hand through rejecting sketchy charges even if it means lower up front revenues. I have seen bad actors open up fake porn sites to obtain processing for their illegal activities because adult processing for legitimate sites is that available. Edit:typos
  - turnitoff 8y ago
    Exactly this. Adult and high risk in general are an absolute quagmire, and all actors are trying to "outcompete" with one another, making the situation worse and worse. Risk from transactions: stolen credit cards get default checked on adult sites (digital good delivery instantly verifies if the card is still useable). Bad faith merchants. This goes from outright scams to the still widely used practice of "card banging", when they tack on added services or hit you with a huge fee after your free trial ends (which is not presented to the customer). Affiliates screwing sites, sites screwing affiliates. Billing support building more and more barriers for customers to get a hold of them or to cancel subscriptions. And then let's not even get into the industry's backbone, content producers...
karmakaze 8y ago
I wasn't sure about the heading and was hoping this was about general content for adults being broken. I dont think I'm getting smarter faster but the content is going down fast. That's what's great here expect one thing, learn another.
asimpletune 8y ago
Do developers make more or less working in adult entertainment?
- xutopia 8y ago
  In Montreal I see a lot of junior developers making quite a bit more money than they would in other companies. I don't know any senior developers in the field though.
  - 00117 8y ago
    Yes, we have a low senior count and are always on the lookout for more.
  - mgleaker 8y ago
    Montreal unique. MindGeek here for cheap worker. Why pay american so much higher money and stock when canadien work for 100000 US dollar less and no stock. Government also pay back much amount of salary. Price for company finally maybe 40000 US dollar for each year for developer. They do have senior but many more junior.
segmondy 8y ago
As someone in the payment industry, find a processor/payfac that specializes in this. They handle all that complexity, they will have multiple processors/banks in the backend to find out who will accept the card. Your frustration is due to lack of who to use, all the pros use such processors. It's pretty much transparent, they also have massive fraud systems, and since they process for tons of sites, if they notice a card doing fraud/multiple chargebacks across different sites, they put a stop to it quickly.
Miltnoid 8y ago
Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20180809104802/https://dev.to/jwoertink/programming-in-the-adult-entertainment-industry-is-broken-hgn https://web.archive.org/web/20180809104802/https://dev.to/jw...
- rever 8y ago
  We have to go deeper: https://archive.is/mP6Ky https://archive.is/mP6Ky
- bhelkey 8y ago
  Thanks! I arrived late to the party.
crtasm 8y ago
Post has been deleted. > To those of you spreading the "you're admitting to fraud" comments, you're the reason we can't have nice things. I fail to see how this forced you to remove the post.
- smsm42 8y ago
  Maybe because the author expected sincere discussion of the problems they are facing, and got a storm of crap dumped on their head by people who spent all of 2 minutes on the issue but already know everything about it and are very judgmental about it. There is no shortage of those on the internet, and dealing with them is very annoying. Not everybody can tolerate such environment.
bsder 8y ago
This is such a shame because the porn industry used to be at the forefront of technological innovation. Quite often, the AVN Expo had better actual technical content than CES (which was held at the same time). The porn industry was the first to adopt videodiscs, VHS, DVD, handheld cameras, the web, online payments, etc. Basically, if any new technology was useful for porn, it was going to catch on.
- istorical 8y ago
  If you look at VR film making, they are still at the forefront. Camera rigs evolving at lightspeed.
cartercole 8y ago
It looks liek this entire article has been deleted after he changed the post content
AngeloAnolin 8y ago
Update: I found an archived link [2] as I scrolled further below. I may have missed the boat as this is what can be seen on the original post: "I've deleted the post because some of you are [insert expletive]. The client I do work for is not doing anything illegal. There's no money laundering going on. It's a more legit business than some big-chain stores I shop at." Anybody care to provide a gist of what was originally posted? Tried cached version [1] but contents are still the same. [1 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qqZZR3ggRv0J:https://dev.to/jwoertink/programming-in-the-adult-entertainment-industry-is-broken-hgn+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qqZZR3... [2] https://archive.is/mP6Ky https://archive.is/mP6Ky
norswap 8y ago
Since the article has been censored/retracted now, here's the wayback link: https://web.archive.org/web/20180809104802/https://dev.to/jwoertink/programming-in-the-adult-entertainment-industry-is-broken-hgn https://web.archive.org/web/20180809104802/https://dev.to/jw...

287 points by gf-nl 8y ago

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... 'Educational video company'.

robinduckett 8y ago
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-kink-armory-closing-san-francisco 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!)
- latchkey 8y ago
  To be clear, I was never ashamed of working for kink. My ex-wife was worried about her conservative parents. I was ok with respecting that. I wasn't really into it that much either to be honest. It was fun and novel and I got to learn a lot, but I'm like you, to each their own. =)
- uRreading2slow 8y ago
  I generally agree, but in this day and age, there is also real horrid, vile stuff... just follow banner ads on random free porn sites and you'll find a lot that is more an excessive dehumanization arms race than anything to do with sex. 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.
  - krapp 8y ago
    There is plenty of exploitation and abuse (including sexual abuse) in mainstream media as well... but because there isn't a public stigma attached to that, it's possible for public and political pressures to be arrayed against it. But since we're all supposed to be ashamed of porn and sex outside of marriage in the west, the worst of those industries are just considered par for the course and left to fester.
    - uRreading2slow 8y ago
      > we're all supposed to be ashamed of porn and sex outside of marriage in the west So basically, you're not aware of any of the stuff I'm referring to, and reroute it to what you do know. It isn't the weakest possible interpretation of what I wrote, it's completely out of bounds -- there is no way you honestly think I'm referring to extramarital sex with "horrible, vile stuff" and "excessive dehumanization". And it's pointless and a bit unfair, because I can't show you anything, and even to just describe it in detail would ruin my day. I don't feel anything I'm "supposed to" either -- including this idea that if someone is into X, and it's legal, you can't say bad things about it, but they can say good things about it all day long. Because "it's a thing", and once it's a thing, it's just there in the world as an item to pick off the shelf and consume, and the cardinal sin is to have any opinions on the choices of other consumers. All that matters is that someone wants something, and that it's legal. People are into things because they are into them, end of discussion, and in many cases also end of reflection. That's like one "camp", and anyone who has anything to say about that other than "awesome" has be be conservative, religious, whatever. It's like many conflicts, try to talk sense to hawks on either side and they cannot imagine you as anything but a "supporter of the other side". If you can imagine shame and horror only as response to social conditioning, religious upbringing, and so on, you by necessity cannot understand where I'm coming from. If I had the choice to give an earful to anyone who consumes or makes movies and games and music, as someone who gamed a lot, loves music (but to be honest kinda stopped watching a lot of movies) or to anyone who makes or consumes porn, porn doesn't even enter consideration. But the subject at hand was porn, and while I don't think the person I responded to meant it that way, taken literally they said that any adult site, i.e. all of them, is nothing to be ashamed of. That is the only reason I responded, that's too broad for me to agree.
- kkop 8y ago
  I wouldn't necessarily hold it against anyone working in porn so much as working in the porn industry. The porn industry is violently against even basic things like condom use (and the list continues). Such resistance tends to mean justifying things with excuses. Since compromising would be to admit to responsibility. So why should I trust that someone working in such an environment isn't going to treat private data, important infrastructure or financial software the same? Random programmers from overall mediocre environments are quite easy to find whether it is porn or something else. Edit: It is always funny how when you claim that people are biased and don't have arguments on Hacker News, they downvote you. People really can't get out of their heads. My point still stands. Good programmers doesn't have to go into controversial industries. They don't need excuses to justify how things "actually really are". The article says that the porn industry is "leading" in technology. That is bullshit. They might be leading in commercialization of certain technologies for a brief second, but that is all. How many programming languages did they invent? Zero. Don't go into mediocre industry where people accept problems as a feature. All the people around will be there because they don't care about certain things and so won't you. You might not like it, that is up to you, but don't come complaining when you can't find a job after 40 because you haven't developed the skills companies are looking for at that age. Like identifying, solving and taking responsibility for larger problems.
  - FlipperBucket 8y ago
    > The porn industry is violently against even basic things like condom use THAT is a matter of profitability, whatever else you may think. SMH I have to wonder what's wrong with people who think there's some other motives.
    - kkop 8y ago
      That is certainly part of it, but it is also about capability. They don't know how to make it work, maybe especially not in their own heads. The same is true for developers. Seniority is largely measured in how good you are at delivering what is fundamentally correct without compromising. While lesser programmers will convince themselves that it is unnecessary or that their own solution is good enough.
jgh 8y ago
Ah now everyone who works for Lynda.com are going to be suspicious!

gonzo41 8y ago

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.

krapp 8y ago
>You'd think porn companies would charge with sensible names? If they're doing legal business, why should they?
- teekert 8y ago
  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.
  - lagadu 8y ago
    > I can understand that companies prefer not to be associated with a world that seemingly contains a lot of misery. They're already in the pharma and health business.
    - teekert 8y ago
      I understand the down voting and I also understand your response. But wouldn't it be nice if there were fair-trade porn sites? Where we know people are treated an paid well? It's insane that there is so much for free while there is so much work involved.
      - lagadu 8y ago

pjc50 8y ago

The big "legit" payment provider is cc-bill. The "tube" sites are more exploitative than the rest of the industry in that they don't actually pay the performers, they're simply piracy, and because small independent producers don't have the political leverage to impose an equivalent of content-ID on them they stay that way.

stef25 8y ago
The tube sites have (official?) channels for all the big porn studios + they have this "verified amateur" feature as well. That's not all piracy afaik.
- ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
  The problem is its just like Youtube though right? You build a gigantic audience on pirated content, then once you are many people's go-to destination for porn, you can allow the big companies to have official partnerships. They are kind of stuck with that partnership because of the size of the Tube sites audience, which they built illegally. They also CONTINUE to post pirated content everyday, which sustains that audience and prevents those companies from just making their own TUBE site. But because the pirated content posted today will be from users, and the TUBE site will eventually take it down, the TUBE company is not a bad actor in this situation. At the end of the day, I can still watch the newest Netflix Standup special I've been waiting for, for free on Youtube. And I'll still catch the new Adult Avenger's Parody on another TUBE site for free, without the consent of the companies that paid to create those films.
sincerely 8y ago
arent the tube sites owned by the same people that own the content production studios?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
neoform 8y ago
As someone who works for a large tube site, you're entirely wrong. We pay a lot of money to people who upload content.

saurik 8y ago

> Speaking of fees... Stripe charges 2.9% + .30 cents per transaction. Some of the billers in the porn industry charge up to 30% per transaction. Yup, 30% (not cents; percent) PER CHARGE. So if we charge someone $1.00 for a 1 day trial, the biller gets 30 cents off the top. 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.

lowercased 8y ago
The paypal route made you choose which type of processing the account would be. "microtransaction" account was indeed the 5% plus 5c, and the 'regular' was the 2.9%. One account didn't process both ways. Would be nicer if paypal just ... adjusted your charges. I used paypal in a situation where some charges would be ~$5, and some would be $50+. The 5% rate applied to a $60 charge was comparatively crazy. I ended up creating 2 paypal accounts, and routed $5 charges to the 'micropayment' account, and others to the regular once. It was against paypal terms of service, technically, but... was also annoying. I was doing enough transactions that the 2% spread was... well... I wasn't raking in millions, but the 2-3k I did some months meant a difference of $50/month or so.

akanet 8y ago

This article is extremely alarming. The process the author is calling "cascade billing" is money laundering. This exact process of disguising the nature of transactions to get banking institutions to transfer funds is literally what the feds took down Backpage for recently. I am very familiar with the details of that case and am surprised to see someone be so cavalier with the details publicly. 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 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.

caruana 8y ago
They are selling content through different payment services, this is not money laundering, stop being an alarmist. "the concealment of the origins of illegally obtained money, typically by means of transfers involving foreign banks or legitimate businesses" Illegally obtained money being they key term! > literally what the feds took down Backpage for recently. Also, incorrect. Backpage was taken down because they facilitated human trafficking https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/501214002 https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/501214002
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  I wouldn't say that money needs to be "illegally obtained" to be classified as laundered. There are tax benefits to "laundering" legally obtained money, for example. Although at this point we're just arguing semantics.
  - koboll 8y ago

vesak 8y ago

Something like Stellar should have a great market here, and in the legal cannabis market as well (check out the first commenter on OP's link). Every new innovation in the websphere starts from porn, so why not cryptocurrencies as well. https://www.stellar.org/ https://www.stellar.org/

LarryL 8y ago

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 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 :-(((

chopin 8y ago
You're looking for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paysafecard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paysafecard. It's pretty common here in Europe.
dangom 8y ago
That's really a nice idea. 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.

PunchTornado 8y ago

I don't understand why these companies don't have normal names and then nobody will suspect anything. Like the video chat company that I worked for was called Telecom. Their website said nothing about this, all general words about what a good company they are with happy employees and nothing specific. Put it on my CV with no issues. Then they have an affiliate website where everything was happening. All charges were direct through this Telecom company. If someone asked about the billing they probably answered something about a phone, extra charges etc.

Rjevski 8y ago

Seems like cryptocurrencies would be the way to go for this.

lawn 8y ago
It's a perfect fit for a peer-to-peer electronic cash system (title of Bitcoin's whitepaper) yes. This is the problem with permissioned transactions which cryptocurrencies remove. The only thing missing is adoption. With the fees and issues I don't understand why the porn business isn't pushing harder for cryptocurrency use on their sites. There's huge amount of money to be saved here.
- mratzloff 8y ago
  It's almost like being paid a salary in an unregulated Internet Buck that landlords and grocery stores won't accept would make things difficult for people. ;-)
  - shabda 8y ago
    That argument might have been valid in 2015. Today converting BTC to USD is nearly automated if you so want.
    - Retric 8y ago
      Bitcoin is not viable due to it’s high transaction fees and low transaction rate. Some random Alt coin might work, but getting PornCoin adopted is difficult.
      - swift532 8y ago
        You don't have to have PornCoin, they can use an exchange like Binance which has a lot of different currencies supported, and the customer could pay in any one of these. Or they could use Request Network if that pans out. And lastly, Bitcoin fees currently aren't large and you can get a confirmation with a few cents fee. That might stop being so if it becomes too popular again, but if off chain solutions like Lightning Network pan out, then that'd be sorted out.

philip1209 8y ago

Some questions: - Would ACH solve an issue like this? There are some clean interfaces (e.g. Plaid), and chargebacks are not trivial. - Would 3-D secure solve the chargeback problem? As I understand it, it shifts liability to the consumer, not the business. - Is blockchain being adopted anywhere for micropayments like this?

lawn 8y ago
> Is blockchain being adopted anywhere for micropayments like this? These aren't really micropayments, just regular small payments. Cheap cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin Cash work well for these amounts. As a bonus you can stay private enough from your spouse and the chargeback issue basically goes away from the business side.
kennydude 8y ago
> Would ACH solve an issue like this? Still doesn't solve the problem of people with shared accounts and then one half pays for porn without telling the other. It happens so often UK banks have ways of looking up subscriptions. People would reverse the transaction, still enjoy porn and the company goes out of business. > Would 3-D secure solve the chargeback problem? As far as I know, that's a European only thing? It shifts it to the consumer, but people get very angry on the phone to the bank causing a higher chargeback rate.
- mrweasel 8y ago
  One of the points of 3D Secure is that it shifts the responsibility from the sells to the card company or bank, not necessarily the customer. So I don't believe the bank has much incentive to do a chargeback, as they will be the ones covering it. Also I don't believe chargeback on a 3D Secured transaction doesn't count as a strike towards the seller, not to sure about that one though. It would seem reasonable not to count it, seeing as the seller was in good faith, and the card company claims to have verified the buyer... but the rules of online credit card payment are anything but fair.
- joecot 8y ago
  3-D Secure is not a european only thing. If someone successfully signs up with 3-D Secure, the onus is on the issuing card's bank, not the merchant, so that would be ideal. The problem we ran into was that since the 3-D Secure verification (which is a page you redirect the surfer to, or an iframe or similar) is handled by the credit card issuing bank, each page is different, and since no one actually uses 3-D Secure, when we tried to implement it, it mostly didn't work. Reducing chargebacks is great, but if you lose 30% of your sales by redirecting them to broken pages, it defeats the purpose.

marikio 8y ago

There are a few companies/orgs trying to solve these issues: https://spankchain.com/ https://spankchain.com/ https://www.iliac.io/ https://www.iliac.io/ But porn doesn't have high margins. No one (except the large distributors like Mindgeek - Pornhub, Redtube, YouPorn) is making much money. Especially these small sites that are being built. After you subtract legal, production, performer fees you're left with almost nothing. I worked in the Adult Industry for several years, but building tech for the industry wasn't financially stable for me so I had to leave. Still really passionate about the sex worker community though. Porn performers/activists are the kindest, sweetest, most intelligent group of folks I've ever worked with. Maybe we can start a small group of engineers who want to discuss working through some solutions together. My email is hello@marik.io if anyone is interested.

rbinv 8y ago
iliac seems to be your very own venture. A disclaimer would have been nice. In what form exactly hasn't the industry been "financially stable" for you and why? As a contractor? As an employee?
philtar 8y ago
> Porn performers/activists are the kindest, sweetest, most intelligent group of folks I've ever worked with. I'm finding it difficult to believe this given that it's known that pornography is known to be an industry riddled with violence, hard drugs, human trafficking and so on and so forth. Edit: As soon as I posted this I see the other commenter outed you as having an inherent benefit from tricking people into believing pornography is a reputable industry.
- pjc50 8y ago
  They metioned "Porn performers/activists", while the violence and everything else will be from the producers/"pimps" involved.
- ta230493 8y ago
  From my limited experience talking to people working in this space, the violence / human trafficking portion is not really a problem in the adult entertainment space. At least, many models definitely work voluntarily. I think trafficking is more of a potential issue at the shady ends of prostitution. The downside of the adult entertainment industry is that you did hear of tales of questionable employers... it's less "violence" and more environments and/or tactics that sometimes seemed shady or unethical. There was also tales of drugs, sure. Also the pay is often relatively lousy. IMHO your best bet to avoid shady places is to support models / producers / etc. at an individual level, which is more possible these days thanks to the Internet. (To be honest the industry it reminded me of the most is the music industry. Which has similar bits of shady employers / work environments here and there, similar drug issues, similar lousy pay, and a similar scenario where the best way to avoid the shady parts is directly supporting the non-shady artists and venues as much as possible.)

oliwarner 8y ago

We're what's broken. Our prudish approach to adult entertainment. "Joe" would have a happier life if he and his wife were open about how much money they were each spending on porn. They might learn something about each other. Hiding it in layers of shell billing companies isn't just ridiculous at the technical level described here, it's unhealthy. Also needs to be noted that —as others have said— card processing companies need to get the hell out of the way and just deal with money at a fair risk level. Adult entertainment is higher risk than a card-present or delivered transaction, but absolutely no worse than your Netflix subscription. Considerably less risky than the in-app junk that Adyen happily underwrites ("My toddler bought this without my permission, waaa").

moneylaundering 8y ago
Your assertion regarding adult CNP risk is incorrect, they do in fact have much higher levels of fraud and chargebacks. The card networks came down on this category because of chargebacks, not because porn is bad. I would also point out Adult CNP is far from the only category to get this treatment, but they are one of the only high risk categories that have four major banks more than happy to take their business. Travel sites, dating sites, and other high risk CNP merchants don’t have the same benefit. The techniques described in this article are exactly why issuers block transactions. Merchants are trying to force transactions that are likely to be charged back by engaging in increasingly elaborate, and likely illegal, schemes. If you’re operating a legitimate adult CNP site, there are plenty of options available to you and the adult-focused processors will hold your hand through rejecting sketchy charges even if it means lower up front revenues. I have seen bad actors open up fake porn sites to obtain processing for their illegal activities because adult processing for legitimate sites is that available. Edit:typos
- turnitoff 8y ago
  Exactly this. Adult and high risk in general are an absolute quagmire, and all actors are trying to "outcompete" with one another, making the situation worse and worse. Risk from transactions: stolen credit cards get default checked on adult sites (digital good delivery instantly verifies if the card is still useable). Bad faith merchants. This goes from outright scams to the still widely used practice of "card banging", when they tack on added services or hit you with a huge fee after your free trial ends (which is not presented to the customer). Affiliates screwing sites, sites screwing affiliates. Billing support building more and more barriers for customers to get a hold of them or to cancel subscriptions. And then let's not even get into the industry's backbone, content producers...

karmakaze 8y ago

I wasn't sure about the heading and was hoping this was about general content for adults being broken. I dont think I'm getting smarter faster but the content is going down fast. That's what's great here expect one thing, learn another.

asimpletune 8y ago

Do developers make more or less working in adult entertainment?

xutopia 8y ago
In Montreal I see a lot of junior developers making quite a bit more money than they would in other companies. I don't know any senior developers in the field though.
- 00117 8y ago
  Yes, we have a low senior count and are always on the lookout for more.
- mgleaker 8y ago
  Montreal unique. MindGeek here for cheap worker. Why pay american so much higher money and stock when canadien work for 100000 US dollar less and no stock. Government also pay back much amount of salary. Price for company finally maybe 40000 US dollar for each year for developer. They do have senior but many more junior.

segmondy 8y ago

As someone in the payment industry, find a processor/payfac that specializes in this. They handle all that complexity, they will have multiple processors/banks in the backend to find out who will accept the card. Your frustration is due to lack of who to use, all the pros use such processors. It's pretty much transparent, they also have massive fraud systems, and since they process for tons of sites, if they notice a card doing fraud/multiple chargebacks across different sites, they put a stop to it quickly.

Miltnoid 8y ago

Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20180809104802/https://dev.to/jwoertink/programming-in-the-adult-entertainment-industry-is-broken-hgn https://web.archive.org/web/20180809104802/https://dev.to/jw...

rever 8y ago
We have to go deeper: https://archive.is/mP6Ky https://archive.is/mP6Ky
bhelkey 8y ago
Thanks! I arrived late to the party.

crtasm 8y ago

Post has been deleted. > To those of you spreading the "you're admitting to fraud" comments, you're the reason we can't have nice things. I fail to see how this forced you to remove the post.

smsm42 8y ago
Maybe because the author expected sincere discussion of the problems they are facing, and got a storm of crap dumped on their head by people who spent all of 2 minutes on the issue but already know everything about it and are very judgmental about it. There is no shortage of those on the internet, and dealing with them is very annoying. Not everybody can tolerate such environment.

bsder 8y ago

This is such a shame because the porn industry used to be at the forefront of technological innovation. Quite often, the AVN Expo had better actual technical content than CES (which was held at the same time). The porn industry was the first to adopt videodiscs, VHS, DVD, handheld cameras, the web, online payments, etc. Basically, if any new technology was useful for porn, it was going to catch on.

istorical 8y ago
If you look at VR film making, they are still at the forefront. Camera rigs evolving at lightspeed.

cartercole 8y ago

It looks liek this entire article has been deleted after he changed the post content

AngeloAnolin 8y ago

Update: I found an archived link [2] as I scrolled further below. I may have missed the boat as this is what can be seen on the original post: "I've deleted the post because some of you are [insert expletive]. The client I do work for is not doing anything illegal. There's no money laundering going on. It's a more legit business than some big-chain stores I shop at." Anybody care to provide a gist of what was originally posted? Tried cached version [1] but contents are still the same. [1 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qqZZR3ggRv0J:https://dev.to/jwoertink/programming-in-the-adult-entertainment-industry-is-broken-hgn+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qqZZR3... [2] https://archive.is/mP6Ky https://archive.is/mP6Ky

norswap 8y ago

Since the article has been censored/retracted now, here's the wayback link: https://web.archive.org/web/20180809104802/https://dev.to/jwoertink/programming-in-the-adult-entertainment-industry-is-broken-hgn https://web.archive.org/web/20180809104802/https://dev.to/jw...