5 ms·

My Stepdad's Huge Dataset

78 points by danso 8y ago

subsubsub 8y ago
The porn industries focus on what customers want vs. what consumers want would certainly explain the increasingly extreme nature of free porn. I wonder if this is relevant to the discussion: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
- crooked-v 8y ago
  I'm a bit dubious about that article, because it spends a lot of time spinning the prevalence of kosher and halal food into an elaborate analogy and presuming future resistance to its existence without even considering "it's something that most people just don't care about either way" as an explanation.
Rotten194 8y ago
The article seeks pretty rambling and doesn't have a clear point, but I have friends in the sex-work industry and the closing part is true: like music, people don't want to pay for porn anymore, and it's making it harder and harder for non-megastars to make a living. Everybody I know making a living off porn is doing it through twitter, premium Snapchat accounts, patreon and the like, not traditional sites, and it's not easy.
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  I've been banging on about this point for years. Filesharing doesn't hurt megacorps, who have vast marketing departments that reliably shepherd people through the fare gates or monetize them in other ways, but indie and niche performers and creators suffer terribly because they don't have a big capital pile in addition to their labor and natural assets (whatever those happen to be). Filehsaring has a great deal to recommend it, but ultimately it comes down to wanting something for nothing (and often whining about the very people whose performances it desires to devalue).
  - philipkglass 8y ago
    I tend to think that the economic value of porn would have plummeted in the past decade or so even if there were no copyright infringement. Good cameras keep getting more affordable. Today's smartphones have better video capabilities than professional video gear had at the end of the 1990s. It only takes a tiny percentage of people with exhibitionist tendencies to produce and share more new porn than anybody can watch. Most of these performers don't care about getting paid. And in this niche, true professionals have little if any quality advantage over enthusiastic amateurs.
    - anigbrowl 8y ago
      Most of these performers don't care about getting paid. Amateur porn is absolutely not the default, as even a cursory glance at porn sites reveals. Gonzo and amateur porn are categories but most porn is made to make a buck. Performers like getting paid because they like to eat and not be homeless, and suggesting that most of them don't want to be paid is simply not true. That's like saying most homeless people choose to be on the street - it's an excuse to ignore their problems, though I appreciate you may not have meant it that way. Btw I base my views on over a decade in the indie film (not porn) industry, and from having a lot of friends and acquaintances who are sex workers, and who are already having a tough time dealing with FOSTA/SESTA.
      - zorga 8y ago
        > Performers like getting paid because they like to eat and not be homeless, and suggesting that most of them don't want to be paid is simply not true. He suggested no such thing, you should try reading more carefully. > Amateur porn is absolutely not the default, as even a cursory glance at porn sites reveals. He also never claimed that. What he did say was that there's enough amateur exhibitionists who would do it for free and don't care about getting paid to more than satisfy the demand for porn and that's why professionals are going to continue having a hard time being paid.
        anigbrowl 8y ago
ydnaclementine 8y ago
I always wonder what is considered NSFW in those offices. But it's interesting what types of specific UX is created for adult tube sites. For example, on pornhub, it shows which times of the video are viewed by more people using a flame graph type visual above the video timeline. Example of getting the user to value as quick as possible (skip the 'boring' parts).
- rashkov 8y ago
  I suppose the flame graph feature developer could then write on their resume: “reduced bandwidth costs by $X millions per year by implementing a ‘content of interest’ data visualization. Users’ time-to-success improved 5%” That kind of thing makes me wonder what sort of high caliber developers go into this field. Lotta good engineering going on within this, uh, unique, high volume traffic situation.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    If these devs are high caliber, they don't mind the paltry pay. Mindgeek (the Canadian company that owns most NSFW tube sites) is notorious for low engineering pay.
    - dmoy 8y ago
      Isn't most of Canada known for low (software) engineering pay? Or is this relative even to other Canadian companies?
  - ardy42 8y ago
    > That kind of thing makes me wonder what sort of high caliber developers go into this field. I read long ago that having a porn site on your resume was a pretty strong black mark with non-porn companies, even if you were a developer. Since there's so little crossover an experience sharing between mainstream developers and porn site developers, porn site engineering tended to be relatively sub par. My guess is few high caliber developers go into porn site engineering.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jsjohnst 8y ago
Do most viewers really care at all about the “script” and instead click on the first video that has someone they find attractive doing the sexual act they want to see? If I’m right in my assumption about most “tube viewers”, I wonder how much of the “conclusions” made from the data set provide false conclusions due to confirmation bias. If they think folks want to see [insert script narrative] and so they make more videos of that, just because it had lots of views doesn’t mean that more folks wanted to see that specific narrative IMHO.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  To the extent analytics are used, I think search analytics are probably influential (certainly, the press releases pornhub regularly puts out about what people are searching for advertises that they have this data available, so I'd be very surprised if it wasn't for sale and used by content creators/distributors). And is suspect that search data provides a lot more information about why people watch particular videos than just view data and assumptions.
- dmurray 8y ago
  The article emphasizes that the content creation choices are driven by the tiny minority of paying customers, not the millions of tube viewers.
masayune 8y ago
I’d love to sit in a meeting at one of these companies. It has to be surreal discussing trending data in regards to sex, kinks, and quirks objectively in a business setting. The setup is almost something out of a Monty Python skit.

78 points by danso 8y ago

The porn industries focus on what customers want vs. what consumers want would certainly explain the increasingly extreme nature of free porn. I wonder if this is relevant to the discussion: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

crooked-v 8y ago
I'm a bit dubious about that article, because it spends a lot of time spinning the prevalence of kosher and halal food into an elaborate analogy and presuming future resistance to its existence without even considering "it's something that most people just don't care about either way" as an explanation.

Rotten194 8y ago

The article seeks pretty rambling and doesn't have a clear point, but I have friends in the sex-work industry and the closing part is true: like music, people don't want to pay for porn anymore, and it's making it harder and harder for non-megastars to make a living. Everybody I know making a living off porn is doing it through twitter, premium Snapchat accounts, patreon and the like, not traditional sites, and it's not easy.

anigbrowl 8y ago
I've been banging on about this point for years. Filesharing doesn't hurt megacorps, who have vast marketing departments that reliably shepherd people through the fare gates or monetize them in other ways, but indie and niche performers and creators suffer terribly because they don't have a big capital pile in addition to their labor and natural assets (whatever those happen to be). Filehsaring has a great deal to recommend it, but ultimately it comes down to wanting something for nothing (and often whining about the very people whose performances it desires to devalue).
- philipkglass 8y ago
  I tend to think that the economic value of porn would have plummeted in the past decade or so even if there were no copyright infringement. Good cameras keep getting more affordable. Today's smartphones have better video capabilities than professional video gear had at the end of the 1990s. It only takes a tiny percentage of people with exhibitionist tendencies to produce and share more new porn than anybody can watch. Most of these performers don't care about getting paid. And in this niche, true professionals have little if any quality advantage over enthusiastic amateurs.
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    Most of these performers don't care about getting paid. Amateur porn is absolutely not the default, as even a cursory glance at porn sites reveals. Gonzo and amateur porn are categories but most porn is made to make a buck. Performers like getting paid because they like to eat and not be homeless, and suggesting that most of them don't want to be paid is simply not true. That's like saying most homeless people choose to be on the street - it's an excuse to ignore their problems, though I appreciate you may not have meant it that way. Btw I base my views on over a decade in the indie film (not porn) industry, and from having a lot of friends and acquaintances who are sex workers, and who are already having a tough time dealing with FOSTA/SESTA.
    - zorga 8y ago
      > Performers like getting paid because they like to eat and not be homeless, and suggesting that most of them don't want to be paid is simply not true. He suggested no such thing, you should try reading more carefully. > Amateur porn is absolutely not the default, as even a cursory glance at porn sites reveals. He also never claimed that. What he did say was that there's enough amateur exhibitionists who would do it for free and don't care about getting paid to more than satisfy the demand for porn and that's why professionals are going to continue having a hard time being paid.
      - anigbrowl 8y ago

ydnaclementine 8y ago

I always wonder what is considered NSFW in those offices. But it's interesting what types of specific UX is created for adult tube sites. For example, on pornhub, it shows which times of the video are viewed by more people using a flame graph type visual above the video timeline. Example of getting the user to value as quick as possible (skip the 'boring' parts).

rashkov 8y ago
I suppose the flame graph feature developer could then write on their resume: “reduced bandwidth costs by $X millions per year by implementing a ‘content of interest’ data visualization. Users’ time-to-success improved 5%” That kind of thing makes me wonder what sort of high caliber developers go into this field. Lotta good engineering going on within this, uh, unique, high volume traffic situation.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  If these devs are high caliber, they don't mind the paltry pay. Mindgeek (the Canadian company that owns most NSFW tube sites) is notorious for low engineering pay.
  - dmoy 8y ago
    Isn't most of Canada known for low (software) engineering pay? Or is this relative even to other Canadian companies?
- ardy42 8y ago
  > That kind of thing makes me wonder what sort of high caliber developers go into this field. I read long ago that having a porn site on your resume was a pretty strong black mark with non-porn companies, even if you were a developer. Since there's so little crossover an experience sharing between mainstream developers and porn site developers, porn site engineering tended to be relatively sub par. My guess is few high caliber developers go into porn site engineering.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jsjohnst 8y ago

Do most viewers really care at all about the “script” and instead click on the first video that has someone they find attractive doing the sexual act they want to see? If I’m right in my assumption about most “tube viewers”, I wonder how much of the “conclusions” made from the data set provide false conclusions due to confirmation bias. If they think folks want to see [insert script narrative] and so they make more videos of that, just because it had lots of views doesn’t mean that more folks wanted to see that specific narrative IMHO.

dragonwriter 8y ago
To the extent analytics are used, I think search analytics are probably influential (certainly, the press releases pornhub regularly puts out about what people are searching for advertises that they have this data available, so I'd be very surprised if it wasn't for sale and used by content creators/distributors). And is suspect that search data provides a lot more information about why people watch particular videos than just view data and assumptions.
dmurray 8y ago
The article emphasizes that the content creation choices are driven by the tiny minority of paying customers, not the millions of tube viewers.

masayune 8y ago

I’d love to sit in a meeting at one of these companies. It has to be surreal discussing trending data in regards to sex, kinks, and quirks objectively in a business setting. The setup is almost something out of a Monty Python skit.