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There are plenty of porn friendly payment providers. They just cost a lot of money relative to "normal" merchants because of a few simple reasons: 1) Chargeba

• errantspark 7y ago
  What's the percentage of porn-related shadiness is because our society and business culture forces that? It seems similar to drug prohibitions etc. I haven't had to deal with a shady drug dealer in years now that weed is legal. Maybe if vice-clauses and the like weren't so ubiquitous we'd see more upright actors in the field.
  • 1000units 7y ago
    Almost none of it. Mentally stable people do not want strangers to ejaculate into their mouth on camera for money. Those willing are easily taken advantage of. edit: Many downvotes! Let's hear the dissent. I'll faithfully engage. edit: 'dang, can we please remove flagging privileges from whoever targeted this comment? Thanks.
    • yifanl 7y ago
      Define "mentally stable"? Deviance is a core part of the human identity, isn't it?
      • 1000units 7y ago
        For the purpose of this discussion let's use the clinical psychologist's definition.
    • zzzcpan 7y ago
      You are making a moral judgement, it has nothing to do with mental stability.
      • 1000units 7y ago
        I'm making an objective statement about reality backed by basic, well-understood features of human psychology and personal experience with porn actresses.
        • otterley 7y ago
          The plural of anecdote is not data. Also, do you have any credentials to back up your expertise in the field of psychology?
          • 1000units 7y ago
            http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920 One learns by theory and experiment. Also, I don't flash my credentials to win arguments online. Think of me as an intellectual sparring partner rather than an authority feeding you what to believe and shape the dialectic accordingly.
            • viraptor 7y ago
              There's enough nuance in "mentally stable" that having some actual credentials, training, or at least pointing out relevant studies would be useful. Otherwise it does look like you're equate your moral stance with mental health diagnosis.
              • 1000units 7y ago
                I've not provided my moral stance. Engage with what I actually said. For example, you might claim you are personally acquainted with porn actresses who lead healthy and productive lives. Or you might cite research showing they are less likely to abuse elicit recreational drugs, pursue psychiatric intervention, have histories of traumatic abuse, or commit suicide. Or you might discuss the various motivations that might lead one into the porn industry under ideal conditions. I don't understand the preoccupation with my morals, whatever they're imagined to be.
  • drdeca 7y ago
    Drug prohibition is a thing about laws. It is legal (in the US) for people (of legal age) to purchase pornography* . The fact that there is a cultural disapproval of pornography is not that much like there being laws restricting it. Also, some things should be socially discouraged while being legal. If you mean this as purely a descriptive question, then I suppose that yes, if fewer contracts excluded pornographic content from some service, then (nearly tautologically) there would be more services which permit it, and this might make some able to be more trustworthy about things. However, normatively, I think the fact that pornography is viewed negatively, at least in public, is a good thing.
    • errantspark 7y ago
      > I think the fact that pornography is viewed negatively, at least in public, is a good thing. I'd love to see your thoughts on this expanded. I don't have a particularly rigorously formed opinion on this, but my gut disagrees. I'd settle for some links to articles/etc. that reflect your viewpoint.
      • baumy 7y ago
        Not OP, but my gut agrees with his. Very tricky issue and I don't think anyone can say who is "right", so I fall back to one universal principle to inform my opinion here, as well as a general societal observation. The principle: moderation is almost always best. This applies to food and exercise, to work/life balance, to sex and drugs, and everything in between. Pornography consumption generally does not represent "moderation" of sex, but the extreme end of it - you crave sexual stimulation so badly that you resort to watching other people having their sexual urges fulfilled (which can then make the porn consumer less motivated to pursue healthy avenues to achieve their own sexual fulfillment, leading to a downward spiral). People will always be drawn to porn because sex is the one "addiction" that almost everyone is born with, but having a thin healthy layer of public shame helps to encourage people not to go too far down the rabbit hole. Societal observation: society seems to be becoming shallower, more transactional, particularly in the realm of dating. In my opinion, unrealistic expectations of each other in a sexual context is one of the biggest causes of this, because when those expectations go unmet people move on to the next person they find on some app, instead of investing time into building a relationship and seeing if it can work (and growing themselves as a result of that investment). I think pornography contributes to these unrealistic expectations, and thus to making society more shallow. I'm always cautious to dive into this too much in today's political climate, but I also think there are significant societal downsides to the more extreme levels of sexual liberation that are rapidly becoming normalized in American society (possibly all of western society, but I'm a bit too ignorant to speak on that). I think pornography contributes to this as well.
  • DoreenMichele 7y ago
    Historically, you see more prostitution in uptight eras (Victorian, etc) where "good girls don't." More recently, research suggests that rates of sexual assault go down when porn is readily available. It's a controversial thing that a lot of people don't want to hear at least in part because it directly contradicts a lot of feminist narrative that rape is about power, not desire.
    • mensetmanusman 7y ago
      Also, research is showing sex in general decreasing. Interesting if porn causes humans to stop reproducing just enough to go extinct.
      • DoreenMichele 7y ago
        With 7 billion people on the planet, I'm not losing sleep over this possibility. Especially since I am increasingly seeing stories about outright elderly women giving birth, a la a joke I read forever ago that "In the future, the pressure to produce grandkids will go way down because our grandparents will still be having babies." That future appears to have more or less arrived.
• Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  > Porn operators are, as a whole, rather shady themselves and present their own set of risks to a payment provider. A lot of those chargebacks in #1 are actually valid chargebacks. ...is there a logical reason for this?
  • jandrese 7y ago
    Society holds such jobs in low esteem, so the kind of people who take them are the ones that are not worried about their reputation. There are a few who buck the trend and keep it classy, but most are just the kind of people who will do anything for a quick buck, including double-charging paying customers. It's a viscous cycle, really. We treat porn producers like dirt only only dirty people want to take the job which further reinforces our stereotypes about said people. Plus the barrier to entry is real low and brand loyalty is almost nonexistent so it's a prime industry for fly-by-night operators.
  • Qwertystop 7y ago
    At a guess, people are less likely to make a fuss about fraud when they're embarrassed to admit they were trying to buy such things.
  • phreack 7y ago
    Sound like a sort of catch 22. Payment processors treat them as second class citizens, so first class who would not do shady business don't dare set up in the industry. And so the reputation of the ones who do validates the processors' line of thinking.
  • dpifke 7y ago
    I knew someone who was involved in the 1-900 business in the 90's. Apparently back then it was relatively common to DoS your competition by running up a lot of fraudulent calls to their numbers. The hope being that the telco would cut them off, and you'd have one less competitor. For my friend who was hit by this, it really sucked, because telco billing chargebacks in those days took 3 months or more, so it looked like he had hockey-stick month-over-month growth... until suddenly he didn't, because most of the "growth" was fraudulent charges intended to get him shut down.
• floatingatoll 7y ago
  Are there porn-friendly payroll providers?
  • fluxsauce 7y ago
    ADT. We're just a business.
• jstanley 7y ago
  > If anything it would exacerbate the shady behavior because consumers would have no recourse against fraud. Cryptocurrency works quite a bit differently to credit cards. "Fraud" in the usual sense isn't possible: it is not possible for the service provider to take your money merely by falsely claiming that you authorised a payment. Payments can only be initiated by the client.
• zajio1am 7y ago
  > 1) Chargebacks -- people chargeback the shit out of these kinds of transactions. So perhaps offer a payment system without chargebacks? Direct bank transfers also do not offer chargebacks and people use them for payment for goods and services.
  • guan 7y ago
    In the US, the most common ACH debit and credit transfers can be “returned,” which is similar to a chargeback. This is covered by Subpart A of Regulation E of the Federal Reserve. Only “wire transfers” such as Fedwire and SWIFT transfers, which consumers rarely make here, offer final, irrevocable* payments the way many other countries’ normal domestic transfer systems do. * Meaning they can’t be undone through the payment system. Sometimes it’s possible to sue the recipient or recover the money in other ways.
• uberduber 7y ago
  Used to work in a business that sold porn DVDs and had to deal with chargebacks. We had an inbound sales call center, and a customer service one where you could cancel. Among the chargebacks, fraud is the most common reason code, but the amount of true fraud such as stolen credit cards is astoundingly low to the point of being almost non-existent. I would say 90% of cases were the angry spouse and the man denying it. The most common actual fraud you would see is a relative who lives in the house using it, say a grandson using grandma's credit card or adult children running up a $4k tab after their parent died. Also I had to find friendly merchant banks, the problem with this is it is very much a two-way trust street. Just as there are tons of shady porn providers, there are tons of shady merchant banks. Some will hold your money for no reason and can jeopardize your whole business, so we always had everything spread across multiple banks but that could still be problematic.
  • patrec 7y ago
    So what happens with those angry spouse chargebacks? You just eat the loss if that happens (and ban the customer)?
    • uberduber 7y ago
      We eat the loss and the chargeback fee, it's just a cost of business. It's not worth it to ban the customer. 90% of them don't buy again. Of the 10% that do, it's worth it to keep their business and risk the chargebacks. Most of them get better at hiding the porn. Also if we did this we would end up banning great customers who closed their card due to actual fraud and the bank just ending charging back everything after a certain date. There just weren't really that many trying to scam us out of DVDs. Other business factors affect your chargeback rate way more than these customers.