15 ms·

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

95 points by adultthrowaway 16y ago

And where do people doing this hang out? I've been quietly working on something that's taking off but I'm on my own here.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
bottlerocket 16y ago
Probably should create a throwaway for this :) but way back in college I did a bit of contract front-end web work for some guys in that area, email me (in profile) and I can send you the URL of the message board they were all on.
- gcb 16y ago
  Do you need a secret handshake or something?
  - bottlerocket 16y ago
    No, just didn't want to post gofuckyourself.com here, but others already did so why not :D But speaking of secret handshakes, don't suppose anyone here remembers CFUS by any chance?
what-to-do 16y ago
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=adult+webmasters+board#sclient=psy&hl=en&safe=off&source=hp&q=adult+webmasters+forum&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&fp=6aaff458859385c2 http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#3...
- rodion_89 16y ago
  nothing to do with the post, but im just curious why there is a strange character right after 'ie=UTF-8' in the name of your link.
  - there 16y ago
    because the encoded url is http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=adult... and the HN code that truncates long urls chopped it in the middle of &#38 so it becomes "&#3" which is telling your browser to print the ascii character 3, which it can't show properly, so it shows the character you see instead.
latchkey 16y ago
Funny, these AHN's come up every few months or so. I wrote a good portion of the code and architecture for the kink.com sites. Decided to leave after 4 years working there pretty much because my job there was done, things work really well. Despite what people might think, it was not hard at all to find a 'real' job again as my experience working in extremely high traffic environments is desirable.
- pavel_lishin 16y ago
  > Funny, these AHN's come up every few months or so. And every time I wonder if it's someone trying to score free porn, or a date with an actress.
- bottlerocket 16y ago
  I've had mixed reactions when I mention it, but back then (2002ish) they paid my broke college-self infinitely better, and were doing stuff that was so far ahead of the "mainstream" clients wanting $200 all-flash sites. I really regret not keeping in touch with those guys, aside from being able to show my mom what I work on now :D
- AbnormalGun 16y ago
  Cool. I've been a member of the Kink site in the past and found it to be fast and well done. Did you just work on the back end stuff or did you also work on the design/layout of the site as well?
  - latchkey 16y ago
    I did the backend stuff, but wrote a lot of the jsp pages as well. It is all Java/J2EE/JBoss/EJB3/Hibernate with some fairly complicated single sign on stuff going on to allow cross domain auto-login.
grafa 16y ago
Personally working in the adult industry is a little awkward in the beginning but after that it's fairly rewarding. Personally I found it really useful to get the high traffic/high scalability experience. I mean you don't get too many job opportunities where you can brag about your app serving around a billion page views/day.
citricsquid 16y ago
A guy who works for the people who do Pornhub posts here: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2172382 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2172382 (his comment and subsequent replies)
- Mikushi 16y ago
  Yep that's me. I've been working for Manwin for the past 3 years and a half. Worked on almost every projects they've done. For the past 2 years, i've been involved specifically on the tube sites, Pornhub.com and other ones. I am currently Lead Developer, and like my job, like others stated in this thread, it's a great occasion to work on high traffic websites, solving scalability issues, and a lot of interesting stuff.
ddemchuk 16y ago
I'm not kidding here, gofuckyourself.com is generally considered the most popular porn webmaster forum online. I've heard the quality has dropped in recent times though.
- sixtofour 16y ago
  The quality is always dropping in recent times, at almost any forum you care to visit.
  - jholman 16y ago
    I feel a strong non-rational urge to write "hacker news is turning into reddit", and then rush off to reddit to write "reddit is turning into digg" on any-and-every thread, and so on.
    - khafra 16y ago
      After 5 or 10 steps, does that end in "/b/ is turning into hacker news"?
  - zwadia 16y ago
    PornOverflow.com?
onomojo 16y ago
I've done adult sites. Check out my portfolio. http://onomojo.com http://onomojo.com
jqueryin 16y ago
On the topic of getting a new job after leaving the adult industry: It will generally have little impact on future jobs; especially if you get hands on experience with massively scalable architectures and high traffic volumes. The problems you solve outweigh the environment you worked in. From my experience, adult companies keep things professional due to the nature of the business and the risks of being sued. I have a buddy that was in the industry for awhile, and there are a number of forums they all troll on. Here's a couple: http://iq69.com http://iq69.com http://gfy.com http://gfy.com (nsfw)
SageRaven 16y ago
I've always wondered if sysadmin work for adult sites was a niche due to moral objections or the perception that employment at a "normal" place would be difficult afterwards. I don't often see many admin job postings for such sites, so I assume the industry is somewhat incestuous (no pun intended) and/or nepotist, resulting in more word-of-mouth job prospects than through the usual channels. Discretion and all that. Anyone know where a freelance admin could find such jobs? The smaller the shop, the better.
- calloc 16y ago
  When I got my job in the porn industry they didn't advertise that was what it was for. Instead it was brought up during the interview process. They asked me a series of questions related to it as well. Like "For your day job you may have to visit bigblackcocks.com to make sure their website is functioning again, how do you feel about that?" and "We host a lot of content that might be offensive, if given root access would feel the urge to delete everything because it didn't fit in with your world view?" I'm not offended at anything, so it really didn't bother me. I worked on many different aspects of the business. Massively scaling MySQL, handling DDoS attacks, setting up load balancers on the fly, helping figure out how certain websites were attacked and or compromised. It was a fun job, and one of the sites I worked on currently has 600+ live models streaming to over 1 million unique IP addresses. I don't know how you'd go about finding such a job, I stumbled upon it. No, it is not on my resume since I am a software engineer at heart and not a sys admin, but the knowledge I have gained has allowed me to engineer various different systems in the mean time. CCBill and Cave Creek located in Phoenix are two of the places where I interviewed before landing the other job, later I found out through a friend who did get the job at Cave Creek that he was doing the same stuff I was doing.
  - Vivtek 16y ago
    You just wonder whether they had hired somebody as an admin and they deleted everything... Once bitten, twice shy?
    - calloc 16y ago
51Cards 16y ago
I worked in porn years ago... ah the memories. I worked for one of the first companies doing live interactive video streaming from girls living at home, though "live" in the late 90's was a still image every 1-2 seconds and no audio. The girls were rolling full sized PCs with camcorders around on rolling carts in their houses. I learned a lot about managing high traffic, server push methods, etc. I know I came out of it with a lot of things I wouldn't have picked up elsewhere. I never found it to be a hindrance to getting work later.
pamelafox 16y ago
Related to this, I'd love to see developers who work on porn sites speaking at conferences, to hear about your particular experiences in design, marketing, SEO, hosting, and scaling. Seems like you'd have an interesting perspective on all that.
- evilduck 16y ago
  I always got the impression most tech conferences were too thin-skinned about the subject, which is sad considering the porn industry works on a lot of interesting tech problems.
  - soult 16y ago
    There was one talk called "Tits Bits" at the Chaos Communication Camp 07 (a rather unconventional but awesome tech conference). It was about the technical challenges of operating a porn streaming website. You can download the recording (number 2041) here: http://dewy.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/CCC/CCCamp07/video/m4v/ http://dewy.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/CCC/CCCamp07/video/m4v/ The recording includes some pictures which make it not safe for work (depending on your work environment).
jasonlotito 16y ago
I work for Gamma Entertainment up here in Montreal. I handle the credit card processing side of things (TrustCharge). I won't rehash the places I've mentioned in other comments, but don't neglect actually meeting people. The trade shows are a great place to meet people, even if you don't get a booth. Just keep in mind that the adult business is a business. The people involved are interested in making money. On a side note, we are hiring programmers! Shoot me off an email if you're interested.
- davidmathers 16y ago
  Nice. You're about to start doing payment processing (among other things) for Hot House, my best client. Seeing you here gives me great confidence!
d3x 16y ago
I have worked in adult for 9+ years and sold 2 sites. aebn.com / stockroom.com / domme.com etc... One of the sites i sold was called cameraphoneporn.com; sold it 8 years ago before mobile was big. IMHO the best thing about working in adult is that you gain a good understanding of affiliates and seo / marketing / conversion rates etc... and that is information that has helped me with my mainstream clients as well.
- gonk 16y ago
  stockroom isn't porn, they just use it to sell whips.
tibbon 16y ago
So for those of you that have worked on porn sites- why are they generally so poorly done (or at least, from the perspective that most HN coders would view as poorly). Many have parts that are broken, they are slow, have really messy HTML, rely super heavily on flash, and just lack most modern features that most sites would have. I've been dreaming of 'porn for geeks', where the content is the same, but there's nice RSS feeds, everything has strong semantic meaning, HTML5 is everywhere, they use jquery for consistent javascript rendering, the pages scale properly when you size them up, and hell... maybe even try for some user accessibility. I just have yet to run across a good porn site that looks technically as impressive as someone's 4 hour rails project even. Of course, I wouldn't mind being proven wrong.
- borism 16y ago
  why are they generally so poorly done (or at least, from the perspective that most HN coders would view as poorly) because it doesn't make business sense to make them better? concept that most HN readers will probably have hard time understanding.
- Vivtek 16y ago
  I've been dreaming of 'porn for geeks' Yeah, me, too. Some kind of similarity metric would be nice, wouldn't it? "More like this"? Email me if you want to get serious any time.
  - fredoliveira 16y ago
    I would like to add emphasis to this particular sentence: Email me if you want to get serious any time.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - purveyor 16y ago
    When I think "porn for geeks", I think videos in which the slider is labeled by "act", so you can skip over the stuff that grosses you out (like watching blowjobs), or even avoid videos with that stuff altogether and zero in on videos that have the stuff you like in the largest ratio. I'm not a developer though. Sure, I threw together a tumblr site (http://lookAtThisFuckingSideboob.com http://lookAtThisFuckingSideboob.com), but I think it would be fun to help build and grow a proper [porn for hackers] site.
Vivtek 16y ago
I did a bunch of work for a porn site back in the 90's who somehow managed to not pay me. Something like $6000 down the drain. (So my wife was mad at me twice over that one. Sigh.)
Swannie 16y ago
I had a dabble a few years ago. There was a strong community on a couple of IRC channels. I saw the potential for seriously automated stuff, but sadly when I went to Uni it all fell by the wayside. Got back into it a little after, but lost interest: it had got a lot harder to get converting traffic in the 5 years between the first dabble and later. Now everyone wants video. That's gotta be a killer on your bandwidth bills.
jarin 16y ago
I used to be the R&D Director at Naughty America, here's what I built: http://techcrunch.com/2008/10/08/come-and-get-it-naughty-america-is-building-an-itunes-for-porn/ http://techcrunch.com/2008/10/08/come-and-get-it-naughty-ame... http://gofuckyourself.com http://gofuckyourself.com (NWS) is pretty much the hangout for adult affiliates and webmasters. If you're trying to build traffic, that's where you want to be. Funny enough, I seem to be at it again. My latest client is a porn startup.
- nailer 16y ago
  What does the startup do?
  - jarin 16y ago
    Nothing fancy, just a new porn studio. After the basic stuff is up and running we're going to talk about making it all whiz-bang. I still have dreams about getting the "iTunes Store for Porn" idea up and running again, since there was a lot of interest from other companies about getting their content on there (I think it's the best way to save the industry from the proliferation of free porn). Plus, with the technical/marketing/mobile knowledge I've gained since then I can make it a million times better. Unfortunately, without the content and resources of Naughty America behind me it would be tough to break away from client work long enough to build something that I could pimp out to content producers.
blake8086 16y ago
I made http://pix-plz.com http://pix-plz.com . I originally set out to make a site that was easier to use than hotornot.com (a lot of people just rate all photos the same, because they want to see more.) The site has languished, as I'm not really sure what to do with it, but I'm proud of the features I implemented, the UI, and the things I learned in doing it.
swish 16y ago
I was the Director of Technology for Naughty America up until about 7 months ago when I transitioned to a "mainstream" job as those in the industry call it. Was definitely an interesting experience, but as others have said the things you learn about massive traffic, high availability, scalability and TONS of streaming video are hard to get anywhere else, unless you're working for a Google or Yahoo. Naughty America at one point was in the top 800 highest trafficked of all sites on the web, 1M+ uniques a day. I'm now the CTO of a startup and when I was leaving Naughty America everyone I interviewed with viewed that experience as an asset, as most intelligent people will. www.gfy.com is the most popular adult webmaster forum, but there are others like www.justblowme.com, www.adultwhoswho.com, etc
xutopia 16y ago
My experience with the domain has been less than stellar. I ended up being fired for handing over a petition from all but one employee asking for better treatment. I sued them and they settled out of court. The best part of it was the "best orgasm faces" contest we had. I was a programmer so I just benefited from it but those working on touch ups would screenshot and save the orgasm faces into a shared network drive and we had new stuff to laugh at every day.
vermontdevil 16y ago
Long long long time ago back in the days of dial up ISPs, I along with friends created a website called Kandyland. We bought a negative film scanner for about $1500 or so for a photographer in return for a 2 year supply of naked women photos. About 4 months later we got a cease and deist letter from Hasbro asking us not to use the term Kandyland as it was too similar to Candyland the game. Being young and not exactly flush with VC money, we simply changed it to California Babes or something like that. Eventually after about one and half years, our girlfriends asked us if we are going to make this a career or not? We picked our girlfriends and have left the business altogether. The experience did help my web development career though. Fun times.
drivebyacct2 16y ago
What site is it?
jgalvez 16y ago
raises hand E-mail me if you'd like an alpha invite.
daralthus 16y ago
I worked for livejasmin (and the sister sites), some years ago, I think it was the biggest live streaming sites even back then. Unfortunately, I wasn't a coder then, just support staff, but it was a great experience and I learnt some things about how they run a multimillion dollar biz from a basement. Got a view on everything from creditcard processing, to the sysadmin side. And of course dealing with performers and customers was always fun, as they are not that usual people. Still remember a "crazy stuff" folder, where we used to collect the funny moments.
robotron 16y ago
I work tangentially to porn in adult toys for about six years. Built an affiliate program, retail sites, wholesale sites and various other stuff. Don't really interact with developers in the business, though (outside of some time on GFY before I stopped caring).
mantas 16y ago
Did some contracting on one of porn -tube sites. Also worked on lesbian "stuff" web shop. Crazy days...

And where do people doing this hang out? I've been quietly working on something that's taking off but I'm on my own here.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

bottlerocket 16y ago

Probably should create a throwaway for this :) but way back in college I did a bit of contract front-end web work for some guys in that area, email me (in profile) and I can send you the URL of the message board they were all on.

gcb 16y ago
Do you need a secret handshake or something?
- bottlerocket 16y ago
  No, just didn't want to post gofuckyourself.com here, but others already did so why not :D But speaking of secret handshakes, don't suppose anyone here remembers CFUS by any chance?

what-to-do 16y ago

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=adult+webmasters+board#sclient=psy&hl=en&safe=off&source=hp&q=adult+webmasters+forum&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&fp=6aaff458859385c2 http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#3...

rodion_89 16y ago
nothing to do with the post, but im just curious why there is a strange character right after 'ie=UTF-8' in the name of your link.
- there 16y ago
  because the encoded url is http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=adult... and the HN code that truncates long urls chopped it in the middle of &#38 so it becomes "&#3" which is telling your browser to print the ascii character 3, which it can't show properly, so it shows the character you see instead.

latchkey 16y ago

Funny, these AHN's come up every few months or so. I wrote a good portion of the code and architecture for the kink.com sites. Decided to leave after 4 years working there pretty much because my job there was done, things work really well. Despite what people might think, it was not hard at all to find a 'real' job again as my experience working in extremely high traffic environments is desirable.

pavel_lishin 16y ago
> Funny, these AHN's come up every few months or so. And every time I wonder if it's someone trying to score free porn, or a date with an actress.
bottlerocket 16y ago
I've had mixed reactions when I mention it, but back then (2002ish) they paid my broke college-self infinitely better, and were doing stuff that was so far ahead of the "mainstream" clients wanting $200 all-flash sites. I really regret not keeping in touch with those guys, aside from being able to show my mom what I work on now :D
AbnormalGun 16y ago
Cool. I've been a member of the Kink site in the past and found it to be fast and well done. Did you just work on the back end stuff or did you also work on the design/layout of the site as well?
- latchkey 16y ago
  I did the backend stuff, but wrote a lot of the jsp pages as well. It is all Java/J2EE/JBoss/EJB3/Hibernate with some fairly complicated single sign on stuff going on to allow cross domain auto-login.

grafa 16y ago

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

citricsquid 16y ago

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

Mikushi 16y ago
Yep that's me. I've been working for Manwin for the past 3 years and a half. Worked on almost every projects they've done. For the past 2 years, i've been involved specifically on the tube sites, Pornhub.com and other ones. I am currently Lead Developer, and like my job, like others stated in this thread, it's a great occasion to work on high traffic websites, solving scalability issues, and a lot of interesting stuff.

ddemchuk 16y ago

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

sixtofour 16y ago
The quality is always dropping in recent times, at almost any forum you care to visit.
- jholman 16y ago
  I feel a strong non-rational urge to write "hacker news is turning into reddit", and then rush off to reddit to write "reddit is turning into digg" on any-and-every thread, and so on.
  - khafra 16y ago
    After 5 or 10 steps, does that end in "/b/ is turning into hacker news"?
- zwadia 16y ago
  PornOverflow.com?

onomojo 16y ago

I've done adult sites. Check out my portfolio. http://onomojo.com http://onomojo.com

jqueryin 16y ago

On the topic of getting a new job after leaving the adult industry: It will generally have little impact on future jobs; especially if you get hands on experience with massively scalable architectures and high traffic volumes. The problems you solve outweigh the environment you worked in. From my experience, adult companies keep things professional due to the nature of the business and the risks of being sued. I have a buddy that was in the industry for awhile, and there are a number of forums they all troll on. Here's a couple: http://iq69.com http://iq69.com http://gfy.com http://gfy.com (nsfw)

SageRaven 16y ago

I've always wondered if sysadmin work for adult sites was a niche due to moral objections or the perception that employment at a "normal" place would be difficult afterwards. I don't often see many admin job postings for such sites, so I assume the industry is somewhat incestuous (no pun intended) and/or nepotist, resulting in more word-of-mouth job prospects than through the usual channels. Discretion and all that. Anyone know where a freelance admin could find such jobs? The smaller the shop, the better.

calloc 16y ago
When I got my job in the porn industry they didn't advertise that was what it was for. Instead it was brought up during the interview process. They asked me a series of questions related to it as well. Like "For your day job you may have to visit bigblackcocks.com to make sure their website is functioning again, how do you feel about that?" and "We host a lot of content that might be offensive, if given root access would feel the urge to delete everything because it didn't fit in with your world view?" I'm not offended at anything, so it really didn't bother me. I worked on many different aspects of the business. Massively scaling MySQL, handling DDoS attacks, setting up load balancers on the fly, helping figure out how certain websites were attacked and or compromised. It was a fun job, and one of the sites I worked on currently has 600+ live models streaming to over 1 million unique IP addresses. I don't know how you'd go about finding such a job, I stumbled upon it. No, it is not on my resume since I am a software engineer at heart and not a sys admin, but the knowledge I have gained has allowed me to engineer various different systems in the mean time. CCBill and Cave Creek located in Phoenix are two of the places where I interviewed before landing the other job, later I found out through a friend who did get the job at Cave Creek that he was doing the same stuff I was doing.
- Vivtek 16y ago
  You just wonder whether they had hired somebody as an admin and they deleted everything... Once bitten, twice shy?
  - calloc 16y ago

51Cards 16y ago

I worked in porn years ago... ah the memories. I worked for one of the first companies doing live interactive video streaming from girls living at home, though "live" in the late 90's was a still image every 1-2 seconds and no audio. The girls were rolling full sized PCs with camcorders around on rolling carts in their houses. I learned a lot about managing high traffic, server push methods, etc. I know I came out of it with a lot of things I wouldn't have picked up elsewhere. I never found it to be a hindrance to getting work later.

pamelafox 16y ago

Related to this, I'd love to see developers who work on porn sites speaking at conferences, to hear about your particular experiences in design, marketing, SEO, hosting, and scaling. Seems like you'd have an interesting perspective on all that.

evilduck 16y ago
I always got the impression most tech conferences were too thin-skinned about the subject, which is sad considering the porn industry works on a lot of interesting tech problems.
- soult 16y ago
  There was one talk called "Tits Bits" at the Chaos Communication Camp 07 (a rather unconventional but awesome tech conference). It was about the technical challenges of operating a porn streaming website. You can download the recording (number 2041) here: http://dewy.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/CCC/CCCamp07/video/m4v/ http://dewy.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/CCC/CCCamp07/video/m4v/ The recording includes some pictures which make it not safe for work (depending on your work environment).

jasonlotito 16y ago

I work for Gamma Entertainment up here in Montreal. I handle the credit card processing side of things (TrustCharge). I won't rehash the places I've mentioned in other comments, but don't neglect actually meeting people. The trade shows are a great place to meet people, even if you don't get a booth. Just keep in mind that the adult business is a business. The people involved are interested in making money. On a side note, we are hiring programmers! Shoot me off an email if you're interested.

davidmathers 16y ago
Nice. You're about to start doing payment processing (among other things) for Hot House, my best client. Seeing you here gives me great confidence!

d3x 16y ago

I have worked in adult for 9+ years and sold 2 sites. aebn.com / stockroom.com / domme.com etc... One of the sites i sold was called cameraphoneporn.com; sold it 8 years ago before mobile was big. IMHO the best thing about working in adult is that you gain a good understanding of affiliates and seo / marketing / conversion rates etc... and that is information that has helped me with my mainstream clients as well.

gonk 16y ago
stockroom isn't porn, they just use it to sell whips.

tibbon 16y ago

So for those of you that have worked on porn sites- why are they generally so poorly done (or at least, from the perspective that most HN coders would view as poorly). Many have parts that are broken, they are slow, have really messy HTML, rely super heavily on flash, and just lack most modern features that most sites would have. I've been dreaming of 'porn for geeks', where the content is the same, but there's nice RSS feeds, everything has strong semantic meaning, HTML5 is everywhere, they use jquery for consistent javascript rendering, the pages scale properly when you size them up, and hell... maybe even try for some user accessibility. I just have yet to run across a good porn site that looks technically as impressive as someone's 4 hour rails project even. Of course, I wouldn't mind being proven wrong.

borism 16y ago
why are they generally so poorly done (or at least, from the perspective that most HN coders would view as poorly) because it doesn't make business sense to make them better? concept that most HN readers will probably have hard time understanding.
Vivtek 16y ago
I've been dreaming of 'porn for geeks' Yeah, me, too. Some kind of similarity metric would be nice, wouldn't it? "More like this"? Email me if you want to get serious any time.
- fredoliveira 16y ago
  I would like to add emphasis to this particular sentence: Email me if you want to get serious any time.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- purveyor 16y ago
  When I think "porn for geeks", I think videos in which the slider is labeled by "act", so you can skip over the stuff that grosses you out (like watching blowjobs), or even avoid videos with that stuff altogether and zero in on videos that have the stuff you like in the largest ratio. I'm not a developer though. Sure, I threw together a tumblr site (http://lookAtThisFuckingSideboob.com http://lookAtThisFuckingSideboob.com), but I think it would be fun to help build and grow a proper [porn for hackers] site.

Vivtek 16y ago

I did a bunch of work for a porn site back in the 90's who somehow managed to not pay me. Something like $6000 down the drain. (So my wife was mad at me twice over that one. Sigh.)

Swannie 16y ago

I had a dabble a few years ago. There was a strong community on a couple of IRC channels. I saw the potential for seriously automated stuff, but sadly when I went to Uni it all fell by the wayside. Got back into it a little after, but lost interest: it had got a lot harder to get converting traffic in the 5 years between the first dabble and later. Now everyone wants video. That's gotta be a killer on your bandwidth bills.

jarin 16y ago

I used to be the R&D Director at Naughty America, here's what I built: http://techcrunch.com/2008/10/08/come-and-get-it-naughty-america-is-building-an-itunes-for-porn/ http://techcrunch.com/2008/10/08/come-and-get-it-naughty-ame... http://gofuckyourself.com http://gofuckyourself.com (NWS) is pretty much the hangout for adult affiliates and webmasters. If you're trying to build traffic, that's where you want to be. Funny enough, I seem to be at it again. My latest client is a porn startup.

nailer 16y ago
What does the startup do?
- jarin 16y ago
  Nothing fancy, just a new porn studio. After the basic stuff is up and running we're going to talk about making it all whiz-bang. I still have dreams about getting the "iTunes Store for Porn" idea up and running again, since there was a lot of interest from other companies about getting their content on there (I think it's the best way to save the industry from the proliferation of free porn). Plus, with the technical/marketing/mobile knowledge I've gained since then I can make it a million times better. Unfortunately, without the content and resources of Naughty America behind me it would be tough to break away from client work long enough to build something that I could pimp out to content producers.

blake8086 16y ago

I made http://pix-plz.com http://pix-plz.com . I originally set out to make a site that was easier to use than hotornot.com (a lot of people just rate all photos the same, because they want to see more.) The site has languished, as I'm not really sure what to do with it, but I'm proud of the features I implemented, the UI, and the things I learned in doing it.

swish 16y ago

I was the Director of Technology for Naughty America up until about 7 months ago when I transitioned to a "mainstream" job as those in the industry call it. Was definitely an interesting experience, but as others have said the things you learn about massive traffic, high availability, scalability and TONS of streaming video are hard to get anywhere else, unless you're working for a Google or Yahoo. Naughty America at one point was in the top 800 highest trafficked of all sites on the web, 1M+ uniques a day. I'm now the CTO of a startup and when I was leaving Naughty America everyone I interviewed with viewed that experience as an asset, as most intelligent people will. www.gfy.com is the most popular adult webmaster forum, but there are others like www.justblowme.com, www.adultwhoswho.com, etc

xutopia 16y ago

My experience with the domain has been less than stellar. I ended up being fired for handing over a petition from all but one employee asking for better treatment. I sued them and they settled out of court. The best part of it was the "best orgasm faces" contest we had. I was a programmer so I just benefited from it but those working on touch ups would screenshot and save the orgasm faces into a shared network drive and we had new stuff to laugh at every day.

vermontdevil 16y ago

Long long long time ago back in the days of dial up ISPs, I along with friends created a website called Kandyland. We bought a negative film scanner for about $1500 or so for a photographer in return for a 2 year supply of naked women photos. About 4 months later we got a cease and deist letter from Hasbro asking us not to use the term Kandyland as it was too similar to Candyland the game. Being young and not exactly flush with VC money, we simply changed it to California Babes or something like that. Eventually after about one and half years, our girlfriends asked us if we are going to make this a career or not? We picked our girlfriends and have left the business altogether. The experience did help my web development career though. Fun times.

drivebyacct2 16y ago

What site is it?

jgalvez 16y ago

raises hand E-mail me if you'd like an alpha invite.

daralthus 16y ago

I worked for livejasmin (and the sister sites), some years ago, I think it was the biggest live streaming sites even back then. Unfortunately, I wasn't a coder then, just support staff, but it was a great experience and I learnt some things about how they run a multimillion dollar biz from a basement. Got a view on everything from creditcard processing, to the sysadmin side. And of course dealing with performers and customers was always fun, as they are not that usual people. Still remember a "crazy stuff" folder, where we used to collect the funny moments.

robotron 16y ago

I work tangentially to porn in adult toys for about six years. Built an affiliate program, retail sites, wholesale sites and various other stuff. Don't really interact with developers in the business, though (outside of some time on GFY before I stopped caring).

mantas 16y ago

Did some contracting on one of porn -tube sites. Also worked on lesbian "stuff" web shop. Crazy days...