23 ms·

Interview with a Pornhub web developer (2019)

298 points by brlnwest 6y ago

Supermancho 6y ago
Most interesting bit for me was to hear --- Most of our sites use the following as a base: Nginx PHP MySQL Memcached and/or Redis
- vga805 6y ago
  What did you find interesting about this? Seems like a typical stack to me.
  - UweSchmidt 6y ago
    The stack of a major site could include words you haven't heard yet, prompting urgent studying. Or it could be a bunch of traditional stuff like here, implying a whole lot of new tech could be overhyped. If they can do it with PHP and MySQL, why not your project? :-)
    - kradroy 6y ago
      I worked at the second largest adult content network about 10 years ago. They used the same stack mentioned in the article. The design philosophy was about simplicity and continuity above all. They didn't want to use newer technology because it's hard to find people to support it. They didn't even like you to use regular expressions when case statements could be used. Regex is too conceptually complicated. If you can host and serve porn on a LAMP stack from a traditional bare metal server data center, the guy on the other end doesn't care as long as it's reliable. I work at a large tech company now and it amazes me how terribly executed and unnecessarily complex most development efforts are. There was a very strong results-oriented culture at the adult media company.
      - pantaloony 6y ago
        It's funny how in 2020 PHP use is a sharply bimodal signal—it either means your tech leadership is clueless/absent/hopelessly-terrible, or they are among the few who've achieved true enlightenment.
        ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
        PHP is a very robust, debugged, proven, workhorse language, with millions of pages of documentation, tens (probably hundreds) of thousands of seasoned developers, huge libraries and communities of support, decades of experience, strong, universal, server support, and is used on a lot of "big pipe" servers. Like C++, it's not going anywhere, anytime soon; despite all the kvetching about it. That said, I don't especially like the language, but I knew that I needed to use it, if I wanted to design an infrastructure system that I could throw over the wall to be taken over by a bunch of other people. I was right. There's that old urban myth about the fancy space pen, vs. the pencil.[0] [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...
        cutler 6y ago
        In many ways I preferred PHP4. Can't stand all the pseudo-Java in PHP5+.
        spoopyskelly 6y ago
        You can still (mostly) code in PHP4 style and ignore all the new cruft and syntactic sugar they added over the years. And you get the performance boost of 7.x for "free".
        cutler 6y ago
        Yes, I suppose what really worries me about the "Modern PHP" movement how it looks down on anything that isn't Java-style OO. Procedural PHP is now considered to be some kind of unwashed Cinderella. I cringe when I look at a typical PSR-compliant page of PHP with its K&R braces, blank lines between each line of code and fanfold doc comments. You're lucky if you get more than a handful of lines of business logic on a screen.
      - hef19898 6y ago
        It's crazy how conservative most high-reliablity high-volume stuff is on the technical side. And yet, especially the porn industry, is quite on the fore front of other tech, like VR, DVD, VCR,...
        mywittyname 6y ago
        They don't seem any different from other industries in this respect. A lot of banks still run on systems originally designed in the 60s. So they are conservative from an operations perspective. But most of the big ones have no issues pumping money into the latest financial fad, so they are pretty flexible from a product perspective. Their content is relatively cheap to produce and it tends to be churned out at a high frequency. There's almost no industry out there that matches the frequency of content they produce, except maybe radio (and now YouTube). And with new technology, the limiting factor is almost always content creation. So it makes sense that they'd put aside a few dollars buy some new equipment for some trend. Doing a VR shoot probably involves a new camera and a plugin for Premiere.
      - mpfundstein 6y ago
        i truly believe that a lot of devs make stuff often much more difficult than necessary JUST for the sake of it. reason is probably that the main product is boring af, so you need some distraction to keep it interesting :-)
      - choward 6y ago
        > They didn't even like you to use regular expressions when case statements could be used. I'm confused. How are those two related? Case statements can replace if statements and can be used for exhaustiveness checking. Regexes are for parsing strings.
        sbarre 6y ago
        I think the point was that even within the codebase, simplicity and reduced complexity was preferred over perhaps a "cleaner" or more advanced approach. So managing a bunch of hard-coded code paths via a switch instead of using a regex to pattern-match. It's less future-proof, but even an entry-level dev can reason about a switch statement and update it as needed.
        kradroy 6y ago
        This is exactly it. The nuances of regex patterns can be misconstrued. Obviously if the regex used for flow control cannot be sensibly translated to more traditional conditional statements, then they are permitted. Even in that case, the "simplest" regex was preferred.
        praptak 6y ago
        All of the stuff you can do with regexes can be done with some hand written code. Since thst code often implements the FSM for the regex, it contains a fair share of case statements. The benefit is that the regex library costs a lot in hidden complexity - debugging why a particular regex works slowly or eats lots of memory is hard. If a similar problem pops up in hand written code, you can use your standard profilers and other tools to see what's happening.
        cutler 6y ago
        I can't begin to imagine how much MORE complicated reproducing a regex long-hand might be. They were invented to solve real problems.
        6y ago
    - Dirlewanger 6y ago
      Because my resume needs new tech buzzwords to look good to recruiters/hiring managers.
      - kradroy 6y ago
        Very true, which is why I, as a manager, ask senior devs during interviews why they made those choices and how they integrated and deployed the changes. In a lot of cases it turns out their flashy new tech choices were for one-off greenfield projects that were support systems and not primary production systems. I'm usually more interested in how they improved prod systems using the existing stack. This helps me figure out if they're into maintenance work or if they're only interested in tinkering with shiny new things. Both activities have their places on dev teams, but I take it consideration for the actual role I'm filling.
    - ravenstine 6y ago
      Yeah, reading too much HN might make you think that the only way to write a scalable website is to write your backend in Rust, use Kubernetes, Cassandra w/ PostgreSQL, Kafka, and Hadoop, and TypeScript w/ Webpack and complex functions compiled to WASM.
      - cutler 6y ago
        The K8 cult annoys me most. When Kubernetes and Docker hit the scene YAGNI was the idiomatic response to any scaling scenario which involved less than a massive fleet of servers. Now every solo dev looking to launch his tiny Node app on AWS is expected to use Docker and Kubernetes. Utter madness.
- nitrix 6y ago
  Another former developer here [1][2]; the memcached cluster is what keeps the entire thing afloat. We used to have dedicated 50 Gbps fiber connections straight between the web and memcached nodes, but now the caching is done locally on the web servers with a lot more of them. I would say there's probably something like 100+ servers, 128/256GB RAM each. All the pages are server-side rendered. Every DB query, every DAO object instantiated, every partial/full page HTML render, even some functions at times, gets put into cache. We weren't really afraid of high traffic, that scaled almost on its own... instead we were afraid of infrastructure maintenance or bad manipulations, because too much of the cache could disappear at once. The most incredible part to me was the storage and delivery of the video content. Try to picture 7000 petabytes [3] :) [1] https://www.pornhub.com/humans.txt https://www.pornhub.com/humans.txt [2] https://github.com/nitrix https://github.com/nitrix [3] https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review
  - Mikushi 6y ago
    > All the pages are server-side rendered I should add that this wasn't out of optimisation, just "old-school" PHP+Html with an MVC framework to serve the rendered page. Still can't beat that in my view. > The most incredible part to me was the storage and delivery of the video content That was the fun bit, I still remember the logistic of opening a new origin for the CDN back in 2010 (11 maybe?). Flying hard drives, can't beat that bandwidth. (Former developer here as well, however from before this humans.txt was introduced)
    - Throwaway958 6y ago
      Former Ashley Madison here with basically the same tech stack.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - neoform 6y ago
    Hello fellow former PH dev. ;)
  - 6y ago
- drdaeman 6y ago
  I'm curious is if there was experimentation or not, and what's their attitude towards this. It totally makes sense to use PHP and MySQL as it's what already works, and because there's a team who knows how to use those correctly in this kind of environment. I just wonder if they have a research-oriented team that could experiment with whatever they see as a potential fit and see if they can improve performance, developer experience (without sacrificing performance) or both. Or if they don't (and if so - why?) Facebook is kind of famous for this, as they came up with HipHop VM and Hack.
  - Mikushi 6y ago
    We experimented with HHVM, had a preview version of it very early on but ultimately the extension support was too bad and the performance gain just not impressive enough to justify moving away from the existing stack. We didn't have a research-oriented team per say, but myself and a colleague (I was Lead Dev and he Senior) did spend a lot of time experimenting with things like Redis (back when it was very early and "unproven"), varnish, PHP engine tweaks, custom extensions, ... We still did feature work and regular stuff too.
- etxm 6y ago
  I worked at SG years back (~2005) and that was the stack sans-redis. On my resume I don’t list the company name. In its place it says “social network centered around ‘art’” because we weren’t allowed to call it porn.
bkane521 6y ago
Looks like it was hugged to death. Internet archive link here: https://web.archive.org/web/20200724225904/https://davidwalsh.name/pornhub-interview https://web.archive.org/web/20200724225904/https://davidwals...
uxcolumbo 6y ago
Can't access the interview at the moment. Was this trafficking topic discussed [0], i.e. the site hosts criminal content and the owners apparently didn't do anything about it. [0] https://traffickinghub.com/ https://traffickinghub.com/ Criminal Content = child pornography, rape videos and filmed exploitation. Edit: Clarity
- mercer 6y ago
  No, I was kind of hoping the interview would go into the ethics of it all beyond just 'how do your friends react?'
  - uxcolumbo 6y ago
    Yes exactly. I wonder how the developers feel - working for a leadership team / company that apparently doesn't care much about ethics.
    - goatinaboat 6y ago
      I wonder how the developers feel - working for a leadership team / company that apparently doesn't care much about ethics You could ask the same of any adtech employees.
      - uxcolumbo 6y ago
        Not sure you can compare standard adtech companies with Pornhub. Nothing wrong with consuming content that increases sexual excitement, but there are more ethical options out there [0]. If we as consumers care about this then at least we can vote with our wallet or attention. [0] https://mashable.com/article/pornhub-alternatives-free-porn-paid-porn/ https://mashable.com/article/pornhub-alternatives-free-porn-...
        inDigiNeous 6y ago
        Well, you could argue that widespread porn has massive implications on how people think about other people. I mean, why is it normal that we as a society prioritize access to porn so much ? Why is it possible, in under 5 seconds probably, see even the most hardcore act of non-humanizing act of sexual expression that we can imagine ? Can this be good for the general thought process of humans, that you get to grow up with these very visual images of adults having sex that is so far fetched from what making love actually can be between two people ? At least for me personally it has taken a lot of willpower not to look at porn anymore, and I'm willing to admit it. I wish the children wouldn't have access to porn where ever they go. I mean, why is this not an issue ? Is is it because we are afraid to admit that watching porn can cause issues in our thinking ? How it objectifies women, and how these visual images can take up our thinking during the day, how these overly tuned sexual images actually can hijack our thinking and focus on only lust and sexual thoughts all the time, thinking about the woman on the street as a object to be used rather than an person? And what about the effects porn can have on the self worth of men, who are looking to perform like these actors on the screen and compare themselves to them when making love ? I have a hard time understanding why porn is being normalized, why we as a society are not thinking about the negative effects it has on our society, especially young people who are now growing up with this content available from every device they choose to use. There are many psychological issues related to watching porn and also there is the issue of having to resist the urge during the day if you have ever started the habit, I mean you can access it from anywhere, you just have to google and there you are. I wish there would be some moral compass when it comes to working to porn companies, or talking about porn, or supporting this idea that porn is just part of everyday life, when in fact it is far for a healthy thing to be thinking about. Of course, there are sides to this, maybe porn can reduce the amount of rapes and non-conforming sexual acts, but those should be considered morally wrong anyway and guided towards educating our children to restraining their urges towards that anyway. It kinda irks me that in this discussion also porn is just seen as something very normal, when in reality for example 30 years ago porn was not everywhere. Now it is just couple of clicks away, and your mind can be filled with people gagging stuff down other peoples throats, people being choked, violent acts of sex and all kinds of impossible beauty standards to fill. Imagine showing these acts to a five year old and what is going on in his mind while he watches this ? Imagine a 10 year old obsessively thinking about the act he saw, and not being able to forget it, as it is triggering something very primal in his still developing mind ? Image thinking that is normal, and that is how you treat people. To me, this is just a sign of a sick society, and we should as parents and people who are aware talk about the harmful sides of widespread normalization of porn. It is not allright. If you are working on porn, you are causing possible millions of people to possible get hooked into this act of loosing their vitality (sexual energy) in front of their devices every day. This is a fact. This is a direct loss in creativity also, in yogic traditions creativity is considered to be coming from the sexual energy, so everyday we are loosing so much creativity to the fact that people are just jacking off to virtual images. And I'm not even touching the widespread and common abuse of young women entering the field, possible traumatizing them for life, when thinking that a porn actress career would be something to pursue. And this is all because companies like PornHub don't just care, all they care about is making a profit in the end from ad revenues, by trying to maximize profit on the weak willedness of their viewers. To me, that is immoral and something that should not be supported. PornHub acts like they're all cool and that, and it's hip to view porn, but actually they are just a hightech pimp selling to the lowest common denominator and taking advantage of people in the process. I hope everyone who works for the porn industry, thinks about their actions and what consequences it ultimately can have on our society. Anyway, that is just my view on this, hoping that this will spark some thoughts on the subject. I have recovered from porn addiction, and I am more happy because of that. But it is just a few clicks away, and sometimes I still have to struggle with these thoughts taking over.
eric4smith 6y ago
Back in the day I did work at a group of one of the largest adult websites. Tech was PhP, MySQL, memcache and similar vanilla stuff running on many Linux servers - pretty simple stuff. The trick was performance. Simple stupid mistakes that would not be detected in sites that have low traffic become enormous problems in a high traffic server. Pretty much nothing was dynamic and we wrote scripts to create static pages for almost everything except search and authentication. Things like logging just could not be done. It was easier to load a bunch of data in memory on a request and process it instead of running a slightly slower SQL query, since a ton of those could kill the database. And yes, there were no placeholder images or videos. After some time you just get used to it and code. But I have to say you get pretty desensitized to it and when I resigned from that job my life in that area improved quite a lot. Highlights were p*rn stars and random celebs visiting the office - but after some time that got kind of meh. The job itself was just a programming gig and very professional except for the images on the screen which we learned to ignore. On the whole, the guys who ran the thing were a pretty solid and great bunch of people and it was one of the best dev experiences in my long career.
- suddenstutter 6y ago
  What celebs would visit? There are unwritten rules and pr guidelines for celebs not to mix with the porn industry, strange that they would randomly show up at one of the biggest porn sites offices.
- wdb 6y ago
  Yes, I think the desensizing is the biggest problem and you get less interested about it all.
  - mistrial9 6y ago
    long ago (before the Internet) I spoke with a woman who 'performed' in such videos. She said she was a user of pain killers (addict), and second she urged me sincerely not to watch the products; sad situation in the flesh.
- twic 6y ago
eloff 6y ago
>We are generally at the forefront of trends and big changes in tech as they roll out, which keeps it fun and challenging. Still phasing out jQuery and using php and mysql. I'm sure their streaming tech and video player are cutting edge, but otherwise their stack sounds like a large, legacy webapp.
- xrisk 6y ago
  if it ain't broke, don't fix it
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  A "legacy" web app that happens to perform at the same scale as YouTube. Maybe there's nothing wrong with using simple, battle-tested technologies after all?
  - eloff 6y ago
    Seems I rubbed some people the wrong way. That's ok. PHP is a disgusting language. Of the over twenty languages where I have more than passing familiarity, PHP and Perl are the worst. There are better options almost irrespective of the use case. JQuery was fine back in the day, but there are much better options now too. If you find yourself working with these technologies, and you don't like it, find a new job. You couldn't pay me to work with them anymore.
    - Nextgrid 6y ago
      I wasn’t actually commenting about the language itself, more about the fact that you can go very far with just a server-side language and powerful hardware without having to use overhyped stuff like microservices and/or Kubernetes which apparently everyone thinks is a must-have nowadays.
      - eloff 6y ago
        Sure, just about anything could work. With a dynamic language your hardware requirements will be about 10x more. But that's a tradeoff you might want for possibly faster development time.
acatton 6y ago
> We actually don’t use placeholders when we are developing the sites! In the end, what matters is the code and functionality, the interface is something we are very used to at this point. Interesting... 5 years ago I was contacted by a recruiter for a job offer in a (sic) "non-standard industry". Back then, "fullstack development" was the job trend for "people who deal with computers". During the first call, she told me her client was the biggest adult website in my EU country of origin. She insisted that the working environment was (sic) "clean". I raised that topic during my interview with their CTO. He told me the opposite of this post: devs were running the website locally with place-holders and innocent cartoons videos. He was straight-forward about it and mentioned "of course, once in a while you have check an issue on the live website, the way we handle this is by joking about the live content between us." For those interested, they had a pretty standard stack for such a high volume website. Postgres, Django, Redis and RabbitMQ with an HAProxy frontend.
- raziel2p 6y ago
  I doubt the interviewee meant "we" as in the entire adult entertainment industry, just their particular employer or team.
  - acatton 6y ago
    Oh.. Sorry, maybe my phrasing was wrong. I was just surprised that some adult websites would just not do that. If it sounded like I was implying that he was talking about the entire industry, that was not my intent.
- jilles 6y ago
  I am actually very curious what adult website uses Django? My understanding was that most of them are written in PHP and re-used across various domain names.
  - conradfr 6y ago
    Jacquie et Michel, which is a very popular site in France, uses Django.
arecurrence 6y ago
I stumbled into a meet and greet with these guys a few years ago. The recruiter invited me to an event for one of the world's largest content distributors. The role actually sounded really interesting and I assumed this was a corporate edition of CloudFlare but upon entering the social... ...well they had pornhub signs everywhere. They ended up being a really cool group to meet. Very interesting people with a lot going on in their lives. They had a strong entrepreneurial culture and many employees had their own companies on the side. Their home base is Montreal; it sounded like it didn't pay as well as other areas... but they were quick to point out that the cost of living is among the lowest in North America and that Montreal is a really cool city (This is true). The most significant thing I remember is a surprising number of people walking by tried to get into the event. :)
blue52 6y ago
What filth.
nicodds 6y ago
If you think about it, the adult-media field is scalable by design
- therealdrag0 6y ago
  Are you saying they know how to grow their content to show users? And they have no problem handling any load dumped on them?
bigtunacan 6y ago
Some things I'm curious about are not addressed in the article. First, how does the pay compare to industry standard? Second, for people that have moved out of the industry how did it impact your future opportunities? I feel like it would be more difficult to find new employment outside the industry due to the negative stigma attached.
- distrill 6y ago
  > I feel like it would be more difficult to find new employment outside the industry due to the negative stigma attached. I don't share this feeling at all. None of my peers would have any stigma attached to anyone we knew worked in this industry. In fact, if anything the opposite would be true. The porn industry deals with scale that most others don't, and often leads innovation on things like video players. It's not uncommon to see youtube copy features that showed up first on a porn site.
  - alphachloride 6y ago
    I do not know if one data point, or an anecdotal observation, can be generalized. A good measure would be to look at companies developers worked for after leaving an adult website (for e.g. MindGeek aka Pornhub). And then look at average pay change, duration of stay etc.
    - distrill 6y ago
      Sure, but as far as I can tell nobody in this comment thread is proposing a generalization be derived. We were both sharing how we felt about people having worked in the porn industry.
  - wtracy 6y ago
    I don't care whether my peers feel any stigma. I care about what the hiring manager feels. I'm convinced that the mid/upper management at the B2B companies I've worked at (and the one defense contractor I've worked at) would not be pleased. OTOH, Google, Facebook, and Amazon probably wouldn't care. Of course, I've never worked for an adult entertainment network, so I don't actually know.
intellix 6y ago
Am working in the online casino industry and was always told that porn sites are at the forefront of technology but based on this interview it seems that pornhub are clearly not
- protonfish 6y ago
  It possible that they are using the best current tech and what is fashionable right now is actually garbage that would never work for a high volume, easily maintainable site.
  - Mikushi 6y ago
    Bingo. Modern web dev has actually made me hate my job, it's a nightmare for no real value. Source: Former Pornhub dev as well.
    - cutler 6y ago
      Did I get this right in that you would rather be back at Pornhub where they don't indulge all the whims of modern web dev?
  - TallGuyShort 6y ago
    I'm relieved to see others with this sentiment. I enjoyed full-stack (including front-end) development back when JQuery was just starting to be a thing. Now when I have to dig into these layers where you have an Angular components wrapped inside some React stuff that's all part of an Elm app I just hit a mental block too fast. I don't understand how anyone can reason about their code in such an environment...
    - cutler 6y ago
      Angular inside React inside Elm??? Does such a thing really exist or did I miss the hyperbole?
      - 6y ago
stickfigure 6y ago
I wrote something similar for Quora some years ago. Since Quora links seem to be a faux pas on HN, I'll paste it here in its entirety: ----- What is it like to work on the development team for a porn site? I was the Chief Technology Officer of Kink.com 2006-2007. I will say in advance that every company is different and my experience will not necessarily resemble the experience you will have at another company (or even Kink today). There's more variation among companies than among industries. Still, here are my observations: * There's a lot of really awful technology in the porn business. It's the content that sells, not the technology. You'll be amazed by how many thriving businesses are "my first PHP project".[1] When I arrived at Kink, the core infrastructure was essentially a system that processed credit cards and inserted a username/password into an apache dbm file. No CRM, not even any idea if bob123 on one site is the same person as bob123 on another site. Most porn sites start like this, so expect to deal with a lot of legacy code. * Third-party tools and services generally suck. The really great payment systems like Stripe and WePay won't touch adult content, so you're left with third-tier processors who can barely keep their sites online. A disproportionate amount of your concentration will focus on reliable (and redundant) billing, because your provider may suddenly decide to exit the industry with almost no warning. Some variation of this same problem exists for most of the cloud services you commonly take for granted - CDNs, email delivery, support desk, etc. It has gotten somewhat better over the last seven years, but you will often feel hobbled compared to developing "normal" software.[2] * It is hard to hire good people - yeah, even harder than it is for normal development jobs. This surprised me. I have a large and talented social circle to draw from, but a couple key individuals rebuffed my intense lobbying. These are progressive, sex-positive Bay Area folk who would have loved to come work with me, but couldn't accept the inevitable explanation to their mother-in-law what they did for a living. Some of my team hid their employer from their extended families. * The salary is good, but there is no other long-term upside. Adult companies don't go public, and the few that broke this rule have been fiascos. You won't get stock options, and even if you did you couldn't sell them. Unless you're a founder and getting a direct share of the profit, negotiate hard for cash. * If you're in a production house like Kink, technology is not at the top of the totem pole. My department was 10 people out of a 100-person company and remember, it's the content bringing in the customers. Combined with the pay differential between production staff vs technology staff, it can produce ugly politics. At one point the head of production got a list of all the salaries in the company and exploded at me. I had to patiently explain to her that we pay six-figure salaries because that's what you have to pay to get technology employees, and we still had unfilled job openings. I'm sure there are politics at department head level at all big companies, but the cultural gap between unrelated fields didn't help.[3] * Speaking of a 100-person production shop, a significant part of your responsibility is to support internal users. It's not nearly as glamorous or fun as building customer-facing software, especially when you start with a rotting pile of hastily-developed internal tools. But this is just as important for keeping the porn flowing as managing the data center. On the other hand, internal users would have your entire team perpetually building software for them and the paying customers wouldn't get any new features. Marketing has an agenda too. It's a balancing act very different from life in a startup where all you do every day is add features to your product. That probably sounds more grim than it was. There were some fantastic things: * Building software that millions of users around the world actually use. Gigabits of traffic, zillions of hits per day. It wasn't Google traffic, but it was a hell of a lot more interesting than business apps or yet another game that EA was going to cancel on me. If you work in the porn biz, you will almost certainly get enough real users to feel like someone cares. * Working with fun, creative people. The set builders and directors were making art cars and art flicks in their spare time. Kink was a very hair-down kind of place - it was actually fun to go into the office. To me it felt like a big family - sometimes warm, sometimes squabbling, always chaotic. * Office parties... oh, the office parties. Friday after work was happy hour for employees and friends of employees in the Bar Set, which conveniently was also a fully stocked bar. Guest listing was coveted and most nights ended in the massive Hot Tub Set on the roof of the building. I met a lot of great people at these parties, including my wife. I'm not saying this will happen at every porn company (it doesn't even happen at Kink anymore), but it's hard to imagine it happening at nonporn companies. * I loved the moment when you meet people at cocktail parties and they inevitably ask you what you do for a living. "Pornographer." In case you are wondering: * Yes, porn gets boring. The novelty of looking at your coworkers naked wears off fast. * Most pornstars are pretty much just like everyone else out of costume. For some it is a hobby/thrill and a convenient source of extra spending money (maybe $1-2k for a day). Most have what I would call a healthy attitude about pornography and BDSM, but there are a handful of damaged ones. * If you're considering working in porn, the main question I would ask is: Would you be embarrassed to put it on your resume? Some people are very self conscious, worried what future employers might think. IMHO those concerns are overblown. If you can "own it", don't be afraid of the industry. That said... there are definitely some awful companies in the industry (as there are everywhere) so do your due diligence. [1] This is not criticism. The hard problems in porn are 1) marketing content and 2) producing content. If you solve those two problems, you have a thriving business no matter what your technology stack looks like. #1 is way more complicated than you imagine. [2] In 2006 there was one CDN which would handle porn - Limelight Networks - and they were getting sued by Akamai over patents. It cost $30/Mbit (95th percentile) at volume. Now you have your pick of dozens, at rates a small fraction of that. This chart is what allowed the explosion of tube sites: http://drpeering.net/AskDrPeering/blog/articles/Ask_DrPeering/Entries/2012/1/3_CDN_Pricing_Trend.html http://drpeering.net/AskDrPeering/blog/articles/Ask_DrPeerin... [3] It's also possible that Type A personalities naturally rise to the top of a BDSM company.
rasz 6y ago
I did a small contract involving scrapping pr0n websites (top ~20). Most are using very similar back-end infrastructure (similar/same apis, storage structure, data formats), leading me to believe there might be maybe 3-4 owners and the rest is just branding/business siloing. Obvious one is the titan MindGeek and its pronhub tube8 youporn redtube xtube, but even smaller ones are run in this way like porntrex/shameless. Then there is user facing tech stack, with majority using https://videojs.com/ https://videojs.com/ player, HLS is very rare, pretty much >90% just serve mp4 files.
- c3534l 6y ago
  There is most definitely some kind of porn site white-label thing going on.
john4534243 6y ago
How about the ML stack ? Looks like porn sites has improved the recommendation systems a lot over the years.
aasasd 6y ago
YouPorn made a big-ish article about their stack, ten years ago or so. The backend in particular was of interest for me. For that time when clusters just started getting popular, they were rather exceptional in their scale and thus performance requirements: notably they put HAProxy in front of multiple replicas of Redis, for the throughput—while for me Redis was the second-fastest thing around after Memcached. Also apparently they were massively into using syslogd for logging and statistics—with a multi-tier setup where nodes aggregate entries from other ones. Again, that's before logstash and such plus Elasticsearch became widespread.
zxcvbn4038 6y ago
I had a brief stent at a company that hosted some adult sites - it was really awesome because there were people constantly trying to hack the sites and get the restricted content, it really kept you on your toes. My dream job would be someplace like pornhub. Even if their stack isn’t the latest and greatest, the challenges that come with their scale has got to be over the top amazing. Like Cloudflare level amazing. I’m on the wrong side of the country for both, but I can still dream...
vanusa 6y ago
I’m very proud to work on these products, those close to me are aware and fascinated by it. It’s always an amazing source of conversation, jokes and is genuinely interesting. I wouldn't say porn sites are the most regressive (or otherwise evil) thing in the world, by any stretch. There's much, much worse stuff going on out there. But the complete absence of any introspection as to the obvious negative side effects of the product he helps push -- not to mention the notoriously exploitive aspects of the industry that creates that product -- all wrapped up in an almost sheepish "What's not to like?" attitude -- is, sadly, quite typical for Big Tech.

298 points by brlnwest 6y ago

Most interesting bit for me was to hear --- Most of our sites use the following as a base: Nginx PHP MySQL Memcached and/or Redis

vga805 6y ago
What did you find interesting about this? Seems like a typical stack to me.
- UweSchmidt 6y ago
  The stack of a major site could include words you haven't heard yet, prompting urgent studying. Or it could be a bunch of traditional stuff like here, implying a whole lot of new tech could be overhyped. If they can do it with PHP and MySQL, why not your project? :-)
  - kradroy 6y ago
    I worked at the second largest adult content network about 10 years ago. They used the same stack mentioned in the article. The design philosophy was about simplicity and continuity above all. They didn't want to use newer technology because it's hard to find people to support it. They didn't even like you to use regular expressions when case statements could be used. Regex is too conceptually complicated. If you can host and serve porn on a LAMP stack from a traditional bare metal server data center, the guy on the other end doesn't care as long as it's reliable. I work at a large tech company now and it amazes me how terribly executed and unnecessarily complex most development efforts are. There was a very strong results-oriented culture at the adult media company.
    - pantaloony 6y ago
      It's funny how in 2020 PHP use is a sharply bimodal signal—it either means your tech leadership is clueless/absent/hopelessly-terrible, or they are among the few who've achieved true enlightenment.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
        PHP is a very robust, debugged, proven, workhorse language, with millions of pages of documentation, tens (probably hundreds) of thousands of seasoned developers, huge libraries and communities of support, decades of experience, strong, universal, server support, and is used on a lot of "big pipe" servers. Like C++, it's not going anywhere, anytime soon; despite all the kvetching about it. That said, I don't especially like the language, but I knew that I needed to use it, if I wanted to design an infrastructure system that I could throw over the wall to be taken over by a bunch of other people. I was right. There's that old urban myth about the fancy space pen, vs. the pencil.[0] [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...
        cutler 6y ago
        In many ways I preferred PHP4. Can't stand all the pseudo-Java in PHP5+.
        spoopyskelly 6y ago
        You can still (mostly) code in PHP4 style and ignore all the new cruft and syntactic sugar they added over the years. And you get the performance boost of 7.x for "free".
        cutler 6y ago
        Yes, I suppose what really worries me about the "Modern PHP" movement how it looks down on anything that isn't Java-style OO. Procedural PHP is now considered to be some kind of unwashed Cinderella. I cringe when I look at a typical PSR-compliant page of PHP with its K&R braces, blank lines between each line of code and fanfold doc comments. You're lucky if you get more than a handful of lines of business logic on a screen.
    - hef19898 6y ago
      It's crazy how conservative most high-reliablity high-volume stuff is on the technical side. And yet, especially the porn industry, is quite on the fore front of other tech, like VR, DVD, VCR,...
      - mywittyname 6y ago
        They don't seem any different from other industries in this respect. A lot of banks still run on systems originally designed in the 60s. So they are conservative from an operations perspective. But most of the big ones have no issues pumping money into the latest financial fad, so they are pretty flexible from a product perspective. Their content is relatively cheap to produce and it tends to be churned out at a high frequency. There's almost no industry out there that matches the frequency of content they produce, except maybe radio (and now YouTube). And with new technology, the limiting factor is almost always content creation. So it makes sense that they'd put aside a few dollars buy some new equipment for some trend. Doing a VR shoot probably involves a new camera and a plugin for Premiere.
    - mpfundstein 6y ago
      i truly believe that a lot of devs make stuff often much more difficult than necessary JUST for the sake of it. reason is probably that the main product is boring af, so you need some distraction to keep it interesting :-)
    - choward 6y ago
      > They didn't even like you to use regular expressions when case statements could be used. I'm confused. How are those two related? Case statements can replace if statements and can be used for exhaustiveness checking. Regexes are for parsing strings.
      - sbarre 6y ago
        I think the point was that even within the codebase, simplicity and reduced complexity was preferred over perhaps a "cleaner" or more advanced approach. So managing a bunch of hard-coded code paths via a switch instead of using a regex to pattern-match. It's less future-proof, but even an entry-level dev can reason about a switch statement and update it as needed.
        kradroy 6y ago
        This is exactly it. The nuances of regex patterns can be misconstrued. Obviously if the regex used for flow control cannot be sensibly translated to more traditional conditional statements, then they are permitted. Even in that case, the "simplest" regex was preferred.
      - praptak 6y ago
        All of the stuff you can do with regexes can be done with some hand written code. Since thst code often implements the FSM for the regex, it contains a fair share of case statements. The benefit is that the regex library costs a lot in hidden complexity - debugging why a particular regex works slowly or eats lots of memory is hard. If a similar problem pops up in hand written code, you can use your standard profilers and other tools to see what's happening.
        cutler 6y ago
        I can't begin to imagine how much MORE complicated reproducing a regex long-hand might be. They were invented to solve real problems.
        6y ago
  - Dirlewanger 6y ago
    Because my resume needs new tech buzzwords to look good to recruiters/hiring managers.
    - kradroy 6y ago
      Very true, which is why I, as a manager, ask senior devs during interviews why they made those choices and how they integrated and deployed the changes. In a lot of cases it turns out their flashy new tech choices were for one-off greenfield projects that were support systems and not primary production systems. I'm usually more interested in how they improved prod systems using the existing stack. This helps me figure out if they're into maintenance work or if they're only interested in tinkering with shiny new things. Both activities have their places on dev teams, but I take it consideration for the actual role I'm filling.
  - ravenstine 6y ago
    Yeah, reading too much HN might make you think that the only way to write a scalable website is to write your backend in Rust, use Kubernetes, Cassandra w/ PostgreSQL, Kafka, and Hadoop, and TypeScript w/ Webpack and complex functions compiled to WASM.
    - cutler 6y ago
      The K8 cult annoys me most. When Kubernetes and Docker hit the scene YAGNI was the idiomatic response to any scaling scenario which involved less than a massive fleet of servers. Now every solo dev looking to launch his tiny Node app on AWS is expected to use Docker and Kubernetes. Utter madness.
nitrix 6y ago
Another former developer here [1][2]; the memcached cluster is what keeps the entire thing afloat. We used to have dedicated 50 Gbps fiber connections straight between the web and memcached nodes, but now the caching is done locally on the web servers with a lot more of them. I would say there's probably something like 100+ servers, 128/256GB RAM each. All the pages are server-side rendered. Every DB query, every DAO object instantiated, every partial/full page HTML render, even some functions at times, gets put into cache. We weren't really afraid of high traffic, that scaled almost on its own... instead we were afraid of infrastructure maintenance or bad manipulations, because too much of the cache could disappear at once. The most incredible part to me was the storage and delivery of the video content. Try to picture 7000 petabytes [3] :) [1] https://www.pornhub.com/humans.txt https://www.pornhub.com/humans.txt [2] https://github.com/nitrix https://github.com/nitrix [3] https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review
- Mikushi 6y ago
  > All the pages are server-side rendered I should add that this wasn't out of optimisation, just "old-school" PHP+Html with an MVC framework to serve the rendered page. Still can't beat that in my view. > The most incredible part to me was the storage and delivery of the video content That was the fun bit, I still remember the logistic of opening a new origin for the CDN back in 2010 (11 maybe?). Flying hard drives, can't beat that bandwidth. (Former developer here as well, however from before this humans.txt was introduced)
  - Throwaway958 6y ago
    Former Ashley Madison here with basically the same tech stack.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- neoform 6y ago
  Hello fellow former PH dev. ;)
- 6y ago
drdaeman 6y ago
I'm curious is if there was experimentation or not, and what's their attitude towards this. It totally makes sense to use PHP and MySQL as it's what already works, and because there's a team who knows how to use those correctly in this kind of environment. I just wonder if they have a research-oriented team that could experiment with whatever they see as a potential fit and see if they can improve performance, developer experience (without sacrificing performance) or both. Or if they don't (and if so - why?) Facebook is kind of famous for this, as they came up with HipHop VM and Hack.
- Mikushi 6y ago
  We experimented with HHVM, had a preview version of it very early on but ultimately the extension support was too bad and the performance gain just not impressive enough to justify moving away from the existing stack. We didn't have a research-oriented team per say, but myself and a colleague (I was Lead Dev and he Senior) did spend a lot of time experimenting with things like Redis (back when it was very early and "unproven"), varnish, PHP engine tweaks, custom extensions, ... We still did feature work and regular stuff too.
etxm 6y ago
I worked at SG years back (~2005) and that was the stack sans-redis. On my resume I don’t list the company name. In its place it says “social network centered around ‘art’” because we weren’t allowed to call it porn.

bkane521 6y ago

Looks like it was hugged to death. Internet archive link here: https://web.archive.org/web/20200724225904/https://davidwalsh.name/pornhub-interview https://web.archive.org/web/20200724225904/https://davidwals...

uxcolumbo 6y ago

Can't access the interview at the moment. Was this trafficking topic discussed [0], i.e. the site hosts criminal content and the owners apparently didn't do anything about it. [0] https://traffickinghub.com/ https://traffickinghub.com/ Criminal Content = child pornography, rape videos and filmed exploitation. Edit: Clarity

mercer 6y ago
No, I was kind of hoping the interview would go into the ethics of it all beyond just 'how do your friends react?'
- uxcolumbo 6y ago
  Yes exactly. I wonder how the developers feel - working for a leadership team / company that apparently doesn't care much about ethics.
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    I wonder how the developers feel - working for a leadership team / company that apparently doesn't care much about ethics You could ask the same of any adtech employees.
    - uxcolumbo 6y ago
      Not sure you can compare standard adtech companies with Pornhub. Nothing wrong with consuming content that increases sexual excitement, but there are more ethical options out there [0]. If we as consumers care about this then at least we can vote with our wallet or attention. [0] https://mashable.com/article/pornhub-alternatives-free-porn-paid-porn/ https://mashable.com/article/pornhub-alternatives-free-porn-...
      - inDigiNeous 6y ago
        Well, you could argue that widespread porn has massive implications on how people think about other people. I mean, why is it normal that we as a society prioritize access to porn so much ? Why is it possible, in under 5 seconds probably, see even the most hardcore act of non-humanizing act of sexual expression that we can imagine ? Can this be good for the general thought process of humans, that you get to grow up with these very visual images of adults having sex that is so far fetched from what making love actually can be between two people ? At least for me personally it has taken a lot of willpower not to look at porn anymore, and I'm willing to admit it. I wish the children wouldn't have access to porn where ever they go. I mean, why is this not an issue ? Is is it because we are afraid to admit that watching porn can cause issues in our thinking ? How it objectifies women, and how these visual images can take up our thinking during the day, how these overly tuned sexual images actually can hijack our thinking and focus on only lust and sexual thoughts all the time, thinking about the woman on the street as a object to be used rather than an person? And what about the effects porn can have on the self worth of men, who are looking to perform like these actors on the screen and compare themselves to them when making love ? I have a hard time understanding why porn is being normalized, why we as a society are not thinking about the negative effects it has on our society, especially young people who are now growing up with this content available from every device they choose to use. There are many psychological issues related to watching porn and also there is the issue of having to resist the urge during the day if you have ever started the habit, I mean you can access it from anywhere, you just have to google and there you are. I wish there would be some moral compass when it comes to working to porn companies, or talking about porn, or supporting this idea that porn is just part of everyday life, when in fact it is far for a healthy thing to be thinking about. Of course, there are sides to this, maybe porn can reduce the amount of rapes and non-conforming sexual acts, but those should be considered morally wrong anyway and guided towards educating our children to restraining their urges towards that anyway. It kinda irks me that in this discussion also porn is just seen as something very normal, when in reality for example 30 years ago porn was not everywhere. Now it is just couple of clicks away, and your mind can be filled with people gagging stuff down other peoples throats, people being choked, violent acts of sex and all kinds of impossible beauty standards to fill. Imagine showing these acts to a five year old and what is going on in his mind while he watches this ? Imagine a 10 year old obsessively thinking about the act he saw, and not being able to forget it, as it is triggering something very primal in his still developing mind ? Image thinking that is normal, and that is how you treat people. To me, this is just a sign of a sick society, and we should as parents and people who are aware talk about the harmful sides of widespread normalization of porn. It is not allright. If you are working on porn, you are causing possible millions of people to possible get hooked into this act of loosing their vitality (sexual energy) in front of their devices every day. This is a fact. This is a direct loss in creativity also, in yogic traditions creativity is considered to be coming from the sexual energy, so everyday we are loosing so much creativity to the fact that people are just jacking off to virtual images. And I'm not even touching the widespread and common abuse of young women entering the field, possible traumatizing them for life, when thinking that a porn actress career would be something to pursue. And this is all because companies like PornHub don't just care, all they care about is making a profit in the end from ad revenues, by trying to maximize profit on the weak willedness of their viewers. To me, that is immoral and something that should not be supported. PornHub acts like they're all cool and that, and it's hip to view porn, but actually they are just a hightech pimp selling to the lowest common denominator and taking advantage of people in the process. I hope everyone who works for the porn industry, thinks about their actions and what consequences it ultimately can have on our society. Anyway, that is just my view on this, hoping that this will spark some thoughts on the subject. I have recovered from porn addiction, and I am more happy because of that. But it is just a few clicks away, and sometimes I still have to struggle with these thoughts taking over.

eric4smith 6y ago

Back in the day I did work at a group of one of the largest adult websites. Tech was PhP, MySQL, memcache and similar vanilla stuff running on many Linux servers - pretty simple stuff. The trick was performance. Simple stupid mistakes that would not be detected in sites that have low traffic become enormous problems in a high traffic server. Pretty much nothing was dynamic and we wrote scripts to create static pages for almost everything except search and authentication. Things like logging just could not be done. It was easier to load a bunch of data in memory on a request and process it instead of running a slightly slower SQL query, since a ton of those could kill the database. And yes, there were no placeholder images or videos. After some time you just get used to it and code. But I have to say you get pretty desensitized to it and when I resigned from that job my life in that area improved quite a lot. Highlights were p*rn stars and random celebs visiting the office - but after some time that got kind of meh. The job itself was just a programming gig and very professional except for the images on the screen which we learned to ignore. On the whole, the guys who ran the thing were a pretty solid and great bunch of people and it was one of the best dev experiences in my long career.

suddenstutter 6y ago
What celebs would visit? There are unwritten rules and pr guidelines for celebs not to mix with the porn industry, strange that they would randomly show up at one of the biggest porn sites offices.
wdb 6y ago
Yes, I think the desensizing is the biggest problem and you get less interested about it all.
- mistrial9 6y ago
  long ago (before the Internet) I spoke with a woman who 'performed' in such videos. She said she was a user of pain killers (addict), and second she urged me sincerely not to watch the products; sad situation in the flesh.
twic 6y ago

eloff 6y ago

>We are generally at the forefront of trends and big changes in tech as they roll out, which keeps it fun and challenging. Still phasing out jQuery and using php and mysql. I'm sure their streaming tech and video player are cutting edge, but otherwise their stack sounds like a large, legacy webapp.

xrisk 6y ago
if it ain't broke, don't fix it
Nextgrid 6y ago
A "legacy" web app that happens to perform at the same scale as YouTube. Maybe there's nothing wrong with using simple, battle-tested technologies after all?
- eloff 6y ago
  Seems I rubbed some people the wrong way. That's ok. PHP is a disgusting language. Of the over twenty languages where I have more than passing familiarity, PHP and Perl are the worst. There are better options almost irrespective of the use case. JQuery was fine back in the day, but there are much better options now too. If you find yourself working with these technologies, and you don't like it, find a new job. You couldn't pay me to work with them anymore.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    I wasn’t actually commenting about the language itself, more about the fact that you can go very far with just a server-side language and powerful hardware without having to use overhyped stuff like microservices and/or Kubernetes which apparently everyone thinks is a must-have nowadays.
    - eloff 6y ago
      Sure, just about anything could work. With a dynamic language your hardware requirements will be about 10x more. But that's a tradeoff you might want for possibly faster development time.

acatton 6y ago

> We actually don’t use placeholders when we are developing the sites! In the end, what matters is the code and functionality, the interface is something we are very used to at this point. Interesting... 5 years ago I was contacted by a recruiter for a job offer in a (sic) "non-standard industry". Back then, "fullstack development" was the job trend for "people who deal with computers". During the first call, she told me her client was the biggest adult website in my EU country of origin. She insisted that the working environment was (sic) "clean". I raised that topic during my interview with their CTO. He told me the opposite of this post: devs were running the website locally with place-holders and innocent cartoons videos. He was straight-forward about it and mentioned "of course, once in a while you have check an issue on the live website, the way we handle this is by joking about the live content between us." For those interested, they had a pretty standard stack for such a high volume website. Postgres, Django, Redis and RabbitMQ with an HAProxy frontend.

raziel2p 6y ago
I doubt the interviewee meant "we" as in the entire adult entertainment industry, just their particular employer or team.
- acatton 6y ago
  Oh.. Sorry, maybe my phrasing was wrong. I was just surprised that some adult websites would just not do that. If it sounded like I was implying that he was talking about the entire industry, that was not my intent.
jilles 6y ago
I am actually very curious what adult website uses Django? My understanding was that most of them are written in PHP and re-used across various domain names.
- conradfr 6y ago
  Jacquie et Michel, which is a very popular site in France, uses Django.

arecurrence 6y ago

I stumbled into a meet and greet with these guys a few years ago. The recruiter invited me to an event for one of the world's largest content distributors. The role actually sounded really interesting and I assumed this was a corporate edition of CloudFlare but upon entering the social... ...well they had pornhub signs everywhere. They ended up being a really cool group to meet. Very interesting people with a lot going on in their lives. They had a strong entrepreneurial culture and many employees had their own companies on the side. Their home base is Montreal; it sounded like it didn't pay as well as other areas... but they were quick to point out that the cost of living is among the lowest in North America and that Montreal is a really cool city (This is true). The most significant thing I remember is a surprising number of people walking by tried to get into the event. :)

blue52 6y ago

What filth.

nicodds 6y ago

If you think about it, the adult-media field is scalable by design

therealdrag0 6y ago
Are you saying they know how to grow their content to show users? And they have no problem handling any load dumped on them?

bigtunacan 6y ago

Some things I'm curious about are not addressed in the article. First, how does the pay compare to industry standard? Second, for people that have moved out of the industry how did it impact your future opportunities? I feel like it would be more difficult to find new employment outside the industry due to the negative stigma attached.

distrill 6y ago
> I feel like it would be more difficult to find new employment outside the industry due to the negative stigma attached. I don't share this feeling at all. None of my peers would have any stigma attached to anyone we knew worked in this industry. In fact, if anything the opposite would be true. The porn industry deals with scale that most others don't, and often leads innovation on things like video players. It's not uncommon to see youtube copy features that showed up first on a porn site.
- alphachloride 6y ago
  I do not know if one data point, or an anecdotal observation, can be generalized. A good measure would be to look at companies developers worked for after leaving an adult website (for e.g. MindGeek aka Pornhub). And then look at average pay change, duration of stay etc.
  - distrill 6y ago
    Sure, but as far as I can tell nobody in this comment thread is proposing a generalization be derived. We were both sharing how we felt about people having worked in the porn industry.
- wtracy 6y ago
  I don't care whether my peers feel any stigma. I care about what the hiring manager feels. I'm convinced that the mid/upper management at the B2B companies I've worked at (and the one defense contractor I've worked at) would not be pleased. OTOH, Google, Facebook, and Amazon probably wouldn't care. Of course, I've never worked for an adult entertainment network, so I don't actually know.

intellix 6y ago

Am working in the online casino industry and was always told that porn sites are at the forefront of technology but based on this interview it seems that pornhub are clearly not

protonfish 6y ago
It possible that they are using the best current tech and what is fashionable right now is actually garbage that would never work for a high volume, easily maintainable site.
- Mikushi 6y ago
  Bingo. Modern web dev has actually made me hate my job, it's a nightmare for no real value. Source: Former Pornhub dev as well.
  - cutler 6y ago
    Did I get this right in that you would rather be back at Pornhub where they don't indulge all the whims of modern web dev?
- TallGuyShort 6y ago
  I'm relieved to see others with this sentiment. I enjoyed full-stack (including front-end) development back when JQuery was just starting to be a thing. Now when I have to dig into these layers where you have an Angular components wrapped inside some React stuff that's all part of an Elm app I just hit a mental block too fast. I don't understand how anyone can reason about their code in such an environment...
  - cutler 6y ago
    Angular inside React inside Elm??? Does such a thing really exist or did I miss the hyperbole?
    - 6y ago

stickfigure 6y ago

I wrote something similar for Quora some years ago. Since Quora links seem to be a faux pas on HN, I'll paste it here in its entirety: ----- What is it like to work on the development team for a porn site? I was the Chief Technology Officer of Kink.com 2006-2007. I will say in advance that every company is different and my experience will not necessarily resemble the experience you will have at another company (or even Kink today). There's more variation among companies than among industries. Still, here are my observations: * There's a lot of really awful technology in the porn business. It's the content that sells, not the technology. You'll be amazed by how many thriving businesses are "my first PHP project".[1] When I arrived at Kink, the core infrastructure was essentially a system that processed credit cards and inserted a username/password into an apache dbm file. No CRM, not even any idea if bob123 on one site is the same person as bob123 on another site. Most porn sites start like this, so expect to deal with a lot of legacy code. * Third-party tools and services generally suck. The really great payment systems like Stripe and WePay won't touch adult content, so you're left with third-tier processors who can barely keep their sites online. A disproportionate amount of your concentration will focus on reliable (and redundant) billing, because your provider may suddenly decide to exit the industry with almost no warning. Some variation of this same problem exists for most of the cloud services you commonly take for granted - CDNs, email delivery, support desk, etc. It has gotten somewhat better over the last seven years, but you will often feel hobbled compared to developing "normal" software.[2] * It is hard to hire good people - yeah, even harder than it is for normal development jobs. This surprised me. I have a large and talented social circle to draw from, but a couple key individuals rebuffed my intense lobbying. These are progressive, sex-positive Bay Area folk who would have loved to come work with me, but couldn't accept the inevitable explanation to their mother-in-law what they did for a living. Some of my team hid their employer from their extended families. * The salary is good, but there is no other long-term upside. Adult companies don't go public, and the few that broke this rule have been fiascos. You won't get stock options, and even if you did you couldn't sell them. Unless you're a founder and getting a direct share of the profit, negotiate hard for cash. * If you're in a production house like Kink, technology is not at the top of the totem pole. My department was 10 people out of a 100-person company and remember, it's the content bringing in the customers. Combined with the pay differential between production staff vs technology staff, it can produce ugly politics. At one point the head of production got a list of all the salaries in the company and exploded at me. I had to patiently explain to her that we pay six-figure salaries because that's what you have to pay to get technology employees, and we still had unfilled job openings. I'm sure there are politics at department head level at all big companies, but the cultural gap between unrelated fields didn't help.[3] * Speaking of a 100-person production shop, a significant part of your responsibility is to support internal users. It's not nearly as glamorous or fun as building customer-facing software, especially when you start with a rotting pile of hastily-developed internal tools. But this is just as important for keeping the porn flowing as managing the data center. On the other hand, internal users would have your entire team perpetually building software for them and the paying customers wouldn't get any new features. Marketing has an agenda too. It's a balancing act very different from life in a startup where all you do every day is add features to your product. That probably sounds more grim than it was. There were some fantastic things: * Building software that millions of users around the world actually use. Gigabits of traffic, zillions of hits per day. It wasn't Google traffic, but it was a hell of a lot more interesting than business apps or yet another game that EA was going to cancel on me. If you work in the porn biz, you will almost certainly get enough real users to feel like someone cares. * Working with fun, creative people. The set builders and directors were making art cars and art flicks in their spare time. Kink was a very hair-down kind of place - it was actually fun to go into the office. To me it felt like a big family - sometimes warm, sometimes squabbling, always chaotic. * Office parties... oh, the office parties. Friday after work was happy hour for employees and friends of employees in the Bar Set, which conveniently was also a fully stocked bar. Guest listing was coveted and most nights ended in the massive Hot Tub Set on the roof of the building. I met a lot of great people at these parties, including my wife. I'm not saying this will happen at every porn company (it doesn't even happen at Kink anymore), but it's hard to imagine it happening at nonporn companies. * I loved the moment when you meet people at cocktail parties and they inevitably ask you what you do for a living. "Pornographer." In case you are wondering: * Yes, porn gets boring. The novelty of looking at your coworkers naked wears off fast. * Most pornstars are pretty much just like everyone else out of costume. For some it is a hobby/thrill and a convenient source of extra spending money (maybe $1-2k for a day). Most have what I would call a healthy attitude about pornography and BDSM, but there are a handful of damaged ones. * If you're considering working in porn, the main question I would ask is: Would you be embarrassed to put it on your resume? Some people are very self conscious, worried what future employers might think. IMHO those concerns are overblown. If you can "own it", don't be afraid of the industry. That said... there are definitely some awful companies in the industry (as there are everywhere) so do your due diligence. [1] This is not criticism. The hard problems in porn are 1) marketing content and 2) producing content. If you solve those two problems, you have a thriving business no matter what your technology stack looks like. #1 is way more complicated than you imagine. [2] In 2006 there was one CDN which would handle porn - Limelight Networks - and they were getting sued by Akamai over patents. It cost $30/Mbit (95th percentile) at volume. Now you have your pick of dozens, at rates a small fraction of that. This chart is what allowed the explosion of tube sites: http://drpeering.net/AskDrPeering/blog/articles/Ask_DrPeering/Entries/2012/1/3_CDN_Pricing_Trend.html http://drpeering.net/AskDrPeering/blog/articles/Ask_DrPeerin... [3] It's also possible that Type A personalities naturally rise to the top of a BDSM company.

rasz 6y ago

I did a small contract involving scrapping pr0n websites (top ~20). Most are using very similar back-end infrastructure (similar/same apis, storage structure, data formats), leading me to believe there might be maybe 3-4 owners and the rest is just branding/business siloing. Obvious one is the titan MindGeek and its pronhub tube8 youporn redtube xtube, but even smaller ones are run in this way like porntrex/shameless. Then there is user facing tech stack, with majority using https://videojs.com/ https://videojs.com/ player, HLS is very rare, pretty much >90% just serve mp4 files.

c3534l 6y ago
There is most definitely some kind of porn site white-label thing going on.

john4534243 6y ago

How about the ML stack ? Looks like porn sites has improved the recommendation systems a lot over the years.

aasasd 6y ago

YouPorn made a big-ish article about their stack, ten years ago or so. The backend in particular was of interest for me. For that time when clusters just started getting popular, they were rather exceptional in their scale and thus performance requirements: notably they put HAProxy in front of multiple replicas of Redis, for the throughput—while for me Redis was the second-fastest thing around after Memcached. Also apparently they were massively into using syslogd for logging and statistics—with a multi-tier setup where nodes aggregate entries from other ones. Again, that's before logstash and such plus Elasticsearch became widespread.

zxcvbn4038 6y ago

I had a brief stent at a company that hosted some adult sites - it was really awesome because there were people constantly trying to hack the sites and get the restricted content, it really kept you on your toes. My dream job would be someplace like pornhub. Even if their stack isn’t the latest and greatest, the challenges that come with their scale has got to be over the top amazing. Like Cloudflare level amazing. I’m on the wrong side of the country for both, but I can still dream...

vanusa 6y ago

I’m very proud to work on these products, those close to me are aware and fascinated by it. It’s always an amazing source of conversation, jokes and is genuinely interesting. I wouldn't say porn sites are the most regressive (or otherwise evil) thing in the world, by any stretch. There's much, much worse stuff going on out there. But the complete absence of any introspection as to the obvious negative side effects of the product he helps push -- not to mention the notoriously exploitive aspects of the industry that creates that product -- all wrapped up in an almost sheepish "What's not to like?" attitude -- is, sadly, quite typical for Big Tech.