8 ms·

> A lot of sex workers overtly reinforce social behaviors towards women (sexualization and objectification among other things) in order to appeal to men, which

by brazzy 5y ago

> A lot of sex workers overtly reinforce social behaviors towards women (sexualization and objectification among other things) in order to appeal to men, which hurts them in the long run. This is something that's really been bugging me when looking at Reddit's porn subs. There has been a really noticeable change in the last 2 years. Back then, a majority of the posters seemed to actually be amateurs getting their kicks from online exhibitionism. Now it's 99% OnlyFans advertising. I guess that professionalization was bound to happen. But what bugs me are the titles: they used to be descriptions of the content, sometimes addressing the audience as a whole. But now, most titles personally address the viewer with things like "Be honest, would you lick it?". I bet that raises engagement and gets subscriptions, but seems like a really bad idea in terms of, as you wrote, mental health for the women, and reinforcing toxic attitudes among the men.

tinco 5y ago
The titles on sites like pornhub are a lot worse. Sometimes I feel like they're automatically generated or something, with weird sexual fantasies that aren't even remotely in the video. It's become a bit of a meme, and it certainly has always been present but for example the incest stuff, it's just disturbing to me to the point where I greatly prefer browsing on Reddit just because the titles are more tame. Another cultural thing, they've recently started automatically translating the titles to my native language, and I don't know why but the titles sound so much more vulgar in Dutch than they do in English to me. Automatic translation is always annoying but here it's especially jarring.
- toyg 5y ago
  >the titles sound so much more vulgar in Dutch than they do in English to me. It's the other way around: you're less emotionally connected to your second language. You're not phased by the most scurrilous elements of English, because of a combination of factors (like the way your brain processes a second language, and the fact that you did not grow up in a native English culture). Whereas you have a primary connection to Dutch and its native culture, so you instinctively know what is vulgar or disgusting in a much more direct way.
  - tut-urut-utut 5y ago
    This is so much true. It's almost like swearing in English is not swearing at all, even in semi-formal context. You can tell the worst swear in English you can think of, and it just sounds harmless compared to swearing in local language.
    - echelon 5y ago
      I'd posit English doesn't have swear words anymore. I'm a native English speaker and I've noticed that swearing no longer feels like a big deal. Our media and online discourse are saturated with the worst swears our language has to bear, to the point none of it hits with gravity. I also think some of it has to do with changing generational attitudes. Millennials and Gen Z use swearing as friendly banter. You can call your casual friend a "fucking asshole", and as long as you're smiling and laughing, it's an endearing gesture. And if it were truly meant as a jab, it doesn't even sting. The only words you can't (and shouldn't!) say are racial epithets. Those are untouchable. It's almost like what swear words themselves felt like when I was a child and knew I would be punished for saying "shit" or "damn".
      - astrange 5y ago
        You haven't been to Australia I see.
      - tablespoon 5y ago
        https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/what-george-carlin-got-wrong-about-profanity/618786/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/what-georg... > In medieval Bristol, one casually referred to a glade called Fuckinggrove, while up in Chester, one could proudly sport a name like Roger Fuckbythenavel. Only later did fuck become a word so dirty that generations of lexicographers pretended that it didn’t exist. And just as a word can attain the power of profane status, it can lose it.... > More broadly, while the sacred status of most of the words Carlin mentioned has weakened considerably, new words have arisen that occupy the same place in the culture. Aunt Ruth might have walked out of the room rather than listen to Carlin's disquisition when her nephew Craig played it on his record player. She seems so old-fashioned today, but how many of us would be up for watching a hot new comedian on Netflix gabbing cockily about how we need to get over n[*****] and f[*****]? Edit: in reply to dead comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27896373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27896373: I'm pretty sure your comment is dead because you didn't "prudishly" redact the words I did, but I can add the brackets if it makes you happy.
- brazzy 5y ago
  > The titles on sites like pornhub are a lot worse. I don't agree. Even the most misogynistic stuff there doesn't actively try to draw in the viewer to the same degree, and most importantly, it allows the women a much clearer separation of what they're doing before the camera and who they really are. They don't have to advertise it and tell random strangers "you can have that too!".
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  I feel like titles - both on PH and Youtube - tend to get optimized either automatically or by the uploaders themselves. It has overlaps with marketing and SEO, linkbait and optimizing page / article titles to draw in the most views. Youtube also - sometimes - translates video titles, which in some cases is convenient (like Japanese videos). But that's the thing, from a Dutch standpoint you can read English titles just fine, but sites like Pornhub, Youtube are international affairs, and assuming everyone knows some English, while fair enough, is not actually a global truth and there's plenty of non-western countries where English is a lot more uncommon. I do believe 'our' generation (in NL) knows good English because we grew up with the early internet, which was a lot bigger if you could read and write English. But the current generation is landing in a much more internationalized internet.
  - Dah00n 5y ago
    >It has overlaps with marketing and SEO Huh, I wonder if there are tools to do A B testing on sites like Pornhub..
    - dannyw 5y ago
      pornhub does this implicitly: the videos you see are the highest engaging winners.
      - 8note 5y ago
        I think YouTube lets you put multiple titles, and it'll automatically use the more engaging one
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  They're gaming the algo in order to check the most boxes. Every word you add is another tag or search your video is related to.
- throwaway234502 5y ago
  I'm turned off of the whole thing by how easy it is to end up watching something I would rather not, without knowing it. For example, if you're just browsing for thumbnails that look good, and you click forward to the action, there's a decent chance you're unknowingly watching some kind of rape or exploitation scenario. Some are just silly, like stepmom's arm is stuck in the couch, but others are sleazy and many would be crimes in real life. I don't think such content should be censored, but it doesn't make a great fantasy for me, and I don't like the undercurrent of wondering if my engagement with whatever video I'm watching is contributing to some marketing drone saying, "The stepdad-punishing-teen-daughter-with-sex genre is trending, let's push it hard today!" Another thing that vividly stuck in my mind was seeing a photo of an actress I recognized in a news headline: teen victim of car accident identified as 19-year-old runaway. The reason it stuck in my mind was the realization that I had been jerking off to her videos for easily four years, maybe longer. Such a thing shouldn't be shocking. If people will obtain forged proof of age documents to win Little League tournaments, they'll do it to make money, right? But that was pretty sobering and made it hard to look at young attractive women on my laptop without wondering how old they are and if maybe I should watch something else instead. Don't get me wrong; I don't abstain completely. I've just developed a distaste that keeps me away a lot of the times when otherwise I would gladly partake.
dspillett 5y ago
> Now it's 99% OnlyFans advertising. I guess that professionalization was bound to happen. It was, but the last couple of years have accelerated the process significantly beyond where it would otherwise have moved in this amount of time. The pandemic had created changes in both the supply (people jobless without support, or at least support that fully covered their living costs, people at home and bored, etc.) and demand (people working at home taking breaks in a way they couldn't at the office, people at home not working and bored and able to pay for it (supported by furlough schemes for instance), and people unable to pay but similarly bored and so future "I spent my savings and got into dept on porn" stories. > now, most titles personally address the viewer with things like That sounds like the good ol' "call to action" of the advertising world, it engages the mind, even if only subconsciously, especially if the wording means it could be directed personally, and gets more attention. If course when most titles follow the pattern the benefit will drop off precipitously but the pattern will stick around until the next big idea comes along and saturates the market. > and reinforcing toxic attitudes Including the "abuse of power" fantasies, either directly or through "she made me do it" inversions. Though porn has always had these there seems to have been a mad scramble towards "step family" crap in the role play as porn makers have realised it is legal in most places and recent (or recently surfaced) big scandals have made their previous go-to options (like the casting couch) less palettible. All the mainstream providers pushing the same thing, and the smaller/independent ones following so they appear in "related content" lists, poses a threat of normalising these dynamics in some minds which can put already vulnerable people at greater risk.
roenxi 5y ago
Probably bad for the mental health of the men too. As the thread ancestor noted - sometimes "'fan[s]' [go] nuclear and was waging all out digital war.". I'm guessing that is just a thing some men do but it is bound to be made worse by women correctly figuring out the high-engagement equilibrium is tantalising without promising. But a lot of them probably aren't going to realise that they're dealing with unexploded ordinance; that could foreseeably lead to some spectacular meltdowns for men who were already mental health edge cases when it dawns on them that their time is being wasted.
- paganel 5y ago
  > aren't going to realise that they're dealing with unexploded ordinance That's why in places like strip-clubs you usually have at least a couple of strongly-built bodyguards who can address this issue right there on the spot, on the Internet there is no such thing.
- frickinLasers 5y ago
  fyi, explosive "ordnance" is spelled without the i. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/506723/how-did-ordnance-lose-the-i https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/506723/how-did-o...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- flyinglizard 5y ago
  This is in no way exclusive to porn. After running a B2C business for a while I realized that if, as an owner, you should be wary of some people, it needs to be your biggest, most vocal fans. They are the most emotionally attached, feeling they’ve personally invested their money, time and faith into your brand and they are the most violent when disappointed. At some point they all expect special treatment, which makes disappointment that much easier. Of course not all fans are like this but it just takes a very vocal minority to create a big problem. But then again, it takes some insanity to become a brand fan in the first place. I’m sure that when trading desires and emotion like on OnlyFans, the things I’ve mentioned become 100x worse.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
Personally addressing the reader makes them engage more, tempts them into engaging with the author in comments or, if they're thirsty, DMs. It's like youtube videos where a repeated pattern is direct questions to answer in the comments, invitations to share your thoughts, or even games like including "hidden words" in the video. There's not even a reward or anything for finding it, but it's apparently enough for some people to feel involved.
- dannyw 5y ago
  Is this wrong at all? I like YouTube, particularly creators like Gamers Nexus/ Hardware Unboxed for example, and like it when they engage in discussions on reddit or discord. The internet connects people, sometimes 1:1, sometimes 1:N.
  - brazzy 5y ago
    It's wrong when it deliberately creates a promise of closeness that is completely illusionary. A Youtuber asking for comments they may or may not have the time to read is one thing, a camgirl writing 200 subscribers "Haven't seen you in a while, touching myself now imagining your dick inside me" is a very different thing.
    - cinntaile 5y ago
      I would argue that the same thing happens on Twitch, a completely fake "emotional" bond with your subscribers is created by live interacting with them. You also have whales tipping thousands of dollars.
  - 9dev 5y ago
    It's "wrong" (in the sense we're discussing here, that is, morally) if the invitation to engagement isn't an honest desire to communicate with viewers, but merely a marketing strategy to lure in more viewers to maximize ad spend.
- city41 5y ago
  I was always under the impression a video with more comments does better in YouTube's algorithms, so those schemes seemed more about pumping up the comment count rather than attempting to artificially engage people.
vagrantJin 5y ago
> reinforcing toxic attitudes among the men. Or it could just be normal, expected behaviour.
- brazzy 5y ago
  Expected by whom? I'm really not sure what you're trying to say.
  - kennyadam 5y ago
    I get strong 'it's just locker room talk' from their comment. Boys will be boys, etc.
  - vagrantJin 5y ago
    > viewer with things like "Be honest, would you lick it?". I bet that raises engagement and gets subscriptions, but seems like a really bad idea in terms of, as you wrote, mental health for the women, and reinforcing toxic attitudes among the men. I believe since this is HN, it isn't a radical claim to suggest reading/ comprehension isn't the problem. But since I can't make guarantees I'll give a succinct answer in the interests of time. Expected by whom? The Pope.

by brazzy 5y ago

tinco 5y ago

The titles on sites like pornhub are a lot worse. Sometimes I feel like they're automatically generated or something, with weird sexual fantasies that aren't even remotely in the video. It's become a bit of a meme, and it certainly has always been present but for example the incest stuff, it's just disturbing to me to the point where I greatly prefer browsing on Reddit just because the titles are more tame. Another cultural thing, they've recently started automatically translating the titles to my native language, and I don't know why but the titles sound so much more vulgar in Dutch than they do in English to me. Automatic translation is always annoying but here it's especially jarring.

toyg 5y ago
>the titles sound so much more vulgar in Dutch than they do in English to me. It's the other way around: you're less emotionally connected to your second language. You're not phased by the most scurrilous elements of English, because of a combination of factors (like the way your brain processes a second language, and the fact that you did not grow up in a native English culture). Whereas you have a primary connection to Dutch and its native culture, so you instinctively know what is vulgar or disgusting in a much more direct way.
- tut-urut-utut 5y ago
  This is so much true. It's almost like swearing in English is not swearing at all, even in semi-formal context. You can tell the worst swear in English you can think of, and it just sounds harmless compared to swearing in local language.
  - echelon 5y ago
    I'd posit English doesn't have swear words anymore. I'm a native English speaker and I've noticed that swearing no longer feels like a big deal. Our media and online discourse are saturated with the worst swears our language has to bear, to the point none of it hits with gravity. I also think some of it has to do with changing generational attitudes. Millennials and Gen Z use swearing as friendly banter. You can call your casual friend a "fucking asshole", and as long as you're smiling and laughing, it's an endearing gesture. And if it were truly meant as a jab, it doesn't even sting. The only words you can't (and shouldn't!) say are racial epithets. Those are untouchable. It's almost like what swear words themselves felt like when I was a child and knew I would be punished for saying "shit" or "damn".
    - astrange 5y ago
      You haven't been to Australia I see.
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/what-george-carlin-got-wrong-about-profanity/618786/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/what-georg... > In medieval Bristol, one casually referred to a glade called Fuckinggrove, while up in Chester, one could proudly sport a name like Roger Fuckbythenavel. Only later did fuck become a word so dirty that generations of lexicographers pretended that it didn’t exist. And just as a word can attain the power of profane status, it can lose it.... > More broadly, while the sacred status of most of the words Carlin mentioned has weakened considerably, new words have arisen that occupy the same place in the culture. Aunt Ruth might have walked out of the room rather than listen to Carlin's disquisition when her nephew Craig played it on his record player. She seems so old-fashioned today, but how many of us would be up for watching a hot new comedian on Netflix gabbing cockily about how we need to get over n[*****] and f[*****]? Edit: in reply to dead comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27896373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27896373: I'm pretty sure your comment is dead because you didn't "prudishly" redact the words I did, but I can add the brackets if it makes you happy.
brazzy 5y ago
> The titles on sites like pornhub are a lot worse. I don't agree. Even the most misogynistic stuff there doesn't actively try to draw in the viewer to the same degree, and most importantly, it allows the women a much clearer separation of what they're doing before the camera and who they really are. They don't have to advertise it and tell random strangers "you can have that too!".
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I feel like titles - both on PH and Youtube - tend to get optimized either automatically or by the uploaders themselves. It has overlaps with marketing and SEO, linkbait and optimizing page / article titles to draw in the most views. Youtube also - sometimes - translates video titles, which in some cases is convenient (like Japanese videos). But that's the thing, from a Dutch standpoint you can read English titles just fine, but sites like Pornhub, Youtube are international affairs, and assuming everyone knows some English, while fair enough, is not actually a global truth and there's plenty of non-western countries where English is a lot more uncommon. I do believe 'our' generation (in NL) knows good English because we grew up with the early internet, which was a lot bigger if you could read and write English. But the current generation is landing in a much more internationalized internet.
- Dah00n 5y ago
  >It has overlaps with marketing and SEO Huh, I wonder if there are tools to do A B testing on sites like Pornhub..
  - dannyw 5y ago
    pornhub does this implicitly: the videos you see are the highest engaging winners.
    - 8note 5y ago
      I think YouTube lets you put multiple titles, and it'll automatically use the more engaging one
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
They're gaming the algo in order to check the most boxes. Every word you add is another tag or search your video is related to.
throwaway234502 5y ago
I'm turned off of the whole thing by how easy it is to end up watching something I would rather not, without knowing it. For example, if you're just browsing for thumbnails that look good, and you click forward to the action, there's a decent chance you're unknowingly watching some kind of rape or exploitation scenario. Some are just silly, like stepmom's arm is stuck in the couch, but others are sleazy and many would be crimes in real life. I don't think such content should be censored, but it doesn't make a great fantasy for me, and I don't like the undercurrent of wondering if my engagement with whatever video I'm watching is contributing to some marketing drone saying, "The stepdad-punishing-teen-daughter-with-sex genre is trending, let's push it hard today!" Another thing that vividly stuck in my mind was seeing a photo of an actress I recognized in a news headline: teen victim of car accident identified as 19-year-old runaway. The reason it stuck in my mind was the realization that I had been jerking off to her videos for easily four years, maybe longer. Such a thing shouldn't be shocking. If people will obtain forged proof of age documents to win Little League tournaments, they'll do it to make money, right? But that was pretty sobering and made it hard to look at young attractive women on my laptop without wondering how old they are and if maybe I should watch something else instead. Don't get me wrong; I don't abstain completely. I've just developed a distaste that keeps me away a lot of the times when otherwise I would gladly partake.

dspillett 5y ago

> Now it's 99% OnlyFans advertising. I guess that professionalization was bound to happen. It was, but the last couple of years have accelerated the process significantly beyond where it would otherwise have moved in this amount of time. The pandemic had created changes in both the supply (people jobless without support, or at least support that fully covered their living costs, people at home and bored, etc.) and demand (people working at home taking breaks in a way they couldn't at the office, people at home not working and bored and able to pay for it (supported by furlough schemes for instance), and people unable to pay but similarly bored and so future "I spent my savings and got into dept on porn" stories. > now, most titles personally address the viewer with things like That sounds like the good ol' "call to action" of the advertising world, it engages the mind, even if only subconsciously, especially if the wording means it could be directed personally, and gets more attention. If course when most titles follow the pattern the benefit will drop off precipitously but the pattern will stick around until the next big idea comes along and saturates the market. > and reinforcing toxic attitudes Including the "abuse of power" fantasies, either directly or through "she made me do it" inversions. Though porn has always had these there seems to have been a mad scramble towards "step family" crap in the role play as porn makers have realised it is legal in most places and recent (or recently surfaced) big scandals have made their previous go-to options (like the casting couch) less palettible. All the mainstream providers pushing the same thing, and the smaller/independent ones following so they appear in "related content" lists, poses a threat of normalising these dynamics in some minds which can put already vulnerable people at greater risk.

roenxi 5y ago

Probably bad for the mental health of the men too. As the thread ancestor noted - sometimes "'fan[s]' [go] nuclear and was waging all out digital war.". I'm guessing that is just a thing some men do but it is bound to be made worse by women correctly figuring out the high-engagement equilibrium is tantalising without promising. But a lot of them probably aren't going to realise that they're dealing with unexploded ordinance; that could foreseeably lead to some spectacular meltdowns for men who were already mental health edge cases when it dawns on them that their time is being wasted.

paganel 5y ago
> aren't going to realise that they're dealing with unexploded ordinance That's why in places like strip-clubs you usually have at least a couple of strongly-built bodyguards who can address this issue right there on the spot, on the Internet there is no such thing.
frickinLasers 5y ago
fyi, explosive "ordnance" is spelled without the i. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/506723/how-did-ordnance-lose-the-i https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/506723/how-did-o...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
flyinglizard 5y ago
This is in no way exclusive to porn. After running a B2C business for a while I realized that if, as an owner, you should be wary of some people, it needs to be your biggest, most vocal fans. They are the most emotionally attached, feeling they’ve personally invested their money, time and faith into your brand and they are the most violent when disappointed. At some point they all expect special treatment, which makes disappointment that much easier. Of course not all fans are like this but it just takes a very vocal minority to create a big problem. But then again, it takes some insanity to become a brand fan in the first place. I’m sure that when trading desires and emotion like on OnlyFans, the things I’ve mentioned become 100x worse.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

Personally addressing the reader makes them engage more, tempts them into engaging with the author in comments or, if they're thirsty, DMs. It's like youtube videos where a repeated pattern is direct questions to answer in the comments, invitations to share your thoughts, or even games like including "hidden words" in the video. There's not even a reward or anything for finding it, but it's apparently enough for some people to feel involved.

dannyw 5y ago
Is this wrong at all? I like YouTube, particularly creators like Gamers Nexus/ Hardware Unboxed for example, and like it when they engage in discussions on reddit or discord. The internet connects people, sometimes 1:1, sometimes 1:N.
- brazzy 5y ago
  It's wrong when it deliberately creates a promise of closeness that is completely illusionary. A Youtuber asking for comments they may or may not have the time to read is one thing, a camgirl writing 200 subscribers "Haven't seen you in a while, touching myself now imagining your dick inside me" is a very different thing.
  - cinntaile 5y ago
    I would argue that the same thing happens on Twitch, a completely fake "emotional" bond with your subscribers is created by live interacting with them. You also have whales tipping thousands of dollars.
- 9dev 5y ago
  It's "wrong" (in the sense we're discussing here, that is, morally) if the invitation to engagement isn't an honest desire to communicate with viewers, but merely a marketing strategy to lure in more viewers to maximize ad spend.
city41 5y ago
I was always under the impression a video with more comments does better in YouTube's algorithms, so those schemes seemed more about pumping up the comment count rather than attempting to artificially engage people.

vagrantJin 5y ago

> reinforcing toxic attitudes among the men. Or it could just be normal, expected behaviour.

brazzy 5y ago
Expected by whom? I'm really not sure what you're trying to say.
- kennyadam 5y ago
  I get strong 'it's just locker room talk' from their comment. Boys will be boys, etc.
- vagrantJin 5y ago
  > viewer with things like "Be honest, would you lick it?". I bet that raises engagement and gets subscriptions, but seems like a really bad idea in terms of, as you wrote, mental health for the women, and reinforcing toxic attitudes among the men. I believe since this is HN, it isn't a radical claim to suggest reading/ comprehension isn't the problem. But since I can't make guarantees I'll give a succinct answer in the interests of time. Expected by whom? The Pope.