28 ms·

Inside Pornhub

382 points by basisword 5y ago

tmp65535 5y ago
Be careful working in this field (pornography). In 2017 I wrote a mildly pornographic app (http://driftwheeler.com http://driftwheeler.com) and it appears on my resume. When hiring managers or recruiters take a look, some of them get upset. For example, a scheduled interview was abruptly cancelled the night before. I pursued the matter through a friend who had a senior role at the hiring company and it was determined that the (middle-aged female) in-house recruiter had been deeply offended when she followed the link on my resume and had cancelled everything. Eventually, I received a sincere apology from the CEO. There is a real stigma, and it will affect you. Beware.
- TechBro8615 5y ago
  “Don’t link to NSFW content on your resume” seems like a common-sense rule that’s applicable independently of whether you worked in the porn industry or not.
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    For real, just take it off the resume after the first non-positive reaction. Pro tip: Your resume is your greatest hits album, not an encyclopedia entry on you.
    - wldcordeiro 5y ago
      Maybe they did good work and felt proud of it and thought the hiring managers could look past the content of the product of the company and look at the real work needed to deliver that product.
      - imwillofficial 5y ago
        Unfortunately, here on planet earth, people are not always reasonable, logical, or act in their best interests. We must calibrate our messaging to have the intended effect. If what you’re putting out isn’t being received as intended, modulate the signal.
        sdoering 5y ago
        Exactly. That is why such a entry in your resume works like a great filter. If I had worked in NSFW and an application would get rejected because of that I would sincerely thank my former job for saving me a job in an environment I would not want to touch with a ten foot pole. If people in (even small power) like HR drones abuse their position as to flag a resume because of such a former experience I doubt there is a company culture of honesty, openness, respect or value of the individual. To me personally a great filter to have. If one is desperately in need of a job. OK - remove it and try to jump ship once secured in the current place.
        imwillofficial 5y ago
        A great non-obvious take. I like it.
        wldcordeiro 5y ago
        Good summary of my thoughts on this, thanks for jumping!
        samhw 5y ago
        > If people in (even small power) like HR drones abuse their position I call this the traffic warden principle: Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. A really tiny amount of power, in one specific area of your life, corrupts even more. (Also, FWIW, it's "people in (even small) power", not "people in (even small power)".)
        toyg 5y ago
        TBF, that calculation is only necessary in some circumstances. Want to get into FAANG? Corporate HR is dominated by women, better clean up your act. Wanna get hired by the hot bro-startup to be single-digit-employee? No purge necessary - if anything, those blue entries will score more points.
      - code_runner 5y ago
        It sounds as if they’ve learned otherwise through first hand experience at this point. Seems like a way to shock the people actually putting real effort into vetting a candidates resume/credentials. Maybe a warning that it’s nsfw would cause less extreme reactions.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Even less applicable if you didn't work in the industry.
    - nefitty 5y ago
      Seriously. All he had to do was make a SFW version for his resume if he was so keen on showing off the work. Use pictures of smurfs and puppies. I might unfairly be making assumptions about how technically feasible the change would be. If it would be difficult to do so, I'd be interested to learn how/why, eg was it a system design choice or is it inherent to the tech itself...
      - brailsafe 5y ago
        It's probably true that most work worth keeping on a resume, after some experience, is going to be non-trivial to replicate at best, and awkward to lie about/dance around in explaining purely to accommodate the sensitivities of adults who should chill out. I've worked mostly for companies I wasn't fired from, and it'd be great to avoid talking about the experience directly. Could I re-create the frontend interface for massive auction company? Maybe, but it would take a large amount of extremely unsatisfactory work. Could I recreate the database, backend infrastructure, and conditions that really made the work hard? No
        nefitty 5y ago
        Yeah, you're definitely right. If I was in that situation, I think I would be up front about the nature of the work and offer a "sanitized" textual walkthrough of the project. Let people decide if they want to risk being offended. I'm slightly conflicted here. I don't like pretending that facets of life don't exist, especially when they don't directly harm the involved, but I am also mindful of people's individual sensitivities. To tie it back to something more general, it seems like a lot of software engineering work is predicated on the cis male perspective. It's hard for me to imagine the psychological impact that sexual harassment might have on a woman, partly because I have the privilege of moving through the world without having my body or attractiveness be a point of interest whatsoever. I feel safe walking outside at night. I don't check my car's backseat before getting in. I have no idea what the fear of kidnapping even is. In light of the above, of being honest with the gaps in what I will ever experience, how can I venture to link to a site that might offend a woman? Even if it seems ok to me, and it's a joke or whatever excuse, how can I possibly say I fully understand her perspective when her lived experience places her in such vastly different situations?
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    There's a big difference between surprising someone by leading them to a website that immediate shows NSFW content and putting on your resume that you previously worked for a company that published NSFW content. The latter absolutely should not be considered "NSFW" and shouldn't be considered a red flag by a potential employer.
- _bax 5y ago
  Pecunia not olet..
- shaky-carrousel 5y ago
  This neopuritanism is awful. I thought we already left it behind, but looks like it's returning full force.
  - haliskerbas 5y ago
    Have you heard “family-values” being touted by media correspondents as an excuse for everything.
  - nix23 5y ago
    Just think where Wikipedia would be without the porn industry...and VR-"Gaming" ;-) Porn and advertising is the driving force of the Internet.
    - georgia_peach 5y ago
      This is a soundbite falsehood. The military industrial complex is the driving force of the internet and all things computing. Porn is just another monetization.
      - nix23 5y ago
        >The military industrial complex is the driving force of the internet and all things computing. Was the initial force...but since we call it "internet" and "personal computers" instead of "mainframe" and "arpanet" not anymore.
        georgia_peach 5y ago
        If you closely study Twitter's actions (How did that Arab Spring turn out for everybody?), or read about the InQtel origins of google (Assange's "Google Is Not What It Seems"), or how the Israelis blasted the Palestinians with porn during a siege (the OnlyFans economy!), you will see that it is still very much a weapon. Of the actual innovations in this field, how many came from defense (DOD, CIA, NSA, ARPA, & their contractors), and how many came from pornography?
- ss108 5y ago
  "mildly pornographic" Demo video literally depicts naked chicks. Sure, it's soft porn, but it's fully pornographic lol
  - crtasm 5y ago
    indeed. perhaps they forgot about all the closeup photos of genitalia in the demos!
- slingnow 5y ago
  You realize you have full control over your resume, right? "It appears on my resume" makes it sound like some other controlling entity has put it on your resume, so that it now just appears there as a matter of fact. What an odd statement to make.
- PKop 5y ago
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - twiclo 5y ago
    - sofixa 5y ago
      How is pornography destroying America? And why only America and not also Canada or the UK?
      - twiclo 5y ago
        I would assume it's affecting most countries with high speed internet. I just chose not to opine on those countries since I don't live in them and am less informed. You can view this comment I made for why porn is dangerous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30443056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30443056
        seattle_spring 5y ago
        We get it, you're LDS, but please don't push your unsolicited religious beliefs onto others.
    - Johanx64 5y ago
      Porn is a tool. It's a tool that enables men to disable their sex drive... for a set amount of time. What most people don't realize is how awfully strong the sex drive is and can get given time... since they never let it get to that point. And I'm saying this after 6weeks of complete abstinence. It's utterly distracting and frustrating, making it extremely hard to focus and get any work done. Rubbed one out and I can finally focus again and do some quality programming work. Should have rubbed one out way sooner than that. The amount of actual work I've missed out due to this is not negligible.
- latchkey 5y ago
  F' that. I worked for Kink.com (NSFW) (as a software engineer) and I'm proud of it. I got experience building cutting edge, high demand systems and services that I wouldn't have gotten elsewhere. We did realtime 1080p streaming video before anyone else and a full micro currency (Kinks). I even built a whole ad serving system that served banners from sites like PornHub (so I got a taste of the traffic levels they had). If that held me back from getting a job at some puritanical company, so be it. I wouldn't have wanted to work there any way.
  - twiclo 5y ago
    - claytongulick 5y ago
      That seems like a purposefully inflammatory and reductivist response to a sincere post about technical experience. Perhaps you should evaluate whether your post adds to the conversation, or is intended to be a character attack on the GP.
      - twiclo 5y ago
        dang 5y ago
        You broke the site guidelines badly in this thread. We ban accounts that do that. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
        bitexploder 5y ago
        This probably also breaks the rules, but uhh, thanks for smacking these bozos Dang. I have been here since HN started [ahem, I did lurk for a few years] and I really appreciate it being kept to high standards and a great place to discuss tech and such :)
- potentialporner 5y ago
  > There is a real stigma, and it will affect you. Beware. Small anecdote, but I was recruited by and almost took an offer for the folks behind "BangBros." Their corporate structure was apparently such that the IT / Software roles worked for a shell company with a generic name, generic website, etc. This company apparently works in a "consulting" like capacity for all of their assets (BangBros, "tube" sites, cam sites, etc.) I asked what was going on with the shell company, because it seemed sketchy as all hell. It was explained that because of industry stigma most of their employees use the shell company for their resume with generic "worked on highly-scalable systems handling N amount of traffic." Apparently it was a highly professional outfit, and the closest you could get to dealing with FANG-level problems while not being a FANG-eligible person. Great pay and benefits, business casual dress located in a nice building in Miami Beach.
  - toyg 5y ago
    Same sort of arrangement, I casually discovered, is often in play for gambling sites (pun intended). Because the overall outfit can be seen as questionable (occasionally by accident: gambling regulations change very often, so what is legal today might well be illegal tomorrow), the technical side is kept at arm's length, so that they can still attract good talent.
  - latchkey 5y ago
    In my case, I just told my gf's parents that I worked for an educational video company. Years later after I went on to another job, we told them "the truth" and they just shrugged it off.
  - lupire 5y ago
    > business casual dress for a tech company, and a porn company? that's completely absurd.
- cookieswumchorr 5y ago
  given the overall favourable situation on the IT job market, maybe it's not bad to have a filter against having to work with hypocrites?
  - crtasm 5y ago
    I'm not supporting their decision but what about it was hypocritical?
    - sdoering 5y ago
      If HR passed on them because 'porn' they either abused their position or gave a clear signal about company culture. They need to find someone that fits. In terms of skills and team fit/professionalism. Either the company values prude/neoconservative value signaling (the at least I wouldn't want to work there and they should openly tell people what ideology is expected) or the HR person abused their position and did not do their job in finding someone that fits the skill set and role. Either way is hypocritical in my book.
      - toyg 5y ago
        Being anti-porn is hardly limited to neocons, unless you think the totality of FAANGs are neocons. This is the sort of live wire that cuts right across all political groups.
- theideaofcoffee 5y ago
  I'll echo a sub post on this and say, with a most gentle: fuck. that. I consider it a positive signal that I would be rejected for some of my past work in adult. It shortcuts the whole you're-interviewing-them portion of the recruiting process. They've done my work for me. In the past, my involvement in the area has proven to be an interesting facet of my work history that others don't have, often resulting in interviews just out of curiosity on their end. Did I receive offers on all of them? No, and I don't care either and that's not the point. My point is that I'm not going to censor myself or my background in anticipation of someone being offended. Let them be offended, there's lots of other places where that isn't a problem.
  - AlwaysRock 5y ago
    That is fine if you don't mind loosing out on some opportunities because a very religious recruiting coordinator 6 months out of college making 45K per year decides your profile is icky. It's probably not the CTO, your direct manager, or even any of your peer that would be offended. Anyone in the long chain of people that are involved in your process from applicant to employee could cause a stink. It's difficult to say one employees who might filter you out is indicative of the entire company culture. I know a lot of happy employees who absolutely hated their experience being onboarded because of 1 or 2 difficult people. But who gives a shit about how Michael from HR took 9 days to send an official offer letter if you're never going to have to interact with them again?
- exolymph 5y ago
  Absent some mitigating context, I would also conclude that something is wrong with you for putting NSFW content on your resume. The issue here is mainly what you're telegraphing about your grasp of social norms.
- caeril 5y ago
  The hiring process is determining who is a good fit for whom, both skills-wise, and other-wise. What if they never followed the link, and you had been hired, and you ended up working with a team of people who were culturally incompatible with you? This falls into the same category as "be careful having opinions in public". Ever since we've been easily Googlable, right-wing employers have canceled left-wing candidates and very much vice-versa (e.g. Antonio Garcia Martinez and Apple). There's been some degree of outcry and stink about this, but in the end it's probably a net good for employees to work with teams they are culturally aligned with. Getting cut early on account of what you believe or what else you worked on is probably best for everyone involved. Would you like to be able to enjoy a beer with your coworkers or not?
  - lupire 5y ago
    > Would you like to be able to enjoy a beer with your coworkers or not? Not a job requirement for adults. Open-minded professionalism and civility should trump only working with frat buddies.
- bduerst 5y ago
  >middle-aged female Not sure how that's relevant here. You write about the unjust bias (and unjust it is) against you for having worked with porn, but then seem to to try to evoke ageist and gender stereotypes.
  - cromka 5y ago
    Agreed. And while I doubt this is what the author of the comment actually had in mind, I think it is important to notice that porn, by large extent, takes advantage of women, and so it’s women who naturally have bigger issue with it than man. And I assume the CEO who sent the apologetic letter was a man. In other words, the author inadvertently exemplifies how sexist IT can still be.
  - squintychino 5y ago
    I think the implication is that women tend to have more of a problem with pornography than men. Perhaps if the CEO had been a man it wouldn't have gotten to the point where it resulted in their interview being cancelled.
  - Kranar 5y ago
    OP never said the bias was unjust, only that the bias exists and people working in that industry should be aware it could be used against them. Multiple studies exist showing that men and women have very very different views on pornography and in particular women's views on it are significantly more negative than men's views. Furthermore people's views on pornography change as they get older with older people having an even more negative view about it than younger people. This isn't like a fringe difference either, consumption of porn by women is less than 20% that of men. There's nothing sexist about pointing out that women can and often do have very different views on a subject than men, and no reason to think that women having a negative view of pornography somehow makes them inferior in anyway.
    - bduerst 5y ago
      >Multiple studies exist showing that men and women have very very different views on pornography and in particular women's views on it are significantly more negative than men's views Can you cite some of these studies? IIRC there is a difference in consumption rates between genders, but not negative attitudes.
- yesbabyyes 5y ago
  > (http://driftwheeler.com http://driftwheeler.com) I tend to get suspicious when porn sites (or porn-related sites) avoid https. Maybe I'm paranoid, but it's so simple to use ssl today than I find it hard to give the benefit of the doubt. Is there any reason to your choice in publishing content such as this in a way that exposes all visitors?
- danuker 5y ago
  The downside might be that you limit the available job offers. The upside is you don't get matched with prude co-workers.
- lucidbee 5y ago
  I looked at the "mildly pornographic app" you wrote and my reaction was, I would not choose to hire you. Basically I don't want to be exposed to people's sexual fantasies as a part of my job. It's obnoxious and way, way into the territory of TMI. Do what you like and keep it private. The fact you thought it was appropriate to share this with a potential employer reviewing your resume is a red flag. Your sense of what is appropriate to share in the workplace is clearly off. This is quite different than merely listing an employer such as pornhub on your resume.
BeefWellington 5y ago
This is an interesting follow up to the morality discussion earlier in the week.[1] It really does seem as though you'd wind up defending or turning a blind eye to a lot of shady practices for a paycheck working for companies like this. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30436189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30436189
prirun 5y ago
From the article: "I often encountered videos that were uploaded again and again, no matter how many times I removed them. One day, a woman emailed me, calmly explained that her ex-boyfriend had uploaded a video of them having sex, and asked me to remove it. I deleted the clip. Later that week, it was re-uploaded. The woman wrote again, I removed it, and this continued for months; I must have pulled the same video down a dozen times. This was before I had ever heard the term “revenge porn.” Requests like this were not uncommon. Once, a woman wrote to say there was a video of her on Tube8 that showed her being sexually assaulted after someone spiked her drink at a party. The video had tens of thousands of views, so I had to review it before making the call to remove it. In the clip, the woman is clearly high, laughing and head lolling, having sex on a bed surrounded by fully dressed people holding drinks and watching as colored lights flashed and music blared in the background. I took it down, but it was uploaded again repeatedly in the following months. Each time, the mortified woman flagged it, and each time, I removed it; both of us were aware that there was nothing we could do to stop the clip from resurfacing." I have read the same thing from Facebook content moderators. They got so frustrated at having to watch and take down the same videos over and over. This seems to be such a simple problem to solve: record a hash of the video file, don't allow uploading it again. That would probably get rid of most re-posting. It could be bypassed by modifying the file slightly, but the hashing could also get more sophisticated. At some point, an ex-boyfriend is not likely to want to keep modifying a video to piss off his ex.
- rhizome 5y ago
  I would think that either FB-level facial recognition, or Disney-level copyright/ContentID frame recognition would be helpful for all this. I don't suppose they're thinking of open-sourcing it.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  I've never used it, but apparently you can hash a image in such a way that small changes will result in the same hash. I think that is what Apple was doing with it's child abuse filter announced earlier this year.
  - 5y ago
sandworm101 5y ago
Don;t take legal advice from someone online who cannot even spell correctly. I am not your lawyer. I will never be your lawyer. Back when I practiced I had several clients come to me with the same story: My daughter is at home crying because she got drunk at a party and now there is a topless photo of her on facebook/youtube/email etc. We had the image taken down but it keeps popping back up in reverse-image searches. To these clients I offer two scenarios: (1) Pamela Anderson's approach: Sue the internet. Bring lawsuits against every platform where you find the picture. Everyone in town will hear about this. It might make the news. You daughter will probably change schools. She will likely have to testify or record a statement describing the impact the sharing of these images have had on her. She will need to talk to the police at least once, perhaps many times. For the next several years her life will be interrupted by this issue again and again. It will define her life as a teenager. (2) The "what's best for my daughter" approach: Only go after those incidents where her name is attached. I, your lawyer, send a note to the platform and they remove the image. If necessary we get the boy who took the picture to sign over copyright and I get the image added to the platform content management engines. It might be uploaded again it but won't be associated with your daughter's name. Your daughter never has to involve herself with this again. Unless she is trolling deep in amateur porn forums she will likely never see the image. It will be lost into the constant churn of a thousand other images uploaded every day. Net result: It will not define her life. (Yes, this might well be an illegal image of an underage person, but enforcing that law isn't the responsibility of the victim or her family. Once it is reported to authorities the victim is under no obligation to hunt down copies all over the internet.)
- tasha0663 5y ago
  > enforcing that law isn't the responsibility of the victim or her family IANAL, so I might be mistaken, but isn't the law in some places "if you see it, it is illegal for you not to report it"? (EDIT: specifically when it comes to CSAM, that is)
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    Indeed, but you have to see it. You are not obligated to go looking for it. If you don't look for it you don't see it. Even if you do find it again, no prosecutor would ever dare think of bringing charges on a victim for not reporting her discovery of such images days/weeks/years down the line. But things can go very very wrong whenever kids talk to cops. The story they tell their parents might not be totally accurate. (ie it wasn't some boy. She in fact uploading the image herself.) Tell a false story to a cop and horrible situations can happen very quickly. Scenario B above avoids this by limiting police involvement.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ShockTohp 5y ago
Maybe all those anti-porn "extremists" have a point.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  We don't allow driving without a seatbelt in most states. We have rules saying you must be 21 with ID to purchase alcohol. We ban minors from purchasing firearms. Giving drugs to a child will see you behind bars for a very long time. But heaven forbid that we regulate porn even though it has been scientifically shown to have effects similar to meth in addictiveness in the brain, has caused erectile dysfunction diagnosis to explode, and has caused societal damage from changing the brain to view women as sex objects. It's not extremist to say, considering the above, it needs to be controlled and potentially even banned. Also, the article is the story of a former porn moderator. Of course he would classify anyone opposed to the industry he worked in and anyone who wants to hold him accountable as extremist.
  - commandlinefan 5y ago
    Uh, well, hang on - it already is regulated exactly the same way alcohol and firearms are regulated. The law says you have to be an adult to consume it.
    - gjsman-1000 5y ago
      Then for heaven's sake we need ID Verification (just like Guns and Alcohol and Spray Paint) because the average age is 11 years old first exposure.
      - bitexploder 5y ago
        So, think about the children? I think a much more constructive dialog about your legitimate concerns is useful, but not the over the too “I know best” presentation:)
    - rosndo 5y ago
      Which law?
wvh 5y ago
This might not be a popular opinion for some, but can't we move as a society beyond the point where having a naked picture online would not be upsetting or harmful for the person involved? I can't help but think that if we were all to put a couple of nudes online, the whole "Oh! Shame!" moral outrage would be pretty much over. On the one hand, there's a person's privacy and individual rights, but on the other hand is also society's response which makes a bigger deal out of erotic and sexual material than it perhaps needs to be. It might be worthwhile to also fight this from the other side and try to re-educate society not to point the finger at people for having sex or appearing in nude imagery. After all, the concern seems mostly about the consequences to the lives of the people involved rather nudity itself, so why not also try to turn the whole concept into something more positive on a societal level and fight the victimisation and shame that way?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rosndo 5y ago
  Yeah, it’s really pathetic that we accept this as horrible without questioning whether or not it needs to be that way.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  the problem is involutory porn. that is what the article focuses on, not the moralistic aspect of nudity
  - rosndo 5y ago
    Involuntary porn is so harmful specifically because of the moralistic aspect of nudity. We could just accept that sex is normal and a video of you fucking isn’t different than a video of you playing golf.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - 5y ago
glitchcrab 5y ago
I wondered if Fabian Thylmann would be mentioned; it always gives me a chuckle to see his name as he's the brother of one of the co-founders of the company I work for.
bduerst 5y ago
>When they caught a competitor ripping off content from Pornhub to create a knockoff website, engineers placed a link to the offending website in a few pixels of the Pornhub homepage, where millions of people clicked daily. The resulting tsunami of web traffic swamped the pirate site and knocked it offline in minutes — the kiss of death. Content copying competitor aside, is this type of response even legal? It feels like another form of DDOS.
- convolvatron 5y ago
  under what kind of law would it not be?
  - rileymat2 5y ago
    The intent was a DDOS, I am not sure the mechanism is relevant?
  - dymk 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act > Provisions addressed the distribution of malicious code and denial-of-service attacks.
- vmception 5y ago
  oooh my gawd, I love that found out
- rk06 5y ago
  Thieves don’t go to police for stolen goods. This is all shady. No way in hell, are they going to take legal action. Let alone when they are getting legitimate traffic, instead of automated bots.
wolverine876 5y ago
> One day, I received inquiries from journalists looking to find out more about Manwin. Believing it was a major threat, I sent off a panicked email to the owner of the company and some vice presidents. My bosses were stunned, and not in a good way. Corey, the guy who had originally hired me, marched me into an office, and I nearly got canned. They had mercy on me. I think they could tell that I was trying to protect the company in my own overzealous, entirely inappropriate way. It was true — I felt like part of a team and wanted to do my best for them. But I had blown it. > After that, with my reputation tarnished, my fortunes at the company started to dwindle. That seems wrong to me, but I'm interested in other people's responses. It doesn't seem like 'blowing it' at all. How many companies have problems with employees that are too motivated? First, afaik, CEOs generally work to have open lines of communication with their lower level employees - the problem is people not paying attention, not communicating important information, or it getting filtered by the interests of layers in between. Second, Manwin can't be that big a company. It's not like emailing the CEO of Microsoft, who has >100,000 people working for them (and again, wouldn't Satya Nadella just say - 'hey, thanks for keeping a sharp eye out and for the heads up. It may look bad, but we've seen it many times before. I'm going to forward this to corporate communications, who can handle these things astutely.') Maybe other companies are just different than the ones I've seen.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  If you want to hide something from senior management, you have two options: - Directly tell your subordinates to help you hide it. (Hint: Worst idea ever.) - Select for people who hide everything, unconditionally, as a cultural norm.
- jomkr 5y ago
  At-least this persons email to jeff@amazon.com triggered a ? email. https://independent.co.uk/money/amazon-underpaying-workers-email-jeff-bezos-b1946473.html https://independent.co.uk/money/amazon-underpaying-workers-e...
vbphprubyjsgo 5y ago
lynguist 5y ago
I read the piece, it’s very interesting and personal. But I don’t understand this: how do the porn tubes make money? Could it be advertisement? Or selling user profiles? I can’t understand it. Does anyone know more?
- throw_m239339 5y ago
  Just like Google Ads, it's a huge network of affiliates trying to bring the viewers into paid services like cams, paid porn or straight out prostitution services, these are often linked to violent organized crime forcing women into prostitution.
ksec 5y ago
Given no comments on it so far. Am I the only with issues viewing it on Safari. Chrome and Firefox seems to be doing fine.
shp0ngle 5y ago
Ban porn.
d_runs_far 5y ago
Lots of chatter about the tech side, my experience is quite vintage that came back to be relevant over two decades later. In the mid 1990's, while a grad student, I was approached by a fellow student to help build 'secure image library' (the details never discussed because I didn't sign his NDA) server that could be pretty locked down. At the time, that was quite out of my league and I passed. I also passed on the project and didn't try to use it to learn more, because the guy gave my now ex-wife the creeps. Fast forward 25+ years, his name popped up in the news as being arrested for some rather fucked up child-sex exploitation. It did make me think how I could have contributed to potentially aiding this guy in his journey down the exploitation road so I'm quite content that I passed. I'd hate to know anything I built was used in that realm.
stanler 5y ago
Yes yes fuck
AlexanderTheGr8 5y ago
I have seen a lot of comments about people re-uploading videos with some changes to fool hash-detection software. Can AI help with this? AI is getting very very good at identifying important parts of videos. I am willing to bet that AI can detect similar videos even if 1 of the videos has a black box or is inverted or has some changes. I always presumed that all video-sharing sites (including adult video sites) already had implemented such mechanisms. This would be really great for society in general, as this would prevent revenge-porn. Is this already used? If not, why not?
- PennRobotics 5y ago
  Ten to fifteen years ago, computer vision was already fingerprinting video with landmark detection (SIFT, region segmentation, Canny edges, biomimetic color correction---or simply converting to grayscale). It helps that you'll almost always have a unique audio stream that closely tracks the video stream which can also be fingerprinted and time-scaled and/or time-shifted. It's likely they're already doing machine learning. Why wouldn't they? With what essentially boils down to content recommendation as a way to increase ad viewership targeting an audience likely to have short site visits, wildly different tastes and habits, and a constant influx of new users and new videos, they probably already fingerprint videos (and users) as a method to immediately link new users and new videos to an existing pattern maximizing ad revenue. Another questionable method which might cut down on abusive/unlawful behavior would be shadowbanning offending uploaders once you have a reliable fingerprinting method. Upload a video that's close but not exactly matching a fingerprinted video? Thanks, here's the URL. Privately, we're not adding it to the index for anyone outside your subnet until someone can manually verify the two streams are unique. It's probably even possible to spoof the view count and other properties based on similarly fingerprinted clips, so only the people who make a living from aggressively reuploading are aware of the shadowban. As a bonus, if such a fingerprinting/shadowbanning combo cuts down massively on casual/bot/opportunistic reuploading, the people who continue to modify the video _and_ audio stream enough to bypass the filter could be (just a theory) more likely to be malicious/abusive, and these are the people you definitely want to exclude from your community
elinsensible 5y ago
I used to work there and I can confirm the identities and names mentioned in the article. The mysterious investor is Bernard, originally owner of YouPorn. I used to work in multiple of these websites, and helped on preparing the plan to hand over Spankwire and other "small tubes" to another company to drive them.
amirmaleki 5y ago
How is this banner blurring implemented? When you scroll down, the banner image gets blurred.

382 points by basisword 5y ago

Be careful working in this field (pornography). In 2017 I wrote a mildly pornographic app (http://driftwheeler.com http://driftwheeler.com) and it appears on my resume. When hiring managers or recruiters take a look, some of them get upset. For example, a scheduled interview was abruptly cancelled the night before. I pursued the matter through a friend who had a senior role at the hiring company and it was determined that the (middle-aged female) in-house recruiter had been deeply offended when she followed the link on my resume and had cancelled everything. Eventually, I received a sincere apology from the CEO. There is a real stigma, and it will affect you. Beware.

TechBro8615 5y ago
“Don’t link to NSFW content on your resume” seems like a common-sense rule that’s applicable independently of whether you worked in the porn industry or not.
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  For real, just take it off the resume after the first non-positive reaction. Pro tip: Your resume is your greatest hits album, not an encyclopedia entry on you.
  - wldcordeiro 5y ago
    Maybe they did good work and felt proud of it and thought the hiring managers could look past the content of the product of the company and look at the real work needed to deliver that product.
    - imwillofficial 5y ago
      Unfortunately, here on planet earth, people are not always reasonable, logical, or act in their best interests. We must calibrate our messaging to have the intended effect. If what you’re putting out isn’t being received as intended, modulate the signal.
      - sdoering 5y ago
        Exactly. That is why such a entry in your resume works like a great filter. If I had worked in NSFW and an application would get rejected because of that I would sincerely thank my former job for saving me a job in an environment I would not want to touch with a ten foot pole. If people in (even small power) like HR drones abuse their position as to flag a resume because of such a former experience I doubt there is a company culture of honesty, openness, respect or value of the individual. To me personally a great filter to have. If one is desperately in need of a job. OK - remove it and try to jump ship once secured in the current place.
        imwillofficial 5y ago
        A great non-obvious take. I like it.
        wldcordeiro 5y ago
        Good summary of my thoughts on this, thanks for jumping!
        samhw 5y ago
        > If people in (even small power) like HR drones abuse their position I call this the traffic warden principle: Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. A really tiny amount of power, in one specific area of your life, corrupts even more. (Also, FWIW, it's "people in (even small) power", not "people in (even small power)".)
      - toyg 5y ago
        TBF, that calculation is only necessary in some circumstances. Want to get into FAANG? Corporate HR is dominated by women, better clean up your act. Wanna get hired by the hot bro-startup to be single-digit-employee? No purge necessary - if anything, those blue entries will score more points.
    - code_runner 5y ago
      It sounds as if they’ve learned otherwise through first hand experience at this point. Seems like a way to shock the people actually putting real effort into vetting a candidates resume/credentials. Maybe a warning that it’s nsfw would cause less extreme reactions.
- amelius 5y ago
  Even less applicable if you didn't work in the industry.
  - nefitty 5y ago
    Seriously. All he had to do was make a SFW version for his resume if he was so keen on showing off the work. Use pictures of smurfs and puppies. I might unfairly be making assumptions about how technically feasible the change would be. If it would be difficult to do so, I'd be interested to learn how/why, eg was it a system design choice or is it inherent to the tech itself...
    - brailsafe 5y ago
      It's probably true that most work worth keeping on a resume, after some experience, is going to be non-trivial to replicate at best, and awkward to lie about/dance around in explaining purely to accommodate the sensitivities of adults who should chill out. I've worked mostly for companies I wasn't fired from, and it'd be great to avoid talking about the experience directly. Could I re-create the frontend interface for massive auction company? Maybe, but it would take a large amount of extremely unsatisfactory work. Could I recreate the database, backend infrastructure, and conditions that really made the work hard? No
      - nefitty 5y ago
        Yeah, you're definitely right. If I was in that situation, I think I would be up front about the nature of the work and offer a "sanitized" textual walkthrough of the project. Let people decide if they want to risk being offended. I'm slightly conflicted here. I don't like pretending that facets of life don't exist, especially when they don't directly harm the involved, but I am also mindful of people's individual sensitivities. To tie it back to something more general, it seems like a lot of software engineering work is predicated on the cis male perspective. It's hard for me to imagine the psychological impact that sexual harassment might have on a woman, partly because I have the privilege of moving through the world without having my body or attractiveness be a point of interest whatsoever. I feel safe walking outside at night. I don't check my car's backseat before getting in. I have no idea what the fear of kidnapping even is. In light of the above, of being honest with the gaps in what I will ever experience, how can I venture to link to a site that might offend a woman? Even if it seems ok to me, and it's a joke or whatever excuse, how can I possibly say I fully understand her perspective when her lived experience places her in such vastly different situations?
- tshaddox 5y ago
  There's a big difference between surprising someone by leading them to a website that immediate shows NSFW content and putting on your resume that you previously worked for a company that published NSFW content. The latter absolutely should not be considered "NSFW" and shouldn't be considered a red flag by a potential employer.
_bax 5y ago
Pecunia not olet..
shaky-carrousel 5y ago
This neopuritanism is awful. I thought we already left it behind, but looks like it's returning full force.
- haliskerbas 5y ago
  Have you heard “family-values” being touted by media correspondents as an excuse for everything.
- nix23 5y ago
  Just think where Wikipedia would be without the porn industry...and VR-"Gaming" ;-) Porn and advertising is the driving force of the Internet.
  - georgia_peach 5y ago
    This is a soundbite falsehood. The military industrial complex is the driving force of the internet and all things computing. Porn is just another monetization.
    - nix23 5y ago
      >The military industrial complex is the driving force of the internet and all things computing. Was the initial force...but since we call it "internet" and "personal computers" instead of "mainframe" and "arpanet" not anymore.
      - georgia_peach 5y ago
        If you closely study Twitter's actions (How did that Arab Spring turn out for everybody?), or read about the InQtel origins of google (Assange's "Google Is Not What It Seems"), or how the Israelis blasted the Palestinians with porn during a siege (the OnlyFans economy!), you will see that it is still very much a weapon. Of the actual innovations in this field, how many came from defense (DOD, CIA, NSA, ARPA, & their contractors), and how many came from pornography?
ss108 5y ago
"mildly pornographic" Demo video literally depicts naked chicks. Sure, it's soft porn, but it's fully pornographic lol
- crtasm 5y ago
  indeed. perhaps they forgot about all the closeup photos of genitalia in the demos!
slingnow 5y ago
You realize you have full control over your resume, right? "It appears on my resume" makes it sound like some other controlling entity has put it on your resume, so that it now just appears there as a matter of fact. What an odd statement to make.
PKop 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- twiclo 5y ago
  - sofixa 5y ago
    How is pornography destroying America? And why only America and not also Canada or the UK?
    - twiclo 5y ago
      I would assume it's affecting most countries with high speed internet. I just chose not to opine on those countries since I don't live in them and am less informed. You can view this comment I made for why porn is dangerous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30443056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30443056
      - seattle_spring 5y ago
        We get it, you're LDS, but please don't push your unsolicited religious beliefs onto others.
  - Johanx64 5y ago
    Porn is a tool. It's a tool that enables men to disable their sex drive... for a set amount of time. What most people don't realize is how awfully strong the sex drive is and can get given time... since they never let it get to that point. And I'm saying this after 6weeks of complete abstinence. It's utterly distracting and frustrating, making it extremely hard to focus and get any work done. Rubbed one out and I can finally focus again and do some quality programming work. Should have rubbed one out way sooner than that. The amount of actual work I've missed out due to this is not negligible.
latchkey 5y ago
F' that. I worked for Kink.com (NSFW) (as a software engineer) and I'm proud of it. I got experience building cutting edge, high demand systems and services that I wouldn't have gotten elsewhere. We did realtime 1080p streaming video before anyone else and a full micro currency (Kinks). I even built a whole ad serving system that served banners from sites like PornHub (so I got a taste of the traffic levels they had). If that held me back from getting a job at some puritanical company, so be it. I wouldn't have wanted to work there any way.
- twiclo 5y ago
  - claytongulick 5y ago
    That seems like a purposefully inflammatory and reductivist response to a sincere post about technical experience. Perhaps you should evaluate whether your post adds to the conversation, or is intended to be a character attack on the GP.
    - twiclo 5y ago
      - dang 5y ago
        You broke the site guidelines badly in this thread. We ban accounts that do that. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
        bitexploder 5y ago
        This probably also breaks the rules, but uhh, thanks for smacking these bozos Dang. I have been here since HN started [ahem, I did lurk for a few years] and I really appreciate it being kept to high standards and a great place to discuss tech and such :)
potentialporner 5y ago
> There is a real stigma, and it will affect you. Beware. Small anecdote, but I was recruited by and almost took an offer for the folks behind "BangBros." Their corporate structure was apparently such that the IT / Software roles worked for a shell company with a generic name, generic website, etc. This company apparently works in a "consulting" like capacity for all of their assets (BangBros, "tube" sites, cam sites, etc.) I asked what was going on with the shell company, because it seemed sketchy as all hell. It was explained that because of industry stigma most of their employees use the shell company for their resume with generic "worked on highly-scalable systems handling N amount of traffic." Apparently it was a highly professional outfit, and the closest you could get to dealing with FANG-level problems while not being a FANG-eligible person. Great pay and benefits, business casual dress located in a nice building in Miami Beach.
- toyg 5y ago
  Same sort of arrangement, I casually discovered, is often in play for gambling sites (pun intended). Because the overall outfit can be seen as questionable (occasionally by accident: gambling regulations change very often, so what is legal today might well be illegal tomorrow), the technical side is kept at arm's length, so that they can still attract good talent.
- latchkey 5y ago
  In my case, I just told my gf's parents that I worked for an educational video company. Years later after I went on to another job, we told them "the truth" and they just shrugged it off.
- lupire 5y ago
  > business casual dress for a tech company, and a porn company? that's completely absurd.
cookieswumchorr 5y ago
given the overall favourable situation on the IT job market, maybe it's not bad to have a filter against having to work with hypocrites?
- crtasm 5y ago
  I'm not supporting their decision but what about it was hypocritical?
  - sdoering 5y ago
    If HR passed on them because 'porn' they either abused their position or gave a clear signal about company culture. They need to find someone that fits. In terms of skills and team fit/professionalism. Either the company values prude/neoconservative value signaling (the at least I wouldn't want to work there and they should openly tell people what ideology is expected) or the HR person abused their position and did not do their job in finding someone that fits the skill set and role. Either way is hypocritical in my book.
    - toyg 5y ago
      Being anti-porn is hardly limited to neocons, unless you think the totality of FAANGs are neocons. This is the sort of live wire that cuts right across all political groups.
theideaofcoffee 5y ago
I'll echo a sub post on this and say, with a most gentle: fuck. that. I consider it a positive signal that I would be rejected for some of my past work in adult. It shortcuts the whole you're-interviewing-them portion of the recruiting process. They've done my work for me. In the past, my involvement in the area has proven to be an interesting facet of my work history that others don't have, often resulting in interviews just out of curiosity on their end. Did I receive offers on all of them? No, and I don't care either and that's not the point. My point is that I'm not going to censor myself or my background in anticipation of someone being offended. Let them be offended, there's lots of other places where that isn't a problem.
- AlwaysRock 5y ago
  That is fine if you don't mind loosing out on some opportunities because a very religious recruiting coordinator 6 months out of college making 45K per year decides your profile is icky. It's probably not the CTO, your direct manager, or even any of your peer that would be offended. Anyone in the long chain of people that are involved in your process from applicant to employee could cause a stink. It's difficult to say one employees who might filter you out is indicative of the entire company culture. I know a lot of happy employees who absolutely hated their experience being onboarded because of 1 or 2 difficult people. But who gives a shit about how Michael from HR took 9 days to send an official offer letter if you're never going to have to interact with them again?
exolymph 5y ago
Absent some mitigating context, I would also conclude that something is wrong with you for putting NSFW content on your resume. The issue here is mainly what you're telegraphing about your grasp of social norms.
caeril 5y ago
The hiring process is determining who is a good fit for whom, both skills-wise, and other-wise. What if they never followed the link, and you had been hired, and you ended up working with a team of people who were culturally incompatible with you? This falls into the same category as "be careful having opinions in public". Ever since we've been easily Googlable, right-wing employers have canceled left-wing candidates and very much vice-versa (e.g. Antonio Garcia Martinez and Apple). There's been some degree of outcry and stink about this, but in the end it's probably a net good for employees to work with teams they are culturally aligned with. Getting cut early on account of what you believe or what else you worked on is probably best for everyone involved. Would you like to be able to enjoy a beer with your coworkers or not?
- lupire 5y ago
  > Would you like to be able to enjoy a beer with your coworkers or not? Not a job requirement for adults. Open-minded professionalism and civility should trump only working with frat buddies.
bduerst 5y ago
>middle-aged female Not sure how that's relevant here. You write about the unjust bias (and unjust it is) against you for having worked with porn, but then seem to to try to evoke ageist and gender stereotypes.
- cromka 5y ago
  Agreed. And while I doubt this is what the author of the comment actually had in mind, I think it is important to notice that porn, by large extent, takes advantage of women, and so it’s women who naturally have bigger issue with it than man. And I assume the CEO who sent the apologetic letter was a man. In other words, the author inadvertently exemplifies how sexist IT can still be.
- squintychino 5y ago
  I think the implication is that women tend to have more of a problem with pornography than men. Perhaps if the CEO had been a man it wouldn't have gotten to the point where it resulted in their interview being cancelled.
- Kranar 5y ago
  OP never said the bias was unjust, only that the bias exists and people working in that industry should be aware it could be used against them. Multiple studies exist showing that men and women have very very different views on pornography and in particular women's views on it are significantly more negative than men's views. Furthermore people's views on pornography change as they get older with older people having an even more negative view about it than younger people. This isn't like a fringe difference either, consumption of porn by women is less than 20% that of men. There's nothing sexist about pointing out that women can and often do have very different views on a subject than men, and no reason to think that women having a negative view of pornography somehow makes them inferior in anyway.
  - bduerst 5y ago
    >Multiple studies exist showing that men and women have very very different views on pornography and in particular women's views on it are significantly more negative than men's views Can you cite some of these studies? IIRC there is a difference in consumption rates between genders, but not negative attitudes.
yesbabyyes 5y ago
> (http://driftwheeler.com http://driftwheeler.com) I tend to get suspicious when porn sites (or porn-related sites) avoid https. Maybe I'm paranoid, but it's so simple to use ssl today than I find it hard to give the benefit of the doubt. Is there any reason to your choice in publishing content such as this in a way that exposes all visitors?
danuker 5y ago
The downside might be that you limit the available job offers. The upside is you don't get matched with prude co-workers.
lucidbee 5y ago
I looked at the "mildly pornographic app" you wrote and my reaction was, I would not choose to hire you. Basically I don't want to be exposed to people's sexual fantasies as a part of my job. It's obnoxious and way, way into the territory of TMI. Do what you like and keep it private. The fact you thought it was appropriate to share this with a potential employer reviewing your resume is a red flag. Your sense of what is appropriate to share in the workplace is clearly off. This is quite different than merely listing an employer such as pornhub on your resume.

BeefWellington 5y ago

This is an interesting follow up to the morality discussion earlier in the week.[1] It really does seem as though you'd wind up defending or turning a blind eye to a lot of shady practices for a paycheck working for companies like this. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30436189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30436189

prirun 5y ago

From the article: "I often encountered videos that were uploaded again and again, no matter how many times I removed them. One day, a woman emailed me, calmly explained that her ex-boyfriend had uploaded a video of them having sex, and asked me to remove it. I deleted the clip. Later that week, it was re-uploaded. The woman wrote again, I removed it, and this continued for months; I must have pulled the same video down a dozen times. This was before I had ever heard the term “revenge porn.” Requests like this were not uncommon. Once, a woman wrote to say there was a video of her on Tube8 that showed her being sexually assaulted after someone spiked her drink at a party. The video had tens of thousands of views, so I had to review it before making the call to remove it. In the clip, the woman is clearly high, laughing and head lolling, having sex on a bed surrounded by fully dressed people holding drinks and watching as colored lights flashed and music blared in the background. I took it down, but it was uploaded again repeatedly in the following months. Each time, the mortified woman flagged it, and each time, I removed it; both of us were aware that there was nothing we could do to stop the clip from resurfacing." I have read the same thing from Facebook content moderators. They got so frustrated at having to watch and take down the same videos over and over. This seems to be such a simple problem to solve: record a hash of the video file, don't allow uploading it again. That would probably get rid of most re-posting. It could be bypassed by modifying the file slightly, but the hashing could also get more sophisticated. At some point, an ex-boyfriend is not likely to want to keep modifying a video to piss off his ex.

rhizome 5y ago
I would think that either FB-level facial recognition, or Disney-level copyright/ContentID frame recognition would be helpful for all this. I don't suppose they're thinking of open-sourcing it.
willcipriano 5y ago
I've never used it, but apparently you can hash a image in such a way that small changes will result in the same hash. I think that is what Apple was doing with it's child abuse filter announced earlier this year.
- 5y ago

sandworm101 5y ago

Don;t take legal advice from someone online who cannot even spell correctly. I am not your lawyer. I will never be your lawyer. Back when I practiced I had several clients come to me with the same story: My daughter is at home crying because she got drunk at a party and now there is a topless photo of her on facebook/youtube/email etc. We had the image taken down but it keeps popping back up in reverse-image searches. To these clients I offer two scenarios: (1) Pamela Anderson's approach: Sue the internet. Bring lawsuits against every platform where you find the picture. Everyone in town will hear about this. It might make the news. You daughter will probably change schools. She will likely have to testify or record a statement describing the impact the sharing of these images have had on her. She will need to talk to the police at least once, perhaps many times. For the next several years her life will be interrupted by this issue again and again. It will define her life as a teenager. (2) The "what's best for my daughter" approach: Only go after those incidents where her name is attached. I, your lawyer, send a note to the platform and they remove the image. If necessary we get the boy who took the picture to sign over copyright and I get the image added to the platform content management engines. It might be uploaded again it but won't be associated with your daughter's name. Your daughter never has to involve herself with this again. Unless she is trolling deep in amateur porn forums she will likely never see the image. It will be lost into the constant churn of a thousand other images uploaded every day. Net result: It will not define her life. (Yes, this might well be an illegal image of an underage person, but enforcing that law isn't the responsibility of the victim or her family. Once it is reported to authorities the victim is under no obligation to hunt down copies all over the internet.)

tasha0663 5y ago
> enforcing that law isn't the responsibility of the victim or her family IANAL, so I might be mistaken, but isn't the law in some places "if you see it, it is illegal for you not to report it"? (EDIT: specifically when it comes to CSAM, that is)
- sandworm101 5y ago
  Indeed, but you have to see it. You are not obligated to go looking for it. If you don't look for it you don't see it. Even if you do find it again, no prosecutor would ever dare think of bringing charges on a victim for not reporting her discovery of such images days/weeks/years down the line. But things can go very very wrong whenever kids talk to cops. The story they tell their parents might not be totally accurate. (ie it wasn't some boy. She in fact uploading the image herself.) Tell a false story to a cop and horrible situations can happen very quickly. Scenario B above avoids this by limiting police involvement.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ShockTohp 5y ago

Maybe all those anti-porn "extremists" have a point.

gjsman-1000 5y ago
We don't allow driving without a seatbelt in most states. We have rules saying you must be 21 with ID to purchase alcohol. We ban minors from purchasing firearms. Giving drugs to a child will see you behind bars for a very long time. But heaven forbid that we regulate porn even though it has been scientifically shown to have effects similar to meth in addictiveness in the brain, has caused erectile dysfunction diagnosis to explode, and has caused societal damage from changing the brain to view women as sex objects. It's not extremist to say, considering the above, it needs to be controlled and potentially even banned. Also, the article is the story of a former porn moderator. Of course he would classify anyone opposed to the industry he worked in and anyone who wants to hold him accountable as extremist.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  Uh, well, hang on - it already is regulated exactly the same way alcohol and firearms are regulated. The law says you have to be an adult to consume it.
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    Then for heaven's sake we need ID Verification (just like Guns and Alcohol and Spray Paint) because the average age is 11 years old first exposure.
    - bitexploder 5y ago
      So, think about the children? I think a much more constructive dialog about your legitimate concerns is useful, but not the over the too “I know best” presentation:)
  - rosndo 5y ago
    Which law?

wvh 5y ago

This might not be a popular opinion for some, but can't we move as a society beyond the point where having a naked picture online would not be upsetting or harmful for the person involved? I can't help but think that if we were all to put a couple of nudes online, the whole "Oh! Shame!" moral outrage would be pretty much over. On the one hand, there's a person's privacy and individual rights, but on the other hand is also society's response which makes a bigger deal out of erotic and sexual material than it perhaps needs to be. It might be worthwhile to also fight this from the other side and try to re-educate society not to point the finger at people for having sex or appearing in nude imagery. After all, the concern seems mostly about the consequences to the lives of the people involved rather nudity itself, so why not also try to turn the whole concept into something more positive on a societal level and fight the victimisation and shame that way?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rosndo 5y ago
Yeah, it’s really pathetic that we accept this as horrible without questioning whether or not it needs to be that way.
paulpauper 5y ago
the problem is involutory porn. that is what the article focuses on, not the moralistic aspect of nudity
- rosndo 5y ago
  Involuntary porn is so harmful specifically because of the moralistic aspect of nudity. We could just accept that sex is normal and a video of you fucking isn’t different than a video of you playing golf.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - 5y ago

glitchcrab 5y ago

I wondered if Fabian Thylmann would be mentioned; it always gives me a chuckle to see his name as he's the brother of one of the co-founders of the company I work for.

bduerst 5y ago

>When they caught a competitor ripping off content from Pornhub to create a knockoff website, engineers placed a link to the offending website in a few pixels of the Pornhub homepage, where millions of people clicked daily. The resulting tsunami of web traffic swamped the pirate site and knocked it offline in minutes — the kiss of death. Content copying competitor aside, is this type of response even legal? It feels like another form of DDOS.

convolvatron 5y ago
under what kind of law would it not be?
- rileymat2 5y ago
  The intent was a DDOS, I am not sure the mechanism is relevant?
- dymk 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act > Provisions addressed the distribution of malicious code and denial-of-service attacks.
vmception 5y ago
oooh my gawd, I love that found out
rk06 5y ago
Thieves don’t go to police for stolen goods. This is all shady. No way in hell, are they going to take legal action. Let alone when they are getting legitimate traffic, instead of automated bots.

wolverine876 5y ago

> One day, I received inquiries from journalists looking to find out more about Manwin. Believing it was a major threat, I sent off a panicked email to the owner of the company and some vice presidents. My bosses were stunned, and not in a good way. Corey, the guy who had originally hired me, marched me into an office, and I nearly got canned. They had mercy on me. I think they could tell that I was trying to protect the company in my own overzealous, entirely inappropriate way. It was true — I felt like part of a team and wanted to do my best for them. But I had blown it. > After that, with my reputation tarnished, my fortunes at the company started to dwindle. That seems wrong to me, but I'm interested in other people's responses. It doesn't seem like 'blowing it' at all. How many companies have problems with employees that are too motivated? First, afaik, CEOs generally work to have open lines of communication with their lower level employees - the problem is people not paying attention, not communicating important information, or it getting filtered by the interests of layers in between. Second, Manwin can't be that big a company. It's not like emailing the CEO of Microsoft, who has >100,000 people working for them (and again, wouldn't Satya Nadella just say - 'hey, thanks for keeping a sharp eye out and for the heads up. It may look bad, but we've seen it many times before. I'm going to forward this to corporate communications, who can handle these things astutely.') Maybe other companies are just different than the ones I've seen.

whatshisface 5y ago
If you want to hide something from senior management, you have two options: - Directly tell your subordinates to help you hide it. (Hint: Worst idea ever.) - Select for people who hide everything, unconditionally, as a cultural norm.
jomkr 5y ago
At-least this persons email to jeff@amazon.com triggered a ? email. https://independent.co.uk/money/amazon-underpaying-workers-email-jeff-bezos-b1946473.html https://independent.co.uk/money/amazon-underpaying-workers-e...

vbphprubyjsgo 5y ago

lynguist 5y ago

I read the piece, it’s very interesting and personal. But I don’t understand this: how do the porn tubes make money? Could it be advertisement? Or selling user profiles? I can’t understand it. Does anyone know more?

throw_m239339 5y ago
Just like Google Ads, it's a huge network of affiliates trying to bring the viewers into paid services like cams, paid porn or straight out prostitution services, these are often linked to violent organized crime forcing women into prostitution.

ksec 5y ago

Given no comments on it so far. Am I the only with issues viewing it on Safari. Chrome and Firefox seems to be doing fine.

shp0ngle 5y ago

Ban porn.

d_runs_far 5y ago

Lots of chatter about the tech side, my experience is quite vintage that came back to be relevant over two decades later. In the mid 1990's, while a grad student, I was approached by a fellow student to help build 'secure image library' (the details never discussed because I didn't sign his NDA) server that could be pretty locked down. At the time, that was quite out of my league and I passed. I also passed on the project and didn't try to use it to learn more, because the guy gave my now ex-wife the creeps. Fast forward 25+ years, his name popped up in the news as being arrested for some rather fucked up child-sex exploitation. It did make me think how I could have contributed to potentially aiding this guy in his journey down the exploitation road so I'm quite content that I passed. I'd hate to know anything I built was used in that realm.

stanler 5y ago

Yes yes fuck

AlexanderTheGr8 5y ago

I have seen a lot of comments about people re-uploading videos with some changes to fool hash-detection software. Can AI help with this? AI is getting very very good at identifying important parts of videos. I am willing to bet that AI can detect similar videos even if 1 of the videos has a black box or is inverted or has some changes. I always presumed that all video-sharing sites (including adult video sites) already had implemented such mechanisms. This would be really great for society in general, as this would prevent revenge-porn. Is this already used? If not, why not?

PennRobotics 5y ago
Ten to fifteen years ago, computer vision was already fingerprinting video with landmark detection (SIFT, region segmentation, Canny edges, biomimetic color correction---or simply converting to grayscale). It helps that you'll almost always have a unique audio stream that closely tracks the video stream which can also be fingerprinted and time-scaled and/or time-shifted. It's likely they're already doing machine learning. Why wouldn't they? With what essentially boils down to content recommendation as a way to increase ad viewership targeting an audience likely to have short site visits, wildly different tastes and habits, and a constant influx of new users and new videos, they probably already fingerprint videos (and users) as a method to immediately link new users and new videos to an existing pattern maximizing ad revenue. Another questionable method which might cut down on abusive/unlawful behavior would be shadowbanning offending uploaders once you have a reliable fingerprinting method. Upload a video that's close but not exactly matching a fingerprinted video? Thanks, here's the URL. Privately, we're not adding it to the index for anyone outside your subnet until someone can manually verify the two streams are unique. It's probably even possible to spoof the view count and other properties based on similarly fingerprinted clips, so only the people who make a living from aggressively reuploading are aware of the shadowban. As a bonus, if such a fingerprinting/shadowbanning combo cuts down massively on casual/bot/opportunistic reuploading, the people who continue to modify the video _and_ audio stream enough to bypass the filter could be (just a theory) more likely to be malicious/abusive, and these are the people you definitely want to exclude from your community

elinsensible 5y ago

I used to work there and I can confirm the identities and names mentioned in the article. The mysterious investor is Bernard, originally owner of YouPorn. I used to work in multiple of these websites, and helped on preparing the plan to hand over Spankwire and other "small tubes" to another company to drive them.

amirmaleki 5y ago

How is this banner blurring implemented? When you scroll down, the banner image gets blurred.