7 ms·

CEO and COO of Mindgeek (Pornhub, Youporn, redtube) resign

59 points by tgtweak 4y ago

techdragon 4y ago
I get the feeling this is a “fuck it” exit. They don’t appear to have fallen out with the rest of management, since the two would basically control the corporate direction, and if they were disagreeing with each other then why would both leave since the company would likely side with one and the other would leave. I can imagine they got sick of fighting for their company against the ongoing campaign to make them Pay for their past transgressions. It’s kinda hard to really sum up the whole situation now, you have spineless credit card processing companies, duopolistic credit card companies, religious anti-porn activists, feminist anti-porn activists, porn industry advocates, individual porn performers (“amateurs” ), the traditional porn studios, the end user customers, and the news media … all in one huge pot stewing over complex issues that most people don’t really bother digging into. Yes they did bad things, but they also weren’t as bad as some were painting them, and they also destroyed a chunk of the entire porn industry in one fell swoop as a knee jerk reaction to frantically damage control an issue that was primarily pushed by a smear campaign by a religiously funded group that wants to end all porn… they were an easy target due to social stigmas and they basically had a near lethal blow dealt to them, which had knock on effects to the entire industry they were the dominant player in. It’s not a great situation and I don’t blame them for want the hell out of it. I’d probably have burned out too.
- 4oo4 4y ago
  This wasn't just anti-porn hysteria, they lied about their content filtering process for user uploads, so it was full of underage and revenge porn. Those in particular are against the law and harmful regardless of how one feels about porn in general. I totally agree that it's messed up that payment processors are now the internet morality police, but hosting those two kinds of harmful and illegal porn are 100% on MindGeek. Dissemination of those kinds of porn is very illegal, and as far as I know no one at MindGeek ever faced legal consequences, even though they were recklessly negligent and did it and on such a large scale for so many years. These guys were running things during this whole time and don't deserve any sympathy. Had MindGeek been following the law, moralist anti-porn crusaders would probably have had far less success than they did. https://www.theverge.com/c/22925906/pornhub-mindgeek-content-moderation https://www.theverge.com/c/22925906/pornhub-mindgeek-content...
  - alldayeveryday 4y ago
    Why is being anti-porn a kind of hysteria? Can a person not object to it based upon their personal values, and participate in collectivized political action just as other interest groups do to create change in favor of their values? What I would like to know, is who the leaders of this company are politically connected to in order to not be held accountable for their actions.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > Why is being anti-porn a kind of hysteria? You seem to confusing a description of “anti-porn hysteria” as an existing thing with a claim that all anti-porn inclination is hysteria, either in error or as a deliberate construction of a strawman to argue against. But, in either case, no one claimed the thing you are trying to argue against.
      - alldayeveryday 4y ago
        I would like to respond but your comment makes almost zero logical sense.
        Schiendelman 4y ago
        It made sense to me. They’re saying that not all anti-porn people are engaging in anti-porn hysteria. Ergo, your argument doesn’t make sense - you’re relying on all anti-porn being hysteria.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    > I totally agree that it's messed up that payment processors are now the internet morality police The payment processors are the internet morality police since at least 10 years. Paypal did this 10 years ago.
    - bdcravens 4y ago
      Been like that for well beyond that, 20+ years (probably since the first porn site went online). In the late 90s, early in the career, I was brought into an adult website project. You were limited to working with a few payment processors that were willing to work with the industry, and the integration was pretty rudimentary, even for the time. Note that it's not just a morality issue: porn sites have a tremendous number of chargebacks. As a result, payment processors ban categories where the risk is higher.
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  >Yes they did bad things, but they also weren’t as bad as some were painting them, I think you're glossing over this. They systematically allowed and profited from obviously illegal content. For years there was essentially not even an attempt to really prevent child porn on their site. It's one thing to go the Youtube route for civil stuff like copyright violations, but there's no putting the genie back in the bottle with child porn and rape. If an individual were found to have the videos that MindGeek had, they would've spent a lifetime in prison, not become millionaires.
sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago
I never understand these resignations. If you believe you did nothing wrong, why resign? If you believe you did something wrong, why didn't you do the right thing to begin with?
- nickff 4y ago
  >"If you believe you did nothing wrong, why resign?" For the same reason that an innocent person may plead guilty: because the expected outcome is better than the alternative.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > I never understand these resignations. If you believe you did nothing wrong, why resign? You quit a job because its not a job that, on balance, you want anymore. Like, have you never quit a job other than because you felt you had committed some kind of wrongdoing?
  - sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago
    I've never quit an executive-level job other than because I felt I had committed some kind of wrongdoing.
    - prirun 4y ago
      I quit as co-founder after 7 years (we were at peak earnings) because I was ready for a change, and I'm guessing that happens a lot. No wrongdoing. Money isn't everything in life.
      - sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago
        We're not talking about you though.
        ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
        Whatever led you to think that we were talking about _you_?
leotravis10 4y ago
This news comes after the New Yorker published a bombshell investigative piece on the company over a week ago. Previous discussion on that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31724701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31724701
- devindotcom 4y ago
  Between this and the payments stuff it was probably decided the gravy train has jumped the tracks. Time to pull the ripcord on the ol' golden parachute.
  - stuaxo 4y ago
    These companies want to run age verification for every site in the UK.
eslachance 4y ago
I've worked for Mindgeek in the past (left 2 years ago) and still had friends working there. Many dozens of employees were locked out of their accounts this morning, none of them knowing what the hell was going on. A personal friend of mind had to wait until 2pm to get a call from HR finally telling him the news, even though it had been so long that the media were already aware of the fact. I still remember when Feras was on stage at a town hall meeting 2ish years ago telling us that the company wasn't going to do any RRSP matches to the employees because we were "too young to think about retirement", all the while driving around his bright yellow Porsche Cayenne and getting his 19 million dollar mansion built. Considering they were still reeling from Visa and MC cutting off their service and having to rely on cryptocurrency for payment, it's no surprise to me that now that crypto is failing hard, the value of those payments is vastly reduced and so is, probably, existing cash that was still in the crypto space.
- cuttysnark 4y ago
  I have to know—are videos/content in the dev environment... placeholders? Or are features and other dev work done with actual porn videos? I realize sometimes one might need get the latest from prod for whatever reason, but surely day-to-day dev work isn't done with videos that—distracting?
  - eslachance 4y ago
    In the dev environment we had custom videos uploaded, and I often uploaded my own. Nice kittens and puppy videos and such. Still, the mindgeek office life was mostly the same as any office, except for the porn on half the screens. As with anything else at one point you get desensitized by the same content, since it was all test data and not live production stuff, it didn't get updated often.
- hnthrowaway0315 4y ago
  Yeah I know about that RRSP line too. RRSP matching was one of the hottest ask at the time but they just brushed it off quickly. The salary was also shitty comparing to others.
- 4y ago
stefantalpalaru 4y ago
hnthrowaway0315 4y ago
I heard there is a company wide 70% layoff, could be off but indeed there was a huge wave of layoff.
totony 4y ago
I worked there and met Feras and only have good memories of the place. It's a very difficult industry to be in and it sucks that fair criticism gets mixed with a hate train. Feras himself seemed very motivated to make the company and industry bigger. He was a very motivated guy and I look forward to see what he'll do next.

59 points by tgtweak 4y ago

I get the feeling this is a “fuck it” exit. They don’t appear to have fallen out with the rest of management, since the two would basically control the corporate direction, and if they were disagreeing with each other then why would both leave since the company would likely side with one and the other would leave. I can imagine they got sick of fighting for their company against the ongoing campaign to make them Pay for their past transgressions. It’s kinda hard to really sum up the whole situation now, you have spineless credit card processing companies, duopolistic credit card companies, religious anti-porn activists, feminist anti-porn activists, porn industry advocates, individual porn performers (“amateurs” ), the traditional porn studios, the end user customers, and the news media … all in one huge pot stewing over complex issues that most people don’t really bother digging into. Yes they did bad things, but they also weren’t as bad as some were painting them, and they also destroyed a chunk of the entire porn industry in one fell swoop as a knee jerk reaction to frantically damage control an issue that was primarily pushed by a smear campaign by a religiously funded group that wants to end all porn… they were an easy target due to social stigmas and they basically had a near lethal blow dealt to them, which had knock on effects to the entire industry they were the dominant player in. It’s not a great situation and I don’t blame them for want the hell out of it. I’d probably have burned out too.

4oo4 4y ago
This wasn't just anti-porn hysteria, they lied about their content filtering process for user uploads, so it was full of underage and revenge porn. Those in particular are against the law and harmful regardless of how one feels about porn in general. I totally agree that it's messed up that payment processors are now the internet morality police, but hosting those two kinds of harmful and illegal porn are 100% on MindGeek. Dissemination of those kinds of porn is very illegal, and as far as I know no one at MindGeek ever faced legal consequences, even though they were recklessly negligent and did it and on such a large scale for so many years. These guys were running things during this whole time and don't deserve any sympathy. Had MindGeek been following the law, moralist anti-porn crusaders would probably have had far less success than they did. https://www.theverge.com/c/22925906/pornhub-mindgeek-content-moderation https://www.theverge.com/c/22925906/pornhub-mindgeek-content...
- alldayeveryday 4y ago
  Why is being anti-porn a kind of hysteria? Can a person not object to it based upon their personal values, and participate in collectivized political action just as other interest groups do to create change in favor of their values? What I would like to know, is who the leaders of this company are politically connected to in order to not be held accountable for their actions.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Why is being anti-porn a kind of hysteria? You seem to confusing a description of “anti-porn hysteria” as an existing thing with a claim that all anti-porn inclination is hysteria, either in error or as a deliberate construction of a strawman to argue against. But, in either case, no one claimed the thing you are trying to argue against.
    - alldayeveryday 4y ago
      I would like to respond but your comment makes almost zero logical sense.
      - Schiendelman 4y ago
        It made sense to me. They’re saying that not all anti-porn people are engaging in anti-porn hysteria. Ergo, your argument doesn’t make sense - you’re relying on all anti-porn being hysteria.
- hulitu 4y ago
  > I totally agree that it's messed up that payment processors are now the internet morality police The payment processors are the internet morality police since at least 10 years. Paypal did this 10 years ago.
  - bdcravens 4y ago
    Been like that for well beyond that, 20+ years (probably since the first porn site went online). In the late 90s, early in the career, I was brought into an adult website project. You were limited to working with a few payment processors that were willing to work with the industry, and the integration was pretty rudimentary, even for the time. Note that it's not just a morality issue: porn sites have a tremendous number of chargebacks. As a result, payment processors ban categories where the risk is higher.
SilverBirch 4y ago
>Yes they did bad things, but they also weren’t as bad as some were painting them, I think you're glossing over this. They systematically allowed and profited from obviously illegal content. For years there was essentially not even an attempt to really prevent child porn on their site. It's one thing to go the Youtube route for civil stuff like copyright violations, but there's no putting the genie back in the bottle with child porn and rape. If an individual were found to have the videos that MindGeek had, they would've spent a lifetime in prison, not become millionaires.

sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago

I never understand these resignations. If you believe you did nothing wrong, why resign? If you believe you did something wrong, why didn't you do the right thing to begin with?

nickff 4y ago
>"If you believe you did nothing wrong, why resign?" For the same reason that an innocent person may plead guilty: because the expected outcome is better than the alternative.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> I never understand these resignations. If you believe you did nothing wrong, why resign? You quit a job because its not a job that, on balance, you want anymore. Like, have you never quit a job other than because you felt you had committed some kind of wrongdoing?
- sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago
  I've never quit an executive-level job other than because I felt I had committed some kind of wrongdoing.
  - prirun 4y ago
    I quit as co-founder after 7 years (we were at peak earnings) because I was ready for a change, and I'm guessing that happens a lot. No wrongdoing. Money isn't everything in life.
    - sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago
      We're not talking about you though.
      - ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
        Whatever led you to think that we were talking about _you_?

leotravis10 4y ago

This news comes after the New Yorker published a bombshell investigative piece on the company over a week ago. Previous discussion on that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31724701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31724701

devindotcom 4y ago
Between this and the payments stuff it was probably decided the gravy train has jumped the tracks. Time to pull the ripcord on the ol' golden parachute.
- stuaxo 4y ago
  These companies want to run age verification for every site in the UK.

eslachance 4y ago

I've worked for Mindgeek in the past (left 2 years ago) and still had friends working there. Many dozens of employees were locked out of their accounts this morning, none of them knowing what the hell was going on. A personal friend of mind had to wait until 2pm to get a call from HR finally telling him the news, even though it had been so long that the media were already aware of the fact. I still remember when Feras was on stage at a town hall meeting 2ish years ago telling us that the company wasn't going to do any RRSP matches to the employees because we were "too young to think about retirement", all the while driving around his bright yellow Porsche Cayenne and getting his 19 million dollar mansion built. Considering they were still reeling from Visa and MC cutting off their service and having to rely on cryptocurrency for payment, it's no surprise to me that now that crypto is failing hard, the value of those payments is vastly reduced and so is, probably, existing cash that was still in the crypto space.

cuttysnark 4y ago
I have to know—are videos/content in the dev environment... placeholders? Or are features and other dev work done with actual porn videos? I realize sometimes one might need get the latest from prod for whatever reason, but surely day-to-day dev work isn't done with videos that—distracting?
- eslachance 4y ago
  In the dev environment we had custom videos uploaded, and I often uploaded my own. Nice kittens and puppy videos and such. Still, the mindgeek office life was mostly the same as any office, except for the porn on half the screens. As with anything else at one point you get desensitized by the same content, since it was all test data and not live production stuff, it didn't get updated often.
hnthrowaway0315 4y ago
Yeah I know about that RRSP line too. RRSP matching was one of the hottest ask at the time but they just brushed it off quickly. The salary was also shitty comparing to others.
4y ago

stefantalpalaru 4y ago

hnthrowaway0315 4y ago

I heard there is a company wide 70% layoff, could be off but indeed there was a huge wave of layoff.

totony 4y ago

I worked there and met Feras and only have good memories of the place. It's a very difficult industry to be in and it sucks that fair criticism gets mixed with a hate train. Feras himself seemed very motivated to make the company and industry bigger. He was a very motivated guy and I look forward to see what he'll do next.