5 ms·

Porn is always the frontier. It's a well-understood self-contained use-case without many externalities and simple business models. What more, with porn, the m

Porn is always the frontier. It's a well-understood self-contained use-case without many externalities and simple business models. What more, with porn, the medium is the product probably more than the content. Having it on home-media in the 80s was the selling point. Getting it over the 1-900 phone lines or accessing it over the internet ... these were arguably the actual product. It might have been a driver of early smart phone adoption as well. Adult content is about an 80% consumption on handheld devices while the internet writ large is about 60%. Private tunable multi-media interaction on-demand is the product here. Also it's a unique offer. Role playing prohibited sexual acts can be done arguably victim free. There's a good fiction story there... "I thought I was talking to AI"

shortrounddev2 1y ago
There's something Freudian about the idea that the more you can customize porn, the more popular it is. That, despite the impression that "all men want one thing", it turns out that men all want very different and very oddly specific things. Imbuing somrthing with a "magical" quality that doesnt exist is the origin of the term "fetish". Its not about the raw attractive preference for a particular hair color; its a belief in the POWER of that hair color.
- kristopolous 1y ago
  oh it's wildly different. About 15 years ago I worked on a porn recommendation system. The idea is that you'd follow a number of sites based on likes and recommendations and you'd get an aggregated feed with interstitial ads. So I started with scraping and cross-reference, foaf, doing analysis. People's preferences are ... really complex. Without getting too lewd, let's say there's about 30-80 categories with non-marginal demand depending on how you want to slice it and some of them can stack so you get a combinatoric. In early user testing people wanted the niche and found the adventurous (of their particular kind) to be more compelling. And that was the unpredictable part. The majoritarian categories didn't have stickiness. Nor did these niches have high correlation. Someone could be into say, specific topic A (let's say feet), and correlating that with topic B (let's say leather) was a dice roll. The probabilities were almost universally < 10% unless you went into majoritarian categories (eg. fit people in their 20s). People want adventure on a reservation with a very well defined perimeter - one that is hard to map and different for every person. So the value-add proposition went away since it's now just a collection of niche sites again. Also, these days people have Reddit accounts reserved for porn where they do exactly this. So it was built after all.
  - kridsdale3 1y ago
    You may be interested in the data surfaced by this large-scale survey[1] [1] https://aella.substack.com/p/fetish-tabooness-and-popularity-v3 https://aella.substack.com/p/fetish-tabooness-and-popularity...
    - kristopolous 1y ago
      This is interesting but there's a little more to it, especially with the erotic. If people were polled what they want to see on social media, few would say things that are inflammatory, upsetting, divisive, etc but those as we know are strong drivers of engagement. It's because you're polling for affinity or disclosed preference not for the actual engagement drivers. For instance, if a male says they watch male pornography, they are labeling, or at least stating an affinity to a sexual identity. However, the identities people choose to own are not the same as the preferences they actually have. Instead if you track things like scroll velocity, linger time, revisitation, the time distance (such as 2 days apart instead of 5 minutes) a different story emerges. For instance a given male could frequently look at male pornography but for all kinds of social reasons not want that affinity so they'd never even internally ideate the preference although their behavior of frequenting male content will be there regardless. That's one of the problems with this approach is that not many people want to own all the social identities which map to their preferences so they don't openly identify it. There (maybe) three levels of acceptance: admitting it to oneself, to others, identifying with it. And honestly these have a poor mapping to actual engagement with explicit content. You can have a (insert sexual affinity) rights activist who does not look at explicit content and someone protesting them who does all the time.
      - cm2012 1y ago
        Man, I would pay money to see the (anonymized) trends on an adult website. Fascinating view into such an under studied area of humanity nature. I bet the porn tubes have data that sociologists could write papers on.
        vidarh 1y ago
tuatoru 1y ago
1, Porn. 2 Military.
- eru 1y ago
  The firmer is a lot more nimble and the procurement processes of your customers are easier to navigate.
  - degamad 1y ago
    > firmer snort
    - eru 1y ago
      Sometimes a typo makes you look wittier than you are.
slt2021 1y ago
even if it is victim free, it can affect mental health in a way that a consumer will be more compelled to do a criminal act and create a real victim. let's say you publish a Steam game how to be a school shooter and shoot kids, wouldn't that lead to real school shootings ? who can definitely say that computer generated content about criminal behavior, won't lead to real crime with real victims? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Shooter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Shooter
- ses1984 1y ago
  Who can say that it does?
- kristopolous 1y ago
  I view it more like methadone. Let's be specific: Rape, incest, necrophilia, bestiality, and pedophila ideation. I think we can all agree (1) these are harmful, anti-social behaviors that we do not want in our society, (2) people don't choose to have these desires, (3) most people who have them have no desire to actually traumatize others, (4) people who have these struggle with it. These multi-media AI role-play environments would allow that type of engagement without any harm. Now given all this, I am not a psychologist and do not know if that's part of how someone unfortunate enough to have those inclinations can deal with it healthily. But if it is, now it exists and hopefully we can see less of it in the real world. I'm all for harm reduction if this is a way to get there.
  - landl0rd 1y ago
    It’s not unreasonable to suspect that engaging in high-fidelity simulations of these behaviors will further entrench and worsen paraphilias. This is pretty evident with the progression of many pornography addictions that don’t include these sorts of things that still follow the pattern of increasing novelty seeking leading to increasingly deviant stuff. I am at a principled level uneasy with what’s fundamentally a sort of prior restraint (you haven’t yet hurt anyone but this may increase the likelihood and/or be an effective proxy to lock up those who are more likely to do so) but also see a really strong case for doing it given the fact that these are arguably the most antisocial behaviors one can imagine.

shortrounddev2 1y ago

There's something Freudian about the idea that the more you can customize porn, the more popular it is. That, despite the impression that "all men want one thing", it turns out that men all want very different and very oddly specific things. Imbuing somrthing with a "magical" quality that doesnt exist is the origin of the term "fetish". Its not about the raw attractive preference for a particular hair color; its a belief in the POWER of that hair color.

kristopolous 1y ago
oh it's wildly different. About 15 years ago I worked on a porn recommendation system. The idea is that you'd follow a number of sites based on likes and recommendations and you'd get an aggregated feed with interstitial ads. So I started with scraping and cross-reference, foaf, doing analysis. People's preferences are ... really complex. Without getting too lewd, let's say there's about 30-80 categories with non-marginal demand depending on how you want to slice it and some of them can stack so you get a combinatoric. In early user testing people wanted the niche and found the adventurous (of their particular kind) to be more compelling. And that was the unpredictable part. The majoritarian categories didn't have stickiness. Nor did these niches have high correlation. Someone could be into say, specific topic A (let's say feet), and correlating that with topic B (let's say leather) was a dice roll. The probabilities were almost universally < 10% unless you went into majoritarian categories (eg. fit people in their 20s). People want adventure on a reservation with a very well defined perimeter - one that is hard to map and different for every person. So the value-add proposition went away since it's now just a collection of niche sites again. Also, these days people have Reddit accounts reserved for porn where they do exactly this. So it was built after all.
- kridsdale3 1y ago
  You may be interested in the data surfaced by this large-scale survey[1] [1] https://aella.substack.com/p/fetish-tabooness-and-popularity-v3 https://aella.substack.com/p/fetish-tabooness-and-popularity...
  - kristopolous 1y ago
    This is interesting but there's a little more to it, especially with the erotic. If people were polled what they want to see on social media, few would say things that are inflammatory, upsetting, divisive, etc but those as we know are strong drivers of engagement. It's because you're polling for affinity or disclosed preference not for the actual engagement drivers. For instance, if a male says they watch male pornography, they are labeling, or at least stating an affinity to a sexual identity. However, the identities people choose to own are not the same as the preferences they actually have. Instead if you track things like scroll velocity, linger time, revisitation, the time distance (such as 2 days apart instead of 5 minutes) a different story emerges. For instance a given male could frequently look at male pornography but for all kinds of social reasons not want that affinity so they'd never even internally ideate the preference although their behavior of frequenting male content will be there regardless. That's one of the problems with this approach is that not many people want to own all the social identities which map to their preferences so they don't openly identify it. There (maybe) three levels of acceptance: admitting it to oneself, to others, identifying with it. And honestly these have a poor mapping to actual engagement with explicit content. You can have a (insert sexual affinity) rights activist who does not look at explicit content and someone protesting them who does all the time.
    - cm2012 1y ago
      Man, I would pay money to see the (anonymized) trends on an adult website. Fascinating view into such an under studied area of humanity nature. I bet the porn tubes have data that sociologists could write papers on.
      - vidarh 1y ago

tuatoru 1y ago

1, Porn. 2 Military.

eru 1y ago
The firmer is a lot more nimble and the procurement processes of your customers are easier to navigate.
- degamad 1y ago
  > firmer snort
  - eru 1y ago
    Sometimes a typo makes you look wittier than you are.

slt2021 1y ago

even if it is victim free, it can affect mental health in a way that a consumer will be more compelled to do a criminal act and create a real victim. let's say you publish a Steam game how to be a school shooter and shoot kids, wouldn't that lead to real school shootings ? who can definitely say that computer generated content about criminal behavior, won't lead to real crime with real victims? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Shooter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Shooter

ses1984 1y ago
Who can say that it does?
kristopolous 1y ago
I view it more like methadone. Let's be specific: Rape, incest, necrophilia, bestiality, and pedophila ideation. I think we can all agree (1) these are harmful, anti-social behaviors that we do not want in our society, (2) people don't choose to have these desires, (3) most people who have them have no desire to actually traumatize others, (4) people who have these struggle with it. These multi-media AI role-play environments would allow that type of engagement without any harm. Now given all this, I am not a psychologist and do not know if that's part of how someone unfortunate enough to have those inclinations can deal with it healthily. But if it is, now it exists and hopefully we can see less of it in the real world. I'm all for harm reduction if this is a way to get there.
- landl0rd 1y ago
  It’s not unreasonable to suspect that engaging in high-fidelity simulations of these behaviors will further entrench and worsen paraphilias. This is pretty evident with the progression of many pornography addictions that don’t include these sorts of things that still follow the pattern of increasing novelty seeking leading to increasingly deviant stuff. I am at a principled level uneasy with what’s fundamentally a sort of prior restraint (you haven’t yet hurt anyone but this may increase the likelihood and/or be an effective proxy to lock up those who are more likely to do so) but also see a really strong case for doing it given the fact that these are arguably the most antisocial behaviors one can imagine.