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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 recomm

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
      Pornhub does yearly roundups of stats, as well as for various events: https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2024-year-in-review https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2024-year-in-review https://www.pornhub.com/insights/ https://www.pornhub.com/insights/
  - JoshTriplett 1y ago
    > 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. That's because those are two entirely different things. If you polled people and asked them "what causes you to spend more time on social media", then at least some self-aware folks would likely identify conflict, "someone is wrong on the Internet" (https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/), etc. That doesn't mean that's "what they want to see on social media", that means that's "what gets them to spend more time on social media".
eru 1y ago
> Also, these days people have Reddit accounts reserved for porn where they do exactly this. So it was built after all. Didn't reddit remove porn?
- kristopolous 1y ago
  No. Not at all. You must be thinking of a different site. Tumblr did and onlyfans did for a hot minute and then backtracked. Neither of them intended to be porn sites. It's kind of a natural occurrence on UGC sites . Look at Civitai... Credit card processors are kinda weary of it for some legal reasons I'm not qualified to enough to really understand.
  - fc417fc802 1y ago
    > for some legal reasons For moralizing activist reasons. It's nothing to do with legality. With any luck eventually they'll inadvertently trample a sacred cow of whichever party is currently in power and we'll finally get sane legislation outlawing their overbearing nonsense.
    - naasking 1y ago
      I doubt it's moralizing reasons, it's probably because once you disseminate porn, you become a vehicle for child porn, which is a legal and PR disaster.
      - fc417fc802 1y ago
        If you disseminate user uploaded porn then moralizing activists can certainly accuse you of that. It's performative hand wringing though. The admins assuredly don't want to distribute it and the goal of anyone publicly uploading that on the clearnet is to harass and disrupt rather than to disseminate. Anyway "child porn" as well as the broader "legal reasons" fails to explain the US payment processors' moves to block all sorts of content and products over the years. Even including porn that isn't user uploaded (and thus has proper records keeping).

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
    Pornhub does yearly roundups of stats, as well as for various events: https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2024-year-in-review https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2024-year-in-review https://www.pornhub.com/insights/ https://www.pornhub.com/insights/
- JoshTriplett 1y ago
  > 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. That's because those are two entirely different things. If you polled people and asked them "what causes you to spend more time on social media", then at least some self-aware folks would likely identify conflict, "someone is wrong on the Internet" (https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/), etc. That doesn't mean that's "what they want to see on social media", that means that's "what gets them to spend more time on social media".

eru 1y ago

> Also, these days people have Reddit accounts reserved for porn where they do exactly this. So it was built after all. Didn't reddit remove porn?

kristopolous 1y ago
No. Not at all. You must be thinking of a different site. Tumblr did and onlyfans did for a hot minute and then backtracked. Neither of them intended to be porn sites. It's kind of a natural occurrence on UGC sites . Look at Civitai... Credit card processors are kinda weary of it for some legal reasons I'm not qualified to enough to really understand.
- fc417fc802 1y ago
  > for some legal reasons For moralizing activist reasons. It's nothing to do with legality. With any luck eventually they'll inadvertently trample a sacred cow of whichever party is currently in power and we'll finally get sane legislation outlawing their overbearing nonsense.
  - naasking 1y ago
    I doubt it's moralizing reasons, it's probably because once you disseminate porn, you become a vehicle for child porn, which is a legal and PR disaster.
    - fc417fc802 1y ago
      If you disseminate user uploaded porn then moralizing activists can certainly accuse you of that. It's performative hand wringing though. The admins assuredly don't want to distribute it and the goal of anyone publicly uploading that on the clearnet is to harass and disrupt rather than to disseminate. Anyway "child porn" as well as the broader "legal reasons" fails to explain the US payment processors' moves to block all sorts of content and products over the years. Even including porn that isn't user uploaded (and thus has proper records keeping).