47 ms·

The operating cost of adult and gambling startups

137 points by theorchid 6mo ago

deleted 6mo ago
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A_Duck 6mo ago
What's the author trying to say here? It's good that the law isn't the only line between good and evil. A bit of stigma is a bottom-up way for people to shape society. If nobody invites you to dinner parties because you run a startup that combines payday-lending and day-trading, that's a good thing. It's free alpha for companies doing more worthwhile things.
- 3form 6mo ago
  I don't like mixing of everything 18+ in the article. I think the author wants to put all the stigma in one basket, and I don't it's as simple. For example, porn meets some actual human needs and has a certain function - but gambling? Simple abuse at scale. I think like you argue, society shaping business is good. And some people should really reevaluate what they're going for if that's too much for them.
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    > For example, porn meets some actual human needs and has a certain function - but gambling? Simple abuse at scale. Now I'm as as free-minded as people typically gets, but both of those are just "entertainment" for me, one is not more "essential" than the other, what exact "human need" does pornography meet that somehow gambling doesn't also meet, since we're not talking about "fun" or "entertainment" here but something else it sounds like.
    - jjulius 6mo ago
      [dead]
    - 8-prime 6mo ago
      While the porn industry has issue, at its core it isn't constructed to extract money from you. Boiling Gambling down to just being "entertainment" is a bit too reductionist in my opinion.
      - lurkshark 6mo ago
        > it isn't constructed to extract money from you I mean yes, it is; It’s not a charity. I guess you could argue it tends to do it slower than gambling?
      - embedding-shape 6mo ago
        > While the porn industry has issue, at its core it isn't constructed to extract money from you. For what purpose do you think that industry was indirectly created for, if not to make money from people? Even if it might not have been created with that intent (although I'd still argue it was), today it surely is mainly driven and maintain with the (at least) implicit purpose of extracting money from people, that's literally why we call it an "industry" instead of just a "community".
        adrian_b 6mo ago
        Like others have said, any industry has the purpose of extracting money from the customers. The original poster has not expressed this correctly, but I assume that the intention was to say that the gambling industry is different from all other industries, not because it extracts money like any other industry, but because it does not return a product or service for that money. The porn industry is no different from any other entertainment industry and it provides a service for money. Gambling does not really provide any service, it just exploits the hope of the gamblers that they might gain something by gambling, which at least on average, never happens. I do not think that one can call the stimulation of this hope of gaining as entertainment. There are some gamblers for which gambling is really entertainment, i.e. they are rich and they do not seriously expect to gain anything, but the majority of the gamblers do not do this to be entertained but because of the irrational hope of gaining enough to solve all their problems.
    - deleted 6mo ago
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    - deleted 6mo ago
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    - 3form 6mo ago
      Sure - what comes to mind: - helps in managing sexual needs, which can be difficult to handle otherwise, and especially replace - educational: whether it is about workings of sex, ideas to improve your sex life with a partner, or something to discover about yourself I suppose there's more to it, but most other things I can think of are an extension to meeting sexual needs.
      - itake 6mo ago
        > helps in managing sexual needs There are plenty of "sexual needs" that society says "no, you can't satisfy them." (for example, Nguyễn Xuân Đạt). I don't think sexual needs are needs that can't be managed without media. > educational: whether it is about workings of sex I find when a partner characterizes porn, the sex is worse... Maybe other people enjoy the sounds or behaviors seen in the videos, but not for me.
        3form 6mo ago
        >I don't think sexual needs are needs that can't be managed without media. Of course they can, but it still helps - that's why I used that wording. Also replacement of one sex need with another feels more viable than with other needs, given how the chemical machinery of the body seems to work. > I find when a partner characterizes porn, the sex is worse... Maybe other people enjoy the sounds or behaviors seen in the videos, but not for me. I can't say that the content isn't majorly bad, or that the field is not rife with abuse. That's a real problem, but I think u related to the original question of "does it address a real need". In this case I think the main takeaways are the ideas, techniques, and what you can learn about body from some of the more realistic videos. Somewhat unfortunately, many people pick wrongly, but I do believe right choices exist.
        itake 6mo ago
        The media projects that gay conversion initiatives fail at steering the ship the other direction. Governments (and society) expect personal repression and do not allow for outlets or replacements. (for the record, these ideas I'm writing about are not my own, but my observations as a member of the society. I wish these topics were less taboo, but it is what it is.)
  - tempaccountabcd 6mo ago
    [dead]
  - TZubiri 6mo ago
    More importantly, one is legal, the other isn't, running a casino without a license is illegal and you can face criminal charges and jailtime, which I don't think is the case for operating a porn studio. This is regardless of the ethics, I'm actually pro gambling and anti porn, but that's the law is all I am saying, and I don't think it's a trivial difference, and for sure the author is bucketing to downplay their 'stigma'. No buddy, not the same. I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
  - LorenPechtel 6mo ago
    Very much agree. I have no problems with the porn industry--if anything I think the requirements are too strict. Being able to inspect the records during business hours looks innocent enough, but it assumes you have an office and business hours. And it requires more dissemination of real identities than ideal. Virtually all the sins it's blamed for aren't accurate. About the only valid objection is that porn is no more realistic sex than Hollywood is realistic life. And because we won't do something sensible like actually teach kids about it there are problems from not having other models and not understanding how unrealistic it is. Gambling, nuke from orbit. Large scale gambling operations have no redeeming social value.
- strken 6mo ago
  One of the clients I've worked with was a female-led sex toy manufacturer. It was a nuisance trying to dodge some of the roadblocks. Stigma and regulatory pressure don't always mean the company is evil.
  - nekusar 6mo ago
    Just call the brand "Pickle Bread". Cause it's made with dill dough :D (gotta at least have a joke for a friday. its rough for a lot of us.) (edit: seriously, tough crowd. hovering between -2 and -4. Like, this is a light-hearted joke. Not even insulting anyone, either.)
    - ChoGGi 6mo ago
      No jokes allowed here. I chuckled. If you add something to the conversation and sneak the joke in, it'll usually pass by the fun police.
- cj 6mo ago
  > line between good and evil Talking about good and evil in tech is a slippery slope. What's worse, working at Meta building products causing addiction in kids, or building an adult content site? I think there's an argument that Meta is morally worse, yet there's no stigma associated with having Meta on your resume. I find that interesting.
  - ohyoutravel 6mo ago
    Meta isn’t as blatant about it, but they’re arguably much worse than anything else listed here. I think because it has legitimate uses up front, like keeping up with your friends or selling something on the marketplace, and the true evil is just below that veneer. Gambling and payday lending is right out front.
  - juliushuijnk 6mo ago
    > yet there's no stigma associated with having Meta on your resume. You think so?
  - gosub100 6mo ago
    Let me challenge your POV for a moment.. What about proportionally of abuse? How many married people met on fb? Estranged family members reunited, long lost friends who found each other again? Etc. It's impossible to know the number for those, but I vividly remember how difficult it was to find people before fb. And they made it trivial because of critical mass. I'll acknowledge that this has also led to a lot of unwanted "finding" too. Again, we cannot calculate. But it's worth bringing up proportionality. Because you could make the same argument about a mass retailer like Walmart. They sell tires that were used in drunk driving crashes, they sold food eaten by obese people, they sold cigarettes (at least thru the 90s) to lung cancer victims, etc. You can skew the data however you like because they sold items to so many customers. But they also fed a lot of families and reduced the cost of living (sometimes by nefarious means) for a lot of poor people.
    - LorenPechtel 6mo ago
      Facebook, as a community is fine. The evil lies in the feed. All the standard addiction techniques are present. All the engineering to promote "engagement" is actually basically addiction. And the attempts to show you want you want have a strong tendency to show you more extreme versions of anything you previously watched. It's very, very easy for it to lead you down a rabbit hole into extremist territory. It's inherent in any such prediction algorithm unless somehow the selector understands to bias away from extremism.
- raincole 6mo ago
  The article is about payment providers. Do you think payment providers should act like moral police that decide how the customers can spend their money? If so, do you think Google/Apple/Microsoft should have a say in which apps the users can install? Should ISPs decide which sites the users can access?
  - projektfu 6mo ago
    The article does talk about church and social gatherings, and uncomfortable SOs?
  - subscribed 6mo ago
    Remember that payment providers are happy with X openly selling access to the CSAM generator (Grok).
- melenaboija 6mo ago
  That is successful and makes tons of money. The author is saying it explicitly, you can’t flex as normal people do so you have to feed your ego finding different ways such as anonymous posts. Or talking to an stranger being drunk.
- antonvs 6mo ago
  > a startup that combines payday-lending and day-trading Add in crypto and some AI, and there’s a $50m funding round waiting for you.
littlecranky67 6mo ago
> A regular provider charges a regular commission but will not work with you, while another will want a commission 10 times higher and will agree, but may stop working with you at any time. I know I will get downvoted for this because it is an unpopular opinion, but this exactly the reason why we need bitcoin as a means of payments without any middlemen involved.
- jfrbfbreudh 6mo ago
  Yes, because bitcoin transaction costs never surge in price.
  - littlecranky67 6mo ago
    They don't, because you would transfer them via lightning, of course. No one want to pay their porn subscription with traceable onchain transactions.
    - jfrbfbreudh 6mo ago
      TIL
      - rationalist 6mo ago
        FYI, Bitcoin proponents seem to "forget" that Lightning transactions are traceable by the Lightning node operator, whomever that might be.
        littlecranky67 6mo ago
        You can operate your own node (I do). Plus you are not up2date. Trampoline payments were recently introduced, and a client can insert several trampolines. So even if you use a hosted single upstream node, that node can not trace the target. BOLT12 which is currently finalized also hides recipients from invoices. The thing about layer 2 solutions is, they evolve much faster than the base layer (bitcoin). So dont trust statements that are some years old.
b40d-48b2-979e 6mo ago
You may have a cool product in the field of sports betting, casinos, or lotteries. But almost all social networks and search engines won’t let you advertise without a license from the required jurisdiction. Good. You should face social stigma for creating products that literally ruin people's lives.
- antonymoose 6mo ago
  Not to mention the entitlement of startups to just flaunt laws and regulations. Still kills me to this day Uber and AirBNB running illegal billion dollar operations. I suppose one can at least say Uber mitigates drunk driving tendencies. As far as AirBNB goes, it can rot straight in hell. My hometown is now 20% AirBNB, they ran illegally for many years, and this completely prices out normal folks trying to live near their families.
  - RHSeeger 6mo ago
    I don't have a problem with them actively choosing to break laws to protest the laws themselves; to try to get them changed. Civil disobedience is a long standing practice. However, part of doing that is facing the consequences of breaking those laws; being arrested, etc. Just because _you_ think the law isn't just doesn't mean it's not a law - it just means you think it should be changed. And the companies in question break the law and then whine and complain like they shouldn't need to face the consequences; like the law shouldn't apply to them because they don't think it's fair.
    - watwut 6mo ago
      Meh. What they are doing is NOT civil disobedience and protest. What they are doing is just normal breaking the law for profit thing. That being said, I also dont think that civil disobedience means you have to accept whatever harsh punishment whatever authoritarian is using. It is actually ok to avoid those.
      - mcmcmc 6mo ago
j4k0bfr 6mo ago
A well written and thoughtful article! Thanks for sharing. It's been a while since I've read article on something like online gambling without feeling like the author was trying to proselytize. Edit: I appreciate the human perspective shared by the article, and get the feeling that OP offers a warning of the consequences of working in stigmatized fields. Ofc online gambling (and gambling in general tbh) is a terrible thing that ruins lives.
- theorchid 6mo ago
  Thank you very much for reading! Yes, the purpose of this essay was to shed light on the challenges of launching startups in stigmatized niches and the consequences of working in them.
groundzeros2015 6mo ago
I didn’t expect him to describe his own field as illegitimate. Somehow knowing you are doing bad things is even worse than a rationalization. Why spend your time with people who don’t believe in what they do?
- chirau 6mo ago
  I am pretty sure most companies and people doing bad things know they are doing bad things.
post-it 6mo ago
> When posting job openings, you will always have to beat around the bush, without using direct language. And only then, when the candidate has already agreed to an interview or even after it, do you tell them what kind of content they will be working with every day. > Employees join such projects for various reasons. Some realize that the pay is better than in legitimate projects. Others come because they couldn’t find a job where they wanted to, or because they are simply interested in working on something forbidden. And then a good company saving the world will come along and offer them a job, and they’ll leave. Building a stable team from people with this kind of motivation is hard. I think OP made this whole article up. Everyone that applies for Aylo knows exactly what they're applying for. The pay is below-average because (a) there's not actually a lot of money in porn and (b) there's no shortage of dudes that want to work in it.
- theorchid 6mo ago
  > I think OP made this whole article up. Thanks for reading! When writing this essay, I drew solely on my own experience. I’ve often noticed that startups post job listings with misleading job descriptions, especially in stigmatized industries. It’s only after the interview that they reveal what the work will actually entail. Perhaps you simply haven’t noticed such job listings.
  - kelsey98765431 6mo ago
    [flagged]
- _fat_santa 6mo ago
  This, Had a recruiter reach out to me the other day from a sports gambling website (one of the major ones, as reputable as you can get in this industry). I heard them out, thinking they would offer above market rate but in actuality, they offered significantly below market rate.
  - comprev 6mo ago
    Employment at a below market rate might be the only job some people can get due to events in their past i.e someone with a criminal record that puts most employers out of reach. There is a large talent pool who want to get their lives back on track.
Lerc 6mo ago
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Invictus0 6mo ago
[flagged]
leetrout 6mo ago
The title is "Stigma is a tax on every operational decision"
- theorchid 6mo ago
  Thank you for pointing that out! But since HN allows any title, I chose the one that best suits the HN audience.
  - leetrout 6mo ago
    "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
cleansy 6mo ago
I worked as a tech in porn in my very early 20s. My experience was the opposite, interviewers later on remembered my CV because I was transparent about it. In 2009-2011 weren’t many places where a junior developer could work on code that served 100M ad impressions /month and 3-5M requests on the pages. Gambling and porn both hook into your dopamine systems, but mixing them together does not make sense at all. The consequences of watching pornography are two orders of magnitude milder than a gambling addiction.
Zopieux 6mo ago
I cannot care less what (legal) porn content people consume in the intimacy of their room. I cannot understand being prude about this. Like all things, over-use is unhealthy, but I have yet to see studies proving the societal damage caused by porn. Before you ask: the loneliness epidemic (which intuitively translates to more porn consumption) is just a symptom of people losing a "third place" to socialize, or not having their own place. Those are rooted in the shitty economic landscape we're in, and uncontrolled urban sprawl with no public transit. Gambling/betting though? Overwhelming societal damage with basically no upside beyond the ghouls in charge. Regulate this shit to death, tyvm.
- b40d-48b2-979e 6mo ago
  and uncontrolled urban sprawl with no public transit. *sub-urban sprawl. If you're sprawling, you've exited "urban".
- theorchid 6mo ago
  > but I have yet to see studies proving the societal damage caused by porn. It doesn't necessarily have to be harmful for it to be stigmatized by society.
antonyh 6mo ago
And yet I can buy a Premier League soccer shirt with a casino brand sprayed across the front. I wish it would stop, advertising gambling via sports sponsorships should be banned. It literally prevents me from buying the shirt.
- hn_acc1 6mo ago
  This. It makes me less and less interested in the sports I have enjoyed watching for 45+ years (and played frequently in some form). Seeing an NHL player hawking NFTs a few years back really made me do a double take and wonder if I was truly done with it. Thankfully, that faded fast.
gwbas1c 6mo ago
Wow, I'm shocked at the negative attitudes in this thread. Porn and gambling are legit businesses, even if you don't like it. (And some people used to argue that part of the rise of the PC was because some people bought it as a "porn machine.") It's important to keep these things (almost) in the open, because when they become illegal, criminals move in and people get hurt. When I was an intern at a big-name, conservative company, one of my friends came from a porn website.
- sharts 6mo ago
  Also its silly to vilify porn and gambling but not social media and the plethora of seemingly socially acceptable / legal things which are still legitimately destroying the fabric of society. Most haters are just as culpable.
  - jbxntuehineoh 6mo ago
    plenty of people vilify social media on this site. do you think any post criticizing one thing also needs to list out every other thing the poster doesn't like?
- thescriptkiddie 6mo ago
  one of those things is not like the other
  - baobabKoodaa 6mo ago
    Uhh, yeah, they're both different from each other, but are you implying that one of them is worse than the other? Which one?
    - LorenPechtel 6mo ago
      Porn is repeatedly demonized but the supposed evils are pretty much nonexistent. No, porn isn't destroying marriages; rather, people in failing marriages often turn to porn. For porn to be more attractive than reality there must be something wrong with the reality.
Scaled 6mo ago
On the topic of operating costs, the annual "high risk" credit card fees just went up to nearly $2k/year. High risk in quotes because even if you have stellar charge back rates you still get hit with it (did you know the charge back rate for adult is way, way less than the chargeback rate for travel?). The card networks have something called virp/bram, which is basically designed to force adult merchants into paying these absurd fees and limiting the banks they can work with to the most predatory ones. It's a huge antitrust issue that results in higher consumer prices but unfortunately no one is litigating yet
- abigail95 6mo ago
  Adult websites have chargeback rates from single to double digits depending on the product. Airlines/Hotels/Uber/Cruises/Car Rentals do not approach this. You are off by one or two orders of magnitude.
- rationalist 6mo ago
  > did you know the charge back rate for adult is way, way less than the chargeback rate for travel? No; source?
miki123211 6mo ago
This article puts "we pinky swear its not gambling" apps, I'm thinking Robinhood here, but some crypto and prediction market apps would qualify too, in a new light. If you don't appear to be a casino at first glance, it's a lot easier to find employees, payment processors and advertising networks willing to work with you. Brick-and-mortar companies (notably Walmart) used the same trick to get tech talent. Having Walmart on your tech resume doesn't look great, having an e-commerce startup called jet.com looks much better, even if Walmart is that startup owner and sole customer.
camdencheek 6mo ago
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- deleted 6mo ago
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abetancort 6mo ago
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Animats 6mo ago
I used to know a bondage model and porn producer in San Francisco. She was quite open about it, and it didn't seem to hurt her reputation. Her operation was fully compliant, with 18 U.S. Code § 2257 forms on file for all performers. And yes, law enforcement did come by to check. One day we were talking and I asked about credit card processing. I got a twenty minute rant about the problems of offshore credit card processing, ripoffs in the 7 figure range, arbitrary cancellation... That was the hardest part of the business, and the most frustrating. She finally gave it up, moved to Texas, and now manages influencer networks.
_doctor_love 6mo ago
Generally speaking I am a classical liberal in that I believe "vices" like drugs, pornography, prostitution should be legal in order to be regulated and in the open. It cannot eliminate abuse but it can help mitigate it. What I would LOVE to see in the United States in particular is a system where we tax pornography and then plow that money back into sex education in public schools. The state of sex education in the United States is so far beyond a joke it is a travesty. That said, I also feel a lot of folks who are pro-legislation are quite dishonest about the negative side-effects of legalization. They definitely exist!
- decimalenough 6mo ago
  Uh, pornography is legal in the US and providers do pay taxes.
  - _doctor_love 6mo ago
    Good observation, now connect it to the next piece I said.
gavinray 6mo ago
Do you all want to know a fun fact about adult-content startups: Why do you think Onlyfans is the reigning platform for what it does. Not because it's technically superior, or has the best advertising, or any other logical reason you might summon. It's because they have a sweetheart deal with a payment processor (Stripe). I put some time into seriously investigating what it'd take to get an adult-content platform off of the ground, here is one of the emails I received from a self-advertised "high-risk processor": > "Yes, we do have some Payment Facilitator solutions. However, none of these processors will accept Adult content." Nobody will touch it with a 10 foot pole. It's absolute bullshit and is ripe for disruption.
walrus01 6mo ago
This article manages to completely fail to mention one of the primary reasons why credit card processors won't touch porn sites. Not because it's porn, but from a strictly financial risk analysis POV, because a significant portion of the successful charges to cards are later disputed by the cardholder. Some person signs up for a $30 per month whatever porno subscription, and then doesn't understand what they agreed to later on, or regrets it, or their spouse or partner finds the charge on their credit card statement, doesn't know what it is, and starts a dispute with the card issuer. Compared to something else that sells a tangible good on the internet, or some ordinary software as a service thing... If you have 10,000 charges to 10,000 different people placed from an ordinary merchant, and you compare that to 10,000 charges from a porno website, there will be a vastly larger number of chargebacks and human-caused fraud disputes with the porno website. It's a continual and ongoing pain in the ass for any credit card processor that does business with such a merchant. The major processors (stripe and its top competitors) have decided that it is not worth the hassle and are completely happy to cede this niche market to specialists. Basically for the same reason that a car loan through a subprime lending company originated by a "buy here pay here" car sales lot will have a much higher percentage interest rate, because of the risk to the lender, credit card processing for the adult entertainment market will have a much higher percentage fee charged to the merchant to run those cards.
ball_of_lint 6mo ago
Author makes a point badly, but there is an important point here. It's really strange that we de-facto allow the few large credit card networks (Visa, Mastercard) to effectively impose their own particular views and values on what sorts of businesses can process payments. The stigma+roadblocks against these "high-risk categories" generally doesn't come from the processors (like Stripe, Adyen), but are actually driven by the networks themselves, in response to lobbying by groups such as Collective Shout. https://nabesaka.com/visa-mastercard-deciding-content-legality/ https://nabesaka.com/visa-mastercard-deciding-content-legali... Whatever you think about NSFW media or gambling in particular, you _should_ worry that Visa and/or Mastercard could decide tomorrow that they don't want to process payments for you and cause you to lose your livelihood.
- scelerat 6mo ago
  It's not that credit card companies have some kind of moral bone to pick, it is that the legal, logistical and political morass of dealing with the variety of state and national laws, definitions of porn, protections of children and non-consenting performers, etc. are such that it is not worth it for them to pursue. Similar issues exist for, e.g., companies and sites selling legal THC and THC products.
  - bdangubic 6mo ago
    exactly, they would not give two shits about what your business does if they got immunity from any prosecution
  - ball_of_lint 6mo ago
    That might be part of it, but I don't think it's the only or primary motivation. But we don't really get to know. They can and have used this power to effectively censor legal content. I don't think this sort of power is something that a private entity should hold. Being able to refuse service is fine for a random restaurant when there's 10 other options available, much less so for a duopoly that provides a key facet of modern life.
nine_k 6mo ago
> You may have a cool product in the field of sports betting, casinos, or lotteries. I stopped to think what a cool product in this area may look like, without being toxic. Maybe a site explaining why betting loses money in the long term, or how casinos hook gamblers up with random-looking but not entirely random responses of the one-handed bandits?
singleshot_ 6mo ago
> You may have a cool product in the field of sports betting, casinos, or lotteries. But almost all social networks and search engines won’t let you advertise without a license from the required jurisdiction. Finding investment for such projects is far harder than for conventional niches. That’s because you are operating in the market of degeneracy, taking profits by offloading your victims’ losses on their commercial counterparts through the bankruptcy system and the rest of us through social services. There is a reason there were laws against this until the degeneracy operators figured out how to further corrupt our democracy.
casey2 6mo ago
This is really only true for companies operating in old spaces. If you are on the ground floor of social media or roblox then there is no stigma against that fact that you are exploiting children, child labor, and profit on massively increasing the likelihood that they are exploited by predators

137 points by theorchid 6mo ago

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

What's the author trying to say here? It's good that the law isn't the only line between good and evil. A bit of stigma is a bottom-up way for people to shape society. If nobody invites you to dinner parties because you run a startup that combines payday-lending and day-trading, that's a good thing. It's free alpha for companies doing more worthwhile things.

3form 6mo ago
I don't like mixing of everything 18+ in the article. I think the author wants to put all the stigma in one basket, and I don't it's as simple. For example, porn meets some actual human needs and has a certain function - but gambling? Simple abuse at scale. I think like you argue, society shaping business is good. And some people should really reevaluate what they're going for if that's too much for them.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  > For example, porn meets some actual human needs and has a certain function - but gambling? Simple abuse at scale. Now I'm as as free-minded as people typically gets, but both of those are just "entertainment" for me, one is not more "essential" than the other, what exact "human need" does pornography meet that somehow gambling doesn't also meet, since we're not talking about "fun" or "entertainment" here but something else it sounds like.
  - jjulius 6mo ago
    [dead]
  - 8-prime 6mo ago
    While the porn industry has issue, at its core it isn't constructed to extract money from you. Boiling Gambling down to just being "entertainment" is a bit too reductionist in my opinion.
    - lurkshark 6mo ago
      > it isn't constructed to extract money from you I mean yes, it is; It’s not a charity. I guess you could argue it tends to do it slower than gambling?
    - embedding-shape 6mo ago
      > While the porn industry has issue, at its core it isn't constructed to extract money from you. For what purpose do you think that industry was indirectly created for, if not to make money from people? Even if it might not have been created with that intent (although I'd still argue it was), today it surely is mainly driven and maintain with the (at least) implicit purpose of extracting money from people, that's literally why we call it an "industry" instead of just a "community".
      - adrian_b 6mo ago
        Like others have said, any industry has the purpose of extracting money from the customers. The original poster has not expressed this correctly, but I assume that the intention was to say that the gambling industry is different from all other industries, not because it extracts money like any other industry, but because it does not return a product or service for that money. The porn industry is no different from any other entertainment industry and it provides a service for money. Gambling does not really provide any service, it just exploits the hope of the gamblers that they might gain something by gambling, which at least on average, never happens. I do not think that one can call the stimulation of this hope of gaining as entertainment. There are some gamblers for which gambling is really entertainment, i.e. they are rich and they do not seriously expect to gain anything, but the majority of the gamblers do not do this to be entertained but because of the irrational hope of gaining enough to solve all their problems.
  - deleted 6mo ago
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  - deleted 6mo ago
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  - 3form 6mo ago
    Sure - what comes to mind: - helps in managing sexual needs, which can be difficult to handle otherwise, and especially replace - educational: whether it is about workings of sex, ideas to improve your sex life with a partner, or something to discover about yourself I suppose there's more to it, but most other things I can think of are an extension to meeting sexual needs.
    - itake 6mo ago
      > helps in managing sexual needs There are plenty of "sexual needs" that society says "no, you can't satisfy them." (for example, Nguyễn Xuân Đạt). I don't think sexual needs are needs that can't be managed without media. > educational: whether it is about workings of sex I find when a partner characterizes porn, the sex is worse... Maybe other people enjoy the sounds or behaviors seen in the videos, but not for me.
      - 3form 6mo ago
        >I don't think sexual needs are needs that can't be managed without media. Of course they can, but it still helps - that's why I used that wording. Also replacement of one sex need with another feels more viable than with other needs, given how the chemical machinery of the body seems to work. > I find when a partner characterizes porn, the sex is worse... Maybe other people enjoy the sounds or behaviors seen in the videos, but not for me. I can't say that the content isn't majorly bad, or that the field is not rife with abuse. That's a real problem, but I think u related to the original question of "does it address a real need". In this case I think the main takeaways are the ideas, techniques, and what you can learn about body from some of the more realistic videos. Somewhat unfortunately, many people pick wrongly, but I do believe right choices exist.
        itake 6mo ago
        The media projects that gay conversion initiatives fail at steering the ship the other direction. Governments (and society) expect personal repression and do not allow for outlets or replacements. (for the record, these ideas I'm writing about are not my own, but my observations as a member of the society. I wish these topics were less taboo, but it is what it is.)
- tempaccountabcd 6mo ago
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- TZubiri 6mo ago
  More importantly, one is legal, the other isn't, running a casino without a license is illegal and you can face criminal charges and jailtime, which I don't think is the case for operating a porn studio. This is regardless of the ethics, I'm actually pro gambling and anti porn, but that's the law is all I am saying, and I don't think it's a trivial difference, and for sure the author is bucketing to downplay their 'stigma'. No buddy, not the same. I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
- LorenPechtel 6mo ago
  Very much agree. I have no problems with the porn industry--if anything I think the requirements are too strict. Being able to inspect the records during business hours looks innocent enough, but it assumes you have an office and business hours. And it requires more dissemination of real identities than ideal. Virtually all the sins it's blamed for aren't accurate. About the only valid objection is that porn is no more realistic sex than Hollywood is realistic life. And because we won't do something sensible like actually teach kids about it there are problems from not having other models and not understanding how unrealistic it is. Gambling, nuke from orbit. Large scale gambling operations have no redeeming social value.
strken 6mo ago
One of the clients I've worked with was a female-led sex toy manufacturer. It was a nuisance trying to dodge some of the roadblocks. Stigma and regulatory pressure don't always mean the company is evil.
- nekusar 6mo ago
  Just call the brand "Pickle Bread". Cause it's made with dill dough :D (gotta at least have a joke for a friday. its rough for a lot of us.) (edit: seriously, tough crowd. hovering between -2 and -4. Like, this is a light-hearted joke. Not even insulting anyone, either.)
  - ChoGGi 6mo ago
    No jokes allowed here. I chuckled. If you add something to the conversation and sneak the joke in, it'll usually pass by the fun police.
cj 6mo ago
> line between good and evil Talking about good and evil in tech is a slippery slope. What's worse, working at Meta building products causing addiction in kids, or building an adult content site? I think there's an argument that Meta is morally worse, yet there's no stigma associated with having Meta on your resume. I find that interesting.
- ohyoutravel 6mo ago
  Meta isn’t as blatant about it, but they’re arguably much worse than anything else listed here. I think because it has legitimate uses up front, like keeping up with your friends or selling something on the marketplace, and the true evil is just below that veneer. Gambling and payday lending is right out front.
- juliushuijnk 6mo ago
  > yet there's no stigma associated with having Meta on your resume. You think so?
- gosub100 6mo ago
  Let me challenge your POV for a moment.. What about proportionally of abuse? How many married people met on fb? Estranged family members reunited, long lost friends who found each other again? Etc. It's impossible to know the number for those, but I vividly remember how difficult it was to find people before fb. And they made it trivial because of critical mass. I'll acknowledge that this has also led to a lot of unwanted "finding" too. Again, we cannot calculate. But it's worth bringing up proportionality. Because you could make the same argument about a mass retailer like Walmart. They sell tires that were used in drunk driving crashes, they sold food eaten by obese people, they sold cigarettes (at least thru the 90s) to lung cancer victims, etc. You can skew the data however you like because they sold items to so many customers. But they also fed a lot of families and reduced the cost of living (sometimes by nefarious means) for a lot of poor people.
  - LorenPechtel 6mo ago
    Facebook, as a community is fine. The evil lies in the feed. All the standard addiction techniques are present. All the engineering to promote "engagement" is actually basically addiction. And the attempts to show you want you want have a strong tendency to show you more extreme versions of anything you previously watched. It's very, very easy for it to lead you down a rabbit hole into extremist territory. It's inherent in any such prediction algorithm unless somehow the selector understands to bias away from extremism.
raincole 6mo ago
The article is about payment providers. Do you think payment providers should act like moral police that decide how the customers can spend their money? If so, do you think Google/Apple/Microsoft should have a say in which apps the users can install? Should ISPs decide which sites the users can access?
- projektfu 6mo ago
  The article does talk about church and social gatherings, and uncomfortable SOs?
- subscribed 6mo ago
  Remember that payment providers are happy with X openly selling access to the CSAM generator (Grok).
melenaboija 6mo ago
That is successful and makes tons of money. The author is saying it explicitly, you can’t flex as normal people do so you have to feed your ego finding different ways such as anonymous posts. Or talking to an stranger being drunk.
antonvs 6mo ago
> a startup that combines payday-lending and day-trading Add in crypto and some AI, and there’s a $50m funding round waiting for you.

littlecranky67 6mo ago

> A regular provider charges a regular commission but will not work with you, while another will want a commission 10 times higher and will agree, but may stop working with you at any time. I know I will get downvoted for this because it is an unpopular opinion, but this exactly the reason why we need bitcoin as a means of payments without any middlemen involved.

jfrbfbreudh 6mo ago
Yes, because bitcoin transaction costs never surge in price.
- littlecranky67 6mo ago
  They don't, because you would transfer them via lightning, of course. No one want to pay their porn subscription with traceable onchain transactions.
  - jfrbfbreudh 6mo ago
    TIL
    - rationalist 6mo ago
      FYI, Bitcoin proponents seem to "forget" that Lightning transactions are traceable by the Lightning node operator, whomever that might be.
      - littlecranky67 6mo ago
        You can operate your own node (I do). Plus you are not up2date. Trampoline payments were recently introduced, and a client can insert several trampolines. So even if you use a hosted single upstream node, that node can not trace the target. BOLT12 which is currently finalized also hides recipients from invoices. The thing about layer 2 solutions is, they evolve much faster than the base layer (bitcoin). So dont trust statements that are some years old.

b40d-48b2-979e 6mo ago

You may have a cool product in the field of sports betting, casinos, or lotteries. But almost all social networks and search engines won’t let you advertise without a license from the required jurisdiction. Good. You should face social stigma for creating products that literally ruin people's lives.

antonymoose 6mo ago
Not to mention the entitlement of startups to just flaunt laws and regulations. Still kills me to this day Uber and AirBNB running illegal billion dollar operations. I suppose one can at least say Uber mitigates drunk driving tendencies. As far as AirBNB goes, it can rot straight in hell. My hometown is now 20% AirBNB, they ran illegally for many years, and this completely prices out normal folks trying to live near their families.
- RHSeeger 6mo ago
  I don't have a problem with them actively choosing to break laws to protest the laws themselves; to try to get them changed. Civil disobedience is a long standing practice. However, part of doing that is facing the consequences of breaking those laws; being arrested, etc. Just because _you_ think the law isn't just doesn't mean it's not a law - it just means you think it should be changed. And the companies in question break the law and then whine and complain like they shouldn't need to face the consequences; like the law shouldn't apply to them because they don't think it's fair.
  - watwut 6mo ago
    Meh. What they are doing is NOT civil disobedience and protest. What they are doing is just normal breaking the law for profit thing. That being said, I also dont think that civil disobedience means you have to accept whatever harsh punishment whatever authoritarian is using. It is actually ok to avoid those.
    - mcmcmc 6mo ago

j4k0bfr 6mo ago

A well written and thoughtful article! Thanks for sharing. It's been a while since I've read article on something like online gambling without feeling like the author was trying to proselytize. Edit: I appreciate the human perspective shared by the article, and get the feeling that OP offers a warning of the consequences of working in stigmatized fields. Ofc online gambling (and gambling in general tbh) is a terrible thing that ruins lives.

theorchid 6mo ago
Thank you very much for reading! Yes, the purpose of this essay was to shed light on the challenges of launching startups in stigmatized niches and the consequences of working in them.

groundzeros2015 6mo ago

I didn’t expect him to describe his own field as illegitimate. Somehow knowing you are doing bad things is even worse than a rationalization. Why spend your time with people who don’t believe in what they do?

chirau 6mo ago
I am pretty sure most companies and people doing bad things know they are doing bad things.

post-it 6mo ago

> When posting job openings, you will always have to beat around the bush, without using direct language. And only then, when the candidate has already agreed to an interview or even after it, do you tell them what kind of content they will be working with every day. > Employees join such projects for various reasons. Some realize that the pay is better than in legitimate projects. Others come because they couldn’t find a job where they wanted to, or because they are simply interested in working on something forbidden. And then a good company saving the world will come along and offer them a job, and they’ll leave. Building a stable team from people with this kind of motivation is hard. I think OP made this whole article up. Everyone that applies for Aylo knows exactly what they're applying for. The pay is below-average because (a) there's not actually a lot of money in porn and (b) there's no shortage of dudes that want to work in it.

theorchid 6mo ago
> I think OP made this whole article up. Thanks for reading! When writing this essay, I drew solely on my own experience. I’ve often noticed that startups post job listings with misleading job descriptions, especially in stigmatized industries. It’s only after the interview that they reveal what the work will actually entail. Perhaps you simply haven’t noticed such job listings.
- kelsey98765431 6mo ago
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_fat_santa 6mo ago
This, Had a recruiter reach out to me the other day from a sports gambling website (one of the major ones, as reputable as you can get in this industry). I heard them out, thinking they would offer above market rate but in actuality, they offered significantly below market rate.
- comprev 6mo ago
  Employment at a below market rate might be the only job some people can get due to events in their past i.e someone with a criminal record that puts most employers out of reach. There is a large talent pool who want to get their lives back on track.

Lerc 6mo ago

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Invictus0 6mo ago

[flagged]

leetrout 6mo ago

The title is "Stigma is a tax on every operational decision"

theorchid 6mo ago
Thank you for pointing that out! But since HN allows any title, I chose the one that best suits the HN audience.
- leetrout 6mo ago
  "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

cleansy 6mo ago

I worked as a tech in porn in my very early 20s. My experience was the opposite, interviewers later on remembered my CV because I was transparent about it. In 2009-2011 weren’t many places where a junior developer could work on code that served 100M ad impressions /month and 3-5M requests on the pages. Gambling and porn both hook into your dopamine systems, but mixing them together does not make sense at all. The consequences of watching pornography are two orders of magnitude milder than a gambling addiction.

Zopieux 6mo ago

I cannot care less what (legal) porn content people consume in the intimacy of their room. I cannot understand being prude about this. Like all things, over-use is unhealthy, but I have yet to see studies proving the societal damage caused by porn. Before you ask: the loneliness epidemic (which intuitively translates to more porn consumption) is just a symptom of people losing a "third place" to socialize, or not having their own place. Those are rooted in the shitty economic landscape we're in, and uncontrolled urban sprawl with no public transit. Gambling/betting though? Overwhelming societal damage with basically no upside beyond the ghouls in charge. Regulate this shit to death, tyvm.

b40d-48b2-979e 6mo ago
and uncontrolled urban sprawl with no public transit. *sub-urban sprawl. If you're sprawling, you've exited "urban".
theorchid 6mo ago
> but I have yet to see studies proving the societal damage caused by porn. It doesn't necessarily have to be harmful for it to be stigmatized by society.

antonyh 6mo ago

And yet I can buy a Premier League soccer shirt with a casino brand sprayed across the front. I wish it would stop, advertising gambling via sports sponsorships should be banned. It literally prevents me from buying the shirt.

hn_acc1 6mo ago
This. It makes me less and less interested in the sports I have enjoyed watching for 45+ years (and played frequently in some form). Seeing an NHL player hawking NFTs a few years back really made me do a double take and wonder if I was truly done with it. Thankfully, that faded fast.

gwbas1c 6mo ago

Wow, I'm shocked at the negative attitudes in this thread. Porn and gambling are legit businesses, even if you don't like it. (And some people used to argue that part of the rise of the PC was because some people bought it as a "porn machine.") It's important to keep these things (almost) in the open, because when they become illegal, criminals move in and people get hurt. When I was an intern at a big-name, conservative company, one of my friends came from a porn website.

sharts 6mo ago
Also its silly to vilify porn and gambling but not social media and the plethora of seemingly socially acceptable / legal things which are still legitimately destroying the fabric of society. Most haters are just as culpable.
- jbxntuehineoh 6mo ago
  plenty of people vilify social media on this site. do you think any post criticizing one thing also needs to list out every other thing the poster doesn't like?
thescriptkiddie 6mo ago
one of those things is not like the other
- baobabKoodaa 6mo ago
  Uhh, yeah, they're both different from each other, but are you implying that one of them is worse than the other? Which one?
  - LorenPechtel 6mo ago
    Porn is repeatedly demonized but the supposed evils are pretty much nonexistent. No, porn isn't destroying marriages; rather, people in failing marriages often turn to porn. For porn to be more attractive than reality there must be something wrong with the reality.

Scaled 6mo ago

On the topic of operating costs, the annual "high risk" credit card fees just went up to nearly $2k/year. High risk in quotes because even if you have stellar charge back rates you still get hit with it (did you know the charge back rate for adult is way, way less than the chargeback rate for travel?). The card networks have something called virp/bram, which is basically designed to force adult merchants into paying these absurd fees and limiting the banks they can work with to the most predatory ones. It's a huge antitrust issue that results in higher consumer prices but unfortunately no one is litigating yet

abigail95 6mo ago
Adult websites have chargeback rates from single to double digits depending on the product. Airlines/Hotels/Uber/Cruises/Car Rentals do not approach this. You are off by one or two orders of magnitude.
rationalist 6mo ago
> did you know the charge back rate for adult is way, way less than the chargeback rate for travel? No; source?

miki123211 6mo ago

This article puts "we pinky swear its not gambling" apps, I'm thinking Robinhood here, but some crypto and prediction market apps would qualify too, in a new light. If you don't appear to be a casino at first glance, it's a lot easier to find employees, payment processors and advertising networks willing to work with you. Brick-and-mortar companies (notably Walmart) used the same trick to get tech talent. Having Walmart on your tech resume doesn't look great, having an e-commerce startup called jet.com looks much better, even if Walmart is that startup owner and sole customer.

camdencheek 6mo ago

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abetancort 6mo ago

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Animats 6mo ago

I used to know a bondage model and porn producer in San Francisco. She was quite open about it, and it didn't seem to hurt her reputation. Her operation was fully compliant, with 18 U.S. Code § 2257 forms on file for all performers. And yes, law enforcement did come by to check. One day we were talking and I asked about credit card processing. I got a twenty minute rant about the problems of offshore credit card processing, ripoffs in the 7 figure range, arbitrary cancellation... That was the hardest part of the business, and the most frustrating. She finally gave it up, moved to Texas, and now manages influencer networks.

_doctor_love 6mo ago

Generally speaking I am a classical liberal in that I believe "vices" like drugs, pornography, prostitution should be legal in order to be regulated and in the open. It cannot eliminate abuse but it can help mitigate it. What I would LOVE to see in the United States in particular is a system where we tax pornography and then plow that money back into sex education in public schools. The state of sex education in the United States is so far beyond a joke it is a travesty. That said, I also feel a lot of folks who are pro-legislation are quite dishonest about the negative side-effects of legalization. They definitely exist!

decimalenough 6mo ago
Uh, pornography is legal in the US and providers do pay taxes.
- _doctor_love 6mo ago
  Good observation, now connect it to the next piece I said.

gavinray 6mo ago

Do you all want to know a fun fact about adult-content startups: Why do you think Onlyfans is the reigning platform for what it does. Not because it's technically superior, or has the best advertising, or any other logical reason you might summon. It's because they have a sweetheart deal with a payment processor (Stripe). I put some time into seriously investigating what it'd take to get an adult-content platform off of the ground, here is one of the emails I received from a self-advertised "high-risk processor": > "Yes, we do have some Payment Facilitator solutions. However, none of these processors will accept Adult content." Nobody will touch it with a 10 foot pole. It's absolute bullshit and is ripe for disruption.

walrus01 6mo ago

This article manages to completely fail to mention one of the primary reasons why credit card processors won't touch porn sites. Not because it's porn, but from a strictly financial risk analysis POV, because a significant portion of the successful charges to cards are later disputed by the cardholder. Some person signs up for a $30 per month whatever porno subscription, and then doesn't understand what they agreed to later on, or regrets it, or their spouse or partner finds the charge on their credit card statement, doesn't know what it is, and starts a dispute with the card issuer. Compared to something else that sells a tangible good on the internet, or some ordinary software as a service thing... If you have 10,000 charges to 10,000 different people placed from an ordinary merchant, and you compare that to 10,000 charges from a porno website, there will be a vastly larger number of chargebacks and human-caused fraud disputes with the porno website. It's a continual and ongoing pain in the ass for any credit card processor that does business with such a merchant. The major processors (stripe and its top competitors) have decided that it is not worth the hassle and are completely happy to cede this niche market to specialists. Basically for the same reason that a car loan through a subprime lending company originated by a "buy here pay here" car sales lot will have a much higher percentage interest rate, because of the risk to the lender, credit card processing for the adult entertainment market will have a much higher percentage fee charged to the merchant to run those cards.

ball_of_lint 6mo ago

Author makes a point badly, but there is an important point here. It's really strange that we de-facto allow the few large credit card networks (Visa, Mastercard) to effectively impose their own particular views and values on what sorts of businesses can process payments. The stigma+roadblocks against these "high-risk categories" generally doesn't come from the processors (like Stripe, Adyen), but are actually driven by the networks themselves, in response to lobbying by groups such as Collective Shout. https://nabesaka.com/visa-mastercard-deciding-content-legality/ https://nabesaka.com/visa-mastercard-deciding-content-legali... Whatever you think about NSFW media or gambling in particular, you _should_ worry that Visa and/or Mastercard could decide tomorrow that they don't want to process payments for you and cause you to lose your livelihood.

scelerat 6mo ago
It's not that credit card companies have some kind of moral bone to pick, it is that the legal, logistical and political morass of dealing with the variety of state and national laws, definitions of porn, protections of children and non-consenting performers, etc. are such that it is not worth it for them to pursue. Similar issues exist for, e.g., companies and sites selling legal THC and THC products.
- bdangubic 6mo ago
  exactly, they would not give two shits about what your business does if they got immunity from any prosecution
- ball_of_lint 6mo ago
  That might be part of it, but I don't think it's the only or primary motivation. But we don't really get to know. They can and have used this power to effectively censor legal content. I don't think this sort of power is something that a private entity should hold. Being able to refuse service is fine for a random restaurant when there's 10 other options available, much less so for a duopoly that provides a key facet of modern life.

nine_k 6mo ago

> You may have a cool product in the field of sports betting, casinos, or lotteries. I stopped to think what a cool product in this area may look like, without being toxic. Maybe a site explaining why betting loses money in the long term, or how casinos hook gamblers up with random-looking but not entirely random responses of the one-handed bandits?

singleshot_ 6mo ago

> You may have a cool product in the field of sports betting, casinos, or lotteries. But almost all social networks and search engines won’t let you advertise without a license from the required jurisdiction. Finding investment for such projects is far harder than for conventional niches. That’s because you are operating in the market of degeneracy, taking profits by offloading your victims’ losses on their commercial counterparts through the bankruptcy system and the rest of us through social services. There is a reason there were laws against this until the degeneracy operators figured out how to further corrupt our democracy.

casey2 6mo ago

This is really only true for companies operating in old spaces. If you are on the ground floor of social media or roblox then there is no stigma against that fact that you are exploiting children, child labor, and profit on massively increasing the likelihood that they are exploited by predators