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Why America's Outdated Morals Won't Let Porn into Mainstream Business
- krob 13y agoThis is the beginning of the plot of the movie Strange Days. Essentially the ability to record the thoughts of people during extremely intimate periods of their lives. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114558/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114558/ It only took us 18 years to get to that point.
- venomsnake 13y agoAlex Petralia specified he was prohibited by PayPal’s privacy policy from divulging information on accounts I love how the companies use the "privacy policies" as excuses to not answer question even when the question is asked from the media on behalf of the person asking. Do they think we are idiots?
- quantumpotato_ 13y agoNo, but they don't expect us to matter to their bottom line.
- tomp 13y agoIf you had a company, how would you feel if PayPal shared the information with the kind of business they do with you?
- venomsnake 13y agoExcept here the company has gone to the media. That is very different. The company wants to share the data , PayPal no ...
- m_ram 13y agoThere's a mob of religious (and some non-religious) activists waiting around for any excuse to raise hell as soon as one of these companies makes any attempt to legitimize porn.
- fosap 13y agoI'd guess the majority of anti-porn activist are not religious in a traditional sense but feminists. But thats just what I think and I live in Europe.
- mistercow 13y agoThat seems very unlikely to be true in the US. There are far more very strongly religious people here than there are strongly religious people, and a considerably larger percentage of religious people than feminists are anti-porn.
- mseebach 13y agoWhile religious groups are likely quite a bit larger and louder (and thus politically relevant) in the US than in europe, there are certainly very strong feminist groups in the picture in the US as well. For reference, see the ongoing debate on the ACA contraception mandate (if feminism held no sway over religious groups, it would be dead and buried long ago) and the fact that abortion is a perennial topic of debate. (Incidentally, most countries in Europe have abortion laws that would be completely unpalatable to US women's groups - on-demand abortion is generally only allowed in the first trimester, while Planned Parenthood fought for the right to partial birth abortion in the US in 2006).
- krob 13y agoPorn is legal. You are thinking more of any attempt to make porn non-censored and relaxing regulatory restrictions on the distribution of porn. Yes, feminists & the religious "right" will raise hell because they're the primary reason porn is so inflammatory in this country.
- btipling 13y agoI'm an atheist and I still think porn may be a valueless, happiness destroying exploitation of the way the human brain works in a way that makes zynga appear to be an angel of virtue. The less of it there is, the better.
- barry-cotter 13y agoCome now, valueless? Everything else in there I can see a defence of but valueless? Most of everything is shit but there must be porn that is artful. I presume you feel the same way about the female equivalent of porn, romance novels, eh?
- coldtea 13y ago>Come now, valueless? Everything else in there I can see a defence of but valueless? Most of everything is shit but there must be porn that is artful. If the main idea is crap, then there's no "art" that can save it. That's like saying "there can be artful snuff films". >I presume you feel the same way about the female equivalent of porn, romance novels, eh? 100%. Also for action movies, and a lot of sub-par crap that people are served.
- 3825 13y ago>If the main idea is crap, then there's no "art" that can save it. That's like saying "there can be artful snuff films". hang on, sir/madam. who the hell are you to judge what is art and what is not? perhaps you would like to be in the censorship and regulation department that will decide whether or not something is art and whether or not something is of "value"? how do you decide whether something has "value"? the amount of smugness is quite astonishing. what "value" do you create? why do you exist?
- coldtea 13y ago>hang on, sir/madam. who the hell are you to judge what is art and what is not? I'm a European. We're not very populist in this here parts. We are judgemental, and we have standards. They might be flexible, human created standards, that not everybody agrees with, but they are standards nonetheless. Society never knew any other kind of standards, anyway. E.g we do get to judge that eating Nachos and watching BS TV serials for hours on end is "living like a pig". >perhaps you would like to be in the censorship and regulation department that will decide whether or not something is art and whether or not something is of "value"? No need. That's also what critics and cultures do. You, for example, have adopted wholesale the idea of YOUR culture, that everything is just as good, and it's all a matter of personal taste. Which is as much a value judgement as any other.
- cft 13y agoMy favorite is when I read about litigious porn companies suing for copyright violations (like Perfect10 vs Google image search), calling their copyrighted images INTELLECTUAL property!
- jiggy2011 13y agoWhat is weird about that? IP refers to anything that is a product of intellect, it doesn't make judgements about whether something is high brow or not.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- quantumpotato_ 13y agoKilling people good, fucking people bad.
- tomohawk 13y agoWhy is this on HN?
- DanBC 13y agoIt's Sunday, so submissions need less attention to make it to the front page. HN is not just tech, it's for articles which are "deeply interesting". This article is interesting because it shows how hard it is for one area of business to exist even though it's legal, and a normal part of everyday life for many (most?) people. US attitudes to sex have a dampening effect on WWW, affecting sites that have nothing to do with the US. Regular, softer, sites face weird prohibitions. Meanwhile, American porn (often deeply unpleasant) is pervasive and causing some nations to introduce nationwide mandatory filtering.
- sigzero 13y agoGoogle glass was mentioned in the article.
- radio4fan 13y agoYeah, who here is interested in articles about startups, the internet giants, VC funding, etc?
- ig1 13y agoThere's three underlying issues here that drive these decisions: 1) Legal and financial risk, the adult industry sees a vast amount of fraudulent transactions. That's the primary reason that most financial institutions won't deal with it, but there are specialist payment providers who will. 2) Ethical reasons. Many companies won't work with tobacco, alcohol, gambling, porn and other vice industries because it doesn't fit with their corporate objectives. 3) Marketing reasons. Even if a company doesn't intrinsically oppose vice businesses, being involved can clearly impact public perception of the business. This is a much bigger deal if you're running a multisided business like a social network or an app store because it can cause your entire business to shift because of the feedback loop.
- wereHamster 13y agoTo your second point. Aren't the corporate objectives of all US companies to make a shitload of money for their shareholders? If so, they should be jumping on all those businesses like horny teenagers, because those businesses make a lot of money.
- ig1 13y agoYou're mistaken, there's virtually no money in the online adult entertainment business. The entire market size is only a few billion in annual revenue and it's primarily long tail, the majority of the larger players (ala Playboy) are losing hundreds of millions of dollars every year. It's a small fragmented market which is shrinking every year.
- olalonde 13y agoThat's true. From Wikipedia: "In 2007, Bang Bros generated a sales total of $1.9 million." That's very tiny given that BangBros is a pretty big player in that industry (2,898 Alexa rank for a paywalled site).
- mseebach 13y agoWell, you answered your own question there, it seems. A good rule of thumb, even if something is "common knowledge" on the Internet (OMG evil corporations profit), there's probably more to it.
- schoper 13y agoAll the people reproducing themselves at replacement rate in your society (religious people) say that porn interferes with their social patterns.
- trotsky 13y agoWow, if this is the class of insert you get after paying what I presume are not insignificant amounts of fund, I'd hate to see the budget for a compelling one. Reading between the lines, he sounds butt hurt to me due to dismissals from the sand hill road set. Well, no shit. Everybody (there) knows that adult content can be cash positive very close to day one, and due to their strong balance sheets they are hardly the likeliest M&A targets. The rest (bulk) of the article seems to riff on mainstream acceptance nay open discussion. But it's far from jerking off that many people have an aversion to speaking frankly about. Go talk to some random guy on the streets about his bowel movements, or if his daughter is still on anti-psychotics and get back me. If you want "respect" go do a social/mobile/whatever the new hotness is and go to the big firms hat in hand. They'll probably give you the money assuming you keep the crazy bottled up for the duration. Then you'll have no problem getting those business critical speaking gigs and becoming a go to react quote of some 3rd rate blog like tech crunch. And your friends will all be suitably impressed and jealous (to your face). But after the money runs out all that goes away. Personally I'd just take the cash positive business for what it is ( a gift) and stop trying to validate yourself through others. Or just take up lying. (yes, I know this doesn't have a lot to do with the specific points raised, but if you let them frame the conversation tehy've already done 90% of their job)
- wprl 13y agoObviously people have a right to create and consume smut, but it doesn't make it right or beneficial or erase the harm it does.
- olalonde 13y agoWhat harm?
- drdaeman 13y ago> harm it does And, to be more exact, what kind of harm you're talking about? I could think of some very real and large issues that are usually linked with pornography (human abduction, treating [usually] females as sexual objects, etc), but after some thinking (not very deep, I must admit) I've concluded none of them are caused by pornography itself (in a same way knives aren't the cause of homicides, although many people died stabbed with a knife). But I may be missing something.
- danso 13y agoDoes anyone else think there's just an upper-limit to how much porn can be consumed by the average person? I think it's just assumed that if porn were suddenly as acceptable as mainstream programming, it would suddenly become the most popular thing, ever. But would it? People can read books for hours. People can watch Game of Thrones/Breaking Bad/Mad Men/Downton Abbey/James Bond movies in a marathon fashion. Hell, people can run marathons in a marathon fashion. But watching porn, constantly? Besides porn/sex-addicts, how big of a market is there for porn watching in excess of 10min-1 hour a day?