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Comment by pvarangot | Hacker News Reader

I always thought this as payment processors optimizing their bussiness model till it's overfitted to "non-porn".

I never worked in porn but I did work with payment and clearance systems from carrier companies a long time ago, think billing customers for SMS messages to specific numbers and then getting clearance for the carrier for the money. The risk of fraud or any kind of weird issue is stupidly higher for porn. Either simple "customer doesn't have the money" fraud or "the police knocks on your door because you got money from X customer" fraud. So maybe you need more people or better systems to deal with it while still being profitable. CCBill charges are huge when compared to other credit card processors.

It's easy to reduce costs and complexity until the easiest solution to keep or improve current margins is don't do porn.

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Yeah, it may well be chargebacks, not legal or moral concerns.

I live in New Orleans, which has an unusual concentration of strip clubs. I've heard people who work in them complain that to use a credit card, they require you to let them photograph your ID, make an impression or photo of your card, and have you sign a carbon copied form.

This gives some customers cold enough feet that they head out, but the reason is that people will run up a serious tab with lap dances, champagne and whatever else and then strenuously deny they ever set foot in such an establishment. I'm sure porn has the same problem.

It's pretty gross as far as I'm concerned. There's no legitimate moral distinction between falsely saying you never signed up for (random porn service) and Netflix, or saying you never got a lap dance and saying you never went to the ballet, and people acting differently causes legal businesses with avid customers real harm.

A (former) friend of mine used to work for a very popular porn site. He said that some absurd number of sign-ups were canceled through chargeback, and he figured it was kids signing up to a porn site and then the parents getting the bill at the end of the month. Apparently, he could tell, because genuine users would browse for a bit, download some stuff, but the ones who were more likely to do a chargeback would log in, download much of the site's content in a few days.

I wonder if it might be because of how much free porn there is.

"Paying for porn is stupid. But I just have to have everything of this specific person or fetish, so I'll pay, scrape, then chargeback."

I'm skeptical that it's a lot of kids because I feel like finding free porn is pretty darn easy if you try. Why would they ever bother with all the friction that goes with charging their parents CC?

(Just checked, the top three Googles for "free porn" are sites with a lifetime of free porn)

Yeah, I always felt the idea that it was kids was a bit presumptuous, I think it's more likely to be embarrassed spouses, personally.

Well there are free movies, free music too if you search hard enough. I'm happy not everybody thinks like you because this thinking destroys quality and industries.

I think it's because porn doesn't have so much of a social aspect as movies or music do. So tastes are less regulated by normalization through discussion, which means "movies I can talk about with friends" is an important factor in that industry.

Porn is much more about revealed preferences in isolation.

Almost all "mainstream" porn studios are owned by one company. And they own all the "tube" sites too BTW.

Just a FYI.

A common myth. Mindgeek owns Pornhub, YouPorn, Redtube, Tube8, xtube and Gaytube for tube sites.

They own Brazzers, Digital Playground, Reality Kings, Twistys, Babes, Sean Cody and Men.com for production studios.

There are thousands of tube sites, two of which have more traffic than those mentioned above. There are hundreds of porn studios, many which are more popular than those listed above.

I think it counts when it's a subsidiary of Mindgeek that owns the sites as well. Which is what you will find if you dig into the ownership of most porn sites and studios today.

Not true. I listed the sites that Mindgeek owns above. There are no secret subsidiaries. The porn industry is incredibly competitive, if it wasn't, my job wouldn't be so difficult.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindGeek

> the ones who were more likely to do a chargeback would log in, download much of the site's content in a few days

I download a lot of that content too (sans the chargeback). I like to have it available locally, even when the internet is down, when the site decides to take a particular video down for whatever reason, or even when my account expires. And paying for it makes it just a little more likely they will continue to produce more of it in the future.

It's the distinction people make with things done while drunk. Sexual arousal markedly reduces a persons inhibitions. Because people see that state of lowered inhibitions as "not themselves", once they're no longer aroused the various anxieties and pressures they function under normally are re-established they see retracting their decision as OK because it's what they would have done "if they were being themselves." It's morally unjustifiable IMO, and smacks of emotional immaturity, but that's where most people are. 'Just because I did it doesn't mean it's something I would do!'

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