This particular issue has caused trouble for a few other startups, too. IMVU, if I remember correctly, also had a huge fracture with a vocal section of their user base when they decided to ban pedophilia.
Which decision in particular ? (there are several)
And more importantly, why ?
> this is an excellent cautionary tale for what happens if you try to guess what your current customer behavior is instead of measuring it.
Yep. I'm to blame 100% here, I think my naivety really shows.
> also had a huge fracture with a vocal section of their user base when they decided to ban pedophilia.
Pedophilia and anything else that is illegal has always been banned on ww.com, in fact we have a liaison with the dutch police to help catch the really bad apples.
And the users that left were not vocal about it, they just left.
Since you ask, and only since you ask: given the choice between "porn" and "huge revenue hit" (and laying off employees, service closure, or whatever else that entails), I would not hesitate to pick door #2. I could talk about why at length but it would be off-topic for this forum.
If that's not possible I will probably have to step out of it completely. I'm not going to make a moralistic judgment on what end users of a service can or can not do if the service is to survive or not, after all that will affect everybody, the good guys and girls included but I will not want to be associated with the service if the center of gravity shifts further in a direction that I'm not comfortable with.