Interview with a Pornhub web developer (2019)
davidwalsh.name
davidwalsh.name
Tech was PhP, MySQL, memcache and similar vanilla stuff running on many Linux servers - pretty simple stuff.
The trick was performance. Simple stupid mistakes that would not be detected in sites that have low traffic become enormous problems in a high traffic server.
Pretty much nothing was dynamic and we wrote scripts to create static pages for almost everything except search and authentication.
Things like logging just could not be done. It was easier to load a bunch of data in memory on a request and process it instead of running a slightly slower SQL query, since a ton of those could kill the database.
And yes, there were no placeholder images or videos. After some time you just get used to it and code. But I have to say you get pretty desensitized to it and when I resigned from that job my life in that area improved quite a lot.
Highlights were p*rn stars and random celebs visiting the office - but after some time that got kind of meh.
The job itself was just a programming gig and very professional except for the images on the screen which we learned to ignore.
On the whole, the guys who ran the thing were a pretty solid and great bunch of people and it was one of the best dev experiences in my long career.
Which was fine until he revealed that he'd chosen them because that's what he always wore.
But now I gotta ask: you say it was fine until the reveal. Were they pictures of him in the boxers or just a brand he liked-or what did the reveal change for the team?
Good.
There are legitimate reasons to log requests. But far too often, developers that are used to 'printf debugging' will abuse the system. In many cases, what they were actually looking for was either some form of APM, distributed tracing, or much more commonly, would be better done by collecting metrics - which tend to be much more lightweight.
At work I've been fighting a battle to turn multiple dozens of terabytes of logs a day into something manageable, for years now. Sometimes I wonder if I could use the logging system itself in lieu of the application, as practically all data is dumped there! It's difficult battle to convince multiple groups to just use a counter instead of spitting out the same line of text every time the same kind of event happens.
Anyway, back to the point: no matter how busy the system is, you can surely engineer a mechanism to collect error logs, even if you have to sample them. But while things are running smoothly, track metrics. And, if you have a reason to suspect things are wrong, selectively turn on some logging.
I wish more people were aware of the costs of logging. Even more so nowadays, with the microservices craze.
As a result, all of our frontend servers slowed to a crawl because the logging calls were thrashing our disk I/O - and keep in mind, this is an application which never hits the disk and lives entirely in memory, mostly just assembling data structures from other APIs and combining them into a response for the client. To see a server like that brought to its knees by disk I/O from three lines of debug logging was... impressive, to say the least.
When I was younger, I used to while away time by browsing exotic vacation destinations (that I couldn't nearly afford) on travel websites. One day, I got an offer to work at one of them. After about a month there, the last damned thing in the world I wanted to spend my free time doing was looking at travel website destinations. Made me re-evaluate what sort of jobs I'd want to do day in and day out.
Now if you could figure out how to do it without either customers or bosses...
If you do what you love, what you love becomes work.
Is you do what you like, then you like your work, go home, and have energy for the things you love.
Some programmers write code at work and then do side projects on top of that. Other people enjoy knowing a little code, but would find it burdensome to write production quality code everyday. For them, programming is a hobby. Other people are content to program for their job and then leave it at the office and stop there.
People who have a hobby they love sometimes find their enjoyment is completely ruined if they try to turn it into a business. Loving something on weekends and evenings doesn't necessarily translate to being able to do it happily all day, everyday for work when other people are calling the shots and telling you how to do it.
I would say that, in this context, liking something means it is satisfying to you beyond the average activity. While loving something means that it is something you consider a part of your life - something that you feel you couldn't do without.
So working at a job which involves something you love can sap the joy out of it, because you end up doing that thing not for you, but for other people.
For programming the difference between what I like to do and what I can easily get paid to do is not that big, so it makes sense to combine as a career advice. But for hobbies like music or painting, unless you get extremely lucky, it is whole lot harder, takes much longer and requires to make much more compromises to get to the point where it is really fulfilling.
I only ever tried the latter semi-professionally. And it was already a soul crushing experience at times.
For it to make sense, at a minimum you have to also like and be pretty good at running a small business in addition to the thing that you love.
Several theories, probably something to each of them. The one I think explains the most is that if nobody is "passionate" about whatever you're doing, then you can approach things analytically, instead of having a layer of emotional investment gumming things up.
Personally, jobs that I thought the concepts/industry were interesting to me, but the work was far enough removed that it didn't sour me to the industry have worked out well. e.x. If you're a car guy, working on the software for an inspection company isn't too bad, you still come out liking cars, and wind up with some interesting stories.
OTOH, I've spoken with colleagues that have a bit more nuanced mindset: If they don't care about the product, that's fine, but they won't work for a company that sells a product they know they don't like, they won't do it.
The whole process sounded really seedy, and the parenting comments made by him the other guy who worked there were pretty distressing. Her kids (two boys, one girl all under 10) walking around while they were editing her porn scenes, all the marketing materials out in plain view of the kids as well.
He the nail in the coffin was when she stopped paying him and offered him sex instead for payment.
He said it was his first and last job in the industry. He said it also created a problem on what he should put on his resume for the time he worked for her. The suggestions on the site were pretty funny, but it was clear his experience was not like yours.
Was this company located in a building on the corner with a flag flying? And did you maybe sit at a corner desk on the 3rd floor?!
If so, how are you doing, its DanS :)
Had that problem at an ad tech company before. We just did sampling so that 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 requests would get logging.
It definitely made me wonder how many web servers out there have their performance determined by the rate at which logs can be written to disk.
As someone in the HFT space I suspect a lot of traders are performance bound by this. Wouldn't surprise me at all if a couple darkpools were this way.
For a looser definition of "traders" that includes dark pool operators and exchanges, then sure. Writing logs was definitely the bottleneck at one major European exchange for some years. They may not be able to turn off logging for regulatory reasons, but they also don't care so much about the microseconds. In this case they could definitely have improved performance with horizontal scaling (have each computer handle fewer stock symbols) but didn't consider that economically justified.
>You can always arrange for the logging to happen outside the critical path, which is a tiny minority of the code you run. And you will do that if its necessary to gain a fraction of a microsecond on a competitive trade. Even if it's just being able to run a build with logging off for special cases.
Yes you can do that. Yes you'd think that anyone for whom it would be beneficial would do that... but you'd be surprised how often people run with logs cranked to 11 in prod.
The company scammed and logged and sold the data as much as possible. The models were barely legal and a few looked like they were held at gun point. Lasted eight months up until I started getting nightmares and then the company went bankrupt. After receiving the first ever lawsuit in the UK for fake dating.
Did anyone have a chance to work at the company that created Ashley Madison? I always wondered what really happened there.
Would you mind elaborating on this please? I'm just trying to work out if you mean things like a custom user's menu, etc. you'd somehow pre-generate and then cache the HTML, or do you mean things like certain categories, etc. were just HTML?
Maybe i'm overthinking this, but would you generate a dynamic page once (ie. first time user logs into the site -> generate their "my account" page) and then cache it in memory, or as HTML on the disk, or set the cache control header and leave it to them locally?
thanks!
I believe you can put JAMStack on your resume!
Why do porn sites get so much traffic? Why do people enjoy consuming pornography as much as they do, at the volume/frequency that they do?
Everyone has different levels of libedo however, so it's likely that your lack of understanding is due to your own lower libedo not generating the same level of sexual desire. Or, you are the kind of person where the emotional connection involved in sexual relations is far more important, which obviously means watching people you have no connection to would not arouse you as much. Alternatively, it could be that you may have decent access to actual sex, which is obviously more gratifying as a general rule.
these sites get a lot of traffic(clicks and page views) and serve a lot of bandwidth(videos) but most users are just clicking around and watching just a few seconds to a couple minutes of any video they load(due to skipping). I think a lot of the traffic just people looking for the perfect scene or something new... there is a lot of junk on those sites these days.
source: i used to manage a number of high profile adult websites.
Interesting... 5 years ago I was contacted by a recruiter for a job offer in a (sic) "non-standard industry". Back then, "fullstack development" was the job trend for "people who deal with computers".
During the first call, she told me her client was the biggest adult website in my EU country of origin. She insisted that the working environment was (sic) "clean".
I raised that topic during my interview with their CTO. He told me the opposite of this post: devs were running the website locally with place-holders and innocent cartoons videos. He was straight-forward about it and mentioned "of course, once in a while you have check an issue on the live website, the way we handle this is by joking about the live content between us."
For those interested, they had a pretty standard stack for such a high volume website. Postgres, Django, Redis and RabbitMQ with an HAProxy frontend.
Looking at that content all day long was a lot of motivation to get the site done faster and provided endless hours of quality entertainment. It was done in the early days of the company and wasn't particularly high traffic or quality so it made a good test case.
The whole 'not safe for work' thing didn't apply at the company at all. You don't go work for a company like that without being fully aware of what you're going to see.
Long after I left, they re-did the platform again and that site disappeared and now just redirects to the main site. =(
We talk about the history of the stack during my job interview. From my understanding the two founders of the website started by just hiring freelancers on short contracts to update/fix a growing PHP/MySQL codebase. When their business started to become profitable, they hired full time devs, and gave them carte blanche. (the two original founders have no clue about tech) The team just rewrote the whole thing in Django.
in fact i cant think of any widespread use of any other language at all, in adult.
If it sounded like I was implying that he was talking about the entire industry, that was not my intent.
They ended up being a really cool group to meet. Very interesting people with a lot going on in their lives. They had a strong entrepreneurial culture and many employees had their own companies on the side. Their home base is Montreal; it sounded like it didn't pay as well as other areas... but they were quick to point out that the cost of living is among the lowest in North America and that Montreal is a really cool city (This is true).
The most significant thing I remember is a surprising number of people walking by tried to get into the event. :)
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What is it like to work on the development team for a porn site?
I was the Chief Technology Officer of Kink.com 2006-2007.
I will say in advance that every company is different and my experience will not necessarily resemble the experience you will have at another company (or even Kink today). There's more variation among companies than among industries. Still, here are my observations:
* There's a lot of really awful technology in the porn business. It's the content that sells, not the technology. You'll be amazed by how many thriving businesses are "my first PHP project".[1] When I arrived at Kink, the core infrastructure was essentially a system that processed credit cards and inserted a username/password into an apache dbm file. No CRM, not even any idea if bob123 on one site is the same person as bob123 on another site. Most porn sites start like this, so expect to deal with a lot of legacy code.
* Third-party tools and services generally suck. The really great payment systems like Stripe and WePay won't touch adult content, so you're left with third-tier processors who can barely keep their sites online. A disproportionate amount of your concentration will focus on reliable (and redundant) billing, because your provider may suddenly decide to exit the industry with almost no warning. Some variation of this same problem exists for most of the cloud services you commonly take for granted - CDNs, email delivery, support desk, etc. It has gotten somewhat better over the last seven years, but you will often feel hobbled compared to developing "normal" software.[2]
* It is hard to hire good people - yeah, even harder than it is for normal development jobs. This surprised me. I have a large and talented social circle to draw from, but a couple key individuals rebuffed my intense lobbying. These are progressive, sex-positive Bay Area folk who would have loved to come work with me, but couldn't accept the inevitable explanation to their mother-in-law what they did for a living. Some of my team hid their employer from their extended families.
* The salary is good, but there is no other long-term upside. Adult companies don't go public, and the few that broke this rule have been fiascos. You won't get stock options, and even if you did you couldn't sell them. Unless you're a founder and getting a direct share of the profit, negotiate hard for cash.
* If you're in a production house like Kink, technology is not at the top of the totem pole. My department was 10 people out of a 100-person company and remember, it's the content bringing in the customers. Combined with the pay differential between production staff vs technology staff, it can produce ugly politics. At one point the head of production got a list of all the salaries in the company and exploded at me. I had to patiently explain to her that we pay six-figure salaries because that's what you have to pay to get technology employees, and we still had unfilled job openings. I'm sure there are politics at department head level at all big companies, but the cultural gap between unrelated fields didn't help.[3]
* Speaking of a 100-person production shop, a significant part of your responsibility is to support internal users. It's not nearly as glamorous or fun as building customer-facing software, especially when you start with a rotting pile of hastily-developed internal tools. But this is just as important for keeping the porn flowing as managing the data center. On the other hand, internal users would have your entire team perpetually building software for them and the paying customers wouldn't get any new features. Marketing has an agenda too. It's a balancing act very different from life in a startup where all you do every day is add features to your product.
That probably sounds more grim than it was. There were some fantastic things:
* Building software that millions of users around the world actually use. Gigabits of traffic, zillions of hits per day. It wasn't Google traffic, but it was a hell of a lot more interesting than business apps or yet another game that EA was going to cancel on me. If you work in the porn biz, you will almost certainly get enough real users to feel like someone cares.
* Working with fun, creative people. The set builders and directors were making art cars and art flicks in their spare time. Kink was a very hair-down kind of place - it was actually fun to go into the office. To me it felt like a big family - sometimes warm, sometimes squabbling, always chaotic.
* Office parties... oh, the office parties. Friday after work was happy hour for employees and friends of employees in the Bar Set, which conveniently was also a fully stocked bar. Guest listing was coveted and most nights ended in the massive Hot Tub Set on the roof of the building. I met a lot of great people at these parties, including my wife. I'm not saying this will happen at every porn company (it doesn't even happen at Kink anymore), but it's hard to imagine it happening at nonporn companies.
* I loved the moment when you meet people at cocktail parties and they inevitably ask you what you do for a living. "Pornographer."
In case you are wondering:
* Yes, porn gets boring. The novelty of looking at your coworkers naked wears off fast.
* Most pornstars are pretty much just like everyone else out of costume. For some it is a hobby/thrill and a convenient source of extra spending money (maybe $1-2k for a day). Most have what I would call a healthy attitude about pornography and BDSM, but there are a handful of damaged ones.
* If you're considering working in porn, the main question I would ask is: Would you be embarrassed to put it on your resume? Some people are very self conscious, worried what future employers might think. IMHO those concerns are overblown. If you can "own it", don't be afraid of the industry. That said... there are definitely some awful companies in the industry (as there are everywhere) so do your due diligence.
[1] This is not criticism. The hard problems in porn are 1) marketing content and 2) producing content. If you solve those two problems, you have a thriving business no matter what your technology stack looks like. #1 is way more complicated than you imagine.
[2] In 2006 there was one CDN which would handle porn - Limelight Networks - and they were getting sued by Akamai over patents. It cost $30/Mbit (95th percentile) at volume. Now you have your pick of dozens, at rates a small fraction of that. This chart is what allowed the explosion of tube sites: http://drpeering.net/AskDrPeering/blog/articles/Ask_DrPeerin...
[3] It's also possible that Type A personalities naturally rise to the top of a BDSM company.
teeheehee you said top
I read all that morbidly curious about actual D/S relationships infesting the work culture. I'm a little surprised, and relieved to hear how professional it sounds.
This is why #MeToo is a thing. I say that as someone who has mixed feelings about #MeToo.
First, how does the pay compare to industry standard?
Second, for people that have moved out of the industry how did it impact your future opportunities?
I feel like it would be more difficult to find new employment outside the industry due to the negative stigma attached.
I don't share this feeling at all. None of my peers would have any stigma attached to anyone we knew worked in this industry. In fact, if anything the opposite would be true. The porn industry deals with scale that most others don't, and often leads innovation on things like video players. It's not uncommon to see youtube copy features that showed up first on a porn site.
I'm convinced that the mid/upper management at the B2B companies I've worked at (and the one defense contractor I've worked at) would not be pleased. OTOH, Google, Facebook, and Amazon probably wouldn't care.
Of course, I've never worked for an adult entertainment network, so I don't actually know.
What I've learned in my years at Pornhub is invaluable and has made finding a job stupid easy.
I don't see a significant negative stigma as very common at all.
i have certainly been removed from hiring funnels because of my years of work in the adult industry and they were not shy about stating that as the reason. One was a SaaS that happened to have a LOT of religious based organizations using their software. It has even been a possible issue for VCs.
sure, in a few coastal cities, porn and sex work are becoming less and less taboo, but most of the country still isn't on board with that and the risk of that attachment sabotaging something can be too much for some employers to look past.
Pay was generally well above average to counteract the adult nature of the work.
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Most of our sites use the following as a base:
Nginx
PHP
MySQL
Memcached and/or Redis
We used to have dedicated 50 Gbps fiber connections straight between the web and memcached nodes, but now the caching is done locally on the web servers with a lot more of them. I would say there's probably something like 100+ servers, 128/256GB RAM each.
All the pages are server-side rendered. Every DB query, every DAO object instantiated, every partial/full page HTML render, even some functions at times, gets put into cache. We weren't really afraid of high traffic, that scaled almost on its own... instead we were afraid of infrastructure maintenance or bad manipulations, because too much of the cache could disappear at once.
The most incredible part to me was the storage and delivery of the video content. Try to picture 7000 petabytes [3] :)
[1] https://www.pornhub.com/humans.txt [2] https://github.com/nitrix [3] https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review
I should add that this wasn't out of optimisation, just "old-school" PHP+Html with an MVC framework to serve the rendered page.
Still can't beat that in my view.
> The most incredible part to me was the storage and delivery of the video content
That was the fun bit, I still remember the logistic of opening a new origin for the CDN back in 2010 (11 maybe?). Flying hard drives, can't beat that bandwidth.
(Former developer here as well, however from before this humans.txt was introduced)
Local memcached's? local caches or still distributed cache?
If you can host and serve porn on a LAMP stack from a traditional bare metal server data center, the guy on the other end doesn't care as long as it's reliable.
I work at a large tech company now and it amazes me how terribly executed and unnecessarily complex most development efforts are. There was a very strong results-oriented culture at the adult media company.
Like C++, it's not going anywhere, anytime soon; despite all the kvetching about it.
That said, I don't especially like the language, but I knew that I needed to use it, if I wanted to design an infrastructure system that I could throw over the wall to be taken over by a bunch of other people.
I was right.
There's that old urban myth about the fancy space pen, vs. the pencil.[0]
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...
PHP is a kind of crappy OO language, but it is sufficient. I think Java is a better language, for OO. PHP 7+ is lot better than it was, before 5.
A lot of Java programmers came out of school, and started to create PHP chimeras. I feel as if that results in unnecessarily complex code. Things are complex enough, without applying UI-style MVC to server backend systems.
I wrote PHP for around twenty years, starting off procedural and mixed into HTML pages, to OO-based pure PHP systems.
I stopped a couple of years ago. This was my final PHP project[0][1]. It was sort of a "dissertation." No one is actually interested in using it, but it was developed in order to practice my architectural skills. It's a pretty intense system.
[0] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#ba...
[1] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/basalt/tree/master
Their content is relatively cheap to produce and it tends to be churned out at a high frequency. There's almost no industry out there that matches the frequency of content they produce, except maybe radio (and now YouTube). And with new technology, the limiting factor is almost always content creation.
So it makes sense that they'd put aside a few dollars buy some new equipment for some trend. Doing a VR shoot probably involves a new camera and a plugin for Premiere.
I'm confused. How are those two related? Case statements can replace if statements and can be used for exhaustiveness checking. Regexes are for parsing strings.
The benefit is that the regex library costs a lot in hidden complexity - debugging why a particular regex works slowly or eats lots of memory is hard. If a similar problem pops up in hand written code, you can use your standard profilers and other tools to see what's happening.
So you either drag this complexity into your code or dump it on the regex library. It's a trade-off.
I encountered one of these once. A user decided to enter this in the middle of their post:
------------------------------
So managing a bunch of hard-coded code paths via a switch instead of using a regex to pattern-match.
It's less future-proof, but even an entry-level dev can reason about a switch statement and update it as needed.
It totally makes sense to use PHP and MySQL as it's what already works, and because there's a team who knows how to use those correctly in this kind of environment.
I just wonder if they have a research-oriented team that could experiment with whatever they see as a potential fit and see if they can improve performance, developer experience (without sacrificing performance) or both. Or if they don't (and if so - why?)
Facebook is kind of famous for this, as they came up with HipHop VM and Hack.
We didn't have a research-oriented team per say, but myself and a colleague (I was Lead Dev and he Senior) did spend a lot of time experimenting with things like Redis (back when it was very early and "unproven"), varnish, PHP engine tweaks, custom extensions, ... We still did feature work and regular stuff too.
On my resume I don’t list the company name. In its place it says “social network centered around ‘art’” because we weren’t allowed to call it porn.
I wouldn't say porn sites are the most regressive (or otherwise evil) thing in the world, by any stretch. There's much, much worse stuff going on out there.
But the complete absence of any introspection as to the obvious negative side effects of the product he helps push -- not to mention the notoriously exploitive aspects of the industry that creates that product -- all wrapped up in an almost sheepish "What's not to like?" attitude --
is, sadly, quite typical for Big Tech.
Source: Former Pornhub dev as well.
Meteor.js was the only serious attempt at this but it was too different from the status-quo (for most projects, SQL is what you want - MongoDB will bring lots of problems down the line) and never caught on.
Instead, 10 years later, we still mostly have a mess of everyone reinventing the wheel and doing most of the API communication, de/serialization, error handling manually. MVC has never taken off on the frontend either despite it being a good fit for most projects in my opinion. We have things like GraphQL, websockets, etc and yet still nothing that takes all of those together and provides a no-BS development experience comparable to backend frameworks like Django, Rails or Laravel.
My dream job would be someplace like pornhub. Even if their stack isn’t the latest and greatest, the challenges that come with their scale has got to be over the top amazing. Like Cloudflare level amazing.
I’m on the wrong side of the country for both, but I can still dream...
Was this trafficking topic discussed [0], i.e. the site hosts criminal content and the owners apparently didn't do anything about it.
[0] https://traffickinghub.com/
Criminal Content = child pornography, rape videos and filmed exploitation.
Edit: Clarity
If you look up the BBC article from february 2020 you'll find that Rose Kalemba's case took place in 2009, then the article mentions several similar but more recent cases where Pornhub took immediate action (so clearly they've improved), followed by how this trend has now moved to smaller individual porn sites - so again, going after Pornhub in particular seems pointless.
Also interesting that the movement is non-religious but the organization behind it clearly isn't: https://exoduscry.com/getinvolved/prayer/
But the topic is Pornhub.
"In recent news there have been numerous shocking cases of sex trafficking and child rape films that were hosted on Pornhub. A 15-year-old girl who had been missing for a year was finally found after her mother was tipped off that her daughter was being featured in videos on the site — 58 such videos of her rape and sexual abuse were discovered on Pornhub.
Her trafficker, who was seen in the videos raping the child, was identified using surveillance footage of him at a 7-Eleven where he was spotted with his victim. He is now facing a felony charge.
In February 2020, the BBC reported the harrowing story of 14-year-old Rose Kalemba from Ohio who was taken at knifepoint, raped for 12 hours, and the crime scene videos of her abuse were uploaded to Pornhub. Rose said that she pleaded with Pornhub to remove the videos of her rape and torture for months, and it wasn't until she posed as a lawyer and threatened legal action that Pornhub finally took them down.
These are not isolated cases. In 2019 the Internet Watch Foundation stated that it alone had confirmed 118 cases of child rape and sexual abuse on Pornhub—half of the videos were Category A level abuse, which includes penetration and sadism.
Likewise, the Sunday Times investigation into Pornhub reported finding "dozens" of illegal abuse videos within "minutes", including abuse images of children as young as three years old. Some of the videos identified by the newspaper's investigation "had 350,000 views and had been on the platform for more than three years." It went on to say "three of the worst clips still remained on the site 24 hours later."
If I understand this correctly, both the victim and the trafficker / rapist were found because the video was on PornHub, right?
It's super scummy that they didn't take it down after, and you have to wonder how many people got further into these "interests" because of the footage, but this little detail complicates my feelings on how this should be handled. Would they have ever rescued the victim or charged the perpetrator if this had been on darker channels only?
Taking down Pornhub doesn't seem like the only solution worth considering...
One of the abused girls asked PH to take down that video for months.
And it's not just that girl - here let me highlight another bit of text from the campaign site.
"Likewise, the Sunday Times investigation into Pornhub reported finding "dozens" of illegal abuse videos within "minutes", including abuse images of children as young as three years old. Some of the videos identified by the newspaper's investigation "had 350,000 views and had been on the platform for more than three years." It went on to say "three of the worst clips still remained on the site 24 hours later."
FYI i do not support watching porn, using drugs, drinking alcohol, and all the other things that used to be frowned upon by different religions, but trying to prevent such thought-crimes and self-harm crimes by law instead of persuasion have always caused more harm than good.
It's not about the viewer becoming an abuser him/herself.
It's about creating porn with people who are being abused, exploited and trafficked.
It doesn't necessarily have to be a violent porn video.
This is about the owners of those porn platforms having to take this issue more seriously - which they didn't according the investigations, i.e. profit is more important than investing more money in their platform to detect and take down those videos with trafficked and exploited people.
Hopefully in a few years, when neural nets will be able to generate such videos with anyone, people will stop obsessing over deleting numbers.
I wonder how the developers feel - working for a leadership team / company that apparently doesn't care much about ethics.
You could ask the same of any adtech employees.
Nothing wrong with consuming content that increases sexual excitement, but there are more ethical options out there [0].
If we as consumers care about this then at least we can vote with our wallet or attention.
[0] https://mashable.com/article/pornhub-alternatives-free-porn-...
Can this be good for the general thought process of humans, that you get to grow up with these very visual images of adults having sex that is so far fetched from what making love actually can be between two people ?
At least for me personally it has taken a lot of willpower not to look at porn anymore, and I'm willing to admit it. I wish the children wouldn't have access to porn where ever they go. I mean, why is this not an issue ?
Is is it because we are afraid to admit that watching porn can cause issues in our thinking ? How it objectifies women, and how these visual images can take up our thinking during the day, how these overly tuned sexual images actually can hijack our thinking and focus on only lust and sexual thoughts all the time, thinking about the woman on the street as a object to be used rather than an person?
And what about the effects porn can have on the self worth of men, who are looking to perform like these actors on the screen and compare themselves to them when making love ?
I have a hard time understanding why porn is being normalized, why we as a society are not thinking about the negative effects it has on our society, especially young people who are now growing up with this content available from every device they choose to use.
There are many psychological issues related to watching porn and also there is the issue of having to resist the urge during the day if you have ever started the habit, I mean you can access it from anywhere, you just have to google and there you are.
I wish there would be some moral compass when it comes to working to porn companies, or talking about porn, or supporting this idea that porn is just part of everyday life, when in fact it is far for a healthy thing to be thinking about.
Of course, there are sides to this, maybe porn can reduce the amount of rapes and non-conforming sexual acts, but those should be considered morally wrong anyway and guided towards educating our children to restraining their urges towards that anyway.
It kinda irks me that in this discussion also porn is just seen as something very normal, when in reality for example 30 years ago porn was not everywhere. Now it is just couple of clicks away, and your mind can be filled with people gagging stuff down other peoples throats, people being choked, violent acts of sex and all kinds of impossible beauty standards to fill.
Imagine showing these acts to a five year old and what is going on in his mind while he watches this ? Imagine a 10 year old obsessively thinking about the act he saw, and not being able to forget it, as it is triggering something very primal in his still developing mind ? Image thinking that is normal, and that is how you treat people.
To me, this is just a sign of a sick society, and we should as parents and people who are aware talk about the harmful sides of widespread normalization of porn. It is not allright. If you are working on porn, you are causing possible millions of people to possible get hooked into this act of loosing their vitality (sexual energy) in front of their devices every day. This is a fact.
This is a direct loss in creativity also, in yogic traditions creativity is considered to be coming from the sexual energy, so everyday we are loosing so much creativity to the fact that people are just jacking off to virtual images.
And I'm not even touching the widespread and common abuse of young women entering the field, possible traumatizing them for life, when thinking that a porn actress career would be something to pursue. And this is all because companies like PornHub don't just care, all they care about is making a profit in the end from ad revenues, by trying to maximize profit on the weak willedness of their viewers. To me, that is immoral and something that should not be supported.
PornHub acts like they're all cool and that, and it's hip to view porn, but actually they are just a hightech pimp selling to the lowest common denominator and taking advantage of people in the process. I hope everyone who works for the porn industry, thinks about their actions and what consequences it ultimately can have on our society.
Anyway, that is just my view on this, hoping that this will spark some thoughts on the subject.
I have recovered from porn addiction, and I am more happy because of that. But it is just a few clicks away, and sometimes I still have to struggle with these thoughts taking over.
I'm no expert in this - but maybe a first good step would be to introduce some kind of rating system for porn, just like movies have. As with other things in our lives - porn is also on a spectrum. For example:
- Clips showing sensual sexual exchange between 2 people = safe
- Clips showing 10inch phalluses being rammed down your various orifices = probably needs a disclaimer that it's not reflecting the real world.
Regarding kids watching this stuff - I also wonder what this does to their brain development.
And regarding self-worth of men - if you promote the more realistic view of sex then porn can be educational, e.g. learning how to satisfy your sex partner.
You bring up yogic traditions - again not an expert in this, but didn't some yogis show how to elevate your creativity via tantric yoga?
But I think we can all agree (well not all, as is apparent from all the down-votes of the GP comment) that exploitation and abuse in porn is bad and hence why we shouldn't support companies that are not serious about eliminating this.
Not so familiar with tantric traditions, but still that is something more coming closer to elevating your creativity and vital energy through sexual acts, than just releasing it that porn is encouraging people to do.
If you think about this from a deeper perspective, porn is taking a lot of power away from our young men, so maybe it is a good thing to some parties to keep porn available, so people would not have their strength to themselves to resist control structures. But this is just a thought.
We should not support, and yet, pornhub probably makes millions from their exploitative acts.
Care to explain why you felt to downvote the parent comment that highlights serious issues with PH?
Still phasing out jQuery and using php and mysql. I'm sure their streaming tech and video player are cutting edge, but otherwise their stack sounds like a large, legacy webapp.
Also adult site’s performance is insanely read heavy. They can cache the shit out of content and whatever is behind that doesn’t have to be the fastest. That model doesn’t apply to all software needs.
I'm sure they would love to hear from you if you can cut 90% of their hardware costs without increasing other costs.
10x cost savings is hardly unheard of.
I'd put PHP somewhere under the middle of the list of languages/ecosystems I'd like to work in again (RoR, specifically, though not Ruby generally; non-TypeScript JavaScript; and gnarly AbstractFactoryImpl-style Java are all probably worse than it, IMO, and of course PHP deep in anything like Wordpress is pretty miserable) and I like Go quite a bit, but there's no denying that if performance is a top criterion PHP should probably be on your short list when choosing a language/ecosystem, and if PHP's not going to cut it then probably no scripting languages are on your list, and you're very likely looking real hard at C++.
Half the web runs on that stack.
These are actively developed technologies that new programmers are learning all the time, with vibrant ecosystems of suppliers (like wordpress plugin and theme developers, or mysql performance consultants), that aren't showing any sign of fading.
Again, that doesn't compare to COBOL.
I was part of a team that launched recently on C# (.NET Core) and MariaDB, but if more of us were comfortable with PHP I'd have had all confidence that that'd have been just as good a platform.
I don't see how it's a mistake. What wouldn't be? node.js? Something ruby- or python-based?
So, again if it's what your team knows best, it's fine. Otherwise it's a mistake.
The type system being static with dynamic support and reflection enables me to think about real problems instead.
I used to dislike GC languages, but working with C# changed my mind. (not saying refcounted systems aren't nice, I'm following rust from a distance)
I don't believe dynamic languages deliver on faster iteration over the long haul. I used to be the biggest dynamic languages fan, but now I avoid them unless it's a small project.
PHP is a mess of a language that's been cleaned up somewhat well, but it's still at such a disadvantage.
I would never advise a company to use it for a new project unless they have lots of talent very familiar with it already.
It's just a mistake. You can disagree, but know that you're wrong ;)
But credit to ASP.NET Web API being so solid too.
Now that I almost exclusively code in Elixir, I'd love to try F#.
The most famous likely being the selector querying functionality, and the event management (and I'm sure others I am not thinking of).
jQuery still works, but under the hood it's just proxying those native methods, so you might as well just use those native methods directly.
jQuery has a better syntax and smaller coding footprint.