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Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

This might not be so bad for mindgeek. They just cut their storage costs in half, probably mostly cutting out the long tail end of videos that they don't really need. They just made a strong argument for increased regulation that will hurt any newcomers and hurt social media competitors more than them. They just got a whole lot of free press.

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I'm not so sure about cutting the storage costs at this point. They likely soft deleted the content in order to preserve it for potential law enforcement needs or whatever else. Moving forward they will absolutely see a decrease in storage needs since uploads are so much more restricted

Hot-store is more expensive than cold-store. For law enforcement purposes, they can have it shipped out to magnetic tape and dropped in a dry cave somewhere.

It's not even soft-deleted, it's just a "this content has been flagged for verification" UI message. The content is still available for download and/or streaming with other frontend clients, such as youtube-dl.

But probably kill them as visitors will drop and new sites will popup.

Yeah, my first thought was "What will become the next leading porn site on the Internet" when I found out about this. It's like direct download sites. If a direct download sites cracks down on illegal content, people start uploading files somewhere else and suddenly all of the visitors, some of whom would have paid for premium membership, are gone.

Where's Rapidshare now?

The article said one of the removed videos was their most popular of all time. So I’m not so sure how long tail it was.

The real reason this is good for mindgeek is that they own a bunch of the porn production companies too. Making pirating and amateur uploading harder will lead to more people paying both pornhub and the subsidiary porn companies.

Absolutely not, this is an existential crisis for Pornhub. They need the credit card companies now since they're a huge operation that needs to diversify revenue, but a leaner upstart could just survive off of ad network and affiliate payments.

When you're being accused of distributing child pornography, I think this transcends the "there's no such thing as bad publicity" adage...

I can see why you'd like to think that, but I'm not seeing anyone saying "and now I'm going to boycott pornhub", so my guess is it doesn't.

It would be interesting to know how many of these vehement anti-child-pornography activists people are secretly pedophiles themselves, just like it was shown to be true for homophobes.

This is Jung's "shadow". We despise that which we're afraid to acknowledge in ourselves.

I think there is much more hatred for "child" pornography because it is completely natural for humans to be attracted to post-pubescent humans, because biology. But they are also classified as "children" arbitrarily and this "wisdom" is widely accepted and hence the natural attraction shadowed. It is then projected on to celebrities or criminals when they are caught.

Posing as an "anti-pedophile" would be a good way for a pedophile to deflect attention away from themselves, or as a way for them to project the negative feelings they receive outwards.

There have been cases where child rights advocates have been arrested for multiple counts of child rape. I don't think every activist is one, or even most. They probably genuinely feel for the victims, and their suffering.

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