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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

In the world where entire sites are pulled over some silly Q conspiracy theory, we can surely do more to combat porn. We've largely dealt with smoking, also addictive, also once prevalent, also while cigarettes are still available at every gas station and grocery store.

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We can definitely do better, but you have to allow for legal porn with consent to remain or else you will push everything to an underground market where the end result will be far less rules to control content.

One thing that would be nice is an automated take down. Anyone who no longer consents to their porn being hosted (or who never consented) can have the selected files added to a database and all porn sites would have to take down based upon matches to this database. This technology already exists with PhotoDNA for fighting known child porn (though I think the technical details are kept secret to avoid people finding work arounds).

As long as one draws a line between consensual and nonconsensual porn then I think you'll be able to crack down on the non-consensual material without having to worry about the failures of a 'war on x'.

Think of it like the difference between cracking down on weed and cracking down on synthetic 'weed' that is killing people. Or just look at stores that are able to sell alcohol. Because it is generally allowed, specific bans are much easier to enforce because business likes keeping the legal status.

Alcohol and weed are not good examples because these are failed interventions if you consider them harmful. Consumption of both exploded in the last few decades.

This is why I use smoking: it's also legal or semi-legal, it used to be prevalent but its popularity cratered.

"Consumption of both exploded in the last few decades." -> I don't know about weed, but it's definitely not true for alcohol, it's roughly stable; in USA there has been some decrease in per capita consumption since a peak in 1980s - see https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/publications/global_alco... for example.

Why? Is porn bad per se?

Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist behind the Stanford Prison Experiment, seems to think so. He has written a couple of books on the subject of deteriorating development of young men, and has suggested a correlation to the advent of high-speed internet.

Not sure if he's right, but it's certainly a reasonable theory.

He also did a TED talk briefly touching on the subject.

https://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_the_demise_of_guys

You can always find people believing all sorts of things.

Most of them aren't experts in sociobehavioral psychology who write books on this particular subject.

Lots of people also write books. And the Stanford Prison experiment has received a huge amount of criticism by now, afaik.

Also being famous does not automatically make you an expert.

Edit: googled citation for criticism of the SPE https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31380664/

Whether you think the experiment itself was good or bad (Zimbardo recognized its failures and ended it early), the lessons it taught were invaluable and that's why they brought him in as an expert witness for the Abu Ghraib trial. Your suggestion that "lots of people write books" is a silly pooh-poohing in that context, especially considering that Zimbardo was already a Stanford professor by that time in 1971, 50 years ago.

You bring forth one expert to support your claim. I am merely pointing out that there are other experts with differing opinions.

An expert in psychology is basically a modern haruspex.

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