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Comment by ramesh31 | Hacker News Reader

The web badly needs a video site on the scale of Youtube that isn't beholden to the nonsense puritanical values of big tech. Still keep it free of anything illegal or copyright infringing, but allow people to do whatever they want otherwise. Pornhub is in a great spot where they could rebrand and do this.

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> nonsense puritanical values of big tech

I don't think it's "big tech" that has these issues. Pornhub is big tech too...

The problem is that you have you walk on egg shells for anything that could come even remotely close to children, and really a lot of the American (even though they may like to think otherwise) a not-insignificant portion of the European market will give absolutely credence to anything that doesn't explicitly ban sexual things.

Look at what happened to OnlyFans. That wasn't big tech, that was the financial institutions, and the same group that did that is targeting Pornhub next.

the same group that did that is targeting Pornhub next

I thought they already did target pornhub, which is what led to a big purge of content from Pornhub:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/12/visa-mastercard-...

Are they coming back for more?

The group largely behind both of these things, Exodus Cry, is a Christian non-profit seeking the complete abolition of sex work, including making and distributing pornography.

I'd find it more interesting if they did more an "expand brand". Playboy Magazine back in the day had both porn and substantial reporting. "Sure and I bet you Playboy for the interviews" was a standard wisecrack. Porn is incredibly profitable and they probably couldn't get more money featuring non-porn content. But they could gain credibility if they became a safe harbor for worthwhile content unfairly harassed by youtube.

The problem isn't the site as much as it is puritanical society. As soon as the site moves towards more diverse content that isn't porn they start to smell the ad-dollars which come with the puritanism.

Exactly what (almost) happened to Onlyfans once they attempted to pivot towards non-adult content.

What content is not on youtube other than pornography that you can chalk up to Puritanism?

Not sure how directly related, but I've been using Pyro to build my own video gallery site.

https://www.pyro.app

Here's an example site that I built

https://flyn.app/

I watch a lot of swimming videos and it's hard to curate and collect them all in one single place. Pyro has features that let me do that. But it also lets you upload videos directly.

> The web badly needs a video site on the scale of Youtube that isn't beholden to the nonsense puritanical values of big tech.

Are you objecting to YouTube's content being restricted by any value system whatsoever, or just Puritanical values in particular?

I'm just trying to understand your point. Definitely an interesting topic either way.

Luckily, YouTube is not the web, and the web is still open, so anyone can share videos on their own terms, even from their own house if they wanted to.

There's D.Tube and PeerTube

> nonsense puritanical values

Such as?

Facebook removing images of Courbet's painting L'Origine du Monde, the Venus of Willendorf, or Youtube restricting a videoclip from Brassens' Les Passantes to 18+ viewers.

All perfect examples of nonsense puritanical values that Big Tech applies indiscriminately regardless of the audience's values.

And sure, in these examples they backtracked, but only because these created massive negative buzzes, but what about all the other cases that didn't trend on Twitter or made the frontpage news?

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