Hacker News Reader

Comment by godmode2019 | Hacker News Reader

godmode2019

I had a friend once tell me that porn was the driving force for innovation on the internet.

Firstly getting the speeds up to load images, then videos with buffering then 4k, then VR.

The design features and business model of porn sites is years ahead of anything else, for a reason these sites up until very recently were the majority of bandwith over the Internet.

A business model you will start to see more which is very common in porn is to use the streaming site as advertising to your paid membership site.

You release 10min clip of say a podcast and to watch the rest you need to join the members only site. As YouTube partner programme gets worse and rules about what content get more strict you will see a drive to only using YouTube as a marketing tool to get people behind the pay wall.

View on HN

Speaking as someone who built the IT infrastructure for one of the largest sites on the net, this is absolutely true.

We were the first to do live 1080p streaming. At the time, even finding a hardware mixer for this content was difficult. It was so early that there was only one product available that wasn't just prime time equipment.

Wasn't porn the first ecommerce offering? Like they were the pioneers of "give me your credit card we give you porn." or is that an urban legend, I swear I've heard this remarked here on HN before, I just don't have any solid citations.

And the lack of crypto payments for porn should be a strong sign that it’s useless.

This is a wrong correlation fallacy.

Porn sites, while very cutting edge in a lot of ways (which generates more revenue for them), are extremely slow to adopt changes to their source of revenue because they are very protective about that aspect (for obvious reasons).

Not only that, but the sources of revenue are all deeply intertwined with their affiliate networks, which drive the traffic to the sites in the first place. Shaving is a huge concern, so these sites have to use 'approved' software that everyone else uses for this.

One of the largest used pieces of software is called NATS [1] and it is a trainwreck of complexity. Everything is directed through their integrated billing options [2]... which as you can see is extensive. Why? Because credit card companies will routinely shut down your merchant account randomly... because p0rn.

For the company I worked for (early 2000's), we developed a micro currency that was HUGELY successful and was used for all sorts of interesting things, like pay per minute billing. This was all early/pre days of blockchain adoption and had we used a low cost blockchain of some of this, it might have allowed for earlier more interesting experiments.

Anyway, the full answer is that this is a lot more complex than it appears on the surface and you have no idea what you're talking about here with a comment like that.

[1] https://toomuchmedia.com/pp_nats.htm

[2] https://toomuchmedia.com/pp_nats-billers.htm

I was thinking of the "indie" side, namely people using sites like onlyfans who constantly get banned from PayPal and such and so don't have access to money transfers.

There was the ft podcast about porn in which the creator of nats https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_Thylmann played an important part in the consolidation leading to mind geek.

Oh interesting! I didn't know that bit of history.

From the engineering side, the software was beyond horrid. Different versions of their software would re-use the same column in a database for different things! They'd do things like if id>=5000 { do something else } in their code. I always wanted to rewrite it and produce something that was actually sane.

But, being in the p0rn industry, it made it super difficult to hire talented engineers because people were afraid to talk about where they worked (or just had issues p0rn) and I myself left without ever having the chance to do so. Funny enough, I see a similar hiring issue with crypto today.

There are crypto payments for porn tho

Right—but, considering that porn sites famously have tons of trouble with traditional payment processors, if crypto were both practically workable for normal people as a payment method, and actually good for that, in terms of having significant advantages over their halfway-adversarial traditional payment partners, it should be dominating the industry.

I can't believe I'd never made that connection, but it's dead on. If crypto can't even take over porn payments, which are practically an ideal case for the technology, it's not taking over anything else meaningful, either. Now that it's been pointed out, it seems obvious.

( note to self: keep an eye out for headlines re: Mindgeek or similar creating a crypto currency, and invest in it pronto if that happens, because it'll mean they found a way to make it broadly useful )

I do actually think crypto payments are superior for porn, esp as we see visa/Mastercard threaten businesses like OF

Yup thats true, They also pushed cybersecurity very hard it was a very competitive industry and companies could go out of business very quickly if the site weren't properly locked down.

Gaming is why the pipes are fast. Porn is why the pipes are fat.

It's absolutely driving innovation in the VR and stereographic 180 degree film markets.

2k -> 4k -> 6k -> 8k side-by-side video over the course of a 4-5 years.

> You release 10min clip of say a podcast and to watch the rest you need to join the members only site.

That's exactly what John Oliver's show does, and has for years, right? They have a couple major segments and two or three smaller bits in an episode, and one of the two major segments gets released in its entirety for free (and inevitably linked by someone or another in every half-way relevant discussion thread anywhere on the Web). They post them on YouTube, I think, I suppose since HBO Max doesn't have a free streaming site and it wouldn't get 1/10 the eyeballs of YouTube even if they did, and the point is advertising, after all.

and IoT...thinkaboutit

Reply on news.ycombinator.com