Comment by sfink | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sfink | Hacker News Reader

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VHS, the early internet, video compression, and other advances were driven by porn.

Now it seems like ads are driving everything. (Sure, including ads on porn, but I highly doubt porn dominates the ad market overall.)

It seems like the widespread adoption that drives and is driven by technological progress always comes down to catering to some base urge. I guess if you zoom out, everything is driven by base urges, just more or less directly?

So far, the puzzle pieces have always been found in the filthy heap of slop the feeds our primitive brains. We have not yet elected someone because they're the wisest, best fit for the position. It's always the person who can stroke our egos and soothe our fears, who lies with a smile that we choose to trust even when we know it's a lie. It's always a lie. We buy the product that makes us feel best to buy. Sometimes these happen to momentarily coincide with our best interests, but usually not, and never after the competition for our eyeballs and gonads has been minmaxed. Rational superiority is never the deciding factor—even when we convince ourselves that it is, it's that conviction that makes us feel good and determines our action.

Porn is at least enjoyable

>VHS, the early internet, video compression, and other advances were driven by porn.

For posterity, this is completely true; people not liking it does not make it untrue.

VHS was not driven by porn, and neither was video compression.

VHS adoption was driven by the fact that time shifting content was a godsend that people loved. This is a huge reason VHS beat betamax, because you could fit more football games on the VHS, even in it's abysmal longest recording quality. People bought VHS recorders well before anyone was releasing ANY media on VHS.

Name a single video compression codec or ASIC that was produced by or for a porn company. Math geeks made compression codecs well before they were viable for software encoding on general purpose computers, and then set top box manufacturers drove the adoption and development of ASICs that could actually use those codecs.

What porn HAS driven is innovation in video streaming platform UI. Youtube has stolen every nice feature it has from Pornhub, who usually deployed them years earlier.

> VHS was not driven by porn, and neither was video compression.

I think you're quibbling over what "driven by" means. Porn was not the origin of any of these, but there's pretty good evidence that its popularity played a significant role in the adoption of technologies ranging from the printing press to photography to streaming video. VHS being cheaper and recording longer caused it to be adopted by the porn producers, which resulted in much more porn being available on VHS, which tilted things in its favor. (Well, that and Sony's ambivalence towards porn on Betamax.) Geeks indeed liked to work on compression, but nobody would have cared without an application for it, and a big chunk of early internet traffic was porn. The difference between waiting 5 vs 30 minutes for a download is pretty influential. Devices with hardware acceleration, including ASICs, were popular because people had applications for them, and a solid percentage of those applications were porn.

I grew up during the development of all of these technologies. I've never been one for watching porn, but even then, it was pretty clear at least in my environment that porn was very influential. Hints and tricks to download and decode compressed video spread very rapidly through word-of-mouth networks, specifically for porn content.

Earlier, the same thing happened for stills, which were more my thing so I have firsthand knowledge. Heck, the standard test image was Lena—what showed up in the research papers was tame, but the extra 2/3 of the image below that is the reason why that was the most popular test image. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

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