The worst thing about data driven UX - especially with porn - is that it's often a self fulfilling prophecy. Trends that are likely side-effects are considered to be primary factors driving engagement.
With porn, it's usually a fetish that is only moderately popular, but broadly unoffensive. Because the average person who isn't specifically interested in the fetish isn't turned off by it either, that fetish gets more positive engagement relative to other fetishes; which drives studios to make more of it, and tube sites to advertise it more.
This pattern likely started with foot fetish, but really took off over the last few years with "step sibling" porn.
No one I've talked to is actually interested in the step-sibling fetish, yet the overwhelming majority of content being made and advertised - especially by mainstream studios and well-known actors - is step-sibling themed. Why? Because these studios are deciding what to make based on what's popular on pornhub, and what's popular on pornhub is literally anything these studios make. I sincerely doubt that they would see a drop in engagement if they diversified, but trends in data will never drive diversity faster than they drive convergence, because convergence is essentially the goal of data driven production in the first place.
It's also worth noting that the near-monopoly status of Mindgeek in the casual porn streaming industry has amplified this pattern. Their recent decision to stop hosting unverified content - good or bad - has had a pretty serious side-effect on the singular greatest driving factor of internet porn: piracy.
If a porn studio or independent actor doesn't want their content floating around pornhub, they can simply refuse to post it. Anyone who wants to upload a copy without their consent will fail verification.
So now, the only content being shared on pornhub is what creators hope will be interesting, and never what consumers want to share.
Most new competitive content creators are more concerned about getting paid than getting advertised because they don't have the financial buffer that established studios have; so they are less likely to put their content on pornhub, and less likely to by found by the casual consumer.
> No one I've talked to is actually interested in the step-sibling fetish, yet the overwhelming majority of content being made and advertised - especially by mainstream studios and well-known actors - is step-sibling themed. Why? Because these studios are deciding what to make based on what's popular on pornhub, and what's popular on pornhub is literally anything these studios make. I sincerely doubt that they would see a drop in engagement if they diversified, but trends in data will never drive diversity faster than they drive convergence, because convergence is essentially the goal of data driven production in the first place.
I think your analysis is incorrect... it's likely extremely profitable for the porn studios because: 1. It's an easy plot to make up. 2. requires absolutely no extra props fancy locations or anything beyond the basic porn shoot. 3. it's extremely taboo so for whoever is actually into that they get to rope in and for the rest of the porn consumers they can just skip the part where they have all that verbalized and it's basically normal porn for some version of normal.
As opposed to what? Having literally no plot at all? Like 99% of porn? The entire basis of my contention is that people are watching step-sibling porn despite the plot, not because of it. I stand by that assertion.
> As opposed to what? Having literally no plot at all?
yeah, they get to capture whatever market there is for that taboo plotline (which probably isn't insignificant considering it's in the top most searched list[0][1]) without any real downsides for them since people can generally just ignore that and pretend otherwise.
Just a guess but: I suspect a bit that foot thing might be to lower fractions of NSFW parts in an image for otherwise SFW websites(e.g. Twitter), and also to appease older demographic because it is often argued that fetish move downwards as people ages. "Step sibling" is just a successor to "teen" and "schoolgirl" for ban avoidance. There are chances that a successor will appear in 3-5 years and my instinct says it could be a nationality tag.
> because convergence is essentially the goal of data driven production in the first place.
But what comes after an ultimate convergence - let's say, a 3:45 minutes long .mp4 file of an incomprehensible psychedelic rainbow mosaic that cause a strong euphoria to any singular entity of a primate species born in or before 2022 - will audiences not adapt to it? And when they consume the stimuli, how does the convergence sustain? There will have to be a change of trend, and a novel oddity to be normalized will have to be brought in from outside the industry, I think.
I don't know if it actually starts with hair, but yes it's often said that area of interest moves from chest to lower torso to legs as one ages. Is this not widely known or told? Not something openly discussed in public but I thought it's something you hear from across a room and later observe in life.
There may be something to that. We certainly slump more with age, shifting the first thing you're oriented to notice about someone (their face) down to their feet.
> but really took off over the last few years with "step sibling" porn.
Even one of the Mortys in R&M made a wish that "inc*st porn have more a mainstream appeal." My partner both winced at that and said to each other, "Did he just say what I think he said?" So maybe I'm just too old and traditional (despite being queer)?
Go look at fan forums for House of the Dragon, discussing the most recent episode. There was an incest scene and the gist of fan reaction was "hnnnng that's hot".
I don't mean publicly. I mean in conversations where interest in taboo fetish is common and encouraged.
And I have no doubt that there are people who get excited about step-sibling fetish. I just figure that if it was as common to want step-sibling porn as it is to find it, then I would have met (or heard from) someone by now who does.
I built the IT infrastructure for one of the largest hardcore porn sites out there.
When we did a complete rebuild of it (because it was in horrible PHP code), we tried to do a redesign and the CEO of the company made us change it back.
Why? Because it was too nice and the UX was too good.
He told us that his customers actually appreciated a more 'dirty' and 'raw' feel to the site. It is porn after all!
So, we went back to the drawing board and did just that... many of the changes we made to the UX were reverted to intentionally make things a bit harder to use and make the site feel more 'dirty'... which is funny given the content was already super dirty.
Oddly enough, I somewhat agree with your CEO. In the hypothetical scenario where I would ever visit a porn site, I wouldn't ever want to feel like I'm being funneled anywhere. I would already not trust the site and feeling funneled would make me wary of falling into a scam/exploit/trap, even though most sites would most likely only ever want ad money and would never care to scam/exploit/trap me.
I think because most of these sites are dominated by user uploads, it doesn't really help to have a great tagging system, because inevitably you end up with a huge library of videos with insufficient/wrong tags. Arguably the majority will have shitty tags, lots of misspellings, etc. The consequence is if you did an AND search with 6 tags say, you'd end up exclude most if not all the results that would match your query if properly tagged.
Weeaboo sites seem to be an exception for some reason, probably because the average community member is obsessive/hoardy enough to give a shit about tagging at all.
IMO the only booru like site that has a better tagging/searching system than esix is derpibooru. It is fast enough to be almost scary. Even with highly complex filters.
I was curious because I am a back-end tech nerd, and apparently "derpibooru" (I had no idea what to expect) is running on Elixir (I assume Phoenix) specifically this:
Edit: PLEASE BE AWARE OF THE LICENSE, it is AGPL licensed, which means if you copy any of the code into your back-end, your whole back-end must be open sourced, as a back-end nerd I stay away from anything AGPL'd just to be on the safe side of the law.
Fud.
To quote section 13 of the AGPL license: "Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the GNU General Public License into a single combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work, but the work with which it is combined will remain governed by version 3 of the GNU General Public License."
Sounds like generic copyright feature, when you assign license on per file basis in source form. Such compiled combined work will be licensed under AGPL:
13. Use with the GNU Affero General Public License.
Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have
permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed
under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License into a single
combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this
License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work,
but the special requirements of the GNU Affero General Public License,
section 13, concerning interaction through a network will apply to the
combination as such.
"but the special requirements of the GNU Affero General Public License, section 13, concerning interaction through a network will apply to the combination as such."
AGPL Section 13 as you quote it discussed the interaction of AGPL and GPL v3. It has nothing to do with the scenario the parent commenter was discussing involving the interaction of AGPL and closed-source non-GPL code.
Well, does that allow you to have the rest of your backend GPL licensed and simply not distributed? Nobody has a right to see the code unless they have the executable, and you're not giving anyone the executable, so...
I meant a leak of the source code, not the executable. If the source code comes with a license that was intentionally applied by the copyright holder, does it matter that it wasn't intended to be released if the license allows for general use?
If I make changes to a GPL3 library, but never distribute it, and you come along and leak it, you've distributed my changes without a license. Those changes are toxic, and the result cannot be distributed by anyone. It's not really any different than the usual dance one has to perform to combine two components with incompatible licenses: you can mix the ingredients yourself, you can tell people how to mix the ingredients themselves, but you can't distribute the cake.
Correct, but it would be foolish not to warn people BEFORE they peek around the code. GPL (and by extension I assume AGPL) states that even translating the work to a new language still constitutes as copying and therefore the resulting code must be GPL'd.
All projects like this prominently include the license file in the root directory of their code repository. If you don’t read that, you only have yourself to blame. If you have read it but still don’t understand how the license works, don’t touch it or ask a lawyer to help.
a demo of the search engine running locally. Yes, it is that fast. And its not just counts, but the actual result sets. (in this case, no fetching is done though)
Also supports and/or, even nested, along with ranking by whether it has a specific search term (called boosting in the documentation) Oh, and in the example, the default blacklist was used. https://derpibooru.org/pages/search_syntax
That fucking website man. I literally googled the MSG "e number" one time, which is "e621" and in that moment my innocence was ruined.
Is it also surprising that the "booru" websites, which are likely frequented by the most ASD of the ASD inflicted men, would be well cataloged? It is simply what our brains do.
Take a step back and imagine what success, and reflection of good rankings algos would be on these sites. Longer engagement times and multiple videos (+ads) for YouTube. Shorter time on site and less videos for Pornhub.
The interfaces would be designed accordingly with those end goals in mind.
Why would they want less time spent on the site? That's optimal perhaps for the user not site, and the article discusses how the site is designed to keep the user searching.
It could be optimal for the site if the site monetizes via monthly subscription fees. Giving the user what they "want" as rapidly as possible would allow them to save money on infrastructure costs.
Still could cause some interesting 2+ order effects though!
How long does one need to watch porn in a single sitting? Netflix,YouTube, TikTok, etc. benefit from the fact we can sit there all day watching it (and some people do). Porn? Well...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 )
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.
> 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.
The layouts were designed over a decade ago and most tubes sites just copied YouTube for a layout, assuming They know what they were doing when they designed it. Or copied other existing tube sites’ layouts. A lot of these sites started by using an out of the box software that has a prebuilt back then as well. The designs weren’t changed because why would you change a horse that’s winning you many millions per month? Plus everyone was afraid of changing anything that might hurt their seo ranking.
Source: worked in that industry for over a decade and know/knew many of the decision makers at these companies. They weren’t that strategic, I assure you.
They probably got it from Snow Crash. The oldest surviving globes of the known world date back to 1492 according to Wikipedia and the Greeks probably created their own variations a few millennia ago.
It was so natural and intuitive that Youtube's version STILL doesn't compare to how good, fast, seemless, and unintrusive it is done on the porn sites, years later.
Dang I saw that was a new feature but didn't know they'd actually started borrowing features from porn sites. What the heck is the youtube team doing that they're creating useful features slower than that sort of site?
I take issue with that assessment. Porn sites exist in a fiercely competitive environment AND they are profitable. These are two features that Youtube lacks and their presence on porn sites reflects (at least partially) favorably on their engineering quality/innovation.
Porn has generally been a frontrunner of tech. If anything, that has slowed down recently.
Porn was the first to adopt portable cameras. VHS. DVDs. Credit card payments for online. Chat. Webcams. VR. 4K (not the best idea). etc.
For many years, the Adult Entertainment Expo and CES were held simultaneously in Vegas. And the AES tech talks were often better as CES tended to blur the line between marketing and tech while at AES the marketing/sales and tech were ... more strongly delineated.
Oh, hey, look at that. For 2023, they're back to being on the same date. Presumably attendance at both is sufficiently off that they needed to consolidate again.
> People in thumbnails make weird facial expressions for different reasons
I’ve seen porn videos with a YT-style thumbnail (annoying person making a dumb face in front of whatever is actually interesting), but so far they are very rare.
That would seem to suggest that the obnoxious YT-style thumbnails are mainly driven by children. (Or, at least, with strictly adult-only audiences they don't appear.)
I assume this is because the YT annoying dumb face thing is simply less enticing than ... the scenes and "expressions" they can get away with on a porn site. I'd guess a large set of youtube creators would be more risque and scantily clad in their thumbnails if YT would allow it.
So... let's just be glad YT only allows mouths to be agape on the thumbnails you have to scroll past.
No, thumbnails tend to look more like actual thumbnails; a frame in the middle of a video sequence, or figures from a scientific paper, than an excerpt from a tabloid paper.
Interesting how, in attempt to make the article on this topic more SFW, they decided to replace thumbs of actual porn with hand-painted representations..
I have the same issue with this as other commenters here: The article says that porn sites are designed to maximize engagement. As opposed to what, other video sites?
A very naive thought, but isn't it a bit different for porn sites because of the existence of orgasms? If I'm watching TikTok and a really good video comes on I am encouraged to watch more but if there is a really good porn video I'm ... Done? At least for that session. So it's like they want to keep dopamine levels not cranked up, but at sustained medium levels.
Again, I don't know anything about UX, please tell me if I'm wrong.
Probably, but you still want to maximize the amount of time users are on the site, or the amount of pages they visit. Orgasms are just an additional complication, I'd imagine.
TikTok, Netflix, Instagram and other sites specifically designed to be sticky (no pun intended) also have this problem although it isn't orgasms. It is that people need to sleep.
So they'll spend next 30 seconds and close your website? Not good for ad profits. Ideally they should spend 10 minutes searching for something, looking at ads, then finally find it and return to this website next day.
Isn't that the short term thinking that's basically killing social media sites. Like yeah we engage for hours on low quality content for now but eventually move on. Instead what would be better is consistent high quality content that keeps a user coming back day after day, even if a session is shorter. It's reliably good. Like Facebook has nothing interesting for a week even if it's find my self trapped in infinite scroll for longer. I'll eventually leave.
Consider the timing and placement of advertisements. Youtube is most frustrating with a an unskippable advertisement just before an important part of the video. Such behavior by the site is much less desirable with a porn video.
True. It would be interesting to read specific comparisons to YouTube. The problem for an article like this is discussing details of something that's extremely intimate for most people.
Why would they? Imagine you are an organization to create something, and you ... do that, while having ads, (with additional other supports). E.g. I don't think phoronix.com is optimized for engagement. Why can't Michael (phoronix guy) do the articles because it is his job, and not because he want to maximize the ads?
You can have a compromise. There is a minimum number of $$$ you need to stay in business. The less ads you have in total, the more supply and demand allows you to charge. Most sites though are not at the point anyone will pay them more than someone else, so if you show less ads you won't be able to charge more for the few you show. (the super bowl famously can charge very high rates, but for the average web site you are competing with every other website and so less space isn't significant to all customers)
I strongly believe that most web sites are leaving a lot of money on the table by not having their ads in-house. It will be more work (and cost) in the short run, but a good ad salesman can find those customers who really want to target the people reading your website in ways algorithms do not. The big automakers and fast food don't care about targeting - nearly everyone is a potential customer so they can get everyone. Most care about targeting and so by selling direct you ensure that their ads never go to someone who won't buy anyway because of the algorithm.
Phoronix is very much optimized for people staying on the site (most links in articles will go to phoronix.com) as well as for maximizing ad views (articles split into many short pages). Not really a fan of either but it's not like there are many sites for Linux benchmarks and harware news to choose from.
Maybe it's optimizing not for you staying for a longer session but for you to keep coming back? Have more exclusive videos , easy to use UI, fast connection etc.
So they're more in it for the long game?
The top/title banner on this site displayed > 30% of my mobile screen. I'm just noting this before reading, as the topic is website UX ... (e: it's much better when in portrait mode, I just happened to be browsing landscape)
>This story is part of our Weekend Reads series, where we highlight a story we love from the archives. It was originally published in the fifth issue of Eye on Design magazine and again online on August 8, 2019.
I expect a "sow, then reap" (LOL) pattern is super-common on these sites: browse one or a few searches or categories, new-tab anything interesting and move on, then close those and look through what you opened when you think you've got enough queued up. Not just scrolling down a single "feed".
I upvoted it because I read the article and found it to be quite interesting. As other commenters have mentioned, you might find YouTube indistinguishable because of how many features have been inspired by porn sites (or, at the very least, were popularized on those adult content sites first).
With porn, it's usually a fetish that is only moderately popular, but broadly unoffensive. Because the average person who isn't specifically interested in the fetish isn't turned off by it either, that fetish gets more positive engagement relative to other fetishes; which drives studios to make more of it, and tube sites to advertise it more.
This pattern likely started with foot fetish, but really took off over the last few years with "step sibling" porn.
No one I've talked to is actually interested in the step-sibling fetish, yet the overwhelming majority of content being made and advertised - especially by mainstream studios and well-known actors - is step-sibling themed. Why? Because these studios are deciding what to make based on what's popular on pornhub, and what's popular on pornhub is literally anything these studios make. I sincerely doubt that they would see a drop in engagement if they diversified, but trends in data will never drive diversity faster than they drive convergence, because convergence is essentially the goal of data driven production in the first place.
It's also worth noting that the near-monopoly status of Mindgeek in the casual porn streaming industry has amplified this pattern. Their recent decision to stop hosting unverified content - good or bad - has had a pretty serious side-effect on the singular greatest driving factor of internet porn: piracy.
If a porn studio or independent actor doesn't want their content floating around pornhub, they can simply refuse to post it. Anyone who wants to upload a copy without their consent will fail verification.
So now, the only content being shared on pornhub is what creators hope will be interesting, and never what consumers want to share.
Most new competitive content creators are more concerned about getting paid than getting advertised because they don't have the financial buffer that established studios have; so they are less likely to put their content on pornhub, and less likely to by found by the casual consumer.