
Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites? - adultthrowaway
And where do people doing this hang out? I've been quietly working on something that's taking off but I'm on my own here.
======
51Cards
I worked in porn years ago... ah the memories. I worked for one of the first
companies doing live interactive video streaming from girls living at home,
though "live" in the late 90's was a still image every 1-2 seconds and no
audio. The girls were rolling full sized PCs with camcorders around on rolling
carts in their houses. I learned a lot about managing high traffic, server
push methods, etc. I know I came out of it with a lot of things I wouldn't
have picked up elsewhere. I never found it to be a hindrance to getting work
later.

------
swish
I was the Director of Technology for Naughty America up until about 7 months
ago when I transitioned to a "mainstream" job as those in the industry call
it. Was definitely an interesting experience, but as others have said the
things you learn about massive traffic, high availability, scalability and
TONS of streaming video are hard to get anywhere else, unless you're working
for a Google or Yahoo. Naughty America at one point was in the top 800 highest
trafficked of all sites on the web, 1M+ uniques a day. I'm now the CTO of a
startup and when I was leaving Naughty America everyone I interviewed with
viewed that experience as an asset, as most intelligent people will.

www.gfy.com is the most popular adult webmaster forum, but there are others
like www.justblowme.com, www.adultwhoswho.com, etc

------
latchkey
Funny, these AHN's come up every few months or so. I wrote a good portion of
the code and architecture for the kink.com sites. Decided to leave after 4
years working there pretty much because my job there was done, things work
really well. Despite what people might think, it was not hard at all to find a
'real' job again as my experience working in extremely high traffic
environments is desirable.

~~~
AbnormalGun
Cool. I've been a member of the Kink site in the past and found it to be fast
and well done. Did you just work on the back end stuff or did you also work on
the design/layout of the site as well?

~~~
latchkey
I did the backend stuff, but wrote a lot of the jsp pages as well. It is all
Java/J2EE/JBoss/EJB3/Hibernate with some fairly complicated single sign on
stuff going on to allow cross domain auto-login.

------
jasonlotito
I work for Gamma Entertainment up here in Montreal. I handle the credit card
processing side of things (TrustCharge). I won't rehash the places I've
mentioned in other comments, but don't neglect actually meeting people. The
trade shows are a great place to meet people, even if you don't get a booth.

Just keep in mind that the adult business is a _business_. The people involved
are interested in making money.

On a side note, we are hiring programmers! Shoot me off an email if you're
interested.

~~~
davidmathers
Nice. You're about to start doing payment processing (among other things) for
Hot House, my best client. Seeing you here gives me great confidence!

------
jqueryin
On the topic of getting a new job after leaving the adult industry:

It will generally have little impact on future jobs; especially if you get
hands on experience with massively scalable architectures and high traffic
volumes. The problems you solve outweigh the environment you worked in. From
my experience, adult companies keep things professional due to the nature of
the business and the risks of being sued.

I have a buddy that was in the industry for awhile, and there are a number of
forums they all troll on. Here's a couple:

<http://iq69.com> <http://gfy.com> (nsfw)

------
tibbon
So for those of you that have worked on porn sites- why are they generally so
poorly done (or at least, from the perspective that most HN coders would view
as poorly).

Many have parts that are broken, they are slow, have really messy HTML, rely
super heavily on flash, and just lack most modern features that most sites
would have.

I've been dreaming of 'porn for geeks', where the content is the same, but
there's nice RSS feeds, everything has strong semantic meaning, HTML5 is
everywhere, they use jquery for consistent javascript rendering, the pages
scale properly when you size them up, and hell... maybe even try for some user
accessibility.

I just have yet to run across a good porn site that looks technically as
impressive as someone's 4 hour rails project even. Of course, I wouldn't mind
being proven wrong.

~~~
martinemde
When working for Naughty America, I made a website for the members' area that
was attempting to be like hulu for porn. Queueing, favorites, recommendations,
subscriptions. We had it ready to go...

Naughty America was very resistant to change. The didn't want to divert all
their members to a new site. They continued to work on their old members area
so I was always feature chasing.

What it comes down to is that porn companies are not set up to be tech
companies. They start out with 1 hacker that throws together some shitty CMS
site and starts hacking content into it. Since the site quality isn't driving
the money, they never lose the "one guy hacking on the site" mentality. They
were basically doing everything as a one-off, without actually trying to make
a good quality solution that would serve them long term.

~~~
khafra
Is this (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2176038>) the guy who wouldn't
let you put up the new site? I'm fascinated to hear a dialogue on it, if so.

------
SageRaven
I've always wondered if sysadmin work for adult sites was a niche due to moral
objections or the perception that employment at a "normal" place would be
difficult afterwards. I don't often see many admin job postings for such
sites, so I assume the industry is somewhat incestuous (no pun intended)
and/or nepotist, resulting in more word-of-mouth job prospects than through
the usual channels. Discretion and all that.

Anyone know where a freelance admin could find such jobs? The smaller the
shop, the better.

~~~
calloc
When I got my job in the porn industry they didn't advertise that was what it
was for. Instead it was brought up during the interview process.

They asked me a series of questions related to it as well. Like "For your day
job you may have to visit bigblackcocks.com to make sure their website is
functioning again, how do you feel about that?" and "We host a lot of content
that might be offensive, if given root access would feel the urge to delete
everything because it didn't fit in with your world view?"

I'm not offended at anything, so it really didn't bother me. I worked on many
different aspects of the business. Massively scaling MySQL, handling DDoS
attacks, setting up load balancers on the fly, helping figure out how certain
websites were attacked and or compromised. It was a fun job, and one of the
sites I worked on currently has 600+ live models streaming to over 1 million
unique IP addresses.

I don't know how you'd go about finding such a job, I stumbled upon it. No, it
is not on my resume since I am a software engineer at heart and not a sys
admin, but the knowledge I have gained has allowed me to engineer various
different systems in the mean time.

CCBill and Cave Creek located in Phoenix are two of the places where I
interviewed before landing the other job, later I found out through a friend
who did get the job at Cave Creek that he was doing the same stuff I was
doing.

~~~
Vivtek
You just wonder whether they _had_ hired somebody as an admin and they deleted
everything... Once bitten, twice shy?

~~~
calloc
It happened while I worked there. It was a site that featured 18 year old
girls that looked like they were underage. It was the guys third week on the
job and while he had no issues with bestiality or anything along those lines
he felt that a line had been crossed with hosting "child porn" even-though we
had the records on file that said the women were all over the age of 18.

There is a reason we kept backups, and why the new guys (myself included in
the first 4 months) were only allowed access on load-balanced systems so that
if we did go rogue the downtime would be minimal while the more senior admins
flipped a switch.

------
pamelafox
Related to this, I'd love to see developers who work on porn sites speaking at
conferences, to hear about your particular experiences in design, marketing,
SEO, hosting, and scaling. Seems like you'd have an interesting perspective on
all that.

~~~
evilduck
I always got the impression most tech conferences were too thin-skinned about
the subject, which is sad considering the porn industry works on a lot of
interesting tech problems.

~~~
soult
There was one talk called "Tits Bits" at the Chaos Communication Camp 07 (a
rather unconventional but awesome tech conference). It was about the technical
challenges of operating a porn streaming website. You can download the
recording (number 2041) here: <http://dewy.fem.tu-
ilmenau.de/CCC/CCCamp07/video/m4v/>

The recording includes some pictures which make it not safe for work
(depending on your work environment).

------
bottlerocket
Probably should create a throwaway for this :) but way back in college I did a
bit of contract front-end web work for some guys in that area, email me (in
profile) and I can send you the URL of the message board they were all on.

~~~
gcb
Do you need a secret handshake or something?

~~~
bottlerocket
No, just didn't want to post gofuckyourself.com here, but others already did
so why not :D

But speaking of secret handshakes, don't suppose anyone here remembers CFUS by
any chance?

------
jarin
I used to be the R&D Director at Naughty America, here's what I built:

[http://techcrunch.com/2008/10/08/come-and-get-it-naughty-
ame...](http://techcrunch.com/2008/10/08/come-and-get-it-naughty-america-is-
building-an-itunes-for-porn/)

<http://gofuckyourself.com> (NWS) is pretty much the hangout for adult
affiliates and webmasters. If you're trying to build traffic, that's where you
want to be.

Funny enough, I seem to be at it again. My latest client is a porn startup.

~~~
nailer
What does the startup do?

~~~
jarin
Nothing fancy, just a new porn studio. After the basic stuff is up and running
we're going to talk about making it all whiz-bang.

I still have dreams about getting the "iTunes Store for Porn" idea up and
running again, since there was a lot of interest from other companies about
getting their content on there (I think it's the best way to save the industry
from the proliferation of free porn). Plus, with the
technical/marketing/mobile knowledge I've gained since then I can make it a
million times better.

Unfortunately, without the content and resources of Naughty America behind me
it would be tough to break away from client work long enough to build
something that I could pimp out to content producers.

------
xutopia
My experience with the domain has been less than stellar. I ended up being
fired for handing over a petition from all but one employee asking for better
treatment. I sued them and they settled out of court.

The best part of it was the "best orgasm faces" contest we had. I was a
programmer so I just benefited from it but those working on touch ups would
screenshot and save the orgasm faces into a shared network drive and we had
new stuff to laugh at every day.

------
vermontdevil
Long long long time ago back in the days of dial up ISPs, I along with friends
created a website called Kandyland. We bought a negative film scanner for
about $1500 or so for a photographer in return for a 2 year supply of naked
women photos.

About 4 months later we got a cease and deist letter from Hasbro asking us not
to use the term Kandyland as it was too similar to Candyland the game.

Being young and not exactly flush with VC money, we simply changed it to
California Babes or something like that.

Eventually after about one and half years, our girlfriends asked us if we are
going to make this a career or not? We picked our girlfriends and have left
the business altogether. The experience did help my web development career
though.

Fun times.

------
Vivtek
I did a bunch of work for a porn site back in the 90's who somehow managed to
not pay me. Something like $6000 down the drain. (So my wife was mad at me
twice over that one. Sigh.)

------
blake8086
I made <http://pix-plz.com> . I originally set out to make a site that was
easier to use than hotornot.com (a lot of people just rate all photos the
same, because they want to see more.)

The site has languished, as I'm not really sure what to do with it, but I'm
proud of the features I implemented, the UI, and the things I learned in doing
it.

------
daralthus
I worked for livejasmin (and the sister sites), some years ago, I think it was
the biggest live streaming sites even back then.

Unfortunately, I wasn't a coder then, just support staff, but it was a great
experience and I learnt some things about how they run a multimillion dollar
biz from a basement.

Got a view on everything from creditcard processing, to the sysadmin side. And
of course dealing with performers and customers was always fun, as they are
not that usual people. Still remember a "crazy stuff" folder, where we used to
collect the funny moments.

------
citricsquid
A guy who works for the people who do Pornhub posts here:
<http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2172382> (his comment and subsequent replies)

~~~
Mikushi
Yep that's me. I've been working for Manwin for the past 3 years and a half.
Worked on almost every projects they've done. For the past 2 years, i've been
involved specifically on the tube sites, Pornhub.com and other ones. I am
currently Lead Developer, and like my job, like others stated in this thread,
it's a great occasion to work on high traffic websites, solving scalability
issues, and a lot of interesting stuff.

------
Swannie
I had a dabble a few years ago. There was a strong community on a couple of
IRC channels.

I saw the potential for seriously automated stuff, but sadly when I went to
Uni it all fell by the wayside. Got back into it a little after, but lost
interest: it had got a lot harder to get converting traffic in the 5 years
between the first dabble and later.

Now everyone wants video. That's gotta be a killer on your bandwidth bills.

------
grafa
Personally working in the adult industry is a little awkward in the beginning
but after that it's fairly rewarding. Personally I found it really useful to
get the high traffic/high scalability experience. I mean you don't get too
many job opportunities where you can brag about your app serving around a
billion page views/day.

------
mantas
Did some contracting on one of porn -tube sites. Also worked on lesbian
"stuff" web shop. Crazy days...

------
robotron
I work tangentially to porn in adult toys for about six years. Built an
affiliate program, retail sites, wholesale sites and various other stuff.
Don't really interact with developers in the business, though (outside of some
time on GFY before I stopped caring).

------
jgalvez
_raises hand_

E-mail me if you'd like an alpha invite.

------
ddemchuk
I'm not kidding here, gofuckyourself.com is generally considered the most
popular porn webmaster forum online. I've heard the quality has dropped in
recent times though.

~~~
sixtofour
The quality is always dropping in recent times, at almost any forum you care
to visit.

~~~
jholman
I feel a strong non-rational urge to write "hacker news is turning into
reddit", and then rush off to reddit to write "reddit is turning into digg" on
any-and-every thread, and so on.

~~~
khafra
After 5 or 10 steps, does that end in "/b/ is turning into hacker news"?

------
d3x
I have worked in adult for 9+ years and sold 2 sites. aebn.com / stockroom.com
/ domme.com etc... One of the sites i sold was called cameraphoneporn.com;
sold it 8 years ago before mobile was big.

IMHO the best thing about working in adult is that you gain a good
understanding of affiliates and seo / marketing / conversion rates etc... and
that is information that has helped me with my mainstream clients as well.

------
what-to-do
[http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...](http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=adult+webmasters+board#sclient=psy&hl=en&safe=off&source=hp&q=adult+webmasters+forum&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&fp=6aaff458859385c2)

~~~
rodion_89
nothing to do with the post, but im just curious why there is a strange
character right after 'ie=UTF-8' in the name of your link.

~~~
there
because the encoded url is

    
    
        http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&#38;ie=UTF-8&#38;q=adult...
    

and the HN code that truncates long urls chopped it in the middle of &#38 so
it becomes "&#3" which is telling your browser to print the ascii character 3,
which it can't show properly, so it shows the character you see instead.

------
drivebyacct2
What site is it?

------
onomojo
I've done adult sites. Check out my portfolio.

<http://onomojo.com>

