
My Stepdad's Huge Dataset - danso
https://logicmag.io/06-my-stepdads-huge-dataset/
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Rotten194
The article seeks pretty rambling and doesn't have a clear point, but I have
friends in the sex-work industry and the closing part is true: like music,
people don't want to pay for porn anymore, and it's making it harder and
harder for non-megastars to make a living. Everybody I know making a living
off porn is doing it through twitter, premium Snapchat accounts, patreon and
the like, not traditional sites, and it's not easy.

~~~
anigbrowl
I've been banging on about this point for years. Filesharing doesn't hurt
megacorps, who have vast marketing departments that reliably shepherd people
through the fare gates or monetize them in other ways, but indie and niche
performers and creators suffer terribly because they don't have a big capital
pile in addition to their labor and natural assets (whatever those happen to
be).

Filehsaring has a great deal to recommend it, but ultimately it comes down to
wanting something for nothing (and often whining about the very people whose
performances it desires to devalue).

~~~
philipkglass
I tend to think that the economic value of porn would have plummeted in the
past decade or so even if there were no copyright infringement. Good cameras
keep getting more affordable. Today's smartphones have better video
capabilities than professional video gear had at the end of the 1990s. It only
takes a tiny percentage of people with exhibitionist tendencies to produce and
share more new porn than anybody can watch. Most of these performers don't
care about getting paid. And in this niche, true professionals have little if
any quality advantage over enthusiastic amateurs.

~~~
anigbrowl
_Most of these performers don 't care about getting paid._

Amateur porn is absolutely not the default, as even a cursory glance at porn
sites reveals. Gonzo and amateur porn are categories but most porn is made to
make a buck. Performers like getting paid because they like to eat and not be
homeless, and suggesting that most of them don't want to be paid is simply not
true. That's like saying most homeless people choose to be on the street -
it's an excuse to ignore their problems, though I appreciate you may not have
meant it that way.

Btw I base my views on over a decade in the indie film (not porn) industry,
and from having a lot of friends and acquaintances who are sex workers, and
who are already having a tough time dealing with FOSTA/SESTA.

~~~
zorga
> Performers like getting paid because they like to eat and not be homeless,
> and suggesting that most of them don't want to be paid is simply not true.

He suggested no such thing, you should try reading more carefully.

> Amateur porn is absolutely not the default, as even a cursory glance at porn
> sites reveals.

He also never claimed that.

What he did say was that there's enough amateur exhibitionists who would do it
for free and don't care about getting paid to more than satisfy the demand for
porn and that's why professionals are going to continue having a hard time
being paid.

~~~
anigbrowl
Yes, but if that calculus were true, tube sites (which display viewing
figures) would be dominated by amateur content and they're not. The market
demonstrates a clear preference for professionally produced material.

~~~
zorga
> Yes, but if that calculus were true, tube sites (which display viewing
> figures) would be dominated by amateur content and they're not.

That's not a logical conclusion, so no. The market demonstrates a clear
preferences for free content, that's what tube sites show; that professional
content is popular when free does not demonstrate that professional content
matters more than free content. That professional are having such a hard time
making money in fact demonstrates the opposite, the market cares more about
free than about quality. As long as people are willing to make free porn,
which they are, professionals will always struggle to make money. The same is
true of much art, music is another example of exactly this phenomenon.

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jsjohnst
Do most viewers really care at all about the “script” and instead click on the
first video that has someone they find attractive doing the sexual act they
want to see?

If I’m right in my assumption about most “tube viewers”, I wonder how much of
the “conclusions” made from the data set provide false conclusions due to
confirmation bias. If they think folks want to see [insert script narrative]
and so they make more videos of that, just because it had lots of views
doesn’t mean that more folks wanted to see that specific narrative IMHO.

~~~
dragonwriter
To the extent analytics are used, I think search analytics are probably
influential (certainly, the press releases pornhub regularly puts out about
what people are searching for advertises that they have this data available,
so I'd be very surprised if it wasn't for sale and used by content
creators/distributors). And is suspect that search data provides a lot more
information about why people watch particular videos than just view data and
assumptions.

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ydnaclementine
I always wonder what is considered NSFW in those offices.

But it's interesting what types of specific UX is created for adult tube
sites. For example, on pornhub, it shows which times of the video are viewed
by more people using a flame graph type visual above the video timeline.
Example of getting the user to value as quick as possible (skip the 'boring'
parts).

~~~
rashkov
I suppose the flame graph feature developer could then write on their resume:

“reduced bandwidth costs by $X millions per year by implementing a ‘content of
interest’ data visualization. Users’ time-to-success improved 5%”

That kind of thing makes me wonder what sort of high caliber developers go
into this field. Lotta good engineering going on within this, uh, unique, high
volume traffic situation.

~~~
ardy42
> That kind of thing makes me wonder what sort of high caliber developers go
> into this field.

I read long ago that having a porn site on your resume was a pretty strong
black mark with non-porn companies, even if you were a developer. Since
there's so little crossover an experience sharing between mainstream
developers and porn site developers, porn site engineering tended to be
relatively sub par. My guess is few high caliber developers go into porn site
engineering.

~~~
lozenge
Surely it depends which site - the big sites have serious scale and
engineering challenges which will outweigh the seediness aspect while the vast
majority of sites are just a CMS paired with a payment processor integration.

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subsubsub
The porn industries focus on what customers want vs. what consumers want would
certainly explain the increasingly extreme nature of free porn.

I wonder if this is relevant to the discussion:

[https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-
dict...](https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-
of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15)

~~~
crooked-v
I'm a bit dubious about that article, because it spends a lot of time spinning
the prevalence of kosher and halal food into an elaborate analogy and
presuming future resistance to its existence without even considering "it's
something that most people just don't care about either way" as an
explanation.

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masayune
I’d love to sit in a meeting at one of these companies. It has to be surreal
discussing trending data in regards to sex, kinks, and quirks objectively in a
business setting. The setup is almost something out of a Monty Python skit.

