Do you really think it's more likely that "big porn" has astroturfing accounts that go around and downvote people like you who claim it's a money-laundering campaign, rather than commenters unhappy that you have no sources to back up your claims?
No. I think the typical HN commenter participates in a debate where the boundaries are narrowly and firmly defined by officialdom, and that any discussion outside of those boundaries will be treated as heresy.
But hey, nice job putting words in my mouth.
As for evidence, you also have bing and google. There’s no shortage of it.
> I think the typical HN commenter participates in a debate where the boundaries are narrowly and firmly defined by officialdom, and that any discussion outside of those boundaries will be treated as heresy.
On Hacker News, presenting speculative claims without evidence to back them is unpopular, yes. I have desire to put words in your mouth, but I felt that there wasn't all that many ways to interpret a downvoting ring and an exposé you say this points towards.
To respond to your additional edit: presenting your claims and telling me to search online for evidence to support it…is not helping your point, nor is it really what I meant when I asked for you to support your claims.
I just realized that I missed a word and now my sentence means the opposite of what I want it to. For posterity, I meant “I have no desire to put words in your mouth, but…”
I tried googling various subsets of keywords from your claim, and your comment is the #1 hit, and the rest are completely unrelated. Can you be more specific? Saying it's on bing/google doesn't exactly narrow it down.
If you keep tabs on the history of organized crime, the general unwillingness of payment processors to deal with the porn industry, the quality of advertisers on porn sites, and the logistics of the porn business in general, it is a very obvious conclusion.
But I'm not a journalist, and I'm not going to scrounge through all of my books for a post that's probably going to get flagged and removed anyway. I'm sure the good journalists will eventually pick up the slack. There's bound to be another Robert Caro out there for this generation. We just have to wait and see.
> If you keep tabs on the history of organized crime, the general unwillingness of payment processors to deal with the porn industry, the quality of advertisers on porn sites, and the logistics of the porn business in general, it is a very obvious conclusion.
It's not quite obvious. Payment processors won't work with it because of its high rates of chargebacks and other messiness, advertisers don't want their products next to that content; not sure what you mean by "logistics" or what this has to do with organized crime.
So you don’t see the organized crime tie-in when there’s obstacle after obstacle in billing and revenue, high bandwidth and storage expenses, a product that is in such oversupply as to be practically worthless, in a space that is mostly opaque and privately held, and has ties to organized crime all the way back to the Betamax days?
I'm aware of those things, but I'm not sure exactly what it is you're claiming. Why don't you just spell out what this "obvious conclusion" is? Exactly who do you believe is bankrolling the porn industry, and for what purpose?
IMO, you're being downvoted not because of the position you're taking, but for being coy about clearly explaining your theory.
I'm not accusing you of bullshit. You haven't even made any claims that are specific enough to be proven true or false. I don't see how you could be vindicated when you haven't actually claimed anything.
You can be upvoted on HN for pretty out-there theories, but you have to actually make a good case. Talking vaguely about a conspiracy and telling people to google things will get you downvoted.
For whatever it’s worth - you have to be a member on HN for a while to even be able to downvote - and I very rarely do. I downvoted here not because I disagree or am not interested - but because this thread went nowhere and you’ve euclidiated nothing.
