Porn addict here. Made new account to protect identity.
YouPorn does have competitors. Let's take a look (and see how many double entendres I inadvertently use)
RedTube - First totally free porn site I found.
Pro's - Dead simple UI. Blazing fast load times. You can scrub through videos quickly (to skip over boring parts, this is very important). Also, Looong videos.
Con's - Lots of repeat videos. Few ones that you don't see everywhere else. Not too many ways to drill down through the content. They sacrifice user control for simplicity.
Note: Arrington always mentions this one by name when writing about the porn industry.
Spankwire - Digg for porn. Hard to tell though, their UI is awful.
Pro's - Blazing fast load times. Loooong videos. Ability to scrub through them as they play quickly. Also, a really deep, varied selection of videos. User comments on videos are actually intelligent.
Con's - Doesn't update as frequently as other sites. UI is imprenetrable. I've never voted on anything. I wouldn't know what to click.
Xvideos - Big player.
Pro's - Adds about 30 videos each day. Crazy deep selection of videos. Decent tagging system. Related video algo is pretty good. UI is pretty ugly but serves its purpose.
Con's - Video's are slow to load. You can't skip through them without waiting for them to buffer all over again. Major performance issues here.
Megarotic - One of the big semi-pay sites.
Pro's - Incredible video selection. Really good performance and playback. Can scrub through the videos.
Con's - Costs money to watch more than 4 videos a day on their site. Their video player is getting more and more proprietary, adding popup ads, massive popup controls and branding.
Fantasti.cc - This site's incredible. Social network for porn and people looking for casual sex. Rather than power their own videos they simply scrap embed codes from Xvideos, Pornub and Megarotic and tack on a slick UI and social networking features. I think all this could be done with Drupal and a few modules.
Pro's - Well-designed. Really nicely designed. Enormous selection of videos by sucking in everything on other sites including xvideos, pornhub and youporn. There's also an actual user community of people making collections of videos (a great feature I've not seen anywhere else, letting humans organize and categorize them into weird subsections like "Chicks with flip - flops"). Users review videos. They also create user profiles where they post up amateur photos and video clips. The slick UI sets it all apart from other sites that do the same.
Cons - Because they steal from all the other free sites, videos disappear from the DB. Also, performance is only as good as the sites they steal from. I bet 60% of their content comes from XVideos...which means performance is often terrible.
Pornhub - Slick video site.
Pros - Well-organized. Fast playback. Good selection.
Cons - Has the same videos as everyone else. Front page features stuff that people just watched, so you end up seeing the same clips over and over on the front page.
Conclusion from my own observations: There are loads of competitors. The ability to scrub through videos is crucial but still not available on all sites. Offering a simple UI is important but without advanced search or other organizing features like Fantasti.cc's wonderful user collections one risks losing users (I rarely go to redtube. It's too basic and hard to find new stuff.)
But enabling anonymous comments would just hurt things in the long run, no matter what kind of additional positive short-term effects it would have. People would feel little need to "join" the community, as they could interact with it as guests, and thus they would always feel out-of-touch with it, and apathetic to it (it would be outside their Monkeysphere.)
I do have one possible solution, though: for every 50 karma points you earn, say, you get a "free gift" of some sort within the system (because otherwise it would encourage gaming of the system to earn such points). One gift could be a one-use "post this comment anonymously" checkbox that would then disappear. Another would be, to use a fun example, the sort of "mega-upvote" everyone wishes they had around for when something truly deserves it.
I think it'd be interesting if people could use their own karma for the "mega-upvote."
EDIT
Part of what's neat about this idea is that support now can cost people something, so they have to really be behind what they support. On the other hand, it would probably establish a oligarchy.
The problem is that capabilities on this site in particular are partly based on your karma. Spending away your ability to downvote would be a problem, especially if you're a very prominent member of the community, and then even more especially if you served in a sort of vigilante "moderator"/"role model" role, keeping the community clean and pointed in the right direction by your actions. (I know this site can't really be influenced as heavily by its users as that sounds, but it could head that way if pg wished: giving users with a karma total of over 3000, say, automatic moderator powers makes quite a bit of sense to me.)
Sure, it can be a "noble sacrifice" and generate some sort of epic story retold throughout the community where user-Gandalf sacrifices their karma in the fight against troll-user-Balrog, and then others step in to "forge ahead without them," but just because a notion is romantic doesn't mean it's Utilitarian (in fact, they're almost opposite by definition.) Although boring, the community as a whole is likely better off if the others could restore Gandalf afterwards, as long as they thought his actions were justified. Since, in a database, there's no difference between taking something away and instantly finding reason to give it back, let me phrase it this way (thank Doctorow for this):
You don't spend whuffie; you just have it. However, if you do something stupid with it, it can be taken away.
I'm not sure if this has been tried on a social news site before, and it sounds stupid on face-value, but, what if, instead of each comment having an individual score that also affects its author's karma, the comment's score (and therefore its page placement) simply _is_ the author's karma? That is, a comment by a user with 3000 karma starts off with a score of 3000, and is placed on the page accordingly.
As such, you wouldn't really be voting on the comment itself anymore, but rather voting on the user by considering the comment as an action by that user. Taking all your points off of a user for one especially bad thing they did--considered on sites like this and reddit to be quite uncouth--wouldn't be a "sin" any longer, because _you're not rating their comments_ any more; you're just rating _them_. When you give someone one downvote, it applies across the "scores" of all their other posts, and likewise for upvotes.
I'd love to see this system tried out. I don't even have a special attachment to its success or failure; it simply sounds like a great experiment in virtual sociology. I might even be motivated to implement it myself if anyone else shows interest here in being part of the resulting community.
I wish there were a good way to try out all these ideas. I've considered the idea of wikiable applications, perhaps on top of a common database, that might be a possibility.
It takes <30 seconds to create an user account here; If you really have some insights to share and don't feel comfortable making those remarks in a non-anonymous way, you should probably consider creating a new user account and share your wisdom.
