Why the hell is every app and program out there just being prude bitches and making porn harder to access?
In short: it’s a massive pain that comes with responsibilities other content doesn’t.
Hosting porn is a responsibility nightmare. You need to have a system in place to verify that all people depicted in porn are consenting adults who agree to having content hosted with you. Pornhub killed most of its catalogue to implement such a system and competitors are getting sued for not doing the same. Movie theaters have shown porn movies that have later turned out to be rape, and the porn industry is full of videos depicting actors or actresses that did not consent to beforehand. Think “casting couch” except someone who thought they were getting into modelling gets getting dragged into a room right after signing a vague contract. The studio will say it’s all an act, but that’s not what the victim says when the video comes out. Luckily, hosting copyrighted content is already illegal, so you can squish that problem before it becomes too big a deal.
Next, you need to differentiate between porn and revenge porn. There are organisations and companies that focus on helping revenge porn victims get their shit offline, and if you’re hosting porn, you could save yourself a lawsuit or bad publicity by working together with them. That’s going to cost time and money, but it’s better than the alternative.
Then you need to make sure that the porn that gets uploaded isn’t child porn. There are APIs to check uploads against known, existing footage, but you still need to be ready to take action if content that law enforcement didn’t know about gets uploaded. One or those tasks is judging whether or not the people depicted in that type of porn are adults or not.
Of course you’ll need to follow local laws. How many small Lemmy operators followed the law when some douche spammed child porn on the shitpost community? I doubt many of them read the law before purging the images! Some places demand you keep an isolated copy for law enforcement, but any sane person would want to purge such content from their servers as quickly as possible.
Any hosting service needs to be protected against CSAM, but when you set up a site people come to jerk off to, the probability of this trash getting uploaded becomes a lot higher.
Then you need to implement measures to prevent exposing minors to porn, because that’s a crime in many countries. That means registering age/date of birth and hoping nobody sues you because it’s easy to lie about it. Most websites use 18 as a cutoff for access to porn, but not every country considers 18 to be the age you can watch smut.
Apps need to be sabotaged because major app stores don’t want you to see porn. Apple is more strict in this than Google, but you’ll still need to watch out. If you accidentally break your filters or a mistagged post appears during review, you’d better have a good explanation to the reviewers about why they should let you publish your app.
Then there’s the business side of things. Puritans may get pissy, but that’s the least of your troubles. All major international credit card processing companies have either explicit or implicit terms that state you can’t do business with them if you host porn. This is because a) these companies are your typical puritan American big business and b) people who buy porn often get found out or regret their decision, which is followed by a fraudulent charge back, and that costs you and the processing company money. If you’re taking money from paying customers, you’d better read the fine print because you may just be cut off at any random moment in time.
If you make money through ads, you either use one of the few companies that accept porn (and make every ad on your site a gambling ad or a porn ad) or you figure out how to comply. Perhaps you can disable advertising around porn, or lie about your policies and hope nobody over at Google double checks.
Onlyfans makes use of weird rules about art and other technicalities that expensive people came up with. Platforms like Patreon nearly got screwed over for allowing porn. It’s possible to make money with platforms allowing porn, but it’s certainly not cheap or easy.
Lastly, there’s porn laws. Japan, land of the tentacles and schoolgirls, has strict laws forcing genitalia to be censored. In the UK, spanking and face sitting is considered illegal. In some countries porn is banned in its entirety, in others there are laws government drawn porn (hentai/rule34) and more specifically if drawings of children constitute child porn. In some American states you need to do special identification to make sure your visitors are adults. If you sell access, there are special tax rates for porn that differ per state/country.
The solution to all of these problems for most sites is to either ban porn so they don’t need to take special care, or to have special cases for porn with dedicated rules. Usually the most liberal of American states is used as a reference point and from thst point onwards you cross your fingers and hope nobody sues you, and that your holidays abroad aren’t cut short by a border agent checking your history.
The UK law got overturned .
Good to know, that law was asbsolutely ridiculous.
Ha, I sent a very long and furious email to my (Labour) MP when that law got introduced, basically saying excuse me I’m a woman that squirts, what are you as a fellow woman going to do about a law that says that’s a deviant and obscene act? And got completely ignored - usually I got a generic response from her on other issues, on that I just got tumbleweed.
(And before I get any thirsty messages, I’m menopausal and that bitch has dried up. Nothing to see, move on.)
Good on you for weirding out your MP! Let them know how perverted they should really be in the parliament (they’re your representative after all).
Bro if you’re having a hard time finding porn on the Internet, the problem is you!
Advertisers don’t like it, and won’t advertise where there’s porn. Advertisers pay for most of these websites’ existence. They capitulate to the demands.
Every porn site I’ve ever been too is loaded with ads so they can’t be too bad. I will admit almost every ad is for other porn sites/scams
Christ, man! LibreWolf/Fennec with uBlpck, please!
Don’t forget about payment processors like visa that can enforce restrictions on NSFW content
What kind of gourmet shit are you hunting for?
Gourmet shit, obviously.
Scat Apps hate this one simple trick!
You are doing internet wrongly.
-> pornhub.com
-> xvideos.com
An adjacent question that you brought to mind, why are people so intent on using “apps” for everything. It feels as if browsers have been all but forgotten despite filling the same role, but often better.
On the one hand you’re right, but on the other I feel like a lot of stuff has become browser based (like text editors, code editors, even music editors and perhaps video editors someday), all thanks to Web Assembly and how complex a lot of web apps have become.
It feels like people use everyday stuff through apps, and more complex stuff through browsers nowadays. Roles may slowly invert at some point if it keeps going this way.
Because a lot of websites still look and function really bad on mobile devices, and a lot of people nowadays only have mobile devices.
Pornhub works fine on a mobile browser, or so they say
I can nether confirm nor deny that. I just know a lot of places do not work.
Because it’s usually a better experience.
Hard disagree. Having everything in one browser app and switching between tabs is much faster than switching apps. If it’s something that does more heavy lifting like a game or file browser or something sure it makes sense to have an app but just consuming content can be done in a browser just as easily.
I can’t even figure out how to open an app on my computer. I can do it on my phone, but the keyboard and screen on there is tiny.
Competition is so cutthroat. If you started a new porn service today there would CSAM on your servers tomorrow.
Would it be actionable? Diubtful. Not to say it isn’t happening out there but these incidents are largely competition playing dirty.
I base this on nothing. Welcome to the internet.
I claim you are completely wrong. You clearly have no idea what you are talking. Based on my feelings, so I’m right.
I guess you assume it would allow user submissions to reduce costs? If it was curated or first party content only I can’t see how that would happen. But I’m sure the profits are worth spreading and enabling csam.
Obviously this is not competitive, because the mainstream has decided the cheapest route is worth the consequences. Unless there’s regulation I don’t see it changing.
Advertising is the big one. Many companies simply don’t want to advertise anywhere where porn is present even if it’s segregated.
Payment processors is the next big one. Most processors won’t service porn sites which makes it hard to collect money for sites with porn. You get stuck with worse service and higher rates.
Legal compliance is another big problem. Lots of countries have lots of different laws and operating a porn website can get you in trouble in places you weren’t aware of if you aren’t careful. You need to verify ages, and consent of both users and models. In some countries simply looking younger than 18/whatever age can be a problem.
Overall if a site has mixed content, it can be much less hassle and much more income to drop the porn if there’s sufficient non-porn content.
I think a lot of folks are forgetting that Visa and MC are prudes and gatekeep money.
… and here I am, actively blocking porn or porn-adjacent shit on Lemmy.
I like porn. I’m a fan. But I’m with you on that. If I want it, I know where to get it. It’s not really why I’m here.
Also, it really ruins it for me that because it’s all user -contributed, it feels like being recommended porn by a creepy, off-puttingly thirsty highschooler. Given the demographics in places like this, that may actually be somewhat close to reality
that’s your choice, and that’s entirely fine. but it’s different when a platform deliberately makes it inaccessible.
Why? It’s their platform.
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It’s actually the exact same thing. It’s their choice.
Unless it’s a government mandate I don’t have a problem with platforms doing that.
I prefer platforms block porn, because a usable internet requires a basic level of organization so you can find what you want. Sometimes I’m not looking for porn
Same, Its not that i don’t like porn but i got tired of blocking every instance of furry porn; like how many do you need?
There’s only one instance dedicated to furry porn
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I can understand why a person has no interest in it and I personally don’t need to access it but I also don’t really care if it available. I do not become offended if it is available.
In reality I am far more uncomfortable with violent content yet they seem to get far less attention then porn.
I mean, I block it as well, not because I’m a prude, but because I want to read stuff etc. without looking at naked bodies. When I want to get funky, I switch to my other account which is only subscribed to porn.
Been doing that since the bad place. It’s a great system.
I’m constantly having to block porn shit on tumblr and all the stupid bots that come with it.
Porn is easier to access than it’s ever been, unless you live in a country with heavy internet censorship
Please put the NSFW tag on the post.
Then we can talk about the good stuff.
no, then it would be too easy for op to access
It isn’t advertising friendly, that’s why. Also online children protection act or some such law.
Ads for penis enlargement though
A month or two ago I was helping my sister-in-law’s late 60’s father fix his GMC Canyon, and he pulled up a repair video on youtube on his phone. We left it playing as we worked, and then it went to a several minute long ad for penis pills which was awkward as fuck since I wasn’t sure if it was based off his search history or just that he’s an old man and targeted advertising. He also recently got a new girlfriend which muddied the water as I was pondering those two possibilities.
“Would you like a bigger penis? Where would you like it? I can suggest some places…”
I’ve got a few theories:
My guess is that certain companies are concerned about repercussions related to porn related content due to an impending buyout or IPO. Personally I don’t blame them.
Advertisers hate it, payment providers hate it.
Fediverse has recently been attacked by CP spammers, and instances like the one I’m on has actually shut off image sharing all together.
Moderation is a problem globally, even if this content slips through automated filtering there will always be exposure, and always people affected. And unfortunately the tolerance for CP or even copyrighted content is precisely zero due to public backlash and the news articles.
Exactly. There are a lot of sketchy porn related businesses, and porn is ripe with abuse. Also, porn sites have a moderation problem. It is difficult to verify that the videos people upload don’t contain CP (it’s hard to tell someone’s age just by looking at them), rape, if the people actually consented to the video being uploaded etc. PH decided to just delete all non-verified uploaders, and it is understandable why.
A lot of businesses just don’t want to be associated with that, or have to moderate that, or have any involvement. And this also affects their relationship with other businesses.
A hundred percent.
And enabling NSFW isn’t enough, many people would rather choose what type of NSFW to see.
An yeah, the difference between simulated rpe and rpe doesn’t come across in videos I suspect.
Are there even sites with user-uploaded content anymore? I feel like it’s only studio content (which is safer, but we miss out on real amateur videos)
Even without CP, they flood everything, with no respect for topics or categories. Certainly there are times when I don’t want to see porn, but more importantly there are lots of times when I want to be able to find other things
My lemmy feed has so much porn that I had to turn on the filter
How do you do that? I thought I had one on, but I still see sooooo much porn that it makes scrolling uncomfortable in public. I have young kids, so I have to make sure they aren’t in the room if I am scrolling cause too often it’s a random obscene naked chick or dick that is really not all that tasteful of an image… lol and no, I am not prude, but the porn on lemmy I have seen is really…subpar lol 😅
