Name: Porn, Internet Addiction, Algorithms & A Whole Lot Of Fluff I Don't Care About
Item: How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex
Author: dulla

How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex →

by Samantha Cole

Porn, Internet Addiction, Algorithms & A Whole Lot Of Fluff I Don't Care About

dulla

Aug 03, 2024

Getting romantically entangled with someone you met online has an allure and intensity the flesh-world simply doesn't match. Young was right when she said it can be like talking to yourself--imagine your journal not just talking back at the end of a journal entry, but asking what you're wearing and how you touch yourself. Human imagination is a powerful thing. We're able to read between the typed-out lines and insert our own fantasies. In the nineties, a computer in your living room contained a bottomless social pool where everyone could fit in and anyone could be the love of your life, waiting behind the next chat prompt. It's no wonder people felt "addicted".

This book was largely composed of a lot of explanatory storytelling of the different historical subcultures and niches for the sex industry and the ways they've developed, and also presented an enterprising worldview for the future of emerging sex and cybersex industry text.The book overall bored me in their discussion of most topics, so I dodged those. Personally, I have no interest in hearing about cybersex technology or virtual worlds (eg Second Life) or virtual games (eg Minecraft, WoW, Roblox) and their relationship with erotic conversations between people online. Nor did I care about most of the history of the sex industry on the Internet.What I did find interesting was a few parts of a couple of chapters where they discussed porn websites.

Regarding porn search engines:

"But porn search engines...suck. They're really bad. I see it as a conscious decision to create a suboptimal way of navigating through the website in order to generate more page views." -Sophia Chen, Doctoral Candidate at the University at Michigan

Regarding doing testing to determine what subscriptions services to market to your mass of free users:

Brandon calls this a "washing machine" effect between free and paid sites. "When you have forty million people visiting your website every day, if one in five thousand, or even one in ten thousand buys something, the numbers are astronomical," he said. "So even though the click-through rates are lower, the amount of money that you're generating is bat shit crazy."

Regarding the consolidation of porn sites industry-wide:

Then something shifted. Porn websites started evolving from small webmasters' hobby projects to huge machines of revenue and influence. Sexual preferences, fetishes, and fantasies became concentrated down into categories, tags, and keywords. Subscribers started sending Colin and Angie links from new sites called Pornhub.com and YouPorn.com, where porn was free, as examples of the types of films they wanted to see next.
To the webmasters at the time, these years represented a shift in business that's hard to overstate. "Before the tubes, the typical porn aficionado knew where they could go to see free stuff--like Persian Kitty--where there were links of '12 Free Photos and Videos of the Day', or whatever, it may be," Colin said. These were all sponsored through affiliate programs by a paid site: If you saw something you liked and wanted to see more, you might go to the site hosting the images and sign up for a weeklong trial with your credit card, which then became a subscription.
In the mid-2000s, that model changed. "It was the most horrific nail in the coffin," Colin said. "The consolidation of free video porn into tubes. It was a perfect storm...Those things all happening in 2008 changed porn forever." He estimate that close to 70 percent of the porn companies that existed in 2006 no longer did by 2012. "We had to crawl back. We were lucky to have survived. Most didn't. It decimated the industry."

What else was kind of neat to hear about was the discussion of sex and norms that existed by the OG Internet Forum users, starting at the WELL and then moving onto UseNet.

In those spaces, usually more close-knit BBSes like Echo and The WELL, holding accountability for your own words was as important as the freedom to speak them.

All-in-all, there were some informative aspects to the book, but they were obviously coming at it more from a historical story-telling and prospective sales / growth side for new tech in this industry, rather than getting into the addiction and porn site consolidation analysis that I would've liked to see them get more into.

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2 comments

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earlichka1 year ago

There's an entire cottage industry of female Xellenial legacy print media journalists writing already-outdated and superficial books about the internet for their nearly octogenarian audiences. Maybe I'm being uncharitable though. Do they touch on MindGeek's nearly complete market capture, the unnatural rise of OF, porn sites being banned overseas, covid, teledildonics, AI partners, et al?

dulla1 year ago

No you're probably right about that. There is a whole market for different explainer books for people not as familiar with different aspects of the Internet. They did cover most of the topics you've mentioned. They did discuss Mind Geek basically gaining control over the industry (and I'm surprised I neglected to include that in my review as I was planning to). They spoke a little bit about OF, but I did pan over that pretty quickly because I feel like they were going in directions with it that was boring me to sleep (I might have to revisit though just to make sure). I didn't see anything about porn sites being banned overseas, and the teledildonics and AI partners aspect I did see but it didn't really catch my interest.