Why the hell is every app and program out there just being prude bitches and making porn harder to access?

  • all-knight-party@kbin.cafe
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Starb3an@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      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

    • sciawp@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Don’t forget about payment processors like visa that can enforce restrictions on NSFW content

  • JTskulk@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Bro if you’re having a hard time finding porn on the Internet, the problem is you!

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Archpawn@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      If you make money through ads, you either use one of the few companies that accept porn

      I don’t get this one. Why won’t people advertise on porn sites? A people who watch porn less likely to be customers? Or are they just as good, and there’s a huge market untapped outside of gambling and porn and everyone should advertise their services on porn sites? Or is it that the only companies that are good at figuring out what specific ads to show just refuse, and in an alternate reality where they didn’t you could just as easily advertise on NSFW websites?

      • There are a few reasons I can think of went I would avoid porn sites as an advertiser:

        1. Porn is icky and risky because of cultural norms. Brands also like to condition you to think of them in certain scenarios (that’s why they pay to bill to be in the background of sports events in the most replayed parts of the game) and “eagerly waiting to skip/scroll past an ad with cock in hand” isn’t what most brands want to be associated with.

        2. You can reach a much wider audience than just “mostly men for a few minutes” on other sites. Everyone can watch YouTube ads.

        3. Porn sites allow porn ads much more often than not, and that adds competition. How can coca cola possibly compete for attention when their competition can get away with a moving video of two women getting fucked by five men?

        4. Many porn companies are scummy. They survive by uploading unsuspecting people’s porn, even if it has long been taken down at the source. Copyright infringement is the norm on many porn sites. That’s a hard sell for even advertising agencies.

        Yes, plenty of women watch porn, but the majority of this stuff is still consumed by men in a very specific state of mind, for various reasons.

    • gullible@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • DigitalAudio@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • cfi@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Everything that should be an app has become a web page and everything that should be a web page has become an app

          • bob_wiley@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Even the things that have become apps are often done in something like Electron, so even when it’s not a browser, it’s still a browser.

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Browsers are very capable and can do a lot of things really well, but you can also use ad blockers, and they have some privacy protection. Apps dont

      • SgtAStrawberry@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Because a lot of websites still look and function really bad on mobile devices, and a lot of people nowadays only have mobile devices.

        • Archpawn@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

        • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          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.

  • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • foggy@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Astroturfed@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I claim you are completely wrong. You clearly have no idea what you are talking. Based on my feelings, so I’m right.

          • foggy@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I have a PhD in being correct

            Edit: PhD is the highest degree I know about it’s like x infinity but for education

            Edit2: not Xfinity

    • evilgiraffe666@ttrpg.network
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Chriszz@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Am I the only one who has seen absolutely no porn on lemmy ever? I haven’t had to block any but I would if I saw it. Where are you guys seeing this?

        • Chriszz@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          That might be it. I can’t remember but it would explain why I don’t see any porn.

          • Steeve@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            It’s just a checkbox in your account settings. Either that or lemmy.world defederated from the porn instance, but I doubt that

      • DrQuint@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I only ever see it on /c/all, and it’s relatively little and it’s all vanilla, single naked model, still photo shit. Basically as non-pornographic porn can get while still being porn (aka: OnlyFans ads and reposted Celeb shit).

        I was here slightly before the exodus, and the most hilarious post-exodus post I saw was people saying “our lemmy porn is normalizing, we’re finally becoming a place open for normies”, where the OP was saying that the Furries were going away. The thing is: Furries were NEVER a sizable, noticeable presence on Lemmy to begin with. This isn’t Blueskies, the community isn’t suspiciously a bunch fo bara fur enjoyers. And they said that around the time Burggit opened up and being talked a bunch as the place to defederate, meaning degeneracy was going UP.

        So basically, People who complain about Porn on Lemmy just confuse me. Tech, Sports and Politics shit are actual garbage that ACTUALLY floods the entire dashboard.

    • eee@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      that’s your choice, and that’s entirely fine. but it’s different when a platform deliberately makes it inaccessible.

    • metallic_substance@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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

    • Zippy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • who8mydamnoreos@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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?

        • wheeldawg@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          They probably meant the other definition of instance. Although I don’t know how many of those there are, haven’t run into any of them myself. I’ve seen usernames from what must be the one you’re referring to, but luckily haven’t run into any content from it.

  • Granixo@feddit.cl
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    1 year ago

    Please put the NSFW tag on the post.

    Then we can talk about the good stuff.

  • sebinspace@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Actually a skill issue.

    Seriously, don’t even leave this site, just go to the search bar and look up whatever you’re into, there’s probably a comm specifically for it. Even you sounding freaks.

        • JokeDeity@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          I don’t know man, maybe it’s my app? Depending on which account I’m signed into when I search it’s different results. 🤷

            • CaptKoala@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              It’s likely this, spent a few days wondering where all my pron went, when my phone unlocked in my pocket it had enabled SFW mode :/

  • FleetingTit@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    It isn’t advertising friendly, that’s why. Also online children protection act or some such law.

  • rbesfe@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Porn is easier to access than it’s ever been, unless you live in a country with heavy internet censorship

  • fiat_lux@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Because people don’t want to look at other people’s unusual niche kinks and try to identify if it contains children or other non-consenting participants as a part of their employment. And then try to explain to the people about why the unusual niche is against the rules when they receive a complaint about its removal. Amongst so many other reasons.

    Programs and apps on the internet are not simple things and user-generated content can be a very malicious and dangerous thing to have a copy of. The legal risk alone is not worth it, let alone the effort required to enable a slightly easier masturbatory experience for total strangers.