I looked at the title of the article. I said "I'm certainly not clicking that. Linkbait city."
Then I said to myself: "You know, I bet the top-rated comment on this link is something like 'I am shocked, shocked to find this on the front page of news.yc'." So I had to click through, just to find out.
And now I feel kind of dirty. If first-order porn is, well, porn... and second-order porn is trolling (posting links to porn and watching eagerly as people self-righteously denounce them) what the hell did I just do? Third-order metaporn. Eeeeewwwww.
You tested a theory you had. You wanted some evidence about whether it was true, or not. I'd called that 'satisfying curiosity' or some other positive term.
Adult websites are made by Web entrepreneurs and hackers not too different from those who make Facebook and Myspace. I'm sure you need a different set of connections and background though.
I can understand the entrepeneurial angle that makes this interesting to some, but porn aside, it's just as uninteresting (to me) as a lot of the startup-related news that gets posted here. I think there is a sizable wing of HN readers who don't care as much about business and startups as they care about interesting or powerful and novel technological ideas-- and are interested in startups only subordinate to those interests, to the extent that these businesses advance and put into practice new and useful ideas.
That said, the pornography aspect is not inherently wrong in my view. I certainly understand and respect (to varying degrees) the various moralist arguments from different corners of the political spectrum. Interestingly it is divided in at least 4 ways. Libertarian pro-porn, conservative religious anti-porn, liberal feminist (protection of women) anti-porn, and anarchist libertine third-wave feminist pro-porn. While I would morally agree most strongly with the fourth stance that is both pro-woman and sympathetic of (some but certainly not most) porn, inasmuch as it is compatible with the some of the very real concerns of category 3 (to the extent that they are applied legitimately and not as a masked version of category 2), pragmatically I consider pornography, let's say ethical/tasteful artistic or even non-commercial crowd sourced/community-contributed pornography (just for the sake of argument), to be more of a distraction than anything else, despite being morally good.
1. It's a legitimate business
2. It makes a lot of money and touches a lot of people
3. It solves a problem society either has or thinks it has
4. At some point someone sat down and made a business or is trying to make a business from it so lessons can be learned.
From scanning the article, it didn't look like there was much news to it. Everyone knows that there is porn on the Internet and that people use their phones to look at it is not surprising.
If the article mentioned actual business metrics or trends out of which I could make a business, it would be perfectly relevant and I wouldn't have much of an issue. There is a lot of business opportunity surrounding pornography. As it is, it's just a top 10 list of porn sites, Which is one step from being a link site. This makes it off-topic at best and offensive at worst.
Some people want to avoid pornography for 'moral' reasons, others aesthetic, and some are just married. I think that it is in the best interests of HN if we avoid alienating these people.
This is not an issue of free speech. It's a matter of considering others. You are perfectly in your rights to discuss what you will, but some don't want to hear it and it would behoove one to respect their wishes. There are places to discuss this kind of material, IMHO HN isn't really one of them.
Anyway, there used to be three topics that one never spoke of in polite conversation, religion politics and sex, because they always held the risk of offending someone. We avoid two here pretty well and we might as well avoid the third.
No I was talking about the moderators here [dead]ing my posts. Turn on showdead here. If they don't want the topic discussed then shut down the whole thread but not just one side of the debate.
I apologize for double posting but I have requested some recourse for this censoring before and it is totally ignored.
And both accounts are less than an hour old. If one of them truly is your main account, then you seem to have had dubious reasons for signing up. If not, it's clear that they are both sock-puppets. If you hadn't of used sock-puppets, I suspect that you wouldn't have been deaded. Your remark certainly wasn't offensive enough in that regard. But, sock-puppets are almost as bad as porn spam and go right against the principles of this site.
EDIT: I've noticed more posts of yours that were deaded. You seem to be a troll with contempt for HN and those who use it. We don't have to respect your opinion if your just going to insult us.
"It's no wonder that almost all of your silly startups will fail."
No doubt a porn site would be a successful startup. But, most of us are here for more than just money (big ideas or at least something you can discuss with your family) and blanketly accusing this community of wasting its time because it doesn't want to make money this way, is offensive and quite hostile. Especially coming from someone who is hiding behind a sock-puppet.
>There is this newfangled phenomenon called social networking. People go to these websites, which track their friends and shows photo. They also have "Buy and Sell your Friends" applications, and the ability to poke people. Some people spent way too much time on these sites.
You don't think a link to facebook, orkut and myspace is appropriate?
Just to be clear, I've got no problem with porn on the internet but Hacker News is not the place. The article was just a list of links to sites, no information of interest.
The more links like this I see on the front page, the less likely I will return to HN. It is inappropriate in my opinion, and worse than simply being off-topic.
I sincerely hope this site doesn't turn into yet another online ghetto full of porn and cliches. Porn links are not news. "20 top anything" is stupid. Let's not feed into the lowest common denominator... not by voting, and especially not by discussing how surgically maimed women and men whose workday starts with viagra are a moral good resulting from anarchist libertine third-wave feminism.
