I skimmed 96 comments looking for anyone to say, "You know, this is pretty offensive and/or wrong." I found only two posts comprising one sarcastic attempt at pointing that direction.
No one's making the argument that porn's good, but a lot of people either genuinely assume so or want to signal that they're really pragmatic and modern and liberal. (If you think everyone's just bracketing the moral questions and that it's appropriate to do so, ask yourself how well a post on successfully marketing on white supremacist websites would fare.)
I'm not going to make an actual case that porn is evil either: it's clear we'd have to do a lot of work on finding common philosophical ground first, and I don't have the time. But in the face of apparently-overwhelming social acceptance of evil, it's better if someone says, "Hey, everybody, this is wrong," even if they can't convince people of it at the moment. Since I can't find much to upvote here, I'll be that guy:
Pornography is evil in concept and in practice. Building your business through it is considerably worse than, e.g., using huge email spam networks. It beggars belief that--in a community that can at least entertain the idea that it might be wrong to create a business by exploiting people's lizard brains with notifications, gamification, and misleading social ads--ninety-eight percent of comments on using porn to promote your business either avoid considering morality at all or go out of the way to indicate that everything's a-ok here.
Comments which tries to appeal to emotion without any supporting facts should get downvoted. If one where to replace "porn" with "Microsoft" in midnightmonster comment, it would be a common microsoft bash comment. If you replaced it with Apple, it would become an Apple bash comment. As it stand, it is now just a porn bashing comment.
To examplify:
"Microsoft platform is evil in concept and in practice. Building your business through it is considerably worse than, e.g., using huge email spam networks. It beggars belief that--in a community that can at least entertain the idea that it might be wrong to create a business by exploiting people's lizard brains with notifications, gamification, and misleading social ads--ninety-eight percent of comments on using Microsoft platform to promote your business either avoid considering morality at all or go out of the way to indicate that everything's a-ok here."
Comments that has that attribute should not reside on hacker news. It brings nothing to the table, and only tries manipulating the other readers with emotions, rather than with valid logic, to win an argument.[1]
Are you arguing that someone should say it's wrong/offensive?
I submitted the article. I found it fascinating as a marketer myself. However, I'm also a recovering porn addict. I haven't looked at pornography since 2006. Did I find porn harmful to my life? Absolutely. Am I going to say that others shouldn't have the right to look at it? Nope. Am I going to recommend that people not do it because it will skew their view, wrongly, about what sex is really like? You betcha.
That said, I'm not against this company building their user base in this way. They've gone to where the users are, whether we want them to be there or not.
> Pornography is evil in concept and in practice. Building your business through it is considerably worse than, e.g., using huge email spam networks. It beggars belief that--in a community that can at least entertain the idea that it might be wrong to create a business by exploiting people's lizard brains with notifications, gamification, and misleading social ads--ninety-eight percent of comments on using porn to promote your business either avoid considering morality at all or go out of the way to indicate that everything's a-ok here.
Kind Sir, you made my day.
For a moment you had me going:D
No one's making the argument that porn's good, but a lot of people either genuinely assume so or want to signal that they're really pragmatic and modern and liberal. (If you think everyone's just bracketing the moral questions and that it's appropriate to do so, ask yourself how well a post on successfully marketing on white supremacist websites would fare.)
I'm not going to make an actual case that porn is evil either: it's clear we'd have to do a lot of work on finding common philosophical ground first, and I don't have the time. But in the face of apparently-overwhelming social acceptance of evil, it's better if someone says, "Hey, everybody, this is wrong," even if they can't convince people of it at the moment. Since I can't find much to upvote here, I'll be that guy:
Pornography is evil in concept and in practice. Building your business through it is considerably worse than, e.g., using huge email spam networks. It beggars belief that--in a community that can at least entertain the idea that it might be wrong to create a business by exploiting people's lizard brains with notifications, gamification, and misleading social ads--ninety-eight percent of comments on using porn to promote your business either avoid considering morality at all or go out of the way to indicate that everything's a-ok here.