Porn sites are janky, unpolished, often half-broken, and prone to suddenly disappearing as quickly as they appeared.
This is what innovation looks like.
I think they are the definition of innovation in online content delivery of any kind. Live video streams, monetizing content, creating minor internet celebrities who can live off of their online work, confronting head-on issues of privacy and censorship. All of these things and more came far earlier in internet porn than anywhere else, and theres a good chance that whatever edge they're struggling with will be where the rest of tech finds itself shortly thereafter.
It's like graffiti in the subway as a precursor to ads for HSBC. It may be grimy, but they have nothing to lose so there's a good chance what they're doing is a brilliant move.
Funnily enough, while that used to be true, it's no longer the case. The tech world has advanced to the point that it's outstripped the porn industry, which is struggling for the business reasons I outline here in my open letter in Wired, 'Don't Block Porn, Disrupt It':
That's what makes #sextech a huge, huge opportunity - including bringing everything that innovates, does well and makes money in every other sector online - including great design. This is my co-founders, Corey Innis (CTO) and Oonie Chase (UX Lead) talking to BusinessInsider about how you design and build a sex site that isn't a porn site:
I think it is still the case. The production of porn is democratizing and becoming a smaller and smaller economic blip as its production dissipates, so I agree that the economic model is hurting. I also think its serving a valuable social function which is exposing our expectations and fantasies of sex as the ludicrous oddities that they are, despite our protestations that we are mature and civilized.
At MakeLoveNotPorn we're entirely pro-porn - our tagline is 'Pro-sex. Pro-porn. Pro-knowing the difference.' And we're utterly non-judgemental - #realworldsex is all-inclusive, of anything and everything anyone in the world likes doing. This is what we mean when we say we're not porn, not amateur, but #realworldsex:
Porn in the abstract is absolutely, as you say, a valuable tool for exploring our sexuality, finding out what turns us on, learning there are other people with the same tastes out there. The issue isn't porn, but the absence of an open healthy dialogue around sex in the real world, which is what lies at the heart of the business problems this comment stream highlights, which in turn force the porn industry down worse and worse routes: when you force anything into the shadows and underground, you make it a lot easier for bad things to happen, and you make it a lot more difficult for good things to happen.
That same lack of open healthy discussion around sex is why these social problems exist - the ones that MakeLoveNotPorn is out to tackle:
This is what innovation looks like.
I think they are the definition of innovation in online content delivery of any kind. Live video streams, monetizing content, creating minor internet celebrities who can live off of their online work, confronting head-on issues of privacy and censorship. All of these things and more came far earlier in internet porn than anywhere else, and theres a good chance that whatever edge they're struggling with will be where the rest of tech finds itself shortly thereafter.
It's like graffiti in the subway as a precursor to ads for HSBC. It may be grimy, but they have nothing to lose so there's a good chance what they're doing is a brilliant move.