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Comment by yomly | Hacker News Reader

I agree - for many of people(including teens) circumventing restrictions is part of the thrill.

That said I do think there has been an escalation of porn over the years. It's really apparent when you look at things from the 70s. Though apparently banning porn from cinemas shifted content to more "trashy" VHS/DVD/Online videos

I feel data-driven analytics has probably accelerated this, like a race to the bottom (pun unintended). Extremity probably drives engagement so the porn kids are exposed to today is much more extreme than what we may have been as up and coming internet users.

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There has been an escalation of porn compared to the 70s, but so has also every from of consumption and consumerism. What is not clear is if peoples ability to adapt and filter out the extreme aspects has also increased.

Violence in movies are also more extreme. As is violence in music, violence in news flows, and violence in the messages of peoples social communities.

I am also always aware that here in Sweden there was a significant difference in cultural values around both violence and sex compared to the US during the 70s-90s. Casual nudity and minor sexual references were seen as something funny and embarrassing rather than taboo, while violence was seen as twisting the mind of children. In the US it was the opposite, with violence being perfectly fine but anything hinting towards sex was something that would corrupt children. At the later part of the 90s the culture in Sweden copied that of the US, with English became in practice a second language, so I am always a bit weary of claims that images of sex and nudity will corrupt people, teens and even children, while illustrations and reference to violence are given a wide acceptances as innocent to anyone until studies has proven it guilty.

> There has been an escalation of porn compared to the 70s, but so has also every from of consumption and consumerism. What is not clear is if peoples ability to adapt and filter out the extreme aspects has also increased. Violence in movies are also more extreme. As is violence in music, violence in news flows, and violence in the messages of peoples social communities.

And yet, all across the OECD since ~1990 violent crime is down, teen pregnancy is down, and on and on and on. For all of the pearl clutching about the morality and decency of this stuff it doesn't seem to be ruining society.

There is likely other factors at play.

You can't really conclude that "this stuff" is harmless just looking at the tendencies. I agree though that I my pick for what is ruining society would be something else...

>For all of the pearl clutching about the morality and decency of this stuff it doesn't seem to be ruining society.

I won't blame free porn for this, but I mean have you looked at American society in recent months? It seems well on the path to being ruined.

I agree America looks that way, but how different are reality and news? For good and ill. I get the impression that the ratings-grabbing parts of news alternate between chest-thumping tribalism and nut-picking.

America is going to have by far the worst handling of the pandemic compared to similar western democracies. We had a real world test as a society and we failed. That isn't just the news fudging things to grab viewers.

Like with certain drugs, I think it's perfectly possible to acknowledge the potential issues with excessive porn consumption (or with certain kinds of porn) while still thinking that it's not uniformly bad if consumed in moderation.

Yeah you're right. Just because I would never touch crystal meth doesn't mean I should therefore stand in the way of people using cannabis recreationally (or even medically).

So yeah I guess it comes back to education rather than prohibition...

But it is something like a person selling both weed and meth next to each other, without any communication or acknowledgement that one is significantly more likely to cause harm.

Maybe. I propose that it's a question of context.

If pot were legal, maybe people would be happy to get high on that at stop there. I think there are two issues at play, both going in the same direction.

1. If buying pot is going to carry the same risk as buying meth, and I can get higher for the same quantity of meth (I assume meth is more potent per unit of volume) it would make some sense for me to try to get meth, or at the very least to be interested when someone offers, especially if I'm not 100% sure when I'll be able to buy more pot.

2. There is also a question of trust. If the government says pot is as bad as meth (both schedule 1, I hear about big police operations taking down pot dealers, etc) they I might believe them. After all, what do I know? I just want to get high. So when I get to try some pot, see that I like it, see many people smoking pot without much harm, I figure I might as well try some meth. Especially given point 1 above.

Part of the problem is that the education is left to less reputable corners of the web.

There is quite a lot of anecdotal evidence of the damage that can be done by abuse of internet porn. I could add to that.

But we have those with credentials who have made a good career out of attacking the very notion that porn can be harmful or can be abused. I'm not saying it's shilling, it could just be success by contrarianism, but it's still rather invalidating.

If you are in a position where you think porn is doing you harm, it probably is. But one of the first things you find if you go down that path is that information tends to be on the extremes.

I would challenge even this framing. Amphetamines were widely used and abused between the 1940s and 1960s without social stigma. They are for sure a problematic class of chemicals, but I think the perception that they are uniquely dangerous is tied up in their present association with societal out groups, classism, and disdain for the rural poor, whereas cannabis has become accepted among the upper class.

You could make some arguments about relative health effects, but those just as easily apply to alcohol which we readily accept and consume in polite company.

In addition to classism, one of the consequences of the war on drugs is there's not much trustworthy data on drugs' relative impact. Nobody wants to teach high schoolers there are any safe drugs.

So I know people who smoke and drink without obviously destroying their lives. But if you asked me to rank those alongside meth, cocaine and chainsaw juggling for danger I've got nothing but guesswork.

OK I'm gonna challenge you on that. Amphetamine causes (even at low and occasional doses) insomnia, mania, extreme loss of appetite. When used for longer periods, it can cause disordered thinking, delusions, paranoia, invasion of Russia..

We already does millions of people in America at least with Adderall which is an amphetamines not molecularly very different from Methamphetamine. It turns out to be mostly safe for most people, whether it good for you or me to use is a different question.

Also linking amphetamines to Nazis in order to demonize users is just ridiculous.

My mother has had dental problems her whole life because of the 1950s fad of putting little kids on meth to lose weight.

What the hell?! Do you have a link or source on that? That sounds horrible :(

This was likely the brand:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obetrol

The primary mechanism for "meth mouth" and similar oral health issues are dry mouth and teeth clenching which can be caused by a number of stimulants including caffeine(at moderate to high doses of ~6 cups of coffee). The remedy for which seems to be drinking a lot of water.

That said, it's obviously bad to give children diet drugs but that has no real bearing on how we treat recreational drug users who are adults.

>Extremity probably drives engagement so the porn kids are exposed to today is much more extreme than what we may have been as up and coming internet users.

The front page of any given tube site these days is professionals pretending to be step siblings and content produced by the pornographic equivalent of YouTubers and Instagram influencers. I feel like the extremity peaked ~10yr ago.

Mulling on your comment, the latter might actually be the next wave.

After too much "polished" content from Brazzers/BangBros/RealityKings which is really your McDonald's megacorp productions of porn having a decentralised authentic "team of 1" indy authentic production via Porntubers is probably the parallel evolution that we saw in Youtube.

Not sure, I haven't really studied or thought about this issue very much. Although porn is quite fascinating in its universality and scale.

I think that a lot of attempts to clean bloggosphere out of sexy content ended up pushing away soft erotica content and keeping more hadcore stuff.

It is easier to find hardcore bdsm with injuries and humiliation then soft porn or erotica.

During the late 90’s and early 00’s, there was already plenty of weird, extreme porn on the web. I think it might have been more of a step function between offline and online.

It is so easy to encounter it, even accidentally. Things have improved a bit, but 3 yrs ago when I switched to DDG almost any image search with SafeSearch=off came with sudden unexpected nude or porn pics on page 2 or 3 almost regardless of the search term.

You mean you turned the safe search feature off, and you got unsafe results?

Sure, what can you expect, right? Imo not that any unrelated search yields porn. With google this never happened (actually I can't remember ever seeing porn images unexpectedly in ggl image search where I also had safe search off). It held me back recommending DDG to others. Though, as I said, things have improved a bit nowadays, and it happens less often.

I think I read it here on HN that google has/had an entire team dedicated to making sure you never ever got porn unless you were very specifically searching for it.

Try googling "index of".

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