Hacker News Reader

Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

I mean, being a porn tycoon isn't exactly something you use in an introduction.

"Pleased to meet you, I'm Bergemar, frequently known as the Lord of Porn, but you may also know me as the..."

Porn tycoons don't refer to themselves as porn tycoons. But it's not like they're secretive about it. They're about as open about it as other people are about their non-porn business. Sometimes it comes up in conversation, sometimes it doesn't, but it's not like anyone's out denying it or anything.

Source: worked in porn.

Most are most certainly hiding it.

Everyone in adult uses shell companies. The vast majority of them don't tell their neighbors and the local PTA what they do, so they are pretty secretive. I knew some execs whose wives didn't even know what they did.

source: worked in adult for decades.

> Source: worked in porn.

Should I assume in an IT-related role? If so, anything you can share (without naming names) about what's different or special, from a technical standpoint, compared to a "normal" company?

I lived in LA for a long while and met lots of porn people over the years.

My experience was the performers tended to be pretty casual about mentioning it socially. Maybe not the first thing they bring up, but it would come around eventually. They also tended to be sort of proud of it.

The crew people tended to be a little more low key about it, but mostly because they did legit film crew work as well and worried it might hurt them if higher ups knew. And the union thing applied to some. Couldn't do non-union work officially.

I only ever met low-end producers. They didn't care who knew what they did, at all. My social circles didn't include the big time porn producers (this was back in the day when DVDs were still sort of viable).

Ah, I didn't consider that things would be like that in the US, with unions and puritanism hurting careers. It's nice to get a different view point, thanks.

I can only imagine... "pleasure to meet you, I peddle petabytes of digital tits and ass"

edit - petabytes

Petabytes more like it, although the recent purge might have brought it down back to TB territory.

That being said, this was the only introduction that elicited a chuckle out of me.

"Peak pleasure to meet you partner, I profitably peddle petabytes of porn patterns and provide payments"

"I'm the owner of the fourth largest video streaming site, and a couple of smaller ones" seems like a great introduction to me.

"We recently had to purge 80% of our content because we couldn't say with any certainty that it was legal"

Not something i would like to have on my business card.

Something like 98%

"Hey, I'm Bergemar, I run a tech company called MindGeek. Oh, you haven't heard of it? Yeah, we're focused on adult entertainment."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com