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Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

I'm not surprised. They're probably the most recognizable name in porn and undoubtedly under a lot of scrutiny.

Now if only I could tell their algorithm to stop recommending step-sibling/parent fantasy porn... yuck.

The step-stuff is 90% just in the title, in the "plot" there isn't anything like that. Most people in porn aren't in it for the acting. The time of porn with a plot is pretty much dead.

From what I've heard it's zero-effort marketing: you make the content and rename it to whatever you want. The people who are into that will watch it and the rest of us will tolerate it.

Similar to foot fetish stuff, there's a surprising amount of people who are specifically into it and will see/buy anything with feet. The rest will kinda tolerate it.

My 2 cents is that it's an easy way to describe/search the age and genders you want, without getting erroneous results.

So 2 younger people = bro/sis

An older man/younger woman would be Dad/daughter

A much older man/younger son would be granpda/grandson etc

It's hard to search "older man younger woman" because the adjectives will populate "younger man older women" too and skew search results.

If you search for teens, you actually get women in their 20s, which is a better result.

If you want women in their 30s, you can search for milf or wife.

If you want 40s, search for mature.

If you want 50s or older, search for gilf.

NO, it's perverted way to look for content that could be found without the weirdo/CP/incest references. There's no excuse for that language, and as far as SEO goes, are these webmasters trying to groom users, or do they really most of the world enjoys that nonsense.

I'd love to see the meat behind those algorithms. Are the algorithms intentionally biased to prefer serving that type of content for some ideological reason? Or are we now just so far gone as a society that a significant number of users actually search for / consume that type of content, and the algorithm recommending it is actually natural/unbiased?

I wonder if there's a feedback loop in the viewer metrics. Most people are probably not interested in searching around for what they want, so they click on whatever is on the front page. So much porn is perfectly normal-looking based on the thumbnail/preview other than the creepy title, so maybe people just watch it anyway if it looks good, even if the plot premise is offputting.

Then if you're just looking at the viewer metrics, it looks like the step sibling stuff is really popular. So the algorithm prioritizes it further, so people watch it more, etc.

This is all speculation of course, but it's a cautionary tale about why statistical and causal reasoning is useful even if you're in industry, as long as you actually care about delivering a good data product.

> I wonder if there's a feedback loop in the viewer metrics. Most people are probably not interested in searching around for what they want, so they click on whatever is on the front page.

I recall reading something years ago that said some porn site that started to do data-driven analytics and found that even though "step-sibling/parent fantasy" stuff wasn't generally popular, but it was particularly good at attracting paying subscribers. I kinda wonder if that effect was overstated, but all the porn sites started cargo-culting that finding as "conventional wisdom" and made the genre a thing.

> So much porn is perfectly normal-looking based on the thumbnail/preview other than the creepy title, so maybe people just watch it anyway if it looks good, even if the plot premise is offputting.

I think of lot of that particular genre isn't normal-looking, for instance by casting size differences to creepily create the impression of an illegal age difference:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/aeygae/porns-latest-trend-is...

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