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Comment by altay | Hacker News Reader

what? i'm not the only one with a backup pr0n plan?

i'd be so rich right now, if it weren't for these bullshit scruples.

No, you're definitely not the only one. I learned at the last YC dinner that pg and the Viaweb bunch had one, too (a pretty clever one, at that).

Well, damn it, now I'm curious. I'll ask: What was this (now decade old) plan?

I've worked on some adult stuff in the past. I have no issues with it but I won't be doing anything in it again. Mostly because it's such a relatively small and boring subset of the world.

I'll leave the story for pg to tell, should he ever opt to do so.

I will say that it involved clever abuse of search engines to generate traffic for obscure fetishes (all of them). It might not work today.

Then again, now that I think of it, see http://xkcd.com/305/ for a pretty good summary of half of pg's Plan for Pr0n (the other half shall be left as an exercise for the reader).

Trevor and Rtm and I noticed that there seemed to be fetishists for just about every fetish you could imagine, and many you'd never think of. We hypothesized that there was no possible fetish so odd that there wasn't at least one person out there who would be turned on by it. So we thought we'd randomly generate thousands of pages about different fetishes, and see how many hits they each got from search engines.

It wasn't a backup plan though, just an idea for a practical joke like Trevor's Information Supercollider.

Ah, so that's where "Make something people want" came from.

Literally.

Here's mine. You ever play Erotic Photo Hunt? It's a game on those touchscreen video kiosks in bars. Each round, you're shown two almost-identical pictures of a scantily-clad girl. You've got a minute to find the 5 subtle differences in the two photos. (It's embarrassingly addictive -- for both men and women alike.)

Build a web-based version of that. After every round, the player is given two options... "play the next round" or "see more pictures of this girl." The latter is a paid link. Weekend hack => goldmine.

That's a great idea. Any reason you're not doing it? Can I do it?

Hey, thanks! Why am I not doing it? Um, all I can come up with is, "I'm working on other projects... that are more complex... and less of a sure thing." =P

Anyways, if you're inspired, go nuts. Lemme know if you want any help building it. Also lemme know if you want to hear the rest of the idea. (I think Phase 2 could get you one or two patents, and Phase 3 could disintermediate some dirty old men.)

Uh, is it weird that I've put so much thought into this?

You should add your email address to your profile so I can let you know if I get something together. Or just email me so I have your address.

I wouldn't worry about having put too much thought into this, I'm sure we've all spent a lot of time thinking about some really far-out things.

You know, it is on my profile. At least, I filled out the "email" input box. But that doesn't actually show up on my profile.

I'm not sure if this is a feature or a bug. Either way, you can find me at aguvench on gmail.

It's a feature, but not a good one.

http://teppo.tv/pelisali/index_en.html (I haven't played the game on Megatouch, is this the same thing with more boring pictures?)

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