Hacker News Reader

Comment by brendonjohn | Hacker News Reader

hmm, you've reaffirmed my suspicions. The image suggestions for a google search of Twicsy was just adult material.

The TechCrunch article in 2009 criticised the website for being creepy http://techcrunch.com/2009/06/19/twicsy-is-a-killer-and-kind...

"As you might imagine, this service pulls up a lot of slightly personal pics, such as couples being all cutesy together. Since you don’t know any of them, it’s slightly creepy. But hey, if they don’t want those seen, they shouldn’t be sharing them over Twitter in the first place."

View on HN

I regularly review the most trafficked pics on Twicsy and my rough estimate is that about 10-15% of the traffic is porn. But it is hard to know exactly because there is such a long tail of activity. My theory for why the associated words are usually porn is that there is less of long tail of activity when it comes to porn searches than regular searches. It didn't use to be this way, I think that 2 years ago roughly half the traffic was porn and when I realized this I was quite disheartened. I started taking aggressive steps to remove it and mitigate it and traffic suffered for a while, and I thought that was the end of Twicsy. But it bounced back after a few months and kept slogging on...

I would bet the top search on google is something simple porn related like "sex" similar to Twicsy. But that doesn't mean google is a porn site that no one should advertise on.

I'm not blaming you in any way, nor do I have a moral issue with it. I suspect the percentage is higher though...

As you indicate advertisers have a major issue with it. The site being what it is, a search index of unfiltered twitter picture streams now hosted on your servers, you probably can't prevent it either… Severely impacts your ability to make money on it, unless you were willing to go over to the 'dark side' and get 'content-relevant' advertisers… (don't ask me how they make money, it's a mystery to me, I've never paid for it)

Sorry, didn't mean to sound defensive :)

The problem with "going to the dark side" is that I would be serving porn ads to all the Justin Bieber and One Direction fans in the world as well as the porn hounds. That would just be plain wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com