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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27877 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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I'm very skeptical that there has been a significant change in access to porn in the past 25 years.

25 years puts us before the heydey of online porn. There's been an enormous change since then.

25 years puts us in 1999 when internet porn was already widely available. Make that 20 and people even have broadband and can watch videos too. I don't know what you think the heyday of porn is, pornhub? They didn't invent internet pornography, there were plenty of before then. But really, mindgeek was founded almost exactly 20 years ago. Time flies.

Broadband was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is now. Pornographic content was not as extreme or 'hardcore' as it often can be today. There's also a portaling effect where any one of the major video platforms (in a whole sea of them) can keep serving you up not just the one video you sought, but a dozen others loaded up to go on the sidebar or right beneath the player. I don't know how frequent the "Finish, close 30 tabs" meme came up back then, but it's surely more common now? Don't even need to get into video streaming quality, or quality in general. Live shows were a joke, in retrospect.

I dunno, man. I remember what it was like downloading porn as a teenager in the late 90s and early 00s. A lot of grainy 30-second clips, a lot of slow download speeds, a lot of waiting for Kazaa to finish up (sometimes days). Give me this evening and I could probably hoard and/or access more porn than I ever could during my entire adolescence. Maybe it was a gradual phenomenon that sloped real hard with the advent of 'hub sites. But that's still good enough as a marker IMO.

Also, widespread smartphone usage didn't start until roughly 2014, which is also a big factor.

Broadband was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is now

My guess is that anyone who wanted broadband in 2004 had it. In the US penetration was 25% for broadband and 30% for dialup and dialup started declining in 2001. And dialup back then was completely fine for porn. The internet adoption curve post 2000 is a lot flatter than you'd think

Pornographic content was not as extreme or 'hardcore' as it often can be today.

Hard disagree on this one. Back in the Kazaa days you would easily download CP by accident.

I dunno, man. I remember what it was like downloading porn as a teenager in the late 90s and early 00s. A lot of grainy 30-second clips, a lot of slow download speeds, a lot of waiting for Kazaa to finish up (sometimes days).

I have a hard time believing any of this would make much of a significant difference.

Maybe it was a gradual phenomenon that sloped real hard with the advent of 'hub sites. But that's still good enough as a marker IMO.

Fair enough but even hub sites are almost 20 years old at this point, youporn for example launched in 2006.

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