Powerpoint pornography

Mistress Eleise de Lacey

After the yahoo/tumblr news I thought it might be interesting to share some of my thoughts on mainstreams internet companies and how they handle adult material. I have an insiders perspective on this, having helped develop several mainstream consumer internet products inside large software companies. I’ve also many friends in companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook that I’ve swapped war stories with.

From an outsiders perspective it’s often tempting to see these kind of companies as either incompetent, prudish, evil or mercenary. Sometimes all at the same time. In reality, while there are no doubt a few employees who meet that description, most of the developers are smart people trying to build the best product they can. When it comes to adult material there’s typically no broad censorious urge to remove it. These companies do huge amounts of data mining and certainly know just how popular it is. You can bet that Google continually tracks the number of queries with adult intent and has dozens of metrics tracking just which sites and images porn surfers prefer. No sane company leader wants to screw over a big percentage of their users if they can avoid it.

The problem comes from the general corporate culture around building software. It doesn’t mesh well with our social culture around adult material. Specific problems I’ve seen include…

  • A lack of champions.
    Product features often get added because someone says – ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if it did X?’ They get people excited in the idea and the feature gets added. But it’s tough to stand up in a meeting and effectively announce your sexual preference by saying something like – ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we had fetlife integration and I could track all my kinky friends and BDSM events?’
  • No dogfooding.
    Dogfooding is an industry term meaning to use your own product internally and find bugs before your customers do. But who wants to file bugs based on their sexual habits? It’d take a brave man to file a bug entitled – “Our new shopping application didn’t return the butt plug I was looking for in its results. All returned plugs were too small in girth. Please fix.”
  • No bragging rights.
    It’s fun to show off what you’ve built. Both formal and informal presentations on new features are a good way to get noticed and promoted. But if your new feature is pornography related, then those screenshots get a little trickier to compile. Nobody wants to spend an hour writing a presentation and then 4 hours carefully drawing black bars over all the genitalia in it.
  • No pressure to prevent regression.
    People who don’t like adult content are often very vocal about it. The same is not true about people who do. So when someone complains to Google that his daughter has been traumatized while doing a school project on hairless cats, there might be pressure to fix the results returned for “bald pussy“. It’d be tough to be the person in the meeting speaking up on behalf of all the one handed porn surfers spanking it to bare pudenda.

Almost all modern software development is collaborative and iterative. Creating features and improving a product involves suggesting usage scenarios and brainstorming what would make a more compelling user experience. Yet sharing our sexual thoughts and preferences is very much frowned on socially. The Yahoo VP who loves browsing tumblr porn is probably not going to mention that fact. The Yahoo VP who hates the risk of being associated with tumblr porn is probably going to be very vocal about that fact. So the debate is unbalanced and lots of small decisions gradually add up to a deteriorating service to users wanting adult content.

Mistress Eleise de Lacy

Given the post topic, an office type shot seemed appropriate. This is of course the lovely Mistress Eleise de Lacy from Femme Fatale films.

Author: paltego

See the 'about' page if you really want to know about me.

4 thoughts on “Powerpoint pornography”

  1. Fascinating for the insights you offer.

    In the context of Yambler, I have a YahooGroups small business account that I’ve had for around 15 years and that has absolutely nothing to do with sex or kink.

    Today I logged in and used the YahooGroups internal search engine to check on various search terms. Femdom, fetish, bondage, to name but three all returned dozens of groups sitting happily on Yahoo.

    A Yahoo group account allows you to store and make available to those you have accepted as members of your group, text, files, and images that are relevant to your group’s theme.

    So I assume that some of these Yahoo groups have ‘adult’ content on them. Whether there’s a lot of ‘in yer face’ porn on Yahoo, I don’t know. I’m a bit time-crunched at the moment, but I’ll try to explore further.

    1. Thanks, glad you liked the post. I actually had way more to write, but had to edit it for length!

      Yahoo groups definitely have some adult content. I lurk on a few that have been around for a while, so they clearly exist and aren’t aggressively purged. However, as Bacchus pointed out in a recent post ( http://www.erosblog.com/2013/05/17/yahoo-to-buy-tumblr/ ) they do make them hard to find and they do sometimes get deleted for arbitrary reasons. They also (at least the one’s I’ve seen) require a joining process and approval from a moderator. Which makes it that much harder for the average user to stumble across them. I’d be interested to know if there’s any adult content on yahoo that doesn’t require that kind of access control.

      I suspect tumblr will not move to ban adult content. That’d be too heavy handed. But the tendency will be too make the sites harder to find and too make the rules governing what’s allowed more capricious. All of which will push users away.

      -paltego

  2. Paltego! TALK NERDY TO ME, BABY!!!

    Great blog post–quite informative. “Dogfooding?” lol awesome.

    I also love the pic of M. Eleise and her impressive shoes.

    Love your blog; please keep it coming!

    Margo

    P.S. I think Yahoo! sucks. It went down the crapper just like The Huffington Post. The “journalism” on Yahoo! is some of the worst on the internet–I have no idea where they find these yahoo (snigger) journalists, but they make my college newspaper look like The New York Review of Books in comparison.

    P.P.S. Have you seen the documentary “Graphic Sexual Horror?” It’s a film about the pre-Kink.com website, Insex. I mention it because it’s tangentially related to your blog post–porn and corporatism. Hard to watch at time, but it’s very good. You can get it on Netflix if you like.

    1. Glad you liked it Miss Margo. As I said in the reply to Grumpyoldswitch, it’s a topic I could have written more on. It sits at an odd intersection between my professional and private life.

      I never really look at the news stuff on yahoo. Other than flickr and occasionally the yahoo groups site, I can’t remember the last time I used it. Although as I said elsewhere, I do have a lot of respect for Marissa Mayer. She might make them relevant again.

      And no, I’ve not yet seen that documentary. But it’s very high on my things to watch list. I’ve been meaning to order it and then blog about it for the longest time. Thanks for the reminder!

      -paltego

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