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Why are top university websites serving porn? It comes down to shoddy housekeeping.
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2026
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Technology
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Why shouldn’t they? Did you know VHS succeeded because of porn? Same thing here. They are top because of porn.
The logic is irrefutable. There are absolutely zero downsides to porn.
in the early 00's I worked in the porn industry as a web developer. Pretty much every standard of media consumption can be traced back to the adult entertainment industry. VHS? porn. DVDs? porn. I was working in the industry when Bluray vs HDDVD was just ramping up and there were many discussions within the industry at the time on insider web forums (shout out gofuckyourself) about which one to back. Well you can easily guess which one we went with as you can still buy blurays today. They were cheaper to produce than HDDVDs.
like watching streaming content online? thank porn. At the time we were uploading mpegs and what have you to thumb sites (thumb nail galleries, those mini sites that just had like 6 to 10 "preview" images of porn that were all over the place) until a few of us at Digital Playground figured "would be a lot easier for the user to just have the vids play in real time in their browser as opposed to them having to download the stuff." we saw this new fangled thing called Youtube and figured we could embrace that and adapt it to porn. so we started "tube sites". rest is history. in fact for a time up until recently you could still see some of our original code for streaming on pornhub/various other manwin sites as...well...they bought us all out and used it.
Going back to the DVD stuff it was called within the industry the "golden age" because my god companies made so much money off DVD sales it was insane. it dwarfed online subscriptions. We had a massive warehouse in Tucson Arizona that was just constantly shipping out DVDs like 24 hours a day. So when DVD sales started dying everyone friggin panicked and that's how Manwin/Pornhub was able to just buy up everyone in the industry.
How did you get into that? Feel like I never see a listing for those kinds of gigs when I look for jobs online, but a lot of my personal projects came out of acquiring and managing porn, lol.
if I remember correctly I just responded to a job ad posted on craigslist. They said they needed a web developer, didn't say what it was for and I only found out it was porn when I was at the actual interview. Literally one of the interview questions was 'how do you feel about porn?'
Thank you for your service o7
I baited this response. I was being sarcastic. Dorks can’t help themselves.
Not so sure if there are zero downsides. Just as in some corners of the modelling world there is more-often-than-negligible some shady stuff going on.