Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nix23 1573 days ago
Just think where Wikipedia would be without the porn industry...and VR-"Gaming" ;-)

Porn and advertising is the driving force of the Internet.

1 comments

This is a soundbite falsehood. The military industrial complex is the driving force of the internet and all things computing. Porn is just another monetization.
>The military industrial complex is the driving force of the internet and all things computing.

Was the initial force...but since we call it "internet" and "personal computers" instead of "mainframe" and "arpanet" not anymore.

If you closely study Twitter's actions (How did that Arab Spring turn out for everybody?), or read about the InQtel origins of google (Assange's "Google Is Not What It Seems"), or how the Israelis blasted the Palestinians with porn during a siege (the OnlyFans economy!), you will see that it is still very much a weapon.

Of the actual innovations in this field, how many came from defense (DOD, CIA, NSA, ARPA, & their contractors), and how many came from pornography?

I never said secret-services...governments etc have nothing to-do with the Internet, and it would be stupid not to use it for psyop's, but the money comes from private sectors and not the "military" anymore.
What innovation in computing, hardware or software, has the porn industry made?
Back in the day, RedTube had incredibly high quality, low bandwidth video compared to YouTube (which at that stage had been owned by Google for a couple of years). They also had mouse-over previews on the seek bar years before anywhere else did.