[astange]

How is this not the same as spam, and with the same solution: require some cost to be borne by the uploader. The video hosting site can require a credit card and a small fee, like $1, and this problem will go away.

But Pornhub won't do that because it will cut profits.

Which is the real problem here. Pornhub is making $$$ off the victim of sexual assault. They will do just enough to pretend that they are fighting the problem, but not do the one thing that will actually end it.

[FDSGSG]

>But Pornhub won't do that because it will cut profits.

Try to upload a video to pornhub right now. Go on.

(Perhaps next time do the tiniest amount of research before throwing around nonsense like this?)

[boznz]

For those of us that dont want to do this (I assume that would be 100% of us) what happens?

[FDSGSG]

Pornhub only allows uploads from verified users. You have to upload your ID to the verification service run by yoti.com before you can upload videos.

This has been the case for over a year https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Pornh...

Also FWIW they also allow non-porn content. For example https://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=ph604a53bb0c9... And as you can see, it gets a plenty of views.

[bb611]

One piece of context that's important is Pornhub only submitted to those changes due to mass public demands for credit card processors to cut them off, largely due to reporting on this exact problem by Nicholas Kristoff[1] in the opinion section of the New York Times.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...

[Noumenon72]

Idiot that I am, just clicked a Pornhub link on my work computer because it was "non-porn"... I guess today I learned Pornhub is not blocked on my work computer.

[nemothekid]

Another commenter already described how difficult it is to upload on pornhub now; but I think there is an incredible myopia when it comes to Pornhub. For some reason people believe if you shutdown pornhub then the problem goes away.

The profit aspect is misguided as well - there are probably millions of porn sites out there and on 4chan there are probably hundreds of illegally, coerced images trading around for free by obsessed weirdos who will dox women just to feel closer to them. Pornhub likely makes most of it's money from the top 10-20 pornstars; the bottom 99% just represents a headache which is why they probably found it easy to ban non-verified porn.

I'm sympathetic to sex workers who should be allowed to make money from their work; but the very distribution of content over the internet exacerbates this problem whenever there is porn involved.

[stevenicr]

certainly requiring a cc and charging money would get people to upload less, but 'the problem' would not go away. Not at $1 and not at $10.

I've run into some of these revenge post people - and they would pay $10, and they'd do it every week.

Heck some service would crop up to pay someone in country X to upload to 10 different sites every week for $20 with bulletproof hosting and darknet distribution for $50 - and most of these revenge folks would pay that.

I get your sentiment, and I'm pretty sure phub has already cut into uploading in more ways than that already, and they have certainly lost money and traffic with the changes they voluntarily pushed out a while back.

They deleted way more than the non-knowledge uploads, and making it harder for sharing is giving the other tubes an advantage and growth (at their expense) the past so many moons.

[markdown]

> I've run into some of these revenge post people - and they would pay $10, and they'd do it every week.

No they wouldn't, because the upload would no longer be anon, and they'd be charged under a revenge porn law.

[stevenicr]

in my small data point experience in real life - the offender was using vpns and burner phones to post and to harass with different numbers in one case here locally.

I've also unfortunately discovered that there are services that handle this kind of thing; using a stolen ID from a different country to do these things for you - trust me when I tell you that those who really want to bypass all the auths / payments / hashes - will find ways to do it again and again.

I've also tracked down some of these folks and was very plainly told that "the army of my country was not going to invade their country to harass them" for harassing someone here - and they were right.

After spending months putting together verifiable evidence to hand over to agencies in neighboring countries and countries abroad, zero people were arrested.

I did get one person's VPN account disabled once though!

They did return the next day using a new vpn service. So yeah, there are jerks out there that will spend $10 a week, or $50 a week to harass people, I've witnessed it many times.

Anyone you would catch doing something like this (using their own credit card and phone/computer) would already be caught with basic ip logs - no need to set all the extra hoops that make it harder for the average user, because those hoops are not stopping those who are extra shady in the first place. imho, ysmv.

[dillondoyle]

It might just optimize for that profit too