It fails to define critical term definitions, and uses such terms in contextual scopes that depending on the scope meant may contradict itself, with the context absent (i.e. welfare).
Fails to account for impactful actions that occurred in the same time period (i.e. internal catalog search changes, external search changes, and other changes related to requirements of all large businesses doing business in the US related to FOSTA-SESTA Act 2018).
Fails to vet data collection methodology or identify limitations of the dataset (Similarweb, bad data in bad data out).
Most people searching for porn use protection, fails to address collection methodology shortcomings when data collection is thwarted. It is also entirely unclear how the study controls for duplicate signals.
Fails by inserting value-based statements and asserting false narratives or flawed reasoning (a null hypothesis without alternatives, in a stochastic environment), also without proper basis, (i.e. the loss of 80% content and drastic changes in site discoverability/usability in aggregate).
There are a few phrasings, coupled with the poor methodology, that make me think this paper/study was in large part generated by AI, potentially as a pre-fabricated narrative (soft-propaganda).
The reasoning does not follow logically, and fails at obvious points where an AI would fail. On its face, this doesn't look like a sound study.
I am reminded of how people said that spotify "won" over music piracy by simply being more convenient. Remove 80% of the music there, and my bet is that music piracy would see a massive upswing, together with legal competitors. 50% reduction in users do not sound unthinkable.
There's some shows I want to go back and re-watch, but they're no longer on Netflix and out of print on physical media. I'm tempted to put my eye patch on and say "yo-ho-ho," but there's just so much content that I don't even have time to watch.
> and my bet is that music piracy would see a massive upswing
Which makes me suspect that if Spotify dropped 80% of its content, it really depends on which 80% gets dropped. There's just so much content available now that content that's not in major streaming platforms might just get forgotten.
It's not unreasonable that if you're going to host nudity you have a positive legal and moral obligation to ensure that everyone depicted is a consenting adult who has consented to those images being shown on that site.
This rings true to me, especially in the recent context of AI adopters looking for uncensored alternatives. This frame of thinking can be applied not only to models, i.e. many move away from OpenAI/ChatGPT in search of less restricted models, as well as being applied to sites providing AI resources. Just the other day, CivitAI (the current leader for distributing custom checkpoints, LoRAs for image-centric models) announced it was taking a much more heavy-handed approach to moderation due to pressure from Mastercard/Visa. Its users are simply outraged, and many I think will be leaving in search of a safe haven for their models/gens going forward.
The only thing the payment processors really have to fear at this point is the government itself asking for a bigger pound of flesh than they already take or sticking its fingers in their business to increase its own power (perhaps at the behest of other interests) like the did with Backpage. The avenues by which the government would manufacture the political will for such action would likely be the tried and true "but the children", "terrorists", "trafficking" and the like, perhaps with a modern BS twist on it.
The "christian right" boogeyman basically doesn't a) exist in the volume that people like you pretend it does anymore b) care about adult content anymore seeing as the overwhelming majority of people in the western world don't really remember a time before internet adult content and just take it as a fact of life, this stuff just doesn't really move the needle for anybody anymore.
You see this behavior among the hold outs every time. Southern legislatures passed all sorts of dumb laws at the end of the jim crow era. I bet sure a few states will pass absurd laws as weed continues to get legalized.
Even in cases where it might be lawful for the government to restrain the target's speech, they'd be entitled to due process and the state (or at least components of it) have found it unacceptably inconvenient to allow their targets access to due process. This 'issue' is resolved by censoring through proxy actors, and particularly through also restricting access to the relevant facts that the target would need to establish standing.
So: high risk of fraud, legal risks (financing child porn, human trafficking, etc...) and not great for the image of a "respectable" company
The high fees are purely because supply is constrained; Visa declares certain industries "high risk" and limits merchant banks to only allow a minor percentage (IIRC, something like 20%) of their transactions to be in this category. The designation is not empirical; our chargeback rates were extremely low, especially compared to online businesses.
This designation is a political issue. Fraud is not actually the problem.
My understanding from friends in the payment industry is that the “high fraud rates” are just people lying to their credit card companies when their spouse / whoever questions the charge.
If someone has the ability to process fraudulent credit card charges, why in the world would they waste that opportunity buying $20 of digital porn rather than a physical good that can be sold?
I believe GP that the issue is just pressure from evangelicals resulting in a de facto boycott of the woke porn virus.
It is 100% a PR issue, not a fraud issue.
Without chargeback or a similar mechanism it's "pay and pray".
They also have no real way to resolve disputes. The merchant says they delivered the goods and the cardholder says they received an empty box, how is a bank supposed to know who is lying?
The way you actually do this is that you don't make any of that part of the payments system. If someone commits fraud, have the police arrest them.
I ordered a used playstation 4 from amazon or eBay, irrelevant which. The UPS (parcel carrier) driver said hey this box doesn't look right, it's been retaped, do you want to open it? I'm not supposed to let you open it to reject it, but go ahead. "
It was a bucket of tile mud and an ornamental brick. Someone at the local UPS hub had stolen my PS4 and put the label on a shipment originally going to Lowe's.
Now, say the UPS driver and I didn't have that conversation. How do I get my money back? How do I prove the box had a brick and a bucket of tile mud? This isn't rhetorical. Keep in mind, the seller shipped me a PS4. The theft occurred at the carrier.
I find it laughable that any law enforcement would entertain anything other than "filling out a complaint", but the seller shipped a ps4. I paid for a ps4. How do I get a ps4 or my money back in your system?
This is kind of the point. You bought a PS4 from someone on eBay who actually sent you their PS4. and then the carrier stole it. If you issue a chargeback, it's not the thief who loses the money, it's the seller who did nothing wrong.
You do want the police to investigate this so they can arrest the thief, because otherwise what is ever going to stop them from just stealing everybody's packages? This is literally their job.
But in terms of how to get your money back, the answer is that if you want the ability to do that you buy the insurance and then file an insurance claim. Then the cost ends up on the insurance company, which is set up to handle that, instead of random consumers or small businesses. And when UPS is providing the insurance itself, they then have the incentive to stop hiring thieves, which is where you want the incentive because they're the only ones who can really do anything about it.
No true. You think if you get fed poison at a cafe you have no recourse if you pay cash, like you somehow waive all your rights as customer?)
What you are talking about is not "some recourse". You have legal recourse. But you mean specifically "get my money back". In many ways it is good for the actually shady dealer because being sued is worse than one chargeback from one wise guy & getting to keep swindling all the others.
> I'm talking about having at least some recourse against fraud and at least some attempt at resolving disputes.
And making it decentralized would kill exactly this among other things. Should I explain how?
I believe the reason for this is that the risk of chargebacks for adult content is much higher, so the card networks need to pay more to service these merchants and it's less profitable for them (or maybe in some cases unprofitable).
Essentially it just comes down to the bottom line.
Stop repeating this as if it is true.
Timing. MasterCard/Visa ditched Pornhub subs the same month after the story about csam went public. It had nothing to do with chargebacks.
Then they also ditched Pornhub advertisement company. Not relevant to chargebacks.
Read https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/mastercard-visa-sus... for how it went down.
And of course big adult sites including Pornhub are not stupid enough to use anything mentioning "porn" on bank statements.
And if you talk to actual programmers working in adult industry you will learn payment processors have special strict rules for adult industry. Literally because of moral standards. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24291790 where it is discussed.
So no. It was not about chargebacks, it's about making money from child rape videos. Some people have values. Corporations are run by people who have to face their kids and spouses.
Why do you think this is the case?
> In the adult/porn world, there's a high amount of chargebacks and fraud relative to low-risk industries like SaaS software. If you pass a certain chargeback threshold in the adult industry, your account is terminated, and no payment processor will do business with you.
Now it was ages ago that I read this, and I'm sure it's a more nuanced topic than my simplified answer, but that's what I understood from my reading at the time.
And it was ethics and values for Pornhub too. See my other comment or just look up what happened.
Read why Pornhub was ditched in 2020/2022. Trigger alert, it involves rape and trafficking victims.
Or read the sources mijoharas posted. They specifically say that payment processors simply do not like porn. I guess he did not read his own links.
Payment providers note higher chargeback rates for adult/porn services than those for other mundane services, this is a longstanding -- pre-internet, even -- pattern which has nothing to do with the pornhub situation within the last 5 years.
> Payment providers note higher chargeback rates for adult
You get cause and effect inside out. Read the link posted by the guy you are defending https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24291790. Payment processors selectively nerf/buff industries. They see porn immoral and set stricter rules. Including lower allowed chargeback. And yes this means they actually make less money because of it. Believe it or not not everyone thinks money is everything. I give up if you guys actively resist facts.
But if you have real evidence of csam on xitter any journalist not owned by alt right will jump on it. One good news story by a reputable outlet and Visa/MasterCard is out of xitter 100%. If you're lucky they'll also stop processing ad money and the platform is toast. Do it, leak it.
Remember, payment providers ditched pornhub the same month the story about csam and other abuse went public. That's all it takes.
But anyway. Payment processors do not like porn. See my other comments. Maybe they are scared to ditch xitter because of current politics but I think it's the matter of time and good reporting. Let NYT write about it
This already happened and I believe nothing changed as a result. 100,000 tweets found between march and may in 2023 which matched at least 1/40 of the CSAM hashes they used.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/06/stanford_internet_obs...
The industry doesn't give a crap as long as they don't know enough to feel dirty/culpable. Ain't no different than moving money for terrorists or whatever.
BTW, it looks like your PDF is missing figures/illustrations/etc (there is placeholder text) Not sure if this was a publishing tech issue or if missed in authoring
You would think that with a decent LaTeX template academic papers would look reproducibly good, but for some reason some (many?) institutions and authors choose weakly justified convention over typographically sound formatting optimised for actual reading. The font choice (not too bad, but not pleasant either), the outsized leading which competes with the paragraph spacing. Look at how badly the references section on page xxviii scans.
The word missing from the abstract is 'PornHub', of course. They're not just studying “a dominant online platform”. The fact that it is PornHub seems relevant enough not to hide it in the abstract to me.
The fact that it was PornHub is mentioned repeatedly in the paper itself. Leaving it out of the abstract seems fair—they picked PornHub because it was a site that deleted 80% of their content, not because they're specifically interested in studying PornHub.
And, they study several of MindGeek's sites, not just PornHub exclusively.
It is relevant information for anyone scanning through dozens of abstracts on the topics addressed.
I don't think the authors are even doing it maliciously or deliberately, because it's like how students or kids struggle to write anything. It's just a fallback when you're struggling to condense it and have gotten lost in your forest. Like how you can ask someone, "OK, that's all great, but what did you do? What are you trying to say here?" "Oh, I Xed the Y with Z." "There you go. That's your abstract."
I can see for example if its' mostly word documents from source on that area of science maybe there's no point on arxiv like pipeline that builds from source.
wondering if it will ever converge there, like a wikipedia only about science/research but of all areas
Part of the issue is that the arxiv doesn't want every discipline in science, so a certain amount of duplication is necessary.
porn consumption is even more demanding. if you want "that release" you dont really care about the 2257
Or at least one very specific market and platform