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Ask HN: Review my startup - easyjerk.com: couch mode for porn

33 points by handler ↗ HN
NSFW

http://www.easyjerk.com/

easyjerk is a novel approach to a tube site. the main idea is to stop wasting time navigating a website, and just focus on what you are there to do–watch videos.

the two main features that make it unique are: 1. tag based browsing/discovery 2. super fast skipping ability

basically, the player just gets a neverending feed of videos, and you can just click skip as many times as you want until you get to a clip that you like. for each new video, tags from that video appear on the left hand side. if you click those tags, then your stream of videos are limited by those tags (appearing at the top left). this lets you direct your video stream interactively while you're watching it, so far i've gotten lots of great feedback from both guys and girls, i'm curious to hear more.

from within the player, it currently only does a union on tags... i haven't come up with a good ui convention for this :(

as far as monetization is concerned, every video has a link to the site that the video came from (appears in the lower right). my theory is that, the more videos someone sees, the more likely they will see one that makes them reach for their wallet. i am heavily against the idea of advertising.

my real goal is to sell this thing early, because i have another startup that is much more PG that i want to fund, but who knows what will happen.

if it's not obvious, i was heavily influenced by this: http://vimeo.com/12239333 (specifically ryan trecartin's idea's about removing the context from videos–which coincidentally works great for porn)

would love to hear what you guys think, -matt handler handler..at..easyjerk.com

34 comments

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Mckibbles
Pretty awesome... Takes the work out of clicking around and watching those little previews. Nice work.
aurem1
I hope you end up using your talents for something worthwhile in the future
handler
haha, conceptually i believe this is, but yeah, i have another startup i'm working on which would be considered much more worthwhile. i'll post that in the next few weeks as i fix a few more bugs.
aurem1
yeah like solve an actual problem, you know what I mean?
Mz
as a fix a few more bugs.

I assume you meant "as I fix a few more bugs".

(It makes me wonder if you are Southern. I sometimes make the same error when tired: I start typing the "voice" I hear in my head and "I" becomes "a".)

Mckibbles
This isn't rate my English... Only startups... Just sayin'. Anyways the feedback about clicking to pause is good... It should also open your affiliate link in the background or new tab. You'd need to be signed up for the ppc type for that to be beneficial.
kilovoltaire
great name, great idea!

intersection of tags would be pretty awesome, but yeah tricky to have a simple ui for both union and intersection...

[dead] EllieAsksWhy
I'll assess for usability, and give you some feedback. Super-fast skipping ability sounds like a great feature.

The absence of unwanted, unasked for "live chat" window pop-up's would certainly be appreciated, particularly the ubiquitous "Live Jasmine" screen....

chrismealy
You need to make one for kittens and puppies. That's where the real money is.
handler
it's built modularly/would be easy to switch the content. just need a feed of FLV's with tags and we're all set.
handler
oh, forgot to mention. one of the cool things it does is preload the next videos in the queue once the current one is finished downloading.
petercooper
I wonder if there's an easy way you could allow tags to be "blocked." For example, if there are certain things you don't particularly want to see, it'd be useful to click those out. A similar thing for YouTube would be very interesting, TBH (the slick, heavily produced "snippet" type of porn categorized by your site isn't up my alley at all, alas).

Anyway, interesting idea. No idea how you'd monetize it at all but porn has always seemed a bit weird to me like that. There's something a bit ChatRoulette-like about the skipping.. perhaps this is where CR could send all the idiots jerking off on there(!)

handler
great point about the negative tags, it's on the list of things i'd like to add... ostensibly this would be later on when you can become a member, and you can have "tag sets" for different moods.

as far as the slick/heavily produced stuff, you should try looking through the niches at the top. tons of stuff gets lumped under "straight" porn, but there's all sorts of subcategories. right now there's ~85,000 videos in the db.

sbisker
The first thing that jumps to mind is that while your tags UI is nice, they're appearing on top of the content. I couldn't find an easy way to close, hide or otherwise move those tags. [Edit - Whoops, I was completely wrong about that.]

Also, clicking on the actual video should probably do something - my suggestion is to have it pause the video. I can think of lots of good reasons to be able to stop watching couch mode porn very quickly.

I presume you're trying to make money on affiliate links with this? I'd be curious to hear more about that side of things.

handler
the tags fade out when you idle your mouse

clicking on the video for pausing is a good idea, hadn't thought of that

you presume right, if you're really curious shoot me an email

jolie
THIS is how you know you need to stop coding and find a girlfriend.

Good luck with your more, uh, redeeming ventures.

handler
THIS is so that my girlfriend can get a break once in a while
tejaswiy
<offtopic> It's unbelievable that people are actually have an intellectual conversation on this topic on the internet.

I <3 HN! </offtopic>

Stormbringer
see also reddit and 4chan

Welcome to the internet, have a nice day.

Udo
I think the idea is very good, though I don't see why this should only be restricted to porn. The concept could easily be adapted for pretty much any tagged content.

But there's also room for improvement. For example, there is no real option to provide feedback on an item's quality (except maybe if you track the skip button presses). I believe a project like this might profit from either a global ranking system or even an individualized learning filter. For example, you often don't seem to get what you selected initially, the system should learn from this for the benefit of other users.

Also, the UI is already very minimal, but could be made even simpler and cleaner, though that may be a minor point.

On a semi-unrelated note: most porn still sucks, and not in a good way. Maybe that's one more reason to explore advanced filtering :-P

handler
there's nothing restricting it to porn except for the fact that porn is one of the only types of video that humans tend to watch without desire for context. it's not as often that you find someone lining up 100 tv shows in a row, watching 10 seconds, and then skipping to the next. i intend to to use the technology in the future (on a different site) to give a `gist` of a style of film. so you would choose "show me what noir film looks like" and you could just skip through clips real fast to learn.

i agree, there's plenty of room for improvement. i spent about a month building the player, and it's my first project in Flex. i am however keeping track of all the clicks, which i can use to provide natural ranking later.

agreed, i could really benefit from a UI designer... unfortunately i build and design all by myself, and my design aesthetic isn't necessarily simple/obvious.

Udo
> there's nothing restricting it to porn except for the fact that porn is one of the only types of video that humans tend to watch without desire for context.

I don't think that's true, it's a great concept for other topics as well. For example, I enjoy tech talk videos, it would be nice to have an app like that for lazily looking at new and random stuff. There should be other areas where a lot of videos are sifted through in search for random nuggets, like cooking videos, and stuff like that. Youtube playlists just don't cut it...

> i agree, there's plenty of room for improvement.

I didn't mean to be overly critical, I like both the idea and the simplicity of the design very much. Any improvements would at best be incremental and very small.

handler
yeah, i guess when you think about it... people just sit in front of the tv and flip through the channels until they see something they like. though i would argue that the main cause of that is due to commercials.

if you're interested in trying to rig this up for a different purpose (cooking vids, etc...), i'd be game to try it out. it really wouldn't take much code-wise. shoot me an email.

sbisker
Come to think of it, a friend of mine was asking me for a site just like this, for movie trailers. I looked around and found there was no such site for movie trailers (that I knew of). So, you could be the first, if you were so inclined. :)
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[dead] kapauldo
I cannot believe this post hasn't been killed yet.
to
had that idea in 2006... than youporn came out and i called it a day... :/
knowsnothing613
tried the service. The UI is great. Content is decent.

But I prefer using unmoderated google video search. Why do I need to tag, when I can just add it as a search term.

I also prefer being able to scan the small image icons.

But I think google video search is how nerds find porn. We can domain deep search certain sites, if necessary (pun intended). Your site may have greater appeal with a wider audience.