The reason they removed the ban and allowed "artistic nudity" recently in the first place was "a majority of bans due to nudity were female streamers".
The lengths these people will go to avoid accepting men and women are different.
Its wild that in the current year we are still allowing prehistoric puritan "ethics" to make decisions for us. I dont use twitch and never have but our societies sexual repression is so pervasive its shocking.
Maybe the morals our societies have held for hundreds/thousands of years around moral decency and civility had a point. But I guess I'm glad you're wiser than all the generations that came before you, and you know better than all of them.
I think the reason behind medieval "morality" is pretty well understood. I dont necessarily think HN is the best place to discuss this as it could be seen as pretty political. Regardless there is plenty of literature out there talking about this and it comes down to maintaining the hierarchy of the genders, property rights and religious sects seeking societal control (think Calvinism)
Exactly. When you look back 2000 years to Greek and Roman societies they shied away from any nude depictions of the human form. Nudity as we see it in society nowadays has only been around since the invention of Playboy in the 1950s
> Exactly. When you look back 2000 years to Greek and Roman societies they shied away from any nude depictions of the human form. Nudity as we see it in society nowadays has only been around since the invention of Playboy in the 1950s
Right. When I stated that puritan morality existed 2000 years ago, that totally means that there were no displays of nudity at all back then. Everything has to be 100% one way or the other after all. The idea that different kinds of morality could exist among different groups of people, even across individuals, in the world in the same time period is just absurd isn't it?
> The idea that different kinds of morality could exist among different groups of people, even across individuals, in the world in the same time period is just absurd isn't it?
I am sorry I thought that you meant that puritan morals have existed for over 2000 years not that they could have existed over 2000 years.
The fact that modern interpretation of Puritanism may have existed at any point in time is proof positive that pornography as currently defined is bad and should be banned
The morals our societies held for hundreds/thousands of years were held to justify slavery, blood sacrifice, antisemitism, genocide, rape, witch hunts, inquisitions, white supremacy, child labor and countless other once noble and virtuous ends now considered among humanity's greatest atrocities and horrors. Of course that also depends on when and where you look, because those morals have also evolved over time even within the window of what one might consider "traditional values."
Yes, we can be wiser than all the generations that came before us. The premise that all morality and ethics were solved before humanity even learned to smelt iron is absurd.
> morals our societies held for hundreds/thousands of years were held to justify slavery, blood sacrifice, antisemitism, genocide…
People will be people with or without religion, no need to make the leap and claim the reason for the season was to retain all the horrible practices you describe.
Religion may not have been the reason those things were done but has absolutely been used to justify every one of those things. Religion is the tool not necessarily the cause.
Absolurely agreed. If it wasn’t for religion, it would’ve been for something else. Religion was just a background theme/cause for it, but not the reason.
A good analogy that comes to mind is what triggered WW1. Sure, we all know that it kicked off due to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. One thing I remember vividly from that time period being covered in my history classes is the teacher going very in-depth on all the tensions and confilcts between the sides piling up for quite some time before the assassination, and how those countries were all already at their throats itching to get into a fight. The teacher spent multiple lessons going into all of this, which made it rather plain obvious that if it wasn’t for the Archduke’s assassination, it would’ve been for something else.
That’s one thing from that teacher that stuck with me forever, the teacher’s explanation of how major the difference is between a cause and a reason, despite people using them synonymously often. Archduke’s assassination was the cause/trigger for the start of WW1, but it was not the reason for it. Causes/triggers are direct, quick, simple, interchangeable, standalone, and specific. Reasons are fundamental, complex, and often come in multiples, all interacting and feeding off each other in complex ways.
Same with the religion-caused conflicts/atrocities mentioned in this thread of comments. Religion was not the reason for those imo, it was just the cause/trigger, but not the reason. Hell, I am halfway thinking that it could even be that some religions in those ancient days were partially formed in response as to justify certain behaviors, rather than religions causing/triggering those behaviors, but that’s just a baseless speculation on my part that I myself have zero certainty in.
Off-tangent sidenote: without trying to take a dig at any specific religion, as I have no issues with religions themselves or their followers at all in present times, it does seem rather convenient that one of the most mainstream religions these days was found on the premise of a married woman giving a “virgin birth” to a child that wasn’t her husband’s son. Sensibly, once couldn’t explain it any way other than getting pregnant by someone other than the husband or a miraculous divine intervention. And knowing the very real life-ending consequences those days for women for that and, on top of it, giving birth to that child, the choice would be rather obvious.
Religions as an excuse- in the past it was to justify genocide and sexual repression, today its used to justify genocide and sexual repression.
Yet somehow people still claim religious moral guidelines are somehow useful or good.
Look some of the great thinkers were religious, and christian and muslim and hindu and jewish philosophy used to be the best approximation of what we now know as science and rationality. We are standing on the shoulders of folks like Aquinas, Al-Khwarizmi, Aryabhata, Maimonides and others but we now know more than they did in basically every way. Why their moral stances would still hold up is beyond me. Maybe because people are still attached to the power over others that these "ethical" norms give them.
Anything can (and will) be used as an excuse or justification for things like genocide or sexual repression.
Like, I am not trying to defend religion because it holds some special place in my heart, because it doesn’t, i am entirely non-religious. But looking at how Soviet Union did all those terrible things and more, while explicitly cracking down on religion and essentially prohibiting most of it (with a bunch of gulaging and murders, just to speed up the process a bit), I don’t think religion on itself is the problem.
> people still claim religious moral guidelines are somehow useful or good.
I mean, if one cites religion as their source of inspiration and encouragement for doing good things and being kind to other people, who am I to interfere? Sure, we can muse on the fact that good morals and kindness shouldn’t come from a belief in some deity or holy books. Ultimately, as long as someone is doing good things, I don’t really care whether they draw their inspiration to so from a religion or some charitable person in real life or an episode of spongebob squarepants. Whatever is helping them cope with the reality of living in a way that makes lives of those around them better.
If you really want to look at the source of truth of why these decisions are made, all you have to do is Follow The Money. Two key reasons I can posit:
Advertisers do not want their products advertised next to adversarial content. The exodus of advertisers on Twitter/X is a great parallel - flood a user generated content platform with content that does not bode for positive brand associations, and brands stop paying. You can argue that it's "puritanical ethics" at play here if you'd like, but I see this more as wanting to associate their brands with mass market appeal.
Secondly, the moment you cross into pornographic content, your payment processors start bailing. This, in my opinion, plays more into your perception that mass standards for acceptable content influence the decision. I can't think of a major payment processor that permits their service to be used to pay for pornographic content, and that is because it's high risk. It's high risk because it's rife with chargebacks. Things like claims "I didn't pay for this!" when a partner happens to see a charge for a pornographic product, buyer's remorse as the truth of a parasocial relationship plays out to an unsatisfying conclusion, whatever the reason, payment processors just don't want to be associated with it.
You don't have to like it, you don't have to agree with it, but in a sense, this is companies choosing what markets they want to serve.
I think part of the sexual repression I was talking about is a big reason why porn is so popular and why: "Things like claims "I didn't pay for this!" when a partner happens to see a charge for a pornographic product, buyer's remorse as the truth of a parasocial relationship plays out to an unsatisfying conclusion, whatever the reason" are so prevalent.
It is a sad thing and something that I really wish we could address as a society but corporate owned streaming sites/other social media are really not the place for this type of conversation because of the inherently ad revenue based structure of these sites.
I thought about it just now, and it made me think of a potential solution. Though it feels so simple and naive (I feel like it shouldn’t work), but I couldn’t find a reason for why it wouldn’t, so I am curious what people think about this.
Imagine there was a special type of a payment card that would work with only adult-content provider websites (aka porn). It would function sort of like a debit card, you can load up money on it from other sources, you can withdraw money from it at any time, etc. However, no chargebacks allowed (which are already not really a thing with regular debit cards anyway, it is mostly a credit card feature).
For bonus points, you can have some sort of a verification (maybe requiring 2FA, maybe something else) that would kick in every time you load money on that card, but NOT when you use that card to pay for anything. So adult content providers won’t need any verification to do on their part (aka you won’t need to give them any of your identifying info).
I guess what I am describing is literally just a quirky kind of a debit card/account that attempts to resolve issues that stem from the whole “chargeback of shame” scenario, thus making the transactions less high-risk for payment processors/providers. Which would, conversely, make payment processing less of a problem for the adult-content providers and, therefore, customers.
P.S. do adult-content providers currently have any issues with debit cards as the payment source? Asking because if chargebacks were the main concern for the payment processors (which would refuse to work with adult-content providers due to chargebacks making it high-risk), then by that logic they should have no problem with debit cards, since they feature no chargebacks. The only thing my proposal adds on top of that is the verification/dispute with the bank/card issuer would be done not on the level of each individual transaction for an adult service, but on the level of loading up that “adult-only” card (and what happens from that point on is not accessible to your bank). Which also makes the situation a bit less “embarrassing” for the customer too.
Why is twitch different from say deviantart where theres lots of non-pornographic art as well a significant amount of NSFW art?
Is this to say that the twitch community is more likely to draw CP compared to other online communities?
Or perhaps that all porn should be banned across the web?
I dont really understand why twitch should be different from any other platform where people share that kind of content
This issue would be much easier to solve if Twitch weren't owned by Amazon. Any platform is either porn or not porn. If you allow porn, if the porn is successful it'll drive everything else out. So either you have a platform that is not-porn, and bans porn, or it's porn and it's only got porn. The easy thing to do as a business would be to just have Twitch, and then have a sister company Twatch that allows porn. All the pornstars are happy - they have somewhere to go, the normies are happy - they aren't associated with porn. You could share the whole tech stack with the possible tweak of having separate credit card processing so that Visa/Mastercard don't shut off the porn. Hell, you could even have TwArtch for the arty people in the middle.
But the probably is... then Amazon is running a porn business and they'd be in loads of trouble.
I cant actually think of any website thats gone the way the parent describes. Most website that have both do fine having both and its always corporate puritan ethics that causes porn to become its own separate site.
I can only think of Gfycat, which spun off their adult content to a separate site, Redgifs; since then the individual sites have been acquired by different companies.
Taringa and Poringa are examples, websites from Argentina, very popular from the mid 2000's to around mid 2010's. As far as I know they had the same owner and used the same software.
Taringa was basically a forum where most content was links to download any kind of pirated content (except porn), and Poringa was that but for porn.
You've named the two least profitable social media platforms. Reddit is just in the process of discovering that they're going to be non-porn, just like Tumblr did. Twitter... well twitter plays by special rules now.
It started as JustinTV, but it wasn’t for adult content or anything.
JustinTV started just as a single channel website showing the 24/7 irl livestream of one of the founders, Justin Kan. Then they slowly opened it up for others to be able to host their own livestream.
Bit by bit, some people started streaming games rather than irl. Very quickly, gaming became the most popular thing to stream there and overtook most of the platform.
JustinTV staff then spun-off gaming channels on JustinTV into its own new gaming-only platform, Twitch. For a while they were running side-by-side. But as Twitch started becoming more generalist and less gaming-only, yeah, it became clear there is no point in keeping JustinTV alive, if Twitch became their all encompassing superset of JustinTV.
I think the main difference is that Twitch and JustinTV didn’t have that much of a boundary in terms of content as SFW/NSFW split would. Their difference was mostly thematic, so it made sense to them at the time to eventually pool it all into one streaming platform.
But that’s where we currently are with the problem of what’s allowed in twitch and what isn’t. Unlike with SFW/NSFW separation, Twitch wasn’t created for the purpose of hosting content that wasn’t allowed on JustinTV. It was created because gaming started overwhelming any other content on JustinTV, and they wanted the original irl livestreaming content of JustinTV to not die due to it all being games. Games were allowed on JustinTV just fine before that. JustinTV was rendered truly pointless once Twitch introduced IRL and “just chatting” categories, as that was just essentially a “justintv section”.
Note: not disagreeing with you, you are correct. Just wanted to provide a bit more nuance to how it went down, as well as some context for why I don’t think that their separation approach would have the same type of an outcome as a SFW/NSFW spin-off would.
I haven't read gizmodo in years... it's truly sad to see what how atrocious and anti-consumer its layout has become. I feel like I am playing Where's Waldo with the article text while simultaneously inducing a seizure.
It isn’t some cultural/moral US problem, and it doesn’t really have anything to do with puritanism.
It is a universal “i was in the moment and paid for a sub to a porn website, but the day after I regretted that decision and decided to make a payment chargeback/reversal and claim fraud” problem. Which is what leads to payment processors (Visa/MasterCard/Amex/etc.) designating adult-content providers as high-risk businesses, as each chargeback has a cost associated with it. And a good number of payment processors decided it wasn’t worth it to deal with them due to that.
If this was a uniquely US problem, then payment processors providing services outside of the US would have no issues with working with, let’s say, EU-only adult-content providers. However, something is telling me that Visa/MasterCard absolutely don’t care about the locality of service of any given adult-content provider, and neither do they care about any of the moral decisions here. It is all about the bottom line and the cost of doing business.
Hell, payment processors never even claimed any moral ground for refusing to work with adult-content providers, which would make sense for them to grandstand on for the boost in their public image, if the whole thing was truly due to some puritanism culture around nudity in the US. But nope, payment processors claimed as much that it all boils down to the cost of doing business with adult-content providers due to high chargeback rates.
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[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadThe lengths these people will go to avoid accepting men and women are different.
Right. When I stated that puritan morality existed 2000 years ago, that totally means that there were no displays of nudity at all back then. Everything has to be 100% one way or the other after all. The idea that different kinds of morality could exist among different groups of people, even across individuals, in the world in the same time period is just absurd isn't it?
I am sorry I thought that you meant that puritan morals have existed for over 2000 years not that they could have existed over 2000 years.
The fact that modern interpretation of Puritanism may have existed at any point in time is proof positive that pornography as currently defined is bad and should be banned
Yes, we can be wiser than all the generations that came before us. The premise that all morality and ethics were solved before humanity even learned to smelt iron is absurd.
People will be people with or without religion, no need to make the leap and claim the reason for the season was to retain all the horrible practices you describe.
A good analogy that comes to mind is what triggered WW1. Sure, we all know that it kicked off due to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. One thing I remember vividly from that time period being covered in my history classes is the teacher going very in-depth on all the tensions and confilcts between the sides piling up for quite some time before the assassination, and how those countries were all already at their throats itching to get into a fight. The teacher spent multiple lessons going into all of this, which made it rather plain obvious that if it wasn’t for the Archduke’s assassination, it would’ve been for something else.
That’s one thing from that teacher that stuck with me forever, the teacher’s explanation of how major the difference is between a cause and a reason, despite people using them synonymously often. Archduke’s assassination was the cause/trigger for the start of WW1, but it was not the reason for it. Causes/triggers are direct, quick, simple, interchangeable, standalone, and specific. Reasons are fundamental, complex, and often come in multiples, all interacting and feeding off each other in complex ways.
Same with the religion-caused conflicts/atrocities mentioned in this thread of comments. Religion was not the reason for those imo, it was just the cause/trigger, but not the reason. Hell, I am halfway thinking that it could even be that some religions in those ancient days were partially formed in response as to justify certain behaviors, rather than religions causing/triggering those behaviors, but that’s just a baseless speculation on my part that I myself have zero certainty in.
Off-tangent sidenote: without trying to take a dig at any specific religion, as I have no issues with religions themselves or their followers at all in present times, it does seem rather convenient that one of the most mainstream religions these days was found on the premise of a married woman giving a “virgin birth” to a child that wasn’t her husband’s son. Sensibly, once couldn’t explain it any way other than getting pregnant by someone other than the husband or a miraculous divine intervention. And knowing the very real life-ending consequences those days for women for that and, on top of it, giving birth to that child, the choice would be rather obvious.
Yet somehow people still claim religious moral guidelines are somehow useful or good.
Look some of the great thinkers were religious, and christian and muslim and hindu and jewish philosophy used to be the best approximation of what we now know as science and rationality. We are standing on the shoulders of folks like Aquinas, Al-Khwarizmi, Aryabhata, Maimonides and others but we now know more than they did in basically every way. Why their moral stances would still hold up is beyond me. Maybe because people are still attached to the power over others that these "ethical" norms give them.
Like, I am not trying to defend religion because it holds some special place in my heart, because it doesn’t, i am entirely non-religious. But looking at how Soviet Union did all those terrible things and more, while explicitly cracking down on religion and essentially prohibiting most of it (with a bunch of gulaging and murders, just to speed up the process a bit), I don’t think religion on itself is the problem.
> people still claim religious moral guidelines are somehow useful or good.
I mean, if one cites religion as their source of inspiration and encouragement for doing good things and being kind to other people, who am I to interfere? Sure, we can muse on the fact that good morals and kindness shouldn’t come from a belief in some deity or holy books. Ultimately, as long as someone is doing good things, I don’t really care whether they draw their inspiration to so from a religion or some charitable person in real life or an episode of spongebob squarepants. Whatever is helping them cope with the reality of living in a way that makes lives of those around them better.
Advertisers do not want their products advertised next to adversarial content. The exodus of advertisers on Twitter/X is a great parallel - flood a user generated content platform with content that does not bode for positive brand associations, and brands stop paying. You can argue that it's "puritanical ethics" at play here if you'd like, but I see this more as wanting to associate their brands with mass market appeal.
Secondly, the moment you cross into pornographic content, your payment processors start bailing. This, in my opinion, plays more into your perception that mass standards for acceptable content influence the decision. I can't think of a major payment processor that permits their service to be used to pay for pornographic content, and that is because it's high risk. It's high risk because it's rife with chargebacks. Things like claims "I didn't pay for this!" when a partner happens to see a charge for a pornographic product, buyer's remorse as the truth of a parasocial relationship plays out to an unsatisfying conclusion, whatever the reason, payment processors just don't want to be associated with it.
You don't have to like it, you don't have to agree with it, but in a sense, this is companies choosing what markets they want to serve.
I think part of the sexual repression I was talking about is a big reason why porn is so popular and why: "Things like claims "I didn't pay for this!" when a partner happens to see a charge for a pornographic product, buyer's remorse as the truth of a parasocial relationship plays out to an unsatisfying conclusion, whatever the reason" are so prevalent.
It is a sad thing and something that I really wish we could address as a society but corporate owned streaming sites/other social media are really not the place for this type of conversation because of the inherently ad revenue based structure of these sites.
Imagine there was a special type of a payment card that would work with only adult-content provider websites (aka porn). It would function sort of like a debit card, you can load up money on it from other sources, you can withdraw money from it at any time, etc. However, no chargebacks allowed (which are already not really a thing with regular debit cards anyway, it is mostly a credit card feature).
For bonus points, you can have some sort of a verification (maybe requiring 2FA, maybe something else) that would kick in every time you load money on that card, but NOT when you use that card to pay for anything. So adult content providers won’t need any verification to do on their part (aka you won’t need to give them any of your identifying info).
I guess what I am describing is literally just a quirky kind of a debit card/account that attempts to resolve issues that stem from the whole “chargeback of shame” scenario, thus making the transactions less high-risk for payment processors/providers. Which would, conversely, make payment processing less of a problem for the adult-content providers and, therefore, customers.
P.S. do adult-content providers currently have any issues with debit cards as the payment source? Asking because if chargebacks were the main concern for the payment processors (which would refuse to work with adult-content providers due to chargebacks making it high-risk), then by that logic they should have no problem with debit cards, since they feature no chargebacks. The only thing my proposal adds on top of that is the verification/dispute with the bank/card issuer would be done not on the level of each individual transaction for an adult service, but on the level of loading up that “adult-only” card (and what happens from that point on is not accessible to your bank). Which also makes the situation a bit less “embarrassing” for the customer too.
Why is twitch different from say deviantart where theres lots of non-pornographic art as well a significant amount of NSFW art?
Is this to say that the twitch community is more likely to draw CP compared to other online communities? Or perhaps that all porn should be banned across the web? I dont really understand why twitch should be different from any other platform where people share that kind of content
But the probably is... then Amazon is running a porn business and they'd be in loads of trouble.
A sister company of JustinTV and then they closed JustinTV because it didnt make sense
JustinTV started just as a single channel website showing the 24/7 irl livestream of one of the founders, Justin Kan. Then they slowly opened it up for others to be able to host their own livestream.
Bit by bit, some people started streaming games rather than irl. Very quickly, gaming became the most popular thing to stream there and overtook most of the platform.
JustinTV staff then spun-off gaming channels on JustinTV into its own new gaming-only platform, Twitch. For a while they were running side-by-side. But as Twitch started becoming more generalist and less gaming-only, yeah, it became clear there is no point in keeping JustinTV alive, if Twitch became their all encompassing superset of JustinTV.
I think the main difference is that Twitch and JustinTV didn’t have that much of a boundary in terms of content as SFW/NSFW split would. Their difference was mostly thematic, so it made sense to them at the time to eventually pool it all into one streaming platform.
But that’s where we currently are with the problem of what’s allowed in twitch and what isn’t. Unlike with SFW/NSFW separation, Twitch wasn’t created for the purpose of hosting content that wasn’t allowed on JustinTV. It was created because gaming started overwhelming any other content on JustinTV, and they wanted the original irl livestreaming content of JustinTV to not die due to it all being games. Games were allowed on JustinTV just fine before that. JustinTV was rendered truly pointless once Twitch introduced IRL and “just chatting” categories, as that was just essentially a “justintv section”.
Note: not disagreeing with you, you are correct. Just wanted to provide a bit more nuance to how it went down, as well as some context for why I don’t think that their separation approach would have the same type of an outcome as a SFW/NSFW spin-off would.
Hopefully the domination of that 'culture' will timely fade away.
It is a universal “i was in the moment and paid for a sub to a porn website, but the day after I regretted that decision and decided to make a payment chargeback/reversal and claim fraud” problem. Which is what leads to payment processors (Visa/MasterCard/Amex/etc.) designating adult-content providers as high-risk businesses, as each chargeback has a cost associated with it. And a good number of payment processors decided it wasn’t worth it to deal with them due to that.
If this was a uniquely US problem, then payment processors providing services outside of the US would have no issues with working with, let’s say, EU-only adult-content providers. However, something is telling me that Visa/MasterCard absolutely don’t care about the locality of service of any given adult-content provider, and neither do they care about any of the moral decisions here. It is all about the bottom line and the cost of doing business.
Hell, payment processors never even claimed any moral ground for refusing to work with adult-content providers, which would make sense for them to grandstand on for the boost in their public image, if the whole thing was truly due to some puritanism culture around nudity in the US. But nope, payment processors claimed as much that it all boils down to the cost of doing business with adult-content providers due to high chargeback rates.