alt.hn

4/24/2025 at 3:38:44 PM

Asymmetric Content Moderation in Search Markets: The Case of Adult Websites

 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5106235

by amadeuspagel

4/25/2025 at 11:20:00 AM

For a content platform it seems natural that a sharp reduction in content by 80% would reduce the number of visitors. I wonder how this would play out if spotify or youtube removed 80% of their catalogs.

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.

by belorn

4/25/2025 at 2:10:54 PM

> Remove 80% of the music there, and my bet is that music piracy would see a massive upswing, together with legal competitors.

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.

by gwbas1c

4/25/2025 at 3:39:52 PM

The special case of PH here was that it was close to the ""uncensored"" platform people claim to want: they used to allow anyone to upload anything, so most of their material was a huge pirate archive. Of course if you're not checking uploads then some of them are going to be CSAM.

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.

by pjc50

4/25/2025 at 3:53:52 PM

You have that duty if there's nudity or not.

by HeatrayEnjoyer

4/25/2025 at 4:12:51 PM

In theory, to some extent, but when's the last time you needed to submit documentation to post a picture of you and your friends at a restaurant?

by Dylan16807

4/24/2025 at 9:50:52 PM

> The shift did not take place immediately. Within six months, traffic at smaller, less regulated sites had grown by 55%, and at larger sites by 10%, with point estimates implying that the traffic was entirely diverted to competing firms. This suggests that regulating only the largest platforms may push traffic to fringe sites and less controlled spaces.

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.

by ssalka

4/25/2025 at 5:40:48 AM

Why are Mastercard/Visa even trying to police this? It's not the first time (Japan got famously hit by them hard), what is this puritan stranglehold.

by krige

4/25/2025 at 8:08:22 AM

PR risk. US evangelicals exert a lot of pressure to apply their particular censorship standards worldwide. The literal puritans.

by pjc50

4/25/2025 at 11:23:52 AM

It's not 1999 anymore.

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.

by potato3732842

4/25/2025 at 12:48:44 PM

Several US states have implemented adult ID requirements, in a way that seems less free than the past wild west.

by pjc50

4/25/2025 at 1:03:00 PM

That's political pandering in the face of a macro trend going in the other direction. Ain't no different than NY tightening up its gun laws after getting slapped in Bruen(sp?).

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.

by potato3732842

4/25/2025 at 7:52:02 AM

Because they have been pressured by the US Government to engage in censorship which is unlawful for the government to perform. See also: Operation Choke Point and Operation Choke Point 2.0.

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.

by nullc

4/25/2025 at 9:04:01 AM

Porn is notorious for the amount of credit card fraud that is happening. It is evident by the high fees that "adult friendly" payment processors charge. See https://ccbill.com/pricing

So: high risk of fraud, legal risks (financing child porn, human trafficking, etc...) and not great for the image of a "respectable" company

by GuB-42

4/25/2025 at 12:28:49 PM

Back in the mid 2000s I was the CTO of a large player in this industry. It's not true.

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.

by stickfigure

4/25/2025 at 11:21:53 AM

Any actual data you can share?

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.

by brookst

4/25/2025 at 2:27:42 PM

I mean from the processor's POV it hardly matters _why_ there is high fraud, just that there _is_ high fraud.

by rsynnott

4/25/2025 at 2:37:16 PM

Sure, and that's why rates are high. But the person I was responding to was asserting it in the context of "all porn is a massive criminal operation."

by brookst

4/25/2025 at 6:00:01 AM

Because otherwise they end up with criminal charges. Civil cases that result in monetary damages is one thing but executives going to jail is something they actually don't want to have happen.

by fragmede

4/25/2025 at 6:26:52 AM

This, incidentally, is the actual reason we need to decentralize the payments infrastructure. Because they can do this to not just porn -- something they're formally not allowed to prohibit -- but to anything else, behind closed doors, by leaning on the centralized payment intermediaries to censor whatever they don't like.

by AnthonyMouse

4/25/2025 at 6:34:51 AM

Last time I checked cash existed.

by throwaway290

4/25/2025 at 7:09:38 AM

Internet payments infrastructure provides more than cash can provide. It's also more than Bitcoin alone can provide. I'm talking about having at least some recourse against fraud and at least some attempt at resolving disputes.

Without chargeback or a similar mechanism it's "pay and pray".

by praptak

4/25/2025 at 8:40:55 AM

Chargebacks don't really do anything to prevent fraud, all they do is convert it into a fraud against the merchant. And the only reason there is so much credit card fraud is that the banks have a poor incentive to improve their security (e.g. include some cryptography that lets internet purchasers prove to the merchant that they have physical possession of the card), because the banks are foisting the cost of fraud into the merchants.

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.

by AnthonyMouse

4/25/2025 at 9:45:18 AM

This is a true story:

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?

by genewitch

4/25/2025 at 1:51:24 PM

In this case UPS is much more likely to be interested in this than the police. They will go after the employee who did this aggressively. And when UPS makes the report to law enforcement they will be much more likely to listen.

by fallingknife

4/25/2025 at 8:53:49 AM

> Without chargeback or a similar mechanism it's "pay and pray".

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?

by throwaway290

4/25/2025 at 6:56:55 AM

Yes, pay with cash on a website hosted across the world. Genius.

by krige

4/25/2025 at 12:36:06 PM

You know mail exists? Cash in the envelope is a thing

by throwaway290

4/25/2025 at 6:33:22 AM

Because they don't want to make money from CSAM and they have the right and freedom to choose who they do business with?

by throwaway290

4/25/2025 at 6:40:22 AM

Unfortunately no.

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.

by mijoharas

4/25/2025 at 12:32:26 PM

> the risk of chargebacks for adult content is much higher

Stop repeating this as if it is true.

by stickfigure

4/25/2025 at 7:25:07 AM

> I believe the reason for this is that the risk of chargebacks for adult content is much higher

Why do you think this is the case?

by aleph_minus_one

4/25/2025 at 8:21:44 AM

Sorry a very fair question. This is due to an article I read a fair while back asserting that. Let me see if I can find it or similar. Ok here is an HN comment (relevant section extracted from comment[0], full thread[1]) with some discussion on that.

> 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.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24294801

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24291790

by mijoharas

4/25/2025 at 10:17:06 AM

If you read your own sources, the thread your linked, the stories shared by people working in that industry make it super clear that the root cause is that payment processors are allergic to adult industry (ie porn) not higher chargeback risk. They specifically set low chargeback tolerance just for this industry. So how can you deny that it is about people's ethics and values. Of people who run corporations and people who are willing to sue them.

And it was ethics and values for Pornhub too. See my other comment or just look up what happened.

by throwaway290

4/25/2025 at 11:24:44 AM

People buy porn; spouses see credit card bills; people are performatively outraged and say it must be fraud.

by brookst

4/25/2025 at 7:30:42 AM

The classic example case is "honey, I don't know what this charge on our monthly expenses is I promise, look I'll charge it back" — ie cover up for an angry spouse.

by chownie

4/25/2025 at 9:53:19 AM

What you and mijoharas allude to is a cute urban myth. Pornhub never appeared as Pornhub on your bank statements and the same goes for every serious adult content site for decades. And if it was about chargebacks Visa would never even touch Amazon or AliExpress.

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.

by throwaway290

4/25/2025 at 10:12:23 AM

Mijoharas and I both mentioned the adult industry, you've closed the scope down to just pornhub for some reason -- essentially you're arguing some other argument no one else made.

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.

by chownie

4/25/2025 at 12:33:23 PM

pornhub is a good recent example of when payment processors ditched a major company due to csam scandal and this is very relevant to unregulated models.

> 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.

by throwaway290

4/25/2025 at 8:42:24 AM

This is actually easy to debunk.

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.

by throwaway290

4/25/2025 at 6:57:22 AM

CSAM? Let's see... no, both support payments on xitter so that can't be the reason.

by krige

4/25/2025 at 9:27:00 AM

Since this is the first time I hear of this I think's false.

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

by throwaway290

4/25/2025 at 10:20:38 AM

> 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.

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...

by chownie

4/25/2025 at 12:22:41 PM

>Because they don't want to make money from CSAM

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.

by potato3732842

4/24/2025 at 6:17:00 PM

Interesting abstract. I can see similar concepts applied to eg govt regulation, censorship, etc (only one side monitoring, other sides absorb content of the monitored)

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

by motolov

4/24/2025 at 6:28:56 PM

The whole document looks weirdly formatted, but you can click the red numeral in the placeholder text for the tables and figures to jump to the appendix where it is. Not sure if this approach is intentional. It's certainly weird.

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.

by Freak_NL

4/25/2025 at 2:20:22 AM

This always frustrates me about paper abstracts. Whether it's economics or AI, everyone seems to make a point of being as vague as possible, when it would sometimes take 1 tiny word to clarify it hugely . You'll see paper abstracts talk about how they analyze "an important and widely deployed commercial family of large language models (LLMs)" and then you have to skim 10 pages before you finally find out that they mean 'GPT'.

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."

by gwern

4/24/2025 at 6:39:09 PM

> 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.

by mcphage

4/24/2025 at 6:48:10 PM

Sure, but omitting it is like having a study about 'a dominant social medium' and not mentioning that it is Facebook or X in the abstract (or a study about radicalisation of young men focusing on 'an anonymous imageboard' and not putting 4chan or whatever in the abstract). These are for the most part unique beasts, not interchangeable venues.

It is relevant information for anyone scanning through dozens of abstracts on the topics addressed.

by Freak_NL

4/24/2025 at 8:01:12 PM

This is how some people in economics format their papers due to how some top journals require manuscripts to be. Source: I'm an economist (although I personally prefer to place figs/tables where they are supposed to be).

by dkga

4/24/2025 at 7:07:29 PM

I also find this annoying, but it‘s common practice to do this while a draft is still being worked on and not yet getting submitted to a journal (SSRN is ≈ SocSci Arxiv)

by bschne

4/24/2025 at 7:09:56 PM

Why isn't there a global-like open platform for science like ArXiv?

by tough

4/24/2025 at 7:49:56 PM

path dependency with fields having developed their own early on I guess?

by bschne

4/24/2025 at 7:53:50 PM

so are these like other fields don't use LaTeX but other formatting?

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

by tough

4/25/2025 at 7:21:48 AM

Some of it is formatting, some of it is just field dependent. SSRN is commercial and "good enough" for many people. It (at least used to) advertise itself as a social network for social science academics. There's also SocArXiv[0] and others, which are purer extensions of the arxiv model.

Part of the issue is that the arxiv doesn't want every discipline in science, so a certain amount of duplication is necessary.

[0]: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv

by pmyteh

4/24/2025 at 6:28:44 PM

i left reddit because i was tired of mods destroying communities (with "moderation" which is really just shitty curation by your shitty taste)

porn consumption is even more demanding. if you want "that release" you dont really care about the 2257

by nh23423fefe

4/25/2025 at 7:27:44 AM

This study is an example of how you don't do science.

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.

by trod1234

4/25/2025 at 2:15:10 PM

Huh. I remember that happening, but I'm very surprised that they lost significant traffic over it; I'd have assumed that porn was, if not fungible, pretty bloody close to it, and, well, they still have a lot of porn.

by rsynnott

4/24/2025 at 8:27:30 PM

> Our findings highlight how asymmetric exposure to content moderation shocks can reshape market competition, drive consumers toward less regulated spaces, and alter substitution patterns across platforms.

Or at least one very specific market and platform

by frankfrank13

4/25/2025 at 6:23:29 AM

[dead]

by bigbacaloa

4/26/2025 at 8:20:41 AM

[flagged]

by perkins222

4/24/2025 at 7:03:26 PM

"What do you do?" Study porn

by readthenotes1

4/25/2025 at 6:48:34 AM

> Study porn

At least they're not studying how to gobble data on everyone to sell ads with a 3 letter agencies backdoor.

by arkh

4/24/2025 at 8:02:27 PM

A: "I can't believe I caught you in that website!" B: "It's for research, really!"

by dkga