| ▲ | Asymmetric Content Moderation in Search Markets: The Case of Adult Websites(papers.ssrn.com) |
| 76 points by amadeuspagel 18 hours ago | 39 comments |
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| ▲ | ssalka 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | krige 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | pjc50 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | PR risk. US evangelicals exert a lot of pressure to apply their particular censorship standards worldwide. The literal puritans. | |
| ▲ | GuB-42 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 | |
| ▲ | nullc 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | fragmede 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | throwaway290 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Last time I checked cash existed. | | |
| ▲ | praptak 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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". | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | genewitch 20 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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? |
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| ▲ | throwaway290 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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 a 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? |
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| ▲ | krige 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes, pay with cash on a website hosted across the world. Genius. |
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| ▲ | throwaway290 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Because they don't want to make money from CSAM and they have the right and freedom to choose who they do business with? | | |
| ▲ | mijoharas 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | aleph_minus_one 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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? | | |
| ▲ | mijoharas 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 | |
| ▲ | chownie 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | throwaway290 12 minutes ago | parent [-] | | What you and mijoharas allude to is just 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. Read why Pornhub was ditched in 2020/2022. Trigger alert, it involves rape and trafficking victims. |
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| ▲ | throwaway290 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. So no. It's about making money from abuse material. Some people have values. Corporations are run by people. |
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| ▲ | krige 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | CSAM? Let's see... no, both support payments on xitter so that can't be the reason. | | |
| ▲ | throwaway290 38 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | motolov 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | Freak_NL 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | gwern 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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." | |
| ▲ | mcphage 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | Freak_NL 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | dkga 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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). | |
| ▲ | bschne 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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) | | |
| ▲ | tough 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | Why isn't there a global-like open platform for science like ArXiv? | | |
| ▲ | bschne 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | path dependency with fields having developed their own early on I guess? | | |
| ▲ | tough 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 | | |
| ▲ | pmyteh 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 |
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| ▲ | nh23423fefe 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 |
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| ▲ | trod1234 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | frankfrank13 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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 |
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| ▲ | readthenotes1 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| "What do you do?" Study porn |
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| ▲ | arkh 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Study porn At least they're not studying how to gobble data on everyone to sell ads with a 3 letter agencies backdoor. | |
| ▲ | dkga 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | A: "I can't believe I caught you in that website!"
B: "It's for research, really!" |
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