That is a load a bs. If anything, it has been enabling for me. Any business that wouldn't want to hire me based on the incredible scalability experience I gained from working on a super high traffic/revenue project, isn't a company I would want to work for anyway. Nothing I did was black hat.

I was in the business pre-tube. I learned a lot too.

It’s probably very different now but affiliate shaving, spamming, cpc fraud were all ubiquitous in the late 90s/early 2000s.

May 2006 - April 2010

Yes, we had to deal with all of that as well. Also built a lot of automated tools to deal with those sorts of things. My favorite one, I named 'the cockblocker'. ;-) This sort of experience you just can't get elsewhere and has been extremely valuable for me.

That sounds crazy to me. I'd be much more interested in a conversation with a devops engineer from pornhub than one from YouTube.

I was in web hosting, we hosted over 120k sites at our peak. Rent a /21 for a week? No problem. Interesting times for sure.