Re:Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
by hnlmorg on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @03:04AM
(#26011605)
Pre-2000 porn was a wild ride. You were never more that 1 click away from crashing your computer under the weight of a hundred pop ups!
Re:Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
by codezero on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @03:15AM
(#26011662)
And the implicit threat of your bank “outing” you via the transaction if you try to cancel. I may be misremembering but I felt like there was a good chance what I was viewing legally may end up suddenly illegal with the way online legislation was going in the late 90s, and I’m talking just like laughably soft core stuff by comparison to today, and that permeated the online porn business and kept it seedy for a long time.
Re:Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
by dialamac on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @04:11AM
(#26011916)
No idea what you’re talking about. There was the run up to the communications decency act and obscenity prosecutions but these were far more risky for the peddlers, not the consumers (and some were prosecuted). There was the old hilarious CP80 initiative by the Mormons (with a nice tie-in to the SCO v Linux debacle) but that never had any serious legs to stand on. Meanwhile discreet billing for naughtiness predates the internet and was especially notable in the days of 900 numbers - assuring discretion was pretty well stated. Considering that child porn was essentially legal and you could walk into adult stores in broad daylight on Times Square not too long ago I think you are misremembering things or probably too young for context.
What changed is the cultural mainstream acceptance.. that something like PornHub can be a mainstream company. The market itself was alive and well pretty much the day after the movie camera left Menlo Park.
For context, squatters would often land you on some bad sites and URI syntax was unforgiving, so it just isn’t something I remember most doing. There was a general desire for simple branding on the off chance you can get it typed in or printed on a business card or in an ad, but it was not the common entry point.
Also of note: UX expectations back then didn’t trust typing into a box and seeing any result first - it really was the solid ranking of Google results that made that UX something browser vendors adopted or more cynically, that Google pushed first with partnerships then with ownership of Chrome.