"Think of the children" really was just the excuse. The people who passed these age check laws just have a problem with porn. The actual fallout from it though, wasn't really worth lighting the torches and sharpening the pitch forks over.

"Free" porn sites have mostly gone to shit ever since they realized it's just too much a liability hosting user-provided content. The credit card companies threatened to cut them off permanently, since advertising/sponsorships/etc. alone wasn't enough to remain profitable, that was the end of that. There hasn't been anything good on PornHub since the purge anyway.

Semi-paid sites require the ID check if you want to freeload. This would mostly be the chat-n-wank type cam sites, where interactivity is very limited if you're not a paid member (usually involving the purchase of on-site currency tokens), and even most of the entertainers will boot out free members who haven't bought a ticket to watch anything more titillating than the cam entertainer just sitting there looking bored.

Nothing much changed with paid sites. The content locked behind a paywall is still locked behind a paywall.

Sites that technically aren't porn sites by virtue of the amount of non-porn content they host (such as Reddit and X), still have porn without the age checks. It's all mostly people hawking their OnlyFans and Fansly pages, though.

Yeah, you can get upset about it over the principle of the thing, but the heyday of free porn on the internet is over. ChatGPT compared it to the run that the original Napster had, and honestly, I'd concur. As to today's teens missing out, they're probably all sexting each other naughty pictures anyway. I don't think they're going to be deprived of being their usual hormone-driven selves just because PornHub now says "papers, please."

Freemium gaming is just weird in that they're trying to find "whales" - people who spend ungodly amounts of money on the game. Their whole business model depends on getting as many copies of their game in front of as many eyeballs as possible, in the hopes that someone has the right mix of addictive personality and pocketbook size that it pays off for them.

Porn is mostly not like that. Yeah, there's purchasable tokens on adult webcam sites, where the entertainers work for "tips" and the site takes a cut of the action, but it's still a bit up in the air if you'd truly lose those customers without the free preview access. Heck, the entire concept of free porn is mostly an internet thing. In ye olden days, you'd go into your local House O' Fappage and if that copy of "Busty MsBoobFace III" on VHS you bought wasn't doing it for you, well, caveat emptor.

Even outside of porn, the business model that's used by all the major streaming wars participants seems to work just fine without a free access tier. In fact, the bottom paid tier in many cases still has ads. Yuck.

It actually used to be free to watch "old" South Park episodes before Paramount bought the rights. Of course, these days "old" IP is now back catalog to make your streaming service look like it has more content, even if most people are just signing up to watch the latest new hotness anyway (like Disney's Star Wars: Yet Another Character We Pulled From Our Arse, Paramount's Star Trek: Beating a Dead Horse, but in Space, and of course Netflix's Stranger Things: Damn, These Kids Got Old).

The second you sign up for a paid account you've ceased to be anonymous. These sort of age verification laws don't affect people who have paid access to porn sites.

I specifically did say that free content is mostly used in the context of attracting new paid customers. However, a lot of businesses get by just fine without giving away free samples, so it may not be the end of the world for paid adult sites if the freebies go away.

If hosting unverified user-provided content wasn't a huge legal problem, there'd be more porn sites still willing to deal in it. Even in the non-explicit content realm, it's damned hard to turn a profit hosting user-provided content unless you're absolutely raking in the advertising revenue (it also helps to be owned by an advertising company, in the case of YouTube). Plus, with porn, you're very limited in the types of sponsors who are cool with their product being hawked right next to someone being reamed out with a dildo. That's not exactly something Geico or Coca-Cola is going to want associated with their brand, if you catch my drift.

The YouTube-style business model might just be dying for porn sites, but it was on its way out even before age verification laws entered the chat.

That's really the important distinction here though - it's about access to free porn.

I'd assume that signing up for a paid account meets the age check requirements, so it would seem the sites are just losing the freeloaders. Sure, that'll eventually bite them in the ass when they can't use free explicit content as a means of attracting new potential customers, but the immediate negative effect on their revenue is probably not that significant.

At any rate, I'd have to wonder how profitable it really is to run a free porn site anyway. Seems like you'd need to get most of your content for free, and that presents its own massive set of problems (such as people uploading content that is underage and/or non-consensual), which is why PornHub purged all its unverified amateur content.

Probably just by association with Disney. Because one month out of the year they put up pride murals in their parks, sell a few pieces of overpriced made-in-China rainbow colored kitsch, and once slipped a lesbian kiss into a movie that no one would've even noticed if social media hadn't made a huge stink out of it.

So yeah, "woke" in this context often means "this company acknowledged marginalized people exist in a way that made someone on X mad, but perhaps not in this specific film."

All the complaining about it online turned out to be impotent rage (pardon the pun). As near as I can tell, people just did the damn age checks or signed up for a VPN and that was the end of it.

There's that old joke about if they removed porn from the internet, all that'd be left is a page saying "bring back the porn!" Well, it turns out that the wankers/fappers/gooners/[whatever euphemism the kids are calling it these days] are just a vocal minority and political backlash is negligible.

It's obviously location dependent. Even where I live in deep red Florida, minimum wage is presently at $13/hour and even no-skill jobs start higher than that (usually around $15/hr). A studio apartment starts at between $800-$900/mo, which is doable on $15/hr, though you're not going to have much left over.

I'm not saying that's an ideal situation to be in, but as long as someone is willing and able to work they're not ending up on the streets. Now I'll totally agree our social safety nets suck when it comes to if someone truly isn't able to work, or if AI does end up causing massive job loss, but for the moment the sky hasn't fallen.

Again, it's location dependent. Some cities really do have a situation where rents and income are so broadly out-of-proportion that you could end up homeless if you didn't have the good sense to get out of Dodge while you still can. I've never lived anywhere that was the case, so no, I haven't experienced that. From my perspective, if you can work, you'll be able to put a roof over your head, even if it's just a roof over a miserably small studio apartment.

Rsilvergun tends to deal in half-truths. It's entirely possible for someone with a less established financial situation to end up losing their home, but losing one's home does not necessarily lead to homelessness in the sense of "you'll be shitting on the sidewalks of San Francisco". More often than not, as long as someone is still able to maintain some sort of gainful employment, they'll just have to downsize to something more affordable.

I'd call his statement "truth adjacent" (as ChatGPT is fond of putting it). It's true that experiencing financial hardship can result in losing your house, but for most people that just means ending up in an apartment or becoming someone's roommate, not holding up a sign by the highway exit saying "Will suck dick for crack".

Since it's kinda on-brand for this discussion, ChatGPT says 53–62% of working class Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck. Now, that doesn't mean you end up homeless after one missed mortgage payment, but it is really hard to get back on the treadmill if you've suffered a major loss of income. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. I was laid off during the Great Recession, couldn't find anything else that paid nearly what I needed and had to short-sell my home.

Usually people don't lose their homes if they have other expenses they can trim from the budget and keep their note current. It generally is something that results from a loss of income, such as being out of work long term from an illness or a major downturn in the job market.

I mean yeah, if you can fire up the time machine and buy a house back when it didn't take up a huge chunk of your income, then I suppose it might truly be an issue of just being bad with money.

Facebook's already got prior art in this department.

Plus, I don't think the normies are using ChatGPT yet. If it doesn't have short format vertical videos, their limited attention span won't allow it.

They tried that. Elio is looking to be a massive flop.

Obligatory South Park episode (which is presently unavailable to watch for free, due to Paramount being a ginormous sack of dicks).

You can always take those old records off the shelf and sit and listen to 'em by yourself. There's no shame in it. Hell, I've been re-watching ST:DS9 lately.

Nobody is forcing you to watch it. Superhero movies can be fun, but IMHO this just looks like another *meh* reboot, so I'm in no rush to spend money to see it. I can wait for the WEB-DL to hit the high seas.

I mean you can go over to /r/conservative on Reddit to see what that side of the aisle is thinking. Mostly it boils down to "Yeah, I disagree with Trump on $ISSUE, but I still wouldn't vote for a Democrat."

That's tribalism for you.