Comment Re:What pisses me off (Score 1) 96
"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."