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Im looking at porn with a woman I met on the internet.
Bodies grind and groan in their windows, holding positions with dexterous ease.
Kelley is a UX and AI product design director who I connected with via email.
Sites like Pornhub obviously want to monitor our engagement by providing one dopamine hit after another.
Its all about fast consumption and clicks, says Kelley.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
What appears under-designed is in fact highly strategic.
Sites like it are so immediate, says Kelley.
From your search results, you know whats about to happen in a video.
And then you continue to click.
Our culture very rarely talks about what is meant by porn.
Like all the data giants, porn tubes are designed to increase attention retention and time on site.
The longer viewers browse, the more data they produce.
The design patterns of mainstream porn sites
In consumer culture, variety is the illusion of choice.
It instills the belief that youll eventually find what youre looking for.
And in browsing and searching, you stay for longerfinding other products along the way.
Porn tubes function on this same seductive principle.
Keilty likens porn tube design to IKEA, with its carefully plotted consumer pathways.
We see those features on all kinds of sites, but they originated in porn.
Data, on the other hand, first entered porn after the rise of YouTube.
Its the same company behind every one of the tube sites Ive been browsing.
As a result, its increasingly difficult to make a living as an independent pornographer.
And how precisely does MindGeek monetize all its data?
Well, it provides all kinds of services, and not just for porn, says Paasonen.
If everything goes according to plan, MindGeek will actually design the UKs national age verification system.
The first to make it were independent entrepreneurs and a range of individuals distributing and producing for various platforms.
To many, the landscape was liberating.
As a result, the taxonomy of categories in porn has grown rather diverse, says Paasonen.
A certain porn literacy has come into being.
Acts that used to be marginalkink or subculturalhave grown instantly recognizable through online indexing.
In a way, its a dual process.
The tubes are a web of contradictions.
Theres not much transparency in terms of what gets pumped up to the surface in the results.
The live search resultslook very, very different from the listings of the most popular terms, adds Paasonen.
MindGeek is not a listed company, so it does not have to release its data.
The sites are therefore driven by what is most profitable and whats deemed most popular.
