>Who are you to tell us what to believe?

Funny coming from someone whose title used to contain the word “evangelist.” Surely you understand the psychology working there. So you must know that you’re just sticking your hand into the tar baby.

Evan,

Some things you might not know about me. I was a fundamentalist Christian from 1984 through 1992. I know very well that I’m sticking my hand into the tar baby.

To Steve:

Jesus worried a lot more about society’s treatment of the poor than what sex acts we were doing with each other. At least if you believe that the bible was written by God (I used to be a fundamentalist Christian — and was from 1982 through 1992 — so have read the bible probably more times than you have).

Last week I visited New Orleans. What I saw there bothered me a LOT more than any porn site I’ve ever seen.

Are you doing anything about the poverty in our country? In the bible poverty is mentioned at least 200 times more than sex. So, are you writing 600 entries decrying poverty in our country for the three or four you’ve written today about this site, which contains fairly tame pictures as porn sites go?

Wow guys… what the hell does porn have to do with $deity?

By the way, a technology evangelist’s job (at least at Microsoft) isn’t to tell you what to believe. That’s hopeless to change. They were there to help you write software for the next version of Windows. I never told people they were going to Hell for using a Macintosh!

You should hang out here more often, Robert.

Sorry to get back to business/tech aspect of this - but have you noticed that this site seems to be a clone of the recently launched yourep.com?

Compare:

http://www.eroshare.com/nav/learn_more/
and
http://www.yourep.com/nav/learn_more/

Same FAQ-type page, etc.

What’s the connection here? Are they from the same company, or running the same software?

Might be nothing, but it’s curious.

Thanks Mike. I lurk a lot. It’s hard to participate in lots of other blogs lately. MOstly I’m just avoiding work (I have more than 500 emails to answer). Sigh.

I want to make out with Steve.

Most evangelism, in my experience, isn’t about seeing the glory of the deity so much as scaring the flock into submission on threat of torment if they don’t abide and pointing out how the heathens are damned. If you don’t write software for the next version of Windows, so the line would go, you’re going to suffer. Only difference is that might be true, financially.

Oh, and Jimmy: Without the annointed internediaries of $deity’s religion suppressing human sexual desire (a mutated meme from the days of scarcity and disease for the tribe), there wouldn’t be much need for gratification overload through images. God created the need for porn.

Michael,

I love how you have such a HUGE problem with the “ethics” of Payperpost.com but you have no problem promoting this garbage.

Do some research and you will find that thousands if not millions of children are abducted and forced into “porn” related acts that are video taped and spread all over the world to make money. I’m willing to bet that this site you just promoted and other like it will or already have TONs of this “porn” that is created using underage kids or whatever else. This is disgusting!

There is no good porn or bad porn because it all falls in the same boat. IF you promote one you promote them all.

Shame on you…which I’m sure you can care less as you posted this without a problem. When you fall don’t as why. You’ve lost this frequent visitor and I hope others will follow.

Maybe you should follow this up with an “ethics” lesson on why Payperpost.com is wrong.

Garbage: child pornography is illegal and any host that carries it can be shut down. Anyone who watches it, or distributes it, can be arrested (and regularly are). Most porn sites work hard to make sure no child porn appears.

Robert,

How does a user-generated porn site plan on identifying underage kids in these “homemade” movies?

Like I said…promote one and you promote them ALL.

“Oh, and did you know that 20% of all entertainment money goes to adult entertainment? And that your favorite communications companies, and, even, General Motors, make TONS of money off of porn? (I heard that General Motors owns some of the Satellites that transport tons of porn to hotels around the world). ”

Oh bullshit, Scoble. I expect this sort of stunt from idiots like Arrington, but I thought at least you had a modicum of class. Bringing your wife into this sordid thread hits rock bottom.

Porn is not a good thing. It is a predictable thing when a society confused freedom with libertinism. 90% of the world’s population knows this instinctively. Just because Europe and half of America choose to act like common beasts in the field does not make this OK. Humans are half angel, half animal. It is up to us which side we choose to emphasize.

You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Garbage: that’s a good question. But the human mind is pretty good at discerning when it’s a kid and when it’s an adult. It’s the same way we remove crap from Wikipedia.

Or do you look at a 30-year-old in a grocery store and have trouble telling whether she’s really an adult or not?

Why is everyone complaining about this site being listed? It helps to show that that TechCrunch in unbiased, which has been such a hot topic. It is relevant with web 2.0 and technology, what else matters?

@Garbage..
“Do some research and you will find that thousands if not millions of children are abducted and forced into “porn” related acts that are video taped and spread all over the world to make money. I’m willing to bet that this site you just promoted and other like it will or already have TONs of this “porn” that is created using underage kids or whatever else. This is disgusting!”
I find your comment is pure garbage!!

You can trust me on one thing. I will monitor for child pornography and have no problem reporting it instantly to Interpol. I already reported child pornography (including a list of 14.000 IPs) to Interpol. I have good contact to the police.

-eroshare dev.

Mike,

This site has 10 users, why are you profiling it???

Alex

Steve - “I expect this sort of stunt from idiots like Arrington, but I thought at least you had a modicum of class.”

great comment.

Alex - it just launched today. YouTube had just a handful of users the first time I wrote about them, too. As is the case with most startups. You have to start somewhere.

@Soso

“…what else matters?”

What else indeed? My own generation sickens me. Don’t any of you have daughters?

The big point here is that technical and economic barriers for producing and sharing sounds, pictures, text and video are being lowered in this arena just as they are for birdwatchers and sports fans. Along the way, they create new opportunities (can’t wait for what follows the EroShare APIs) and threaten existing players.

I wonder if EroShare will enable flickr-like measures of community. This is a context that normally raises a very high privacy bar. To the degree we see sharing groups, peer tagging, favoriting, geocoding and subscribing to friends, this will be a pretty novel online behavior.

@Morsa, Arrington is talking about EroShare’s technology and business. The adult content riding on top of EroShare is just one more market niche, and it has its constituents.

Feel free to make “societal good” arguments for or against explicit media. It’s just that they will be off-topic for this blog. You might be better served talking to the participants or their hosts on the EroShare site.

Please don’t confuse TechCrunch’s attention to technology diffusion and business innovation with the operation or endorsement of sites engaged in conduct you consider unbecoming. Let’s learn from everyone about what works and what doesn’t, what’s new and what’s changing.

In any event, thanks for sharing your thoughts.

@Mike, @Steve - Mentioning God or moral absolutism ain’t evangelizing. Morsa had a strong reaction to the sexual color of your post, shared his concerns, and got suckered into snidely defending/explaining himself. Neither of Morsa’s comments reads like an invitation to tea. But I bet there’s room for an extended discussion on morals in online community, and another on the markets made of the hundreds of millions who try to keep their hearts and minds occupied free of earthy stimuli.

By the way, Mike, I’m surprised that your inner lawyer gave way to your headline writer by calling it “porn” instead of a less charged word. Me, I like the old fashioned “smut” better.

Happy New Year, y’all.

- Phil

Steve: do you care about all the people in Africa who are being slaughtered as we speak? Or, the thousands who don’t have homes because of Katrina? Don’t any of you have any morals? Why don’t you do something about THAT before worrying about sex acts on the Internet?

@Scoble:

That may be the biggest non sequiter in web history. What in hell are you talking about? I donate time and money to my cousin’s ministry in upsate New York. They carry our missionary work in the poorest parts of the planet, including feeding and vaccinating children.

What that has to do with injecting pornography into a Web 2.0 blog eludes me.

>Bringing your wife into this sordid thread hits rock bottom.

She’s reading this too. Reminds her of growing up in Iran where fundamental religious people run everything (a friend of hers was beaten because he was simply caught riding in a car with a girl).

You can pick what kind of society you want to live in. I would rather live in one with true freedom than one where religious thought decides what I can do in my own bedroom (and whether or not I could share it on the Internet with others).

Yep

>What that has to do with injecting pornography into a Web 2.0 blog eludes me.

Because the bible I read when I was a church goer mentioned caring for the poor a LOT more than caring about sex acts (and, keep in mind, it was written thousands of years ago when community standards were a LOT stricter than today).

I left the church cause most church people I met don’t really follow the teachings of Jesus Christ. He’d be aghast at the beliefs of believers who feel that they need to push their own morality on other people.

If you feel this is against your morality, don’t visit it. Let your own life be a shining example to us all of what “clean living” gets us.

>a 30-year-old in a grocery store

30-year-olds aren’t the problem on “participant-generated” porn sites. 16-year-olds are (at least in the US). You’d be surprised how many (non-porn) models you see on magazine covers and in catalogs are 14 or so. Ask the “Girls Gone Wild” producers about this problem.

The wikipedia analogue doesn’t scan. Consensus reality isn’t so simple. If it were, all that noise above about God wouldn’t have been necessary.

@Scoble

“Reminds her of growing up in Iran where fundamental religious people run everything”

Extremes in either direction are equally bad, Scoble. I am not advocating censorship or anything like it. However that does not mean I need to just go with the flow over the obscene degradation that passes for entertainment these days.

Sexuality is a sacred gift and trust. It should not be splayed all over the web like so much fertilizer for those with no spiritual values.

Florian,

You’re just another drain on society and even if your site is successful financially your life is and always will be empty. You are garbage!

You’re no better then the drug dealer on the street corners.

Sad to see it promoted.

Steve-

Tell me what daughters have to do with technology or how they play any role in determining what would be listed on this site. Should we restrict what we discuss and review just because it doesn’t sit well with us? I certainly dont think so. I must say that there is not much reasoning here.

@Scoble:

“If you feel this is against your morality, don’t visit it.”

Another completely bogus argument. You can make the same argument against KKK sites. They exist, and I don’t visit them because they are utterly repellent and beneath contempt. I certainly hope Arrington won’t be posting links to neo-Nazi sites if they start using Ajax.

Steve - you are starting to scare me. In a you might show up on my doorstep to show me the wrath of God kind of way. You made your point. Other’s made their’s. Let’s all let it go now.

@Soso

“Tell me what daughters have to do with technology or how they play any role in determining what would be listed on this site.”

Daughters–women in general–are harmed by pornography. It cheapens something which should be treated with the utmost reverence and respect. Sexuality is a sacred bond between a man and a woman.

The issue is the other way around: what does Web 2.0 have to do with porn? Would you countenance ANYTHING as long as it had Web 2.0 content?

You don’t live in a vacuum.

@Arrington

“you might show up on my doorstep to show me the wrath of God kind of way”

Not to worry, Arrington. I’ll save my thunderbolts for Steve Ballmer. Go on back to your porno.

Robert,

Nobody is saying they don’t care about the poverty issue in the world. Even though that is always a good one to discuss and debate.

The issue at hand is the promotion of a website that is garbage!

“You are garbage!”
That is your point of view and I’m fine with that.

About the always empty life I must disappoint you - it is rather the other way around.

“You’re no better then the drug dealer on the street corners.”
Got to disappoint you on this one too - we don’t have drug dealers on our street corners.

Hi folks,

I haven’t been sure how much web2.0 people are general interested in the adult industry, so I haven’t mentioned it here until now. However, anyone interesting in this field my want to check out my site at http://www.playfulbent.com

It’s adult social networking, erotic image exchange, collaborative erotic fiction authoring, and something a bit like an online ‘truth or dare’. The site is written in Ruby on Rails, uses AJAX heavily, and aside from the fact that it doesn’t have a white background, could certainly be considered to be web 2.0.

We’ve been featured on fleshbot.com and tinynibbles.com, and have had a slow and steady increase in community size throughout the year. Anyone interested in aspects of our technology or business is welcome to drop me a line at craig at craigambrose.com

Steve Macdonald,

Great point!

I’m going to throw together a website that is a social networking hub for all the great racists organizations our there and jazz it up with some awesome “web 2.0″ tools and maybe Michael will promote it?

Nobody should have a problem with that right? Maybe Mike can point that it has TAGS for all the popular racists terms!

Brilliant!

Great Arrington. Now you’ve opened the floodgates.

Mike: you can’t argue with these people (and I speak from experience since I used to be one). They are not rational thinkers. They see the world in black and white. If you are debating with them they think you are heathen and beneath them — note how “Garbage” is using rhetoric with Florian, a guy I know to be very upstanding. They don’t consider that you have rights to believe anything different than what they believe. Some, on the outer fringes, will go so far as to kill those who don’t believe with them (note the abortion doctor murders).

They don’t really care about the human condition. If they did, they’d be rebuilding some house in New Orleans right now and they’d be a lot more concerned about violence on TV than sex acts.

In my experience these people don’t even read the bible they all profess to believe in. Again, that book doesn’t care about sex all that much. It worries far far far more about poverty and the way we treat each other.

I’m out of here. In my experience arguing with these types just makes them more frothy and they start telling their friends to come over to help out in the fight (and they have a LOT of friends).

All arguing aside, you have to admit that it is a good idea because it entertains users, rather than just get them to create a profile.

Steve - sorry, but people who are too into their religion and forcing it on others creep me out. Too often religious types resort to violence in the belief that God is on their side. When people start to get frightened of you, it may be time to chill out.

@Arrington:

That is a complete crock and you know it. It’s also yet another indication of what a dim-bulb you are. It’s not hard to see through such transparent passive-agressive nonesense.

Ooh! A Christian! I’m so afraid! He might come to my doorstep!

Bullshit.

You have every right to flaunt porn on your blog. It’s a free country. And I a have every right to express the opinion held by hundreds of millions of people: pornography is degrading and unhealthy.

Save your disingenous “fear” for someone else. If you want me to drop the subject, I will. But act like a man about it.

Wow! Did some people have a BAD New Year’s Hangover today? I thought this was suppose to be a fun post you made! I linked to it on my blog, and at this point, I can’t believe all the hate in the world on New Year’s day 2007.

Rex

Mr Arrington is entitled to his own opinions just as everyone else is able to. If he finds pay-per-post to be contemptible but not borderline porno site that aims to induce lust and not much else, then that’s entirely his right to hold down to those views.

Maybe this is my opinion about Mr Arrington that I wish he would embrace a bit of social responsiblity as a recognizable online publisher to have a better taste for your selection choices, that’s all

Robert,

If your idea of “upstanding” is someone who owns and operates a porn site…WOW! What’s your idea of an “ok” person?

Like I said before you keep referring to OTHER topics like I don’t care about them too. I’m going to stay on topic and just let you know you’re NOT the only one who cares about the poverty issue…are you currently building a home for someone in LA? If so that’s awesome.

Scoble, your repeated assertion that because the fundies here are asserting their concern about the subject at hand (porn) they must not be engaged with the moral concern foremost in your mind (poverty), is the same fallacy that whatshisname was asserting earlier with the sex/violence false dichotomy. It is just as shallow a viewpoint as their own.

Previous posters were correct: this is being reviewed because it has gradients and rounded corners. Other sites have been doing this for years now so there is nothing noteworthy here. But they’re smart to use the Web 2.0 terminology and make references to Flickr to get a plug on TechCrunch.

Hopefully they’re prepared to do a lot of monitoring if this takes off. Although it looks like they’re hosted in the United States, they’re apparently not US-based and probably don’t feel the need to comply with the Section 2257 record keeping laws. But if this does become a haven for illegal content, they shouldn’t expect that the EU will shelter them. The bigger issue I see is copyright. For any truly devious person out there, just upload some pictures from Perfect 10 and let Perfect 10 know that their content is being posted on EroShare. Won’t be long for EroShare to start receiving takedown notices and letters from attorneys.

So again, this is not a new or novel idea, and from a business perspective, considering the potential legal and financial liabilities, isn’t as “sexy” as it might appear.

[deleted]

[deleted]