Powerpoint pornography

After the yahoo/tumblr news I thought it might be interesting to share some of my thoughts on mainstreams internet companies and how they handle adult material. I have an insiders perspective on this, having helped develop several mainstream consumer internet products inside large software companies. I’ve also many friends in companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook that I’ve swapped war stories with.

From an outsiders perspective it’s often tempting to see these kind of companies as either incompetent, prudish, evil or mercenary. Sometimes all at the same time. In reality, while there are no doubt a few employees who meet that description, most of the developers are smart people trying to build the best product they can. When it comes to adult material there’s typically no broad censorious urge to remove it. These companies do huge amounts of data mining and certainly know just how popular it is. You can bet that Google continually tracks the number of queries with adult intent and has dozens of metrics tracking just which sites and images porn surfers prefer. No sane company leader wants to screw over a big percentage of their users if they can avoid it.

The problem comes from the general corporate culture around building software. It doesn’t mesh well with our social culture around adult material. Specific problems I’ve seen include…

• A lack of champions.
  Product features often get added because someone says – ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if it did X?’ They get people excited in the idea and the feature gets added. But it’s tough to stand up in a meeting and effectively announce your sexual preference by saying something like – ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we had fetlife integration and I could track all my kinky friends and BDSM events?’
• No dogfooding.
  Dogfooding is an industry term meaning to use your own product internally and find bugs before your customers do. But who wants to file bugs based on their sexual habits? It’d take a brave man to file a bug entitled – “Our new shopping application didn’t return the butt plug I was looking for in its results. All returned plugs were too small in girth. Please fix.”
• No bragging rights.
  It’s fun to show off what you’ve built. Both formal and informal presentations on new features are a good way to get noticed and promoted. But if your new feature is pornography related, then those screenshots get a little trickier to compile. Nobody wants to spend an hour writing a presentation and then 4 hours carefully drawing black bars over all the genitalia in it.
• No pressure to prevent regression.
  People who don’t like adult content are often very vocal about it. The same is not true about people who do. So when someone complains to Google that his daughter has been traumatized while doing a school project on hairless cats, there might be pressure to fix the results returned for “bald pussy“. It’d be tough to be the person in the meeting speaking up on behalf of all the one handed porn surfers spanking it to bare pudenda.

Almost all modern software development is collaborative and iterative. Creating features and improving a product involves suggesting usage scenarios and brainstorming what would make a more compelling user experience. Yet sharing our sexual thoughts and preferences is very much frowned on socially. The Yahoo VP who loves browsing tumblr porn is probably not going to mention that fact. The Yahoo VP who hates the risk of being associated with tumblr porn is probably going to be very vocal about that fact. So the debate is unbalanced and lots of small decisions gradually add up to a deteriorating service to users wanting adult content.

Given the post topic, an office type shot seemed appropriate. This is of course the lovely Mistress Eleise de Lacy from Femme Fatale films.