Category: online

2018 Year in Review – Pornhub Insights

Welcome to Pornhub’s 6th annual Year in Review, our complete recap of the trends, tech and types of porn that logged us on and got us off in 2018. If you’ve followed our Pornhub Insights blog you already know that 2018 was an epic year with lots of searches, celebrities and events that influenced how people around the world have enjoyed visiting and using Pornhub.

Follow along to see the most interesting data points amassed by our team of statisticians, all presented with colorful charts and insightful commentary. Enjoy!

2018 Year in Review – Pornhub Insights

Social Media Is Making Us Dumber. Here’s Exhibit A. – The New York Times

This week, a video surfaced of a Harvard professor, Steven Pinker, which appeared to show him lauding members of a racist movement. The clip, which was pulled from a November event at Harvard put on by Spiked magazine, showed Mr. Pinker referring to “the often highly literate, highly intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right” and calling them “internet savvy” and “media savvy.”

The clip went viral. The right celebrated; the left fumed. The neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website ran an article headlined, in part, “Harvard Jew Professor Admits the Alt-Right Is Right About Everything.” A tweet of the video published by the self-described “Right-Wing Rabble-Rouser” Alex Witoslawski got hundreds of retweets, including one from the white-nationalist leader Richard Spencer.

“Steven Pinker has long been a darling of the white supremacist ‘alt-right,’” noted the lefty journalist Ben Norton. “And he returns the favor.” Others reacted to the rumor with simple exasperation: “Christ on a crutch,” said the liberal commentator and biologist PZ Myers, who also wrote a blog post denouncing Mr. Pinker for this supposed alliance.

The idea that Mr. Pinker, a liberal, Jewish psychology professor, is a fan of a racist, anti-Semitic online movement is absurd on its face, so it might be tempting to roll your eyes and dismiss this blowup as just another instance of social media doing what it does best: generating outrage.

But it’s actually a worthwhile episode to unpack, because it highlights a disturbing, worsening tendency in social media in which tribal allegiances are replacing shared empirical understandings of the world. Or maybe “subtribal” is the more precise, fitting term to use here. It’s one thing to say that left and right disagree on simple facts about the world — this sort of informational Balkanization has been going on for a while and long predates Twitter. What social media is doing is slicing the salami thinner and thinner, as it were, making it harder even for people who are otherwise in general ideological agreement to agree on basic facts about news events.

Social Media Is Making Us Dumber. Here’s Exhibit A. – The New York Times

Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence? – Scientific American

The digital revolution is in full swing. How will it change our world? The amount of data we produce doubles every year. In other words: in 2016 we produced as much data as in the entire history of humankind through 2015. Every minute we produce hundreds of thousands of Google searches and Facebook posts. These contain information that reveals how we think and feel. Soon, the things around us, possibly even our clothing, also will be connected with the Internet. It is estimated that in 10 years’ time there will be 150 billion networked measuring sensors, 20 times more than people on Earth. Then, the amount of data will double every 12 hours. Many companies are already trying to turn this Big Data into Big Money.

Everything will become intelligent; soon we will not only have smart phones, but also smart homes, smart factories and smart cities. Should we also expect these developments to result in smart nations and a smarter planet?

Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence? – Scientific American

‘Fauxcest’: The Disturbing Rise of Incest-Themed Porn

Utter the word “incest” and most people will shudder, ill at the thought of being intimate with a family member. The fantasy of incest isn’t socially acceptable; it’s one of the extreme taboos, which could help explain why titles such as Forbidden Family Affairs, Mother Son Secrets and My New White Step-Daddy are topping the porn sales charts. Fictional incest porn, better known as fauxcest, is on the rise—a dark, dirty desire that’s certainly not for everyone.

Over a century ago, Sigmund Freud suggested most people have unconscious incestuous urges that need to be repressed. Though most of Freud’s theories have been discredited, if recent data on porn viewing habits is any indicator, he may have been onto something. Leading adult content providers GameLink.com reported a 178 percent average increase in the consumption of “family role-play porn,” while 1 in 10 purchases made by young adults on the site were for fauxcest titles.

Feminist pornographer Jacky St. James has embraced the controversial genre, calling it one of her favorites to direct. “It’s the one taboo that can’t really be explored in real life safely. This will be forbidden no matter what you do,” she says. “Because of that there is this allure of the untouchable, and what’s untouchable to us is often the most appealing.”

‘Fauxcest’: The Disturbing Rise of Incest-Themed Porn

Talkspace online therapy grew 80 percent faster since Trump elected

Business has been booming for online counseling start-up Talkspace ever since President Donald Trump was elected.

Talkspace, which launched in 2012, has been growing 70 to 80 percent faster than projected since November 2016, according to CEO and co-founder Oren Frank. Most of the callers have been millennials, with an average age of 33 to 34.

On Election Day itself, the company had five to seven times more customers than usual, and it had three times the normal volume on January 20, Inauguration Day.

“There’s been a lot of anxiety and stress, which may have been there before,” Frank said. “But it’s definitely been triggered by Election Night and the Inauguration.”

Talkspace lets people work with mental health professionals over the internet. Plans — which start at $32 a week and don’t take insurance — allow customers to select a therapist who they correspond with online.

Talkspace online therapy grew 80 percent faster since Trump elected

What becomes of the brokenhearted when they are ‘catfished’ online?

There was a period in my life when I watched a lot of Catfish. Signed off work, I’d lie on the sofa mid-afternoon and watch people lie from their sofas in the American midwest. It’s an MTV reality show following the trails of suspicious lovers. Someone calls the presenter, Nev, and says: “The girl I’m in love with, maybe she doesn’t exist.” Nev performs some science on their text messages, does a Google image search, drives a while and ends up in a dusty suburb crippled by the closure of an abattoir, on the doorstep of a hoaxer, a teenage boy half delighted finally to be noticed.

There have been five series, each with up to 20 episodes, with another series premiering this week. So that’s 100 hearts broken online right there, with 20 more about to air; 100 people who have fallen in love with strangers they’ve only spoken to in emojis, who would totally visit but have a disorder that makes them melt in daylight, who have broken webcams, or Nokia 3210s, or another perfectly valid reason for not being real. It’s not just on TV. It’s happening across the world, every day, right now.

The Guardian

Why People Believe in Conspiracy Theories

Did NASA fake the moon landing? Is the government hiding Martians in Area 51? Is global warming a hoax? And what about the Boston Marathon bombing…an “inside job” perhaps?

In the book “The Empire of Conspiracy,” Timothy Melley explains that conspiracy theories have traditionally been regarded by many social scientists as “the implausible visions of a lunatic fringe,” often inspired by what the late historian Richard Hofstadter described as “the paranoid style of American politics.” Influenced by this view, many scholars have come to think of conspiracy theories as paranoid and delusional, and for a long time psychologists have had little to contribute other than to affirm the psychopathological nature of conspiracy thinking, given that conspiricist delusions are commonly associated with (schizotype) paranoia.

Yet, such pathological explanations have proven to be widely insufficient because conspiracy theories are not just the implausible visions of a paranoid minority.

Scientific American

To Understand Facebook, Study Capgras Syndrome

We start with the case of a woman who experienced unbearable tragedy. In 1899, this Parisian bride, Madame M., had her first child. Shockingly, the child was abducted and substituted with a different infant, who soon died. She then had twin girls. One grew into healthy adulthood, while the other, again, was abducted, once more replaced with a different, dying infant. She then had twin boys. One was abducted, while the other was fatally poisoned.

Madame M. searched for her abducted babies; apparently, she was not the only victim of this nightmarish trauma, as she often heard the cries of large groups of abducted children rising from the cellars of Paris.

As if all this pain was not enough, Madame M.’s sole surviving child was abducted and replaced with an imposter of identical appearance. And soon the same fate befell Madame M.’s husband. The poor woman spent days searching for her abducted loved ones, attempting to free groups of other abducted children from hiding places, and starting the paperwork to divorce the man who had replaced her husband.

 

Nautilus

Daddies, “Dates,” and the Girlfriend Experience: Welcome to the New Prostitution Economy

A growing number of young people are selling their bodies online to pay student loans, make the rent, or afford designer labels. Is it just an unorthodox way to make ends meet or a new kind of exploitation?

…

“The girlfriend experience” is the term women in the sex trade use for a service involving more than just sex. “They want the perfect girlfriend—in their eyes,” says Miranda, the young woman at our table.* “She’s well groomed, cultured, classy, able to converse about anything—but not bringing into it any of her real-world problems or feelings.”

Vanity Fair

I have found a new way to watch TV, and it changes everything

HAVE a habit that horrifies most people. I watch television and films in fast forward. This has become increasingly easy to do with computers (I’ll show you how) and the time savings are enormous. Four episodes of “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” fit into an hour. An entire season of “Game of Thrones” goes down on the bus ride from D.C. to New York.

I started doing this years ago to make my life more efficient. Between trendy Web shows, auteur cable series, and BBC imports, there’s more to watch than ever before. Some TV execs worry that the industry is outpacing its audience. A record-setting 412 scripted series ran in 2015, nearly double the number in 2009.

“There is simply too much television,” FX Networks CEO John Landgraf said last year. Nonsense, responded Netflix content chief Ted Sarandos, who has been commissioning shows at a startling rate. “There’s no such thing as too much TV,” he said.

So here we are, spending three hours a day on average, scrambling to keep up with the Kardashians, the Starks, the Underwoods, and the dozens of others on the roster of must-watch TV, which has exploded in the age of fragmented audiences. Nowadays, to stay on the same wavelength with your different groups of friends — the ones hating on “Meat Chad” and the ones cooing over Khaleesi — you have to watch in bulk.

Washington Post