Unless it was just urban legend, VHS supposedly won out over Betamax because there was more porn available. It was the first “killer app” and helped make early rental stores profitable.
And similar things happened with all forms of the internet: Gopher, BBS (though maybe less so, it was before my time and so bandwidth limited), Hotline, the original cam girls and blogs.
It’s just porn, all the way down. That’s why it’s called the oldest profession.
Unless it was just urban legend, VHS supposedly won out over Betamax because there was more porn available. It was the first “killer app” and helped make early rental stores profitable.
That was just urban legend I’m pretty sure. The reason it was able to be made profitable by video rental stores, I believe, is because JVC was more willing to license out their technology than Sony, so it was cheaper and more available to the average consumer. VHS also came out with more/had more recording styles more faster, and was more willing to degrade the integrity of their system, and degrade video quality, compared to Sony.
I forget if this was the case to begin with, or if this was a retroactive codec/recording style, but you could watch a full home theater VHS copy of a movie with one VHS tape, compared to the two betamax tapes you would need. That contributes, on top of not being a more proprietary technology, to a cheaper overall price. You could also, at a certain point, record multiple hours of a basketball game, in really shitty quality, if you wanted.
Basically, VHS benefited from a sort of economy of scale, and you were able to record more for less money total, which was rapidly becoming more appealing and more relevant, compared to the marginal quality gains of betamax, as things like VCRs and more accessible home movies started to hit the home video market.
I think the only major hits betamax ended up having was sort of filling out a gap in more mid-quality video recordings for stuff like TV shows, on the production end, because they were of higher quality than VHS, but I don’t remember much about that.
The result of VHS’s open system still enabled porn to show up on it sooner. And that helped more dudes want to drop $1-2k on a VCR.
Beta_cam_ did live on as a TV video format, I used one in high school and our local cable access still ran on betacam S in the late 90s.
It was the same sized tape as Betamax, but ran at a much higher speed for better quality (more info per inch of tape), they even switched to digital at some point, but I’d move on to MiniDV in college by then.
Reddit allows people as young as 13 to sign up. It is also one of the biggest sites for OF marketing on the Internet, and the site itself is probably at least 20-30% porn depending on how you measure it. This isn’t even some hypothetical thing, you can go see people with 5 year old reddit accounts making posts like “now that I’m 18 I can finally show you my butthole.”
To be clear here my crusade is not against porn on Reddit, it’s against children on Reddit, and not because I care about guarding their virtue or anything, but originally because I thought reddit was better before it got infested with teenagers, and now because I want to see the site burn, so this seems like a good string to pull.
Without intentional effort to prevent it, every platform eventually becomes some level of this.
Youtube: remember when they had to scrap “reply” videos because they were all borderline NSFW spam?
Onlyfans: was originally intended to be a platform for fans of fashion, idols, etc. I guess they just embraced it since then.
Tumblr: banned NSFW content because they thought they were becoming a porn site and didn’t want to moderate that.
Reddit: Segregated it and relies on community moderation, because otherwise it’s like half of the front page.
Twitter: it’s still all over, under most popular posts. I don’t know if they moderate it out or not.
So is social media becoming porn just like entropy or something
Absolutely. I’d even say it’s media in general. TV shows, movies, advertisements. They will always get as close as legally allowed.
Unless it was just urban legend, VHS supposedly won out over Betamax because there was more porn available. It was the first “killer app” and helped make early rental stores profitable.
And similar things happened with all forms of the internet: Gopher, BBS (though maybe less so, it was before my time and so bandwidth limited), Hotline, the original cam girls and blogs.
It’s just porn, all the way down. That’s why it’s called the oldest profession.
That was just urban legend I’m pretty sure. The reason it was able to be made profitable by video rental stores, I believe, is because JVC was more willing to license out their technology than Sony, so it was cheaper and more available to the average consumer. VHS also came out with more/had more recording styles more faster, and was more willing to degrade the integrity of their system, and degrade video quality, compared to Sony.
I forget if this was the case to begin with, or if this was a retroactive codec/recording style, but you could watch a full home theater VHS copy of a movie with one VHS tape, compared to the two betamax tapes you would need. That contributes, on top of not being a more proprietary technology, to a cheaper overall price. You could also, at a certain point, record multiple hours of a basketball game, in really shitty quality, if you wanted.
Basically, VHS benefited from a sort of economy of scale, and you were able to record more for less money total, which was rapidly becoming more appealing and more relevant, compared to the marginal quality gains of betamax, as things like VCRs and more accessible home movies started to hit the home video market.
I think the only major hits betamax ended up having was sort of filling out a gap in more mid-quality video recordings for stuff like TV shows, on the production end, because they were of higher quality than VHS, but I don’t remember much about that.
The result of VHS’s open system still enabled porn to show up on it sooner. And that helped more dudes want to drop $1-2k on a VCR.
Beta_cam_ did live on as a TV video format, I used one in high school and our local cable access still ran on betacam S in the late 90s.
It was the same sized tape as Betamax, but ran at a much higher speed for better quality (more info per inch of tape), they even switched to digital at some point, but I’d move on to MiniDV in college by then.
Good to know, so it’s not all urban legend, a little bit of truth to it.
Also good to know about the betacam stuff, I couldn’t quite remember what the situation was there.
Instant nostalgia hit. Good times…
Human beings like sex. Any sufficiently large platform will naturally trend toward it if possible.
FTFY. I am genuinely shocked they haven’t been called out for this yet.
Intentionally curating the what now?
Reddit allows people as young as 13 to sign up. It is also one of the biggest sites for OF marketing on the Internet, and the site itself is probably at least 20-30% porn depending on how you measure it. This isn’t even some hypothetical thing, you can go see people with 5 year old reddit accounts making posts like “now that I’m 18 I can finally show you my butthole.”
To be clear here my crusade is not against porn on Reddit, it’s against children on Reddit, and not because I care about guarding their virtue or anything, but originally because I thought reddit was better before it got infested with teenagers, and now because I want to see the site burn, so this seems like a good string to pull.
Called out for what? Please, continue demonizing sex work.
They used to try, now they don’t at all.
The only thing they moderate is people calling musk mean names.
Pornification, the Carcinisation of social media …