Tube sites are killing Rule 34, according to smut scientist Ogi Ogas via the Washington Post. (No joke: he researches porn at Harvard.) Rule 34, if you aren’t apprised, is one of the Rules of the Internet developed on 4chan’s /b/ board, stating that “there is porn of it, no exceptions.”
That’s theoretically true, according to Ogas, but creative, diverse porn no longer really flourishes online. Its heyday was in the mid-to-late aughts. Around 2010, though, tube sites became the go-to way to access porn, and because they’re easy, free, and use the same sorts of algorithms that sites like YouTube and Netflix do to offer the viewer content that the tube figures they’ll like, most people’s quirky sexual tastes have taken a back seat to mainstream porn that also satisfactorily quenches people’s need to jerk it.
Leonard Delaney, author of Tetris porn and Clippy porn (and forthcoming erotica about the white supremacist chatbot Tay), told the Post that despite his own professional experience with weird porn, he doesn’t think that Rule 34 is anything but theoretical — until someone writes porn about Rule 34. Which I think means that Leonard Delaney has just challenged the internet porn ouroboros to eat its own tail — pun intended.
Original by Rebecca Vipond Brink
