The Day The Pornocalypse Came For Sex Stories
On December 21, 2020, the popular adult user-upload site xHamster had 219,000 sex stories in its database:
Five days later, all those stories were gone. The URL had went 404 Page Not Found. (With a cute hamster, naturally.)
Generic 404 text says “Sorry, this feature is technically unavailable due to technical reasons.” But that’s boilerplate. Three and a half months later, the sex stories are still gone. Sorry, people, they ain’t coming back.
Was this truly a #pornocalypse situation? xHamster isn’t talking, but signs point to yes. The biggest (and presumably most profitable) part of xHamster’s offering is its tubesite-style video content, which they monetize, presumably, in all the usual tube ways. In December of 2020, other large tubesites were targeted in a coordinated media campaign that used questionable content on their sites to successfully interrupt their credit card billing access via Visa and Mastercard. My guess is that xHamster saw that attack go down, did a quick internal review of vulnerabilities, and removed the entire erotic stories section out of fear that unpleasant content in there would open them up to similar attacks.
Story sites, as all who frequent them know, accumulate some really bizarre stories when not moderated. I don’t use the word “perversion” lightly, but I feel safe in saying you will get a comprehensive tour of human perversion when exploring any really big story site. The notorious and long-ago arrest of Jake Baker for posting snuff stories to alt.sex.stories notwithstanding, sex story archives have frequently been an “anything goes” medium for over-the-top erotic expression. Blood-on-the-walls splatter-gore, cannibalism, piss and poop and vomit, incest between people of all ages, and other squicky stuff that’s too odd to describe in a few short words: it’s all in there.
Now, I never frequented xHamster’s offering, and thus I can’t say whether or how well they moderated their stories. Maybe they didn’t have any of the wildly perverted stuff. Odds are, though, whatever they did have panicked them. They saw other tubes under attack, and it dawned on them how readily their most unpleasant story content could be weaponized against their billing. Since the stories likely weren’t much of a profit center… Boom! The pornocalypse came, real sudden-like.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=26761
Their stories were pretty shit. I’m more upset about the gradual decline of asstr
It sounds like the way unlocked comments forms get filled with spam unless monitored?
My adrenal glands burned out their capacity for outrage early in the pandemic.
Except these stories are not spam; they are people sharing their (unpleasant, to most of us) fantasies. If a story site doesn’t set out to exclude that sort of thing, the people posting the stories are using the site as it’s offered.
Asstr seems to be down as well?
I mentioned that on Twitter a little while after posting this. “The ancient and venerable Alt. Sex. Stories Text Repository at http://asstr.org being currently down also has my hackles up, but I have no info. It was up as recently as a week ago, and has been visibly-creaky for years due to relying on donations.”
I always thought XHamster’s stories were just mirrors of the stuff at XNXX’s story site.
I do think there will be a moral panic about sex stories sooner rather than later, but I’m 100% certain it’s going to happen once some conservative figure ends up reading the contents of their teenage daughter’s Wattpad library.
Or possibly when they find out about fanfic at AO3…
Per one of the authors on alt.sex.stories.d, “A reliable source tells me that it is not a technical problem and restoring access is being worked on.”
The DNS address itself is down and they seem to be registered with a big, high-reliability provider (Afilias) (https://afilias.info/about-us), so… while I’m not ready to put a nail in that coffin, I am worried about the implications.
( That last comment relates to ASSTR, sorry )
Adrian, I really appreciate the update from A.s.s.d. While my worry does not go away, “restoring access being worked on” is better than “we’re drinking and crying and singing songs of memorial around the flaming hole where the server used to be.”
There is a slightly technical workaround that can let you browse the site, but it’s far from great and who knows how long it’ll stay available that way.