A couple of 20-year-old developers make $500,000 a month promising to help men to stop watching porn, but exposed their private porn watching habits.
not the predictable outcome or a predatory marriage of capitalism and puritanicalism
HAHA they logged their whackin’ off activity into an app to upload that data to the cloud. Did they not ever think “what could go wrong with this?”
People just really let the damn phone apps run their whole lives don’t they. I’m so glad I got to grow up before smartphones existed.
Wow this comment section is actually awful. If you’re somehow seeing this early on in the list: get out of here before it’s too late. There are some really, really toxic takes in here.
You’re right! Holy fuck people are fucked. I want to respond to each of them and tell them so but there’s no point. I can’t educate them hard enough. I’ll have to settle for this release valve here.
You weren’t kidding, it’s baffling how they came to some of these conclusions.
People are so fucking weird
Repression is what does it. Check out Japan after our puritanical takeover. They’re… different now.
Masturbating I get, becoming addicted to something you enjoy I get, using a third party app to try to break your addiction seems dumb but I get how desperation can make you dumb
What I absolutely can’t get is what anyone could productively do with this data. Like, I don’t even think blackmailing someone with this could work. The worst you could say about someone with it is that they had a porn habit they didn’t like and were trying to change it, and anyone rational is just gonna say “I don’t see what’s the big deal with watching porn, but good on you for attempting some kind of self improvement I guess.”
Most people are not really rational, though, so the blackmail would still work very well.
Oh No NaKeD mAmMaLs
I’d imagine someone who watches something illegal would be judged pretty harshly by their peers even if you can’t deny that they were trying to seek help. Like, if someone were to seek help for homocidal thoughts, and their employer and friends found out, I can’t imagine they’d have a job and many friends left. If there are any influential people who used this app, and were into some unsavory things, I could definitely see there being some blackmail going on.
Got to give them a hand. They really found a vast and **untapped **(emphasis) market.
“Porn addiction” is being pushed by fundamentalist christians, to force a complete total porn ban, nothing more.
Sex addiction, to some degree, is literally coded into your brain, unless you’re a certain kind of asexual.
What would you like it to be called then when someone spends 4+ hours a day, 5+ days a week masturbating to porn, feels terrible about it, tries to quit, and then immediately caves and falls right back into the same cycle?
How do you think a person like that feels when they’re hit with all these accusations the second they open up about wanting their normal life back? Reading these comments honestly makes me sick. Just fucking imagine the backlash if almost any other mental-health issue affecting tens of millions of people got ridiculed here the way porn addiction does.
I’m sure you can find recovering alcoholics who equally advocate for alcohol prohibition, but you’d have to be out of your damn mind to jump on someone the moment they mention cutting back on drinking and start accusing them of being a puritan or whatever. Yet somehow that passes for sound logic when it’s about someone trying to quit porn.
Prior to Christian fundamentalists influencing the academic world in the last couple decades, there used to be a distinction between “addiction” and things like “compulsory behaviors” or “habits”.
Alcohol has physiological withdrawal symptoms.
Calling this out is not to undermine those who have real behavioral issues, but to highlight the malicious influence of these very real and VERY well-funded groups. This isn’t some conspiracy theory- there are plenty of documents from government agencies about how sexual restriction and shame is used to control people. The Islamic State pretty famously used this in their recruiting and training programs to radicalize people.
The fault lies not with porn, but with societal repression of sexuality. There will always be people who have behavioral issues- most of which are not sexually related. And any well-functioning society should have the resources available to help those people.
Here’s a person “addicted” to eating drywall. Should we pass laws mandating age verification for purchasing construction materials now? Should we make a bunch of apps with sketchy security to help people track their drywall eating habits?
Nobody here is advocating for banning porn or even restricting anyone’s access to it. I’ve never met a single person struggling with what I call porn addiction - whether it clinically qualifies as addiction or not - who wants to restrict other people’s access to it.
There doesn’t need to be any ideology attached to one’s personal desire to quit or cut back on their porn consumption.
That is always where the argument goes. That is what the Christian Fundamentalists that u/ZILtoid1991 was referring to are calling for. It starts with claiming that this is some huge problem plaguing whatever country they are in, and inevitably leads down the road of invading privacy and authoritarian control.
Are you seriously not able to acknowledge that some people simply want to fix their own lives and don’t care what others do with theirs? Does everyone talking about their porn addiction have a secret agenda? Is that really what you think?
That’s an entirely different thing, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersexuality
Also see my other comment: https://lemmy.world/comment/22596497
Your justifications for these views fall quite deep into the conspiracy land.
Wanting to quit / cut back on porn is not synonymous with being anti-porn and “hypersexuality” is not an official medical diagnosis neither.
Same. The nofap thing always felt wrong to me. You cannot claim publicly that you don’t masturbate unless there is some kind of “god will be happy if I behave well according to the bible or some other shit.”
US has always been weird about sex. If it weren’t for alcohol, it would never happen.
look it up, corn flakes and Graham crackers were both designed to prevent masturbation.
I think they’re pretty effective. Have you ever tried to masturbate with corn flakes and graham crackers? It’s rough.
100% effective when they put a big picture of Marjorie Taylor Green on the box.
These are some wild takes I have only ever seen on lemmy. I mean you can argue about the need for public proclamation, but “nofap” has a lot of self-esteem, social benefits. There are two different worlds, one where you fep, the other where you are giddy and horny and fepless.
“NoFap” doesn’t really refer to any masturbation addiction program as much as it refers to a specific community on Reddit that very much is pseudoscientific and the mods have promoted right wing candidates.
The benefits are all either “I personally have self esteem issues from masturbating, likely due to religious norms” or “I’m overthinking the concept of a refractory period.”
and the mods have promoted right wing candidates.
What does that have to do with anything?
It means they suck as people, and generally have compromised morality.
Human rights are a “Left Wing” concept these days in general. Right Wing bastards are quite literally ruining our world.
I see. I wasn’t really too aware of the current reddit community. Personally, my empirical evidence is simply if I don’t fap, I feel more energetic, happy, searchful, and of course, horny. Makes life nicer. Was not religious for all of my conscious life. Fap is just an addicting task like others (lots of dopamini for little effort). Best if not wasting the time, but damn it’s sure good once in a rare while.
You could argue that the stigma on Masturbation fuels the self esteem etc problems and the improvement once people address it.
If it works for some, great!
Btw not saying there isn’t a lot of rotten stuff about the porn industry, sexy-economics and stuff. Still, just gaving a good wank is great.
Pretty sure you can comfortably argue the whole thing. No doubt there are benefits both sides depending on the individual and their circumstances, but I have never heard anyone outside internet even mention “nofap” or equivalents. I know zero people who would’ve even just mentioned it. So anyone I have ever known would also have these “wild takes”. Pretty sure none of them are in lemmy, and it’s not much wider a set if I include those that realistically could be but I just don’t know. So I’ve only ever seen your take in memes about incels and now, in lemmy, right here.
Nooooo not the gooners.
First they came for the gooners, but being gooners they already came themselves.
🥹🥲
its creators, Alex Slater and Connor McLaren, did not fix its security issues despite multiple requests and an offer from an independent researcher to help them fix the problem.
FUN! How much ya wanna bet this was vibe-coded?
It was, but the actual problem I have with the app is that it had 90% margin. Talk about quick and dirty cash grab.
Once you learn how to CODE, you’ll realize how dumb it is to blame everything on AI.
Once you learn how to code, you’ll realize how dumb it is to vibecode.
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Right. It’s called using AI. Not letting your vibes make decisions. Glad you agree.
The vibe coding thing is a meme that originated in what devs at Microsoft said about how they develop while using AI, if I recall correctly. So vibe-coding has become synonymous with using AI to write the majority of your code.
Vibecommenting?
I’m confused why you linked a Wiki article that reiterates almost exactly what I said? Think the only difference is that it was originally coined by the dude who helped start OpenAI.
And no, most major dev teams aren’t “vibe coding,” but that’s where it becomes a meme. People use it as an insult as well for shit code.
Regardless, your main argument here that “real devs aren’t vibe coding,” is irrelevant, as the people in the original article don’t seem to be competent devs. It’s very possible they used AI-slop code; but, even if they didn’t, they did a piss-poor job so it might as well be insulted as such.
“The software developer describes a project or task in a prompt to a large language model (LLM), which generates source code automatically. Vibe coding typically involves accepting AI-generated code without reviewing it, instead relying on results and follow-up prompts to guide changes.” A.I. written code. Software devs normally check the code for bugs not just accepting whatever code is thrown at them with no checks. It is why real developers are making money fixing the A.I. bullshit code.
Right. Actual vibe coding is rare in real development. Especially large companies. You’d know this if you were a developer. But it’s much more fun to complain about AI with such… “confidence.”
it’s called using AI
Oh, I thought it was called “another AWS outage”
AWS had outages before AI. But since you know nothing about software development, I’m not surprised you thought that.

cope
I wish I could be as dumb as you.
One of my biggest gripes with coding AI like Claude is how desperately polite and flattering they are. I wish there was a way to feed it hand written code to analyze for bugs and security flaws, then have the AI relentlessly roast your shitty code.
"LMFAO, you dumb b!tch! Are you trying to get hacked and sued, by <insert dumb shit here> or are you just that stupid? Here are a few steps you can take to fix your shit code and have it adhere to standard coding practices. "
Sounds like Linus needs to pivot to make his own Claude clone…
So i was reading a thread from the linux kernel mailing list where linus pointed out someone’s coding mistake and why it would lead to a bug…
So i fed the patch email into google gemini pro, and it spotted the same bug as linus
I thought that was interesting.
That exact Linux kernel mailing list was pretty likely fed into the AI as training data.
This was an email from last week. No way gemini already had linus’ solution as part of its training data
Hey ChatGPT, respond to all of my inquiries like my toxic abusive uncle. The more vicious the response the better. Withhold praise. Pretend it’s opposite day and give me your best compliments in the form of the life-long truama that I have come to associate with authority figures.
Here’s my code. What do you think?
“I don’t have fingers to touch your butthole, Starry”
I figured out a way to do this, via Alpaca.
In Alpaca you can set an LLM with a persistent prompt.
Basically, I just told the thing hey, you’re too sycophantic, often needlessly verbose, and often overly confident… can you generate a prompt for yourself to address those issues?
Roughly 30 minutes of trial and error along those lines later, now its quite matter of fact, and is at least more likely to tell me when it is aware it is making an assumption, and ask me for clarification or if i can give it more context, and it doesn’t do the kind of weird, intro and outro paragraphs where it basically just reassures you that your ideas are wonderful and you are valid and i just think the things you say are so interesting!
Then, you feed it a script, ask it do a sanity check, and it will generally go through and identify strenghts and weakness of the code, at least as it perceives such.
Beyond that, Alpaca recently introduced a … character system, that is ostensibly tailored toward making specific kinds of conversational chat bots… but it also introduced a kind of ‘dictionary’ system, where you can give it a kind of additional permanent reference knowledge, to associate with certain terms.
I have not tried this yet, but, I’d be willing to be that you could say, jam that with a bunch of examples of syntax and methods from a particular language or library… and my guess would be that you could thus tailor a ‘character’ that is more up to date or specific to some domain.
So… you could give it the main prompt of something like “You are a tsuntsun senior programmer who has nothing but contempt for any coding mistakes, and you pride yourself on coming up with entirely novel insults for each inadequacy you notice.”
… And then give it a ‘dictionary’ that pertains to syntax, methods, perhaps even broader concepts…
And that might actually produce your desired vicious asshole senior programmer persona.
Of course, this is not going to work for like, an entire massive codebase, unless you’re the one stockpiling all
mythe RAM.But for smaller projects or just single scripts… it might kind of work.
can you generate a prompt for yourself to address those issues
Vibe vibing
You can give it rules.
I work with Gemini a lot and I told it to cut all the polite crap out and just give the facts I need.
On the rare occasion I use LLMs, I just wish they would respect my request for a list of like twenty bullets and nothing else, instead I get two paragraphs of bs and four bullets.
I don’t think it will ever cuss at you, but your can have it be more critical. It say to me all the time, “this or probably a bad idea, before I do this, consider this alternative” (paraphrasing)
But don’t you see how many upvotes that got them?
I don’t see votes. And I assume you agree with everything that is upvoted like a good little slave?
I was being facetious and taking your side - thanks for insulting me for it.
That’s what a /s is for bud.
Yeah, totally my bad that you’re being a mean jerk.
Fucking dorks lmao
Ftr, women do this too with their menstrual cycles. Stop using apps to report your most intimate info and then being surprisepikachu.jpg when they harvest your data lol
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can we stop weaponizing “therapy speak” buzzwords for every, single, thing.
That isn’t victim-blaming, that’s not what that word means. Your stretched use of it here isn’t helpful outside of self-serving to show everyone that you know the word “victim-blame”, further diluting the word until it’s meaningless jargon speak. Stop.
EDIT: Folks very fairly pointed out the dismissiveness of my wording, and y’all are right. While I do think therapy can and does help with addictions of any type, my wording about guilt rather than addressing the actual addiction only served the humor I was going for and wasn’t respectful for the condition. I’m leaving what I wrote as is below mostly because the quip about birding and boobies still gives me a chuckle.
Men will do literally anything other than go to fucking therapy. Jesus. Guys. You’re allowed to watch porn, let’s just direct the fear of people finding out into finding ethical porn you don’t need to feel guilt for. Or better yet, pay for your porn and support creators directly.
Also find some hobbies that get you out of the goon cave. Take up fucking birding and go find some different boobies.
Therapy is incredibly expensive and most people can’t afford it. You don’t understand how privileged you are if you can afford it
True. I make right around 20k a year and manage to scrape together $155 per visit to my therapist. So I promise I know it’s expensive. I do still think lots of people, of all genders/presentations, that could be in therapy and should be, aren’t and at no fault of their financial situation.
There’s even great tits!
I’m more of a blue tit kind of guy
Not just tits, bushtits too! And boobies of course. Can’t forget the mighty cock.


Hmm. Might need a bird addiction app.
Come to NZ and see a titipounamu, morepork, kaka
Are there any ASMR puppy play birds?
I suppose an appropriately trained parrot might do.
Porn addiction has nothing to do with feeling guilty about porn or masturbation, and if you think that’s the problem you have no business pronouncing on it.
Yeah. You’re right. I added an edit because a handful of people have called me out. Ty for the correction.
To be clear though, you should just watch the birds.
Most ethical porn is furry porn hahaha
You’re allowed to watch porn, let’s just direct the fear of people finding out into finding ethical porn you don’t need to feel guilt for.
I mean, YMMV on that ethical porn business. I’ve found that to be more of a marketing gimmick than anything I can sleep soundly on.
Might just settle on not feeling guilty for beating off.
I mean if you pay a creator directly I don’t see how that could be unethical
But also, every job under capitalism is unethical. The system is fucked but people still need to eat, so you know, choose your evil I guess
I mean if you pay a creator directly I don’t see how that could be unethical
Plenty of actresses and cam girls - particularly those working overseas - are managed directly by pimps or by agencies that function no differently. Plenty more are exploited indirectly in the same way Uber and Lyft exploit their drivers - treated as contract labor, underpaid, and subjected to abuse both off and on camera.
The system is fucked but people still need to eat
Sure. “No ethical consumption under capitalism”, yadda yadda.
And there’s plenty of arguments for why direct sourcing has better broad economic incentives. But Hugh Hiefner played this game with Playboy sixty years ago, insisting everyone was paid well and treated respectfully. And that was the softest of soft core. Turns out his organization was barely a step above the guys making porn videos for Times Square.
You make the best decisions you can. But at some point you have to recognize that you’re buying a narrative as much as anything.
For you first paragraph I mean, fair, I guess I had an inexplicit assumption that you’re gonna vet the creator/know them (like, say, from social media). Ofc it doesn’t guarantee everything but. Maybe I shouldn’t have said “I don’t see how”, it’s strong wording. I know sex workers irl so it’s them I had in mind.
But still, yes, you’re right, things are, as usual, always a bit of a mess in our world.
you’re gonna vet the creator/know them
I mean, sure. If you know the person IRL for some reason and you’re just sending them money for nudes in a sugar daddy relationship. Idk how common that is in practice though.
But just going on OnlyFans and opening your wallet isn’t any more ethical than hitting up a strip club.
But still, yes, you’re right, things are, as usual, always a bit of a mess in our world.
I mean, that’s half the reason for decriminalizing sex work. So you’re not offering up police/prosecutors and associated regulators as leverage over people doing the actual work.
Yup that is mostly marketing bullshit. As long as the creator is having fun it’s ethical to me, still keeping in mind that selling your body is not good but still legitimate because of the system we live in
It never ceases to amaze me how incredibly dismissive people on this platform are toward those suffering from porn addiction. Just imagine telling an alcoholic there’s nothing wrong with drinking beer or that they should “just get some hobbies.”
I can only come up with very cynical reasons for why, of all addictions, this particular one gets ridiculed - even by people who probably consider themselves empathetic and compassionate.
You’re right. I added an edit to give credit to the multiple people calling me out. I 100% jumped on the opportunity for humor. I stand by the core point of people, not just men, needing to be more open to therapy as an option, but amounting the addiction to just feeling guilt for watching porn was disingenuous. Ty for the correction.
It’s exceedingly rare for anyone to acknowledge their error online these days - and for that you have my respect.
Probably because all of the loudest people talking about porn addiction like to pretend there is no difference looking at porn a few times a week and spending multiple hours every day trapped in a goon cave that you can’t peel yourself out of.
You’re not wrong, but like gambling, porn addiction exists, but that goes to your first point about therapy. I don’t understand why anyone would load this type of information into an app. I assume it’s ignorance to technology, which is sad, but I can’t help but think how anyone would think it’s a good idea.
Most people don’t really even think about privacy.
Sad but true.
Porn / sex “addiction” does not exist. Some nice folks who were super invested in proving it gave up a while back.
Most people have perfectly average porn / sex use, and are shamed by a partner or cultural messages.
A small percentage of people deal with “OCSB”, out of control sexual behavior.
I disagree, but that’s fine. There are people that squeeze porn into every open minute of their lives, sacrifice relationship is because of it, and spend more than they have to view it. If that’s not addiction, then we might as well say that any non-chemical vice can’t be considered one, like gambling.
Just because many people don’t seem to notice their addiction that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. The methodology used to disprove the existence of porn addiction is just to completely and utterly ignore all the people who experience it and than claiming it doesn’t exist
Reading through this thread has been a bizarre experience - I genuinely couldn’t have imagined the amount of pushback you get here just for speaking up for people struggling with this. It seems exactly the kind of thing I’d have expected deep compassion for, given the userbase here.
Still, my conclusion is that much of it boils down to the term “addiction” - since it’s a medical term, people seem to think that once you medicalize it, you’re paving the way to ban it.
Personally I don’t care what term we use. If people prefer “compulsive porn use,” then fine. For me the point has always been the lived experience of what people mean when they talk about living with a porn addiction - even if it officially doesn’t count as one. In my opinion it does, because it checks virtually all the boxes of the standard definition: you need more of it, you seek out more extreme stuff, you get cravings when you stop, and you keep going long after the negatives have started to outweigh the positives. If that’s not addiction, then I don’t know what is.
Its crazy that everyone is comfortable with the idea of social media being able to cause an addiction, but when the said social media is about sexually explicit content, it automatically becomes ultra healthy and extremely good with no limits and its use always legitimate and to encourage. Porn sites are, at their core, still social media designed with the very intention to keep people into the loop of consumption. Porn sites don’t profit from people who use it every once in a while but to users who watch it hours and hours of it on a daily basis
Then we can argue to the fact that it’s is technically an addiction or not, but if you got all the symptoms of an addiction, if it impacts your life and you still do that even I it means postponing important things of your life, craving it inappropriate moments and constantly feeling the pulsion to do that no matter what even in public, THAT IS AN ADDICTION! I have seen firsthand people who have COMPLETELY changed just by removing porn, including myself. Again, not removing sex or masturbation, but just removing EXCLUSIVELY porn (and maybe increasing how much they have real sex in real life). It can definitely change your life to the better. Moreover, the guy who linked the studies is acting like porn isn’t a multi-billion dollars industry managed by huge corporations with basically unlimited power
I haven’t read any such study myself, but it sounds like a BS study. Anything that controls a person’s life can be considered an addiction. There are certainly people where porn has controlled their lives. One person who’s been very vocal and brutally candid about how it was ruining his life is The Primeagen, a coder on YT. My best friend’s father died in huge debts because he was buying copious amounts of porn outside of his means, and phone sex lines. That’s addiction.
We are talking about sexual addiction and bro linked studies about average and moderate use of adult content lmao
I understand people have big feelings about sex / porn. At present addiction is a narrowly defined medical issue; the NIH has some great information about it, and some cool brain scans! The science, (PET and fMRI) disagree with the feeling porn / sex qualify as an addiction. Researchers and clinicians do recognize that some people are profoundly impacted by sex / porn, and acknowledge it - OCSB, out of control sexual behavior. Researchers and clinicians want to have a better understanding / definition of OCSB, but it’s very difficult to get funding for research into sexuality.
David Ley talks about this in numerous books.
Mayo Clinic - https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/compulsive-sexual-behavior/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20360453
NHS mentions behavioral addiction - https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/addiction-support/addiction-what-is-it/, but oddly doesn’t support it in the IDC-11 🤷♂️
The American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT) - https://www.aasect.org/position-sex-addiction
Grubbs, J. B., Perry, S. L., Wilt, J. A., & Reid, R. C. (2020). Sexual addiction 25 years on: A systematic and methodological review of empirical literature and an agenda for future research. Clinical Psychology Review, 82, 101925. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7044607/
Prause, N., Pfaus, J. G., & Steele, V. R. (2021). Viewing sexual stimuli associated with greater sexual responsiveness, not erectile dysfunction. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 130(7), 742–749. https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/abn-abn0000501.pdf
I have more, but I’m at the wrong device
Light hearted blog post if you don’t want to dig through research - https://www.livingauthenticity.com/post/sex-addiction-isn-t-real-here-s-what-the-science-actually-says
I’m not saying someones sex or porn habits might be causing harm, but please consider the confounding variables defining why it’s considered harm. Consider who is most often reporting the harm. And, please, keep in mind there is a multi billion dollar industry (not considering churches), out there who want to convince someone their behavior is problematic and can be fixed for a nominal fee.
Thanks for the resources. I will read through them when I get a chance to give them a fair read. Just on the surface, it feels like the term addiction is too narrow, or perhaps there should be a better word that encompasses compulsive behaviors that control one’s life. Things like food addiction, gambling, porn, gaming, or literally anything that is done to an unhealthy amount feels like it should be grouped as addiction to me.
Addendum: The terminology: OCSB - out of control sexual behavior, seems to be slowly losing favor to CSB, compulsive sexual behavior.
Again, competent clinicians and researchers are not denying anyone’s experience, or that sex / porn can on occasion be problematic. There is a movement to more appropriately label distressing sex / porn use.
Ahh yes, an “everyone needs therapy because I do” fool.
Never said everyone. If someone is battling addiction, therapy is generally a good idea.
At least they’ll be jerking it with some sunshine.
Giving a business details of your most intimate private life. What could go wrong!?
$500k a month?!
To literally do nothing but jerk each other off.
No, no, they were trying to NOT jerk off
I’m as straight as could be but fucking sign me up.
Straight as spaghetti till it gets wet

So say we all.
Hmmm
Not just, they’re watching and keeping track, too
I’m in the wrong industry.
Need to find a grift like this…
Sometimes I think that myself - I’m probably capable of building something like this. But then the problem is that I am not a total piece of shit so I just work a regular job and live ok while people like this buy a new yacht.
… Should have just rented out chastity cages.
There’s a way to get around that, usually through the backdoor.
Right. That just leads to a pegging addiction.
Free to read from somewhere else(The first link i found on duck duck go). https://mashable.com/article/viral-quittr-app-to-quit-masturbation-exposed-sensitive-data
404media is a super high quality new independent news source and they specifically broke this story as they’ve been breaking a ton of big stories (it seems like at least one per week) since they started up. It’s run by a bunch of former Motherboard (Vice News) reporters who broke tons of big stories for Motherboard back in the day.
It sucks that it’s paywalled but journalists have to eat too and as an independent media company they don’t have the option of operating at a loss that, say, Arstechnica can as a subsidiary of the behemoth Conde Nast which itself is (was?) a subsidiary of AT&T




















