Comment by cm2012
2 days ago
It's just a statistical correlation. Who loves porn demographically?
1) Men.
2) Men age 18-40 in particular.
3) No evidence for this but in my experience tech people tend to like porn more than others for whatever reason.
So a survey of HN users would show more pro-porn respondents than a survey of the UK or the US or EU as a whole.
> No evidence for this but in my experience tech people tend to like porn more than others for whatever reason.
This does not jibe with my experience. I think perhaps your experience is not a representative sample of tech people. But mine probably isn't either. So it's pointless for either of us to state an opinion here based on our experience with our own slice of tech people.
It's kinda funny how this is a subthread about how YouGov's polling on the Online Safety Act is flawed, but we're committing the same exact sins ourselves.
Tech people? I have met utter goons obsessed with porn that barely understand how their phone actually works.
A lot of them work in Westminster.
Old news, but I suspect there hasn't been a sudden outbreak of puritanism.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/mps-peers-and-staff-...
In a number of recent polls in English speaking countries young men have been one of the strongest anti-porn demographics actually. I think HN being tech adjacent with the history and practical reality of how the internet works along with being more libertarian (or at least liberal) is going to bias that more than the gender distribution.
I don't put much faith in polls generally, but I put even less faith in polls where people are asked how they feel about porn. I don't think you can come to any reasonable conclusion from data of such low quality as is typical of polling these days.
Even in the absolute best circumstances where enough people are polled to be representative, and those people aren't asked any leading/misleading questions, and the identity of all those people are known, pre-selected without bias, and verified (preventing the same person/group of people voting 50 times or brigading some anonymous internet survey), and all of those people are 100% confident that their answers are private and won't be able to be used against them, you're still left with the fact that people lie. All the time. Especially about anything to do with sex. They also have terrible memories and their beliefs about themselves and their views often don't hold up when their actual behavior is observed. Self-reported data is pretty weak even when sex/shame/morality/fear of punishment don't come into play.
Without really digging into the specifics to try to work out how seriously you can take a given survey's results at all, it's best to just not to treat them seriously.
There is a similar trend against drinking culture. Less people are going "out on the lash". So it is entirely believable.
Sure but IIRC the statistics were relative to previous polls and the conversation was about how people talk about porn on the web not how they actually use it so I think in this case it actually works well.