If those dramatic clusters are real (as opposed to t-SNE artifacts or whatever), then there have to have been large step changes in 2010 and 2017 (and not much directional change in the other years).
Just saying "SEO" doesn't explain that. Neither does "professionalization" unless it's rapid. And if either of those did change rapidly, then the interesting question is what caused that change.
A change in, say, Pornhub's policy for allowed titles, or a SEO reaction to an abrupt change in what titles Pornhub's search system tended to surface in response to the average user search, might explain the clusters better than anything else could. But the writeup doesn't mention whether anybody looked for that (correction on edit: it does mention titles stopped being truncated).
Such abrupt change in what the users were actually looking for seems pretty unlikely.
> Political efforts may have contributed to locking in some aspects of this monetization trend. FOSTA-SESTA and sundry efforts by payment processors to limit porn exposure probably helped improve the conditions of the supply side and prevented videos of minors and rape from being uploaded.
Citation needed. That bit about improving conditions is an extremely contentious claim.
Also, regardless of speculation about unrelated effects of the legislation, the whole correlation looks questionable. SESTA/FOSTA came into effect in 2018, but 2017 is solidly inside the "new" cluster, and in fact 2017 looks like it's the most extreme year in that cluster in terms of its distance from the earlier clusters. As for "sundry efforts by payment processors", Operation Choke Point apparently started up in 2013. It was news in 2017, but it was shut down in August of 2017.
Of course, there could have been anticipatory action on SESTA/FOSTA, or a late ramp-up on Choke Point, but any number of other things could also have happened. I mean, if we're going to pick random political events, maybe porn titles changed because Trump took office in 2017. It's a better timing match.
> That's good! But it created an unintended consequence at the expense of the demand side: professional studios started to emphasize youth and violence.
... or, alternately, if you buy the "professionalization" narrative, then maybe professionals have always used titles like that, and those titles became more dominant when amateurs, who disproportionately tended to simple, SEO-free descriptive titles, were driven off of the platform by something. Was there an ID checking crackdown in late 2016 or early 2017?
It's not quite "random" to look at the most intentionally directed legislation of several years. What's your explanation? Genuinely curious. One way or another the clusters do exist, the trends do exist in both content and titling convention
My leading guess would be that Pornhub made some technical change to what titles were allowed or promoted, for who-knows-what reason. One possible guess would be that they simply started to promote titles with more descriptors, or more uncommon descriptors, in an attempt to get an easy boost to search specificity.
The timing is wrong for SESTA/FOSTA, and if SESTA/FOSTA was the reason for Pornhub making a change, even in anticipation, then it seems strange for Pornhub to intentionally make a change that would tend to emphasize titles that would increase political heat.
[On edit: ... and as I said, the "professionalization" hypothesis might also have legs as something that happened in response to an ID crackdown... but that wouldn't have to be related to SESTA/FOSTA, and would have had to happen before passage.]
Definitely plausible but it underrates the changes in actual content. It's not just SEO and titling, it's actual videos that have "stepsis" etc. as themes.
Just saying "SEO" doesn't explain that. Neither does "professionalization" unless it's rapid. And if either of those did change rapidly, then the interesting question is what caused that change.
A change in, say, Pornhub's policy for allowed titles, or a SEO reaction to an abrupt change in what titles Pornhub's search system tended to surface in response to the average user search, might explain the clusters better than anything else could. But the writeup doesn't mention whether anybody looked for that (correction on edit: it does mention titles stopped being truncated).
Such abrupt change in what the users were actually looking for seems pretty unlikely.
> Political efforts may have contributed to locking in some aspects of this monetization trend. FOSTA-SESTA and sundry efforts by payment processors to limit porn exposure probably helped improve the conditions of the supply side and prevented videos of minors and rape from being uploaded.
Citation needed. That bit about improving conditions is an extremely contentious claim.
Also, regardless of speculation about unrelated effects of the legislation, the whole correlation looks questionable. SESTA/FOSTA came into effect in 2018, but 2017 is solidly inside the "new" cluster, and in fact 2017 looks like it's the most extreme year in that cluster in terms of its distance from the earlier clusters. As for "sundry efforts by payment processors", Operation Choke Point apparently started up in 2013. It was news in 2017, but it was shut down in August of 2017.
Of course, there could have been anticipatory action on SESTA/FOSTA, or a late ramp-up on Choke Point, but any number of other things could also have happened. I mean, if we're going to pick random political events, maybe porn titles changed because Trump took office in 2017. It's a better timing match.
> That's good! But it created an unintended consequence at the expense of the demand side: professional studios started to emphasize youth and violence.
... or, alternately, if you buy the "professionalization" narrative, then maybe professionals have always used titles like that, and those titles became more dominant when amateurs, who disproportionately tended to simple, SEO-free descriptive titles, were driven off of the platform by something. Was there an ID checking crackdown in late 2016 or early 2017?