Somehow, Watching Porn Online Just Got Even Easier

How much porn do you watch a day? Better yet, how much of it do you even like? Are you watching the porn that's right for you? Have you become so miserably lazy in your porn-viewing habit that you just resort to the same couple of sites, again and again? Or have you given up on finding new material, and just keep pleasuring yourself to the same video you've seen time and again? You know, the way you've always able to summon a tear to that same Moby track?

Because we haven't been consuming smut at our fullest potential, enter a new porn discovery site to up the efficiency of our palm-callousing, finger-wrinkling habits.

If you thought the pursuit of porn has reached its peak in passivity, guess again. Developed by PornHub, PornIQ (NSFW) is like a healthy lover that asks us what we're in to. It's kind of like iTunes Genius. If anything, the site's aim seems to be about increasing passivity, and pairing viewers with the right content. This is great if you're that unfortunate type of consumer, plagued with the first-world phobia of not being able to pick out a video.

How it works:

A visitor begins at the top of an inverted pyramid of options. If s/he doesn't happen to be interested in one of the genres listed, s/he clicks refresh. I went with "Rough Rompings":

And then proceeded to clicking "Extreme Fucking," while imagining some kind of downhill while-riding-pegs BMX porn:

Next came what is probably the highest concern of every workaholic-pornaholic: setting deadlines. In the middle of VICE's Brooklyn office, I generally have little confidence when it comes to rubbing-one-out undetected. "Less than 5 min," it is:

I clicked "Brutral," but I'll leave the rest up to your imagination. What appeared was approximately five minutes of something I shouldn't have to describe here.

You might call it the Netflix-ification of porn, but then again, the gravity of PornIQ has little to do with committing hour-and-a-half blocks of time to watching things that haven't been recommended to you. Forget having to choose, in the modern age of no lunch breaks, fitting some high-speed strokes in between clients and trading sessions is an art form we can enjoy without becoming its masters.

Of course we've learned through research—and the sizeable no fap movement (masturbation cessation)—that the effects of pornography on the reward center of the brain are numbing viewers to real-life sex, and creating social problems due to "unending novelty." But some encouraging words about quitting porn and masturbation seem minute in any perturbance against a steady steam of blue lights, pouring out of laptops in even the most sexually-repressed of nations.

PornIQ is hardly the beginning to video curation and automatic viewing, either. Even Cory Booker, ex-mayor of Newark and now US senator, started his own site Waywire a while ago to try and help people discover Internet video content more fluidly. YouTube of course has had its auto-advancing playlist function for a long time, and services like Hulu and Netflix do that thing where they play the next episode of a show you're watching without you having to be reminded you're using a computer.

Pandodaily compared the porn concierge service to Circa, a news app that gives you little bite-sized pieces of a story, and makes updates to stories as they break and continue to develop in real time. The report exhorted other media companies to learn a thing or two from PornIQ, which I'd agree they should, in making strides down Web 3.0's personalization cyberhighway.

One can't help but be reminded of Eli Pariser's lesson from The Filter Bubble, a book that studied the effects of Web 3.0, in which sites attempting to tailor content for users (and more ultimately for advertising purposes) can end up denying us of a common Internet, and things like universal search results. Parts of our individual Internet experiences become hidden.

Then again, I think most can agree that porn is one of those things—despite adult sites integrating share buttons—that we don't really want the rest of the world to know about. Happy wanking, folks.

@danstuckey