“If they cause enough fuss in the media, over and over, eventually Reddit will decide it’s not financially worthwhile to stand up for sanity, and they’ll just nuke porn out of convenience,” a moderator for … a 3-million subscriber community for adult content, told Motherboard. Like many adult subreddits, posts focused on a specific fetish come from both adult performers promoting their work, and other users who are reposting adult content they lifted from other sites without permission. “Eventually groups like NCOSE will get porn outlawed from the web in general. It’s just a matter of time, and reintroducing the laws several times under different acronyms until people get tired of fighting. I’m very pessimistic about this. Unfortunately, mindlessly shrieking ‘Won’t somebody please think of the children?’ over and over is a dangerously over-effective tactic.”
The moderator pointed out that bills like FOSTA/SESTA—which NCOSE supported and which is largely considered a failure—drive sex workers further underground to one effect: causing more precarity to workers.
“If they win, everyone loses, including themselves,” the mod said. “Likewise, in getting all the big, well-moderated porn sites taken down, these demented religious perverts will inevitably drive all porn underground into closed communities where there is no moderation or control whatsoever. It’s completely backwards. Big sites like Reddit are significantly safer and better moderated than the internet in general. Driving all porn underground is profoundly dangerous and stupid. These anti-sex religious groups are all alike: they’re all depraved, repressed perverts. Absolutely demented, brain-damaged imbeciles, absolutely self-defeating, too stupid to think two seconds in front of their faces.”
Emphasis added by me because I so, so love that quote.
Another porn moderator said:
“Do I particularly care about the fate of my subreddit should such a ban be applied? No. I don’t make money here, and moderation takes a time out of my day. I’ll start collecting post stamps, like my father before me.”
— Samantha Cole and Emmanuel Maiberg at Vox.com