QueerIT.com irksomeness

This really annoys me.

History:
In the 90′s there were two dotcoms that were designed to handle discussion groups. Rather than utilizing the NNTP (Usenet) protocol they adopted the MajorDomo E-Mail List system. They were smart enough to know that e-mail was going to be the singular killer app at lease for the next few years. These two company’s were eGroups and OneList. In the late 90′s eGroups merged with OneList and folded its groups into its own preexisting groups under the eGroups name. Within a year, Yahoo! acquired the merged company and added the eGroup groups under the YahooGroups! umbrella.

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There was a big scare about 2 years ago that centered around leaked information about Yahoo! having plans to eliminate all adult oriented groups.

/cynicism on – I believe that when Yahoo realized exactly how many fewer advertising impressions they would have after eliminating the adult oriented groups they backed off on the idea and instead eliminated only the groups that contained illegal material – kiddy porn, copyrighted material excahnge groups/warez groups – and rightfully so. /cynicism off

At the time this was going on there were tons of gay/lesbian/pagan/other groups that were concerned about their fate. One group I belonged to was called gay-chatterboxes. It was just a non-themed little discussion group made up of gay dudes from all over the world. Due to serendipity, it happened to be filled with gay geeks so we never ran out of things to talk about. I was one of the moderators. When one of the rumors came around that Yahoo! was goung to eliminate any groups with gay in the name or description, one of the other moderators decided we should mirror the group and membership list on a new site called QueerIT.com. We did that and QueerIt at the time was a pretty nifty site. It was trying to be a Gay and Lesbian portal and had GLB news, Travel info, discussion groups… etc.

I liked it. It had one quirk that I found acceptible. To keep up with expenses you had to accept mail from the site that contained advertising material. Through the cunning use of mail rules I just let the mail pile up in a folder and went through it to clean out the folder every few months. The way it works, you cannot stop the mailings unless you delete your account.

I got a new mailing last night that mentioned that QueerIT is under new management. So I went over to the site to see if they have changed much and to check out the new privacy statement.

It’s become essentially a porn site.

It pisses me off that homeosexuals, us guys in particular, collectively can’t seem to keep anything like that going for long before it devolves into a porn site.

And it has such a pretty logo:

I jokingly tell people that I work in the Sex Industry; I actually work for an Internet Service Provider. In essence its the same thing. I have ceased being amazed by the sheer appetite of people for porn. When someone doing tech support gets a frantic call to help someone clear their browser history because they “accidentally” went to a porn site you know whats up. When a person calls to ask “Is the Internet working right at the moment” but won’t tell you what site he’s having trouble loading, you know whats up.

And its not even like GOOD porn! Erotica is one thing, it makes you think and use your imagination. But the pricktures that go flowing through Usenet and YahooGroups! and a billion websites at 19.95 per month are just crap. I’m not a prude by any means, but the fact that people will pay more for what is often substandard photography than they spend on books per month floors me.

Bleh