I remember in the 90's having a conversation with my friend. We were discussing Linux vs Windows for web hosting. My friend said "tell me if you can find a single porn site that's hosted on Windows." He was right, I couldn't find any.
Worked for one that was at least in the top 5 porn sites back around 1998-99. All Windows servers running IIS and we were using NetApp appliances for storage.
Reading tip for you: Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. Especially the part about the first 4 primitive circuits of the mind which govern survival, dominance, sex, stuff like that. War is very centered on Circuit II: dominance, emotions and territorial thinking.
I assumed he was gesturing at the creation/destruction discord inherent in sex/war with war being the referent for obscene. Of course, a full account of sex more than kisses and pleasantries, it also involves competition.
The (oftentimes sublimated) drive to procreate is one of the most powerful drivers of all human society and action. Perhaps even THE "primus motor" behind it all.
In Prometheus Rising RAW mentions that the reason monks take a vow of chastity is because it instantly frees them from one of the major hamster-wheels of the human condition.
Of course, I'm not planning to become a monk :) But food for thought...
The legal definition of obscenity requires that a work is meant to be arousing and has patently offensive sexual conduct, in addition to having no redeeming artistic value.
Therefore, adding sex into something offensive makes it more obscene.
The online porn industry were the first people to really deal with scalability (of managing and serving web content, anyway), the first people to deal with online payments, the first people to come under really heavy, sustained hacking attempts, etc. Don't underestimate how much of what you take for granted technologically in 2012, they pioneered in the mid-90s.
A friend of mine built a lot of porn sites in the late 90s using DB2 and Oracle. He says that Microsoft's SQL Server folks came to him to talk about what it would take to get him (and the porn sites) to use SQL Server.
He said that he was confident that DB2 and Oracle could handle the load. They responded that SQL Server was much more capable than he thought and asked him about the workload.
Their response to his answer was "we can't even simulate that, maybe we're not ready".
It's not just now either, the porn industry was hugely influential in causing the adoption and spread of video (you know, on casette), movies and photography.
Indeed - I've heard it argued that the real reason that VHS won out over the technically superior Betamax format, was that Sony refused to license the Betamax technology to adult video vendors. Never dug into it, but it seems plausible.
Having just one deciding factor seems implausible. Straw that broke the camel's back? Sure. But calling it "the real reason" completely ignores every other relevant factor.
Social took off when Zuck tricked users into giving out their real names, when meant social networks grew much faster (as old school friends would connect).
Porn does "social", but only anonymous social, which is naturally handicapped.
If someone created a social network which allowed better privacy controls, the porn sites would love it.
