“We’re truly cooked.” These were the words of a Reddit user in the NoFap subreddit, responding to a thread about the launch of Pornhub Shorties. The users, mostly self-identified porn addicts in recovery, had just been introduced to their final boss: a TikTok-style feature where porn is embedded into the infinite scroll of vertical video content. While most replies expressed panic over potential relapse or lashed out at the original poster for bringing it up at all, one comment in particular made us stop scrolling and start thinking. A user jokingly referred to the new feature as the goonscroll.
On the surface, it read like a joke. “Goon” sounding conveniently close to “doom,” with gooning loosely associated with compulsive masturbation. But the term stuck, and quickly spiraled into a deeper reflection on the overlapping logics of doomscrolling, porn consumption, and gooning.
Somehow gooners fly under the radar, with the r/gooned subreddit quietly existing alongside other fringe-subreddits dedicated to drug use and digitally native kinks. Any mention of the subculture takes place in grey literary spaces: knowyourmeme, urban dictionary, substack, the occasional clickbait slop article. Similarly to the imaginary of the gooner – a porn addicted figure lurking in the shadowy, dark spaces of the internet – gooning, as a topic, lurks in discursive shadows.
In the public imagination, gooning is often seen as a bizarre, niche online subculture made up of straight men with porn addictions, chasing ego death through endless edging. But with Pornhub Shorties, and the introduction of a feed that blends the mechanics of porn consumption with the logic of the scroll, the lines begin to blur. Could it be that Pornhub Shorties is about to render every guy a goon? Or, more unsettlingly, have we been gooners all along – just without the name for it?1yes, we are gooning you with these questions
Keep Scrolling.
Embracing the Goon
Gooning is a form of masturbation that involves prolonged edging to porn, with the goal of entering a hypnotic, trance-like state. Despite its seemingly fetishistic nature, it is often described as a heterosexual male practice tied to a drive for control-through-surrender. Or rather than strictly heterosexual, it is more homosocial, similar to gangbangs and locker-room talks, in the sense that it is structured around identification through shared phallic worship. Gooners are not necessarily desiring each other, but orbiting the same object of desire, reinforcing a form of relational masculinity that skirts the edges of homoeroticism. What gooning does is stretch heterosexuality to its limit, eventually folding into a new mode of autosexual or phallic desire.
While gooning is said to have first emerged within chemsex scenes, particularly because certain stimulants like methamphetamine and ecstasy can provoke prolonged, intense horniness without a typical climax, it truly took shape as a subculture through online communities. The controversial r/gooned subreddit is the central node where self-identified gooners gather to swap tips, techniques, and devotional accounts of their experiences. What emerges here is a kind of “bro knowledge,” a boy-version of girl math. It operates as a distinctly gendered form of what Donna Haraway calls situated knowledge2Haraway, Donna. "Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective 1." 1988, which is not abstract or theoretical but embodied, shared, and socially embedded.
Slower now. No need to rush. Let the words work you.
In the subreddit, gooning is also formalized into a kind of practice, complete with its own architecture and rituals. One key concept is the gooncave: an area or room dedicated entirely to extended masturbation sessions, often featuring elaborate multi-monitor setups. On these screens, users curate a selection of “goonsluts” (favorite porn performers) and often incorporate hypnotube videos – clips specifically designed to induce a trance-like state through repetitive, hypnotic editing – a form of meta-porn that reveals that watching porn is not a means to an end (to fantasize about the content of a video), but an end in and of itself. Gooners are obviously stimulated and turned on by the content, but also by the thought of themselves consuming the content, by the idea of being an addict. The gooner is paradoxically turned on by being a gooner. This is also why gooning can be categorized as an autosexual practice which is mediated by the consumption of digital content.
While gooning once thrived as a niche online subculture, it is now more commonly encountered as a meme: a hyperbolic shorthand for male sexual excess and digital addiction. These memes are easily recognized by their obsessive repetition of the word “gooning”, its linguistic variations and endless wordplays, as well as by the distinctive physiognomy of the gooner-as-meme: crossed eyes, tongue hanging out – a look echoed by the ubiquitous “zany face” emoji (🤪), derived from the ahegao face, popularized by Bella Delphine.
You’re still scrolling? Good gooner. Don’t stop.
Gooning also needs to be understood in the broader context of the manosphere, where pornography is frequently a point of moral panic. Different factions within the manosphere criticize porn consumption for different reasons. For some, it conflicts with their religion; for others, it is seen as emasculating and as undermining the ability to find real-life partners. Right-wing manosphere influencers consistently encourage their followers to stop watching porn, alongside eating unprocessed foods, exercising, and spending less time online. It is within this discursive context that the gooner has become a kind of anti-hero: a figure who not only embraces porn consumption, but relinquishes real-life sexual encounters and dedicates their life to porn and masturbating instead. Whereas the manosphere responds to the perceived loss of agency induced by pornography through abstinence, the gooner dedicates all his time and sexual desire to it, experiencing euphoria in the complete loss of agency.
Short-form Vertical Doomscrolling
To understand how Pornhub Shorties could turn every guy into a goon, we also have to understand the mechanics and intent behind doomscrolling itself. Its goal is simple: keep users trapped on platforms for as long as possible. In today’s post-Fordist economy of immaterial, cognitive labour, simply “seeing” becomes a form of work. The longer you watch, the more data you generate, the more surplus value the platform extracts. Your attention is processed into behavioral data, which is then sold to advertisers and used to sharpen the very mechanisms that keep you watching. Platforms maximize this act of “seeing” through deliberate design choices. One of the most effective being the infinite scroll, which continuously supplies content without interruption, eliminating the pauses built into traditional media. Through this format there's no end point or obvious moment to stop scrolling. Combined with the vertical format, perfect for a one-handed smartphone grip, the experience becomes seamless. Just a flick of the thumb. It works anywhere, anytime, with no spatial limits, only requiring a charged battery and internet connection.
Another important design feature is the variable reward, a principle borrowed from behavioral psychology. Not every video is equally entertaining, but occasionally, one will hit. This unpredictability keeps your brain engaged in a feedback loop, much like a slot machine [this vibe]. You're never sure what will come next, but the possibility of another great video keeps you scrolling. This creates an edging dynamic: endless partial stimulation without resolution. This is a smart design feature because platforms can’t afford closure. Climax means exit. And exit means you’re no longer a data point, no longer a target for advertising, no longer present in the loop. You can’t extract what’s not there.
Obey the scroll.
When Gooning Meets Doomscrolling
So what happens when the scroll gets embedded into Pornhub – a platform, like any other, built to keep you watching? You’re no longer encouraged to pick and watch a single video. Instead, you scroll endlessly through an infinite stream of porn. Never quite landing. Never quite climaxing. Always half-stimulated, half-searching for the next, better clip. The architecture of the scroll encourages the same behavior that gooning valorizes: existing indefinitely in a state of heightened, unresolved arousal. Where the social media scroll induces a kind of psychic edging, Pornhub Shorties makes that edging literal. The masturbatory economy3Arvidsson, A 2007 ‘Netporn: The Work of Fantasy in the Information Society,’ in C’lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader, eds. Katrien Jacobs, Marije Janssen and Matteo Pasquinelli, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, pp. 69–76. https://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/24.pdf doesn’t want you to come. It wants you to goon.
And you don't even have to intend to edge; the platform edges you. In this sense, gooning is no longer a fringe practice but the logical endpoint of contemporary platform design. The goonscroll is here and it's seamless. It is almost as if Pornhub looked at gooners and thought, “This is the ideal user: endlessly extractable – but too niche.” Then set out to mass-produce them through design.
Have We Always Been Gooners?
Now that we have your attention, it’s probably time for a quick disclaimer. This isn’t a call for moral panic. Pornhub Shorties won’t destroy us all. It’s not a new virus. It's more like the latest mutation of one. The logic of gooning has been with us for years and it’s already far more mainstream than we give it credit for. 
The variable reward, now harnessed and instrumentalized by the doom scroll, predates the era of infinite scroll. Remember those memes about your food getting cold while looking for something to watch? The search for the perfect video has been a common trope in digital media consumption, the catch being that there is no perfect video. The pleasure wasn’t in the watching, but in the searching. This was before infinite scroll, before TikTok, before short-form vertical video took over. The abundance of choice, paired with interfaces designed to feel endless, trained us into a kind of suspended consumption – doomscrolling without climax. Platforms offered users infinite agency (or at least the illusion of it), and that agency collapsed into paralysis. This trope was also common in porn consumption; the idea of the perfect video, one that turns you on just right, drove people into the depths of pornhub, often ending up on page 100+ on their quest. Reaching page 3412 suggests a level of dedication and endurance that mirrored the logic of gooning itself. It also constitutes a form of bro-knowledge – a masculine bonding mechanism disguised as a joke, built on the unspoken understanding that the search itself had become the point. Such behaviour is the prerequisite to gooning, embracing the pleasure of the search, the pleasure of prolonging.
So when we heard about Pornhub Shorties, it didn’t come as a shock. If anything, we were surprised that it had taken this long. The platform wasn’t inventing a new behavior; it was finally building an interface for it. This phenomenon then uncovers something sinister about the conflation of digital content and sexuality, namely that the combination of the two naturally leads to edging, to postponing climax, maybe to not even climax at all, but simply to goon. In this sense, gooning is unrestricted and unashamed doomscrolling. Gooners uncover the material, practical, sexual, and terribly mundane nature of contemporary algorithmic cultures. There has always been an element of sexual desire in digital content consumption. Gooners are just now making it painfully explicit.
Doomscrolling and gooning have both a physical and psychological overlap, although this might not seem self-evident. We frame our devices as external to ourselves, simply as use-objects, but similarly to our bodies, devices require physical stimulation. In the context of porn consumption, the correlation between corporeality and the media being consumed is fairly obvious – you masturbate when you watch porn. But the same tactile relationship exists in the consumption of non-pornographic, safe-for-work digital content as well. Doomscrolling, which is optimal on a mobile device with a touch screen, depends on a series of micromovements which guide us through a virtually infinite feed. The thumb glides up and down the screen, sometimes pausing and pressing on a like or comment button, while our eyes move around the screen staying alert according to whatever is being perceived. This link between content and body is very subtle and easy to overlook. Yet the vertical scroll, characterized by short-form content which is ephemeral and requires consistent movements for users to stay engaged, engenders a very concrete articulation of this tactile relationship. In other words, if doomscrolling had a love language it would be physical touch 💋.
Essentially, we see two ways in which tactility and corporeality are entangled with the consumption of digital content: in the case of porn, corporeality is articulated through masturbation, and in the case of doomscrolling it is through the scrolling movements of the hand. Pornhub Shorties reconfigures these two forms of tactile media consumption, conflating them into a format where users simultaneously repeat the scrolling movement on their device and the sexual movements of masturbation. Both hands work in tandem, almost like different parts of a machine. This has several consequences that should be considered. On the symbolic plane, assuming that most gooners possess biologically male genitalia, both acts become phallic. The phone begins to resemble a phallic object which, similar to the penis, requires consistent physical interaction to maintain the consumption of content. Users – or gooners – will utilize both hands to repeat similar movements with similar goals; to maintain the flow of infinite content and to maintain arousal and postpone climax. Both acts linger in the liminal space between beginning and end.
Pornhub Shorties therefore suggests that porn consumption doesn’t hinge on visuality, but rather on tactility (physically holding and interacting with the mobile device) and the endless scroll. This is somewhat counterintuitive, as we would assume consuming porn is most pleasurable when it's watched on the biggest screen possible, or even in Virtual Reality. An assumption that emerges from the idea that porn is watched as a form of sexual escapism, with the user fantasizing about replacing whoever they’re viewing on screen. The gooner is instead turned on by the awareness and acknowledgement of themselves using their devices to consume content. Gooning is therefore gesturing at the autosexual, or maybe even a transhumanist sexual practice; developing intimate relationships with devices and algorithms – a kind of computational intimacy. When researching the gooning subreddit, there were even several advertisements for AI ‘gooning’ chatbots. This concretizes the notion of computational intimacy: gooners would have sexual relationships with large language models and generative AI that would nudge them into an endless cycle of digital consumption, extracting valuable data along the way.
It’s important to note that although gooning as a pattern has existed throughout our entire post-pubescent life, it hasn’t always existed. It is a specific logic produced by digital content. In a pre-digital porn experience, you went to a store, browsed the back room, maybe rented a video or picked up a magazine. The options were limited, so you had to commit. Your engagement was more or less finite: one video, one climax. There was no page 3412. In such a pre-digital media context gooning didn’t really make sense. Even in the early days of digital porn, the material conditions weren’t quite there. Gooning as we know it depends on high-speed internet, hyper-availability and hyper-mobility of an abundance of pornographic content.
The Subcultural vs. Mainstream Gooner
We’re now left with two kinds of gooners. First, the subcultural gooner – tied to a hyperspecific subculture centered around porn and ritualized edging – who knowingly identifies as such. Second, the mainstream gooner4We (ruben & august) and you belong to this category 😔., whose compulsive, unresolved consumption extends beyond porn to the entire digital ecosystem. Unlike their subcultural counterpart, the mainstream gooner doesn’t realize they’re gooning – at least, not until now. While both contain the essence, which is postponing climaxing in relation to digital media consumption paired with repetitive sensual micromovements, they are of course different. One defining trait of the subcultural gooner is how he constructs his identity in relation to the “goonsluts” who actively humiliate him for his pathetic, NEET-pilled existence. The mainstream gooner, however, no longer submits to a dominatrix, but instead enters into a subordinate relationship with the platform itself. Jaron Lanier, in Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, writes that social media is “structurally humiliating. Being addicted and manipulated makes me feel bad… There was a strange, unfamiliar hollow in me after a session. An insecurity, a feeling of not making the grade, a fear of rejection, out of nowhere.” In the context of the mainstream gooner, this ambient humiliation replaces the intentional degradation of the gooning ritual. Yet the effect is not dissimilar. If anything, the subcultural gooner makes the implicit humiliation structure of digital media explicit. He literalizes the shame, the endless edging, the loss of agency. In doing so, he offers a grotesque mirror of our own condition.
Another trait of subcultural gooning is its spiritual dimension. In The New Religious Movement of the Future, Salesworth Child describes gooning as a leaderless cult, guided not by a prophet, but by porn itself. Gooners, she notes, speak of ego death, trance states, and time loss in ways uncannily close to mystical experience. Their long, focused sessions resemble monastic asceticism. Phrases like Porn owns you and Porn has ruined your life flash across sissy hypno videos like digital mantras, transforming shame into a kind of ecstatic devotion. Child cites one user on a goon subreddit: “My mind turns blank and my eyes move like crazy while I chant how much I adore pornographic content… it feels like I’m going insane.” The gooners, she writes, are “speaking in tongues.”
Such spiritual dimensions are absent when it comes to the mainstream gooners. The doomscroller, the content addict, rarely speaks in terms of transcendence. There is no ecstasy, no communion with higher forces, no clear object of worship. A compulsive session of scrolling unfortunately doesn’t end with ego death. Only a vague sense of sickness and alienation. But perhaps these feelings are not so different after all. The religious language of the subcultural gooner might simply be an exaggerated, recontextualized aestheticized version of what the mainstream doomscroller also experiences. A distorted reflection of the same symptoms. The trance states, the loss of time, the compulsion, the hollow aftermath are not exclusive to the gooncave. They are parts of everyday life online. If there is a difference, maybe it's this: both gooners are on the same drug, but the subcultural gooner took it willingly, with intention, and got a “good trip.” The mainstream gooner, meanwhile, was roofied and so stumbles through a “bad trip,” dazed and nauseous, not even sure what he took.
Goon Accelerationism (g/acc)
If we’ve been gooners all along, then Pornhub Shorties is simply capitalizing on a logic that we were already enacting. In fact, the integration of porn into the vertical infinite scroll is something it seems like porn users had long been asking for. Before Pornhub introduced Shorties, online communities were already mimicking its format. The subreddit r/porninfifteenseconds/, which currently has over 2 million members, is dedicated to user-generated montage videos that aim to capture the whole porno “as well as possible in the 15 seconds allowed.” Interestingly the tagline of the subreddit is “Porn scenes given the tl;dr treatment.”, where tl;dr refers to “too long; didn’t read” a form of internet slang frequently used to express that lengthy text was disregarded because of its excessive length. This taps into an existing memetic trope, namely that of the phrase “I usually skip this part”, which refers to the bad acting often featured in the introduction of longform pornographic content. This phrase – now used to troll people by implying that their acting skills are akin to porn-level acting – also expresses a subconscious desire for shortform content; for a condensed form of porn which allows for instant gratification.
It’s almost absurd to consider, but it seems that studio-produced, standard porn became too “slow” to satisfy its brainfried users whose attention spans had already been eroded by the logic of digital media. In response, they began producing the content they felt was missing - short, fast, condensed porn. Combined with Reddit’s scrollable interface, r/porninfifteenseconds effectively became a prototype for the goonscroll. This suggests that the underlying logic had already been in place for some time and that Pornhub then was catering to this logic.
However, it’s important to note that Pornhub Shorties isn’t merely capitalizing on existing user desires. It is actively transforming, accelerating, and amplifying the conditions for gooning. Unlike traditional desktop-based porn consumption, Pornhub Shorties is designed specifically, through vertical format and touch based interface, for smartphone use. In doing so, Pornhub shorties not only liberates the gooner from the spatial dimension of the gooncave, but also enables the ultimate gooning fantasy: to goon anywhere and anytime. This is not to say that porn-consumption wasn't already mobile, but that they are now, with shorties, being optimized for it.
The vertical, scroll-based short-form video format is also seeming to be shaping our pornographic desires. In a McLuhanian way it seems like we create our ‘tools’ – namely the infinite scroll, vertical shortform content, and mobile devices with vertically oriented touch screens – and, in turn, our tools end up shaping us and our behaviours. This is reflected by Pornhub’s 2024 insights, which show that Gen Z viewers overwhelmingly searched for ‘vertical video’ content, as well as the majority of porn viewing occurring on mobile devices (phones). This is a significant increase from just a decade ago, where only 45% of content was consumed on a phone (already a 12% increase at that time, though). Again this research seems counterintuitive and suggests that the enjoyment of porn consumption doesn’t necessarily hinge on fantasizing about replacing the people you are viewing. Rather it suggests that enjoyment is increasingly hinging on consuming media in the most tactile and least immersive way. On the awareness of yourself masturbating, or gooning.
It’s a kind of Brechtian turn, where we intentionally enact the alienation effect as taken from theater. We make ourselves, as spectators, aware of our positionality and prevent identification with the ‘characters’ we see on screen, facilitating critical distance. It also suggests that the tactility of the device is itself pleasurable; that holding the phone whilst we masturbate is more pleasurable than watching it on a desktop computer. Whereas we assumed the hand was functioning secondary to the eyes, which perceive content and instruct the hand to stimulate the body, perhaps the hand itself is just as, if not more, important than the eyes. Hands allow for a different way of knowing objects; the eyes perceive and interpret objects through representational conceptions, whereas the hand uncovers the use of an object. Through the hand, we experience objects in a more primordial manner. Holding and using the phone when gooning then underscores the phone as an object; as a device. This primordial, tactile interaction between user and device makes someone starkly aware of their positionality as a gooner. It also implicates the device in the gooning ritual, consolidating its position as an essential tool in the mediation of content to the gooner.
Although the use of phones in porn consumption can also be explained by people watching porn in compromised spatial contexts (i.e. bathrooms or public spaces) as well as by accessibility (more people have phones than desktop computers, especially in the global south), we can still operate under the assumption that when people have the option between their computer and their phone, they will most likely choose their phones, at least according to the statistics, especially the search for ‘vertical video’.
Another consequence of porn’s TikTokification is the further erosion of user agency, which, even in earlier digital formats, was already precarious. Take the old meme of someone stuck on page 3412 of Pornhub: as absurd as that number is, this version of gooning still demanded a kind of active participation. You had to make micro-decisions: which thumbnails to click, when to abandon a video, when to refresh. Each micro-decision was part of a rhythm interrupted by page loads, creating a fragmented but still volitional experience. With the scroll, that agency is dissolved. Videos appear, disappear, and advance without effort. There is no need to search, only to react and gooning shifts from something navigated to something passively endured. A state that feels immersive, but is structured entirely by the logic of the platform. This transformation changes how desire itself is processed, automated, and fed back into the machines, which, in turn, raises questions about the gooner as a producer of data, the gooner as a laborer, goonlabor.
We are, for the most part, painfully aware of the data-extractivist practices of digital platforms. The precarious existence of users as unpaid laborers is widely discussed in the context of cognitive capitalism (or semiocapitalism, after Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi). The term cognitariat refers to the proletariat of the digital paradigm. But cognitive labor is always described through its immateriality; as something which is enabled by devices but done by the brain. However, gooning reveals the material dimension of cognitive capitalism: the machinic motion of masturbation and scrolling is all but immaterial, it resembles physical labor of the fordist factory worker, reintroducing the repetitive and rhythmic motions of fordism into the semiocapitalist laborscape. Does gooning catalyze the transition from post-fordism to post-post-fordism? It also complicates the notion of immaterial, cognitive labor because the thing that’s being extracted is immaterial (namely data), but the production of it is both cognitive and physical. The extraction of data from a gooner hinges on them gooning, and gooning is masturbating – something inherently physical. Similarly to the print left in cushioned chairs when sitting on them (Ass of God) for an extended period of time, gooning becomes one of the few traces of the physical in an epoch of immaterial, cognitive labor.
Goon Futurism
We should have seen it coming. Some did – back in September 2022, a user tweeted, “I think if @pornhub makes a reels/shorts feature, more people will be addicted to porn.” And here we are. In many ways, this move follows a predictable trajectory in the evolution of digital media over the past decade. It all started with TikTok introducing the short-form, vertical content doomscroll in 2016. By 2020, Instagram adopted it with Reels, YouTube with Shorts, and Snapchat with Spotlight. In 2023, however more absurdly, Spotify launched “Clips,” and in 2024, LinkedIn introduced In-Feed Video Carousels. It seems like the vertical, short-form video scroll is the end of (social media) history. So, why wouldn’t Pornhub jump on the bandwagon?
It’s easy to perceive Pornhub as distinct from traditional social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, but the similarities run deeper than we often acknowledge. While we view TikTok and Instagram as social networks, at their core, they are entertainment apps much like Pornhub. All of them share a similar revenue model by offering free services to users in exchange for selling users data to advertisers.
For a long time advertising on traditional social media and porn sites were different, however. While no companies were “too good” to advertise on platforms like instagram and facebook, companies were for a long time hesitant to associate their brand with #blowjob, #bukkake and #bbl. Advertising on pornsites were therefore reserved to scam [Your device is infected! Click here to fix it], spam [Hot MILFs in your area are online now!] and companies that were sexually explicit in their nature. But over the past decade, there’s been a notable shift: mainstream companies have begun advertising on Pornhub. In 2019, Kraft Heinz promoted its Devour frozen food brand on the site. Dollar Shave Club has advertised its razors, and in 2018, one of the year’s biggest online multiplayer games, Among Us, ran a campaign despite having no obvious connection to the porn industry. What’s particularly striking is that while brands like Devour leaned into cheeky self-awareness (#foodporn) and Dollar Shave Club joked that their products would reduce your need to visit Pornhub, Among Us made no such nod. It was just… an ad. No wink, no irony. The fact that advertisers no longer feel compelled to justify their presence on Pornhub signals a shift: the normalization of porn platforms as just another ad space in the broader attention economy. As creative director Formichetti said in an interview about Diesels 2016 campaign for Pornhub “We still advertise on billboards and magazines they’re important, but more and more we need to start advertising where people go (...) We all go on websites like Pornhub, you know? So before you start jerking off maybe you can stop and look at our new pants and shoes”
This is not to say that Pornhub now functions like any other mainstream platform. Most advertising on the site remains sexually explicit, and the few mainstream brands that have experimented with campaigns there, like Kraft Heinz or Dollar Shave Club, have faced significant backlash. At the same time, more sinister actors continue to access the platform. In 2023, for example, the Russian private military group Wagner ran an ad on Pornhub featuring a blonde woman in red lipstick sucking on a lollipop, while a female voice urged viewers to “stop masturbating” and instead join “the coolest army in the world.” Still, the increasing “normie” advertisement, urges us to take pornhub as a site for capitalist data-extraction, and the consequences it entails, like the manufacturing of gooners, more seriously.
Another sign that urges this is the bizarre phenomenon of content that typically belongs on YouTube popping up on Pornhub. Take, for example, Shun-Wei Chang, a math tutor who uploads advanced calculus lessons under tags like “naked,” “giant breasts,” “masturbation,” “threesome,” and “oral sex.” Or Zara Dar, a Texas-based engineer who cross-posts lectures such as “What is a Neural Network?” to both YouTube and Pornhub. These cases suggest that Pornhub is not only diversifying its content but also positioning itself as a viable competitor to platforms like YouTube, not just in terms of viewership, but also monetization. Reportedly, Pornhub pays up to $1,000 for certain content, compared to around $340 from YouTube, making it an increasingly attractive option for creators looking to capitalize on platform dynamics, regardless of the medium. Calculus mid goon sesh?
On the flip side, safe-for-work, legacy platforms (like Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter) are becoming increasingly pornified. This was catalyzed by the introduction of OnlyFans, which saw many influencers who were already making sexually suggestive content transitioning to making sexually explicit content on OnlyFans. These influencers would most likely never have gone into the heavily stigmatized industry of studio pornography, but through OnlyFans – which was much more discreet and had a lower barrier to access – they nonetheless started producing pornographic content. OnlyFans then functions as a kind of intermediary between SFW and NSFW platforms; sexually suggestive content on legacy social media easily leads to sexually explicit content through a link in bio. Essentially, the lines between porn platforms and ‘regular’ platforms, which were previously strictly defined, are becoming blurred.
Pornhub Shorties is still officially in beta, which might explain why it hasn’t yet achieved mass cultural saturation. Our society hasn't become fully goonified but things are moving quickly. In March 2024, Pornhub’s help center described Shorties as “an ad-free, scroll-based experience on our platform that is currently in beta.” Today, that first clause, ad-free, is gone. As beta becomes alpha, as ad-free becomes ad-filled, and as Pornhub’s algorithms catch up to its siblings TikTok and Instagram, the writing is on the wall.
Their bodies are machines to mercilessly consume you. Permanent damage, recovery impossible: end stage. nothing is more dangerous to you than they are, their claws are digging, fangs biting deep but you would never know it would feel so good.
Ruben Stoffelen (1999) is an Amsterdam based writer and independent researcher currently completing a research master in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and working at the Institute of Network Cultures. His research ranges from networked subcultures and visual culture to infrastructure and the built environment, whilst underscoring digital culture and the internet.
August Kaasa Sundgaard (1999) is a researcher currently working at the Institute of Network Cultures. He holds a bachelor's degree in Liberal Arts from Leiden University and is interested in the aesthetics of violence, digital subcultures, and post-internet art.