The Stripper Who Ushered in the Subscription-Based Internet

Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago

kansaswriter

28 points

19 comments

thehustle.coTechstory

skepticalmixed

Debate

70/100

Subscription-Based InternetAdult IndustryTechnological Innovation

Key topics

Subscription-Based Internet

Adult Industry

Technological Innovation

The article tells the story of a stripper who allegedly ushered in the modern subscription-based internet, but commenters are skeptical about the accuracy and implications of this claim.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Active discussion

First comment

Peak period

0-12h

Avg / period

9.5

Comment distribution19 data points

Loading chart...

Based on 19 loaded comments

Key moments

01Story posted
Sep 28, 2025 at 8:15 AM EDT
3 months ago
Step 01
02First comment
Sep 28, 2025 at 10:42 AM EDT
2h after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
18 comments in 0-12h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03
04Latest activity
Oct 6, 2025 at 9:45 AM EDT
3 months ago
Step 04

Generating AI Summary...

Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns

Discussion (19 comments)

Showing 19 comments

nadermx

3 months ago

2 replies

Is porn still where technological breakthroughs happen?

lubujackson

3 months ago

1 reply

On some vectors, VR for instance. I wouldn't be surprised if a custom LLM isn't already in the works goes beyond the AI girlfriend thing.

qingcharles

3 months ago

There are a dozen firms offering LLM "chatters" for OnlyFans creators.

supportengineer

3 months ago

The military is the other one.

Porn and the military drive human innovation.

malfist

3 months ago

4 replies

For some reason, blaming sex workers for "starting" the rent seeking behavior of corporations doesn't pass the smell test for me. After all porn magazines have had subscriptions since before the internet.

WrongOnInternet

3 months ago

Did you read the same article I did? The one I read seams to be celebrating her, not blaming.

mingus88

3 months ago

I don’t think that’s what the article was saying. She was a pioneer in digital media and controlled her work without needing publishers or promoters who typically exploit women in that industry

hannasanarion

3 months ago

It's also just wrong that it was innovative. The Wall Street Journal website set up a paywall in the same year, and many other smaller sites probably did as well.

As you say, the idea of subscribing for content goes back hundreds of years.

delichon

3 months ago

I had a sales guy at my employer tell me excitedly that he and a client were inventing a new thing for us to support on their website, selling a book before it was even finished, one chapter at a time! He was crestfallen when I told him that Charles Dickens had done it in the 1830s, and that I learned Ruby on Rails from a book published that way by Pragmatic Programmers around 2005.

FrustratedMonky

3 months ago

1 reply

It is often noted how the Sex Industry funded the internet. I wish we could go back to those times when Sex was the funding instead of Rage Bait.

WrongOnInternet

3 months ago

It was always Rage Bait, except Bait was spelled "Bate"

hannasanarion

3 months ago

1 reply

This is fascinating for the ways that it's wrong, like, subscription services are as old as newspapers, and early internet news sites including Wall Street Journal had paywalls at the same time or earlier.

Also this:

> Video teleconferencing, with the proto-Zoom platform CU-SeeMe

Apparently Skype has completely disappeared from the cultural memory. Video conferencing was invented in 2020, everybody.

phyzome

3 months ago

1 reply

According to Wikipedia, CU-SeeMe was released in 1993 and Skype came a decade later.

hannasanarion

3 months ago

I'm referring to the fact that johnny-come-lately Zoom is the reference point for all video conferencing products. CU-SeeMee isn't "proto-Skype" it's a "proto-Zoom".

pan69

3 months ago

Back in the 90s there was a zeitgeist where people in different pockets of the world came up with similar ideas and similar solutions to certain problems. Technology hit a certain threshold that allowed for specific innovation to occur.

It reminds me of that movie "The Billion Dollar Code" [1] where some guys claim that Google stole their Google Maps idea. Whereas in reality, it's more likely that due to certain technological advances, different people came up with the same/similar idea of how to store and display maps.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Billion_Dollar_Code

Mistletoe

3 months ago

Men of a certain age and on the internet all remember Danni Ashe.

pr337h4m

3 months ago

new funniest satoshi candidate just dropped

mikestew

3 months ago

People were going online in the ‘90s (and using obnoxiously large phones)

Umm, the guy in that picture isn’t “going online”, he’s making drunken purchases at 2:00 a. m. via QVC’s 800 phone number. You see a keyboard attached to that “monitor”?

qoez

3 months ago

Remember that these are often just slop output from some writer trying to fill a writing quota

View full discussion on Hacker News

ID: 45403775Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 2:36:48 PM

Want the full context?

Jump to the original sources

Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.

Open link View on HN