Well There’s a Pandora for Porn Now

How much porn do you watch a day? Better yet, how much of it do you even like? Are you watching the porn that’s right for you? Have you become so miserably lazy in your porn-viewing habit that you just resort to the same couple of sites, again and again? Or have you given up on finding new material, and just keep pleasuring yourself to the same video you’ve seen time and again? You know, the way you’ve always able to summon a tear to that same Moby track?

Because we haven’t been consuming smut at our fullest potential, enter a new porn discovery site to up the efficiency of our palm-callousing, finger-wrinkling habits.

If you thought the pursuit of porn has reached its peak in passivity, guess again. Developed by PornHub, PornIQ (NSFW) is like a healthy lover that asks us what we’re in to. It’s kind of like iTunes Genius. If anything, the site’s aim seems to be about increasing passivity, and pairing viewers with the right content. This is great if you’re that unfortunate type of consumer, plagued with the first-world phobia of not being able to pick out a video.

Created by our friends over at PornHub, PornIQ seeks to offer you the perfect porn experience to suit your mood. In this way, it really is just like Pandora—or Songza, or Spotify Radio, or iTunes Radio, or Rdio, or any other number of music services that attempts to anticipate your whims before they happen. The difference here, of course, being naked people doing things to each other for your enjoyment.

Particularly, though, if you’ve ever used Songza before, things are going to be looking awfully familiar to you. Like, really familiar.

Whether they’ve been sharing design teams or it’s just the fact that porn lends itself to a more visual medium, PornIQ is definitely taking a page out of Songza’s book. You’re immediately greeted by a series of five categories of dirty deeds, but don’t worry. There’s plenty more than that if you hit refresh. I chose “college” because school is important and because most of the people in these videos probably did not go to one.

Next, you’ll find yourself looking at a breakdown of your chosen category, again, just like Songza.

Once you pick your poison, you’re then brought to a (highly crucial) screen that asks you how much time you have to spare on your bishop bashing session— 5 mins, 5-20 mins, or for the leisurely in life, 20 mins or more.

At this point, you’re given a few options of even more specific sex carnage (with pics), and once you make your decision, you’ll find yourself at the external host site of whatever sexytime movie PornIQ decided was the right sexytime movie for you.

Pandodaily compared the porn concierge service to Circa, a news app that gives you little bite-sized pieces of a story, and makes updates to stories as they break and continue to develop in real time. The report exhorted other media companies to learn a thing or two from PornIQ, which I’d agree they should, in making strides down Web 3.0’s personalization cyberhighway.

One can’t help but be reminded of Eli Pariser’s lesson from The Filter Bubble, a book that studied the effects of Web 3.0, in which sites attempting to tailor content for users (and more ultimately for advertising purposes) can end up denying us of a common Internet, and things like universal search results. Parts of our individual Internet experiences become hidden.

Of all the recent advances in pornography, this honestly seems like the most logical, convenient move. While 4K is nice, no one is going to have the means of actually watching that for at least another year or two. Media selection sites like this, though, are already well ingrained in everyone’s repertoire, and tacking porn onto that list of things you consume according to recommendation really isn’t much of a stretch at all.

Then again, I think most can agree that porn is one of those things—despite adult sites integrating share buttons—that we don’t really want the rest of the world to know about. Happy wanking, folks.