Thanks ohiospeedo. I found that site, and I'll be poking around there.
I got to JUB *from* xtube. The thing that really hooked me, right off, was this video posted by a guy named Giantsfrye of him with his girlfriend having a quick fuck in a dorm room (on a couch, I think, under a lofted bed.) There was some TV news or sports or something playing in the background; at some point (like in mid-thrust), GF reaches over, grabs the remote, turns the TV off, and keeps on fucking. GF clearly enjoys what he's doing, and he clearly enjoys the fact that folks are going to be watching him.
Now, as someone who really prefers gay porn to straight porn by an extremely wide margin, one thing that I like is that in this vid, the guy is a hot young guy. I like watching hot young guys having sex they enjoy. Beyond that, though, the girl was a real human person. She was not some sex-doll chick begging in a high-pitched whore voice to be fucked, shrieking over and over again, but a person who enjoyed the sex making noises not unlike the noises my BF makes (or other guys I've heard) when we're having the best of sex. So, I liked this vid a lot.
Within two days, it had been taken down. Evidently, somebody in Giantsfrye's circle of friends had blabbed to one too many other folks, and he and his lady put it on "private." they evidently got tons of requests for the key, and gave it out to no one. Eventually, Frye put up some individual pics of his face and his (very large) member. He seems like a nice young guy, i wish him well in his search for sexy ladies (though I doubt he needs much extra luck beyond what he's naturally endowed with) and when my "slideshow" feature on irfanview passes over some of his pics, I think of him fondly.
This experience is sort of emblematic of my frustrating experiences with XTube -- something is there for a little bit, and then it's gone. Now, I like looking at "twinks" and young-look guys. I think it's in everyone's best interest that they keep pictures of folks who are younger than 18 off the net, but it seems to me that if someone who looks young -- even if they are actually 18 or older, and even if they have some sets of themselves that have been up for months, and even if they have posted a set, had it taken down over a 'too young' flag/objection, and put the set back up again (after speaking with an admin?) -- posts a set, it gets taken down within minutes, and certainly in not less than a couple of hours.
The same goes for their new 'yaoi' section. For every set that's currently there under that category, I bet at least 3 have been taken down (and, if you're counting the sets under the category that actually *are*yaoi, the ratio is probably 1:4!). Do these things get taken down because of copyright problems (not just with individual images, but perhaps copyright on characters? A few days back, there was this hilarious set of a whole comic of Scott Summers (or whatever Cyclops' name is) getting taken by all the male x-men, including Xavier, in the locker-room after a work-out... although i suppose that by itself might have been a copyrighted work....). Anyway, if you're worried about copyright on characters, why even have a yaoi section? Most yaoi (at least, the best in my opinion) is generated by fans or other after-market producers who don't "own" the characters their drawing. Regardless of any of the moot points in the rant above, I don't really see any sense in what gets left up and what gets taken down.
Unless... well, given the apparent volume of material that gets posted on x-tube, you sort of get the feeling that the folks who are doing it don't necessarily look much at stuff before they put it up, and they depend on viewers to flag potentially 'banned' stuff. I mean, they say this up front, the part about depending on viewers to alert them to stuff that might get them, or anybody else, in trouble. The fact that they've got so many bugs that go one for so long is another thing that makes me think that they've got more to do than hands to do it with.
So, who's got enough time on their hands to police stuff so thoroughly that many profiles don't stay up 3 hours (in the 'twinks' section, anyway)?
a. people who work for xtube (if so, they've got no objection to a set called 'apenuts,' of this remendously hairy guy who 55-65 staying in the twink section for days even though their policy says that mis-classified sets will be removed, and from the thumbnail you can clearly see, "no twinks here!"). Maybe they're lawyers so few in number they can really only pay attention to the " we're showing underage or flagrantly violating copyright" cases.
b. people who have set themselves up to police the sight for potential underage/potential copyright violators. LIke, xtube's own guardian angels. To the extent that these possible folks really keep off pics of underage kids out of touch of everyone's computers, we may owe them.
c. people who work for professional pornographers. Professional pornographers absolutely have to have sets of records that prove that everybody in the pictures or vids are at the very least 18 years old. They can pay any young man or woman to put what they want to sell on tape the day those young men and women can provide evidence they're 18. They've got secretaries and etc., or at least some procedure, to make sure that gets done. These folks post a lot on x-tube. I wonder how much it would help them out to fiercely police competing images?
There's nothing wrong with Apenuts, and I don't think there's anything inherently inferior or bad about professionally produced porn, but I do think that there's something that professionally produced porn nearly never gets that you *can* get from pics and vids of people who just because they think it's fun will show themselves to you naked, or having sex, or teasing.
I bet if anybody could provide an answer to the "how do we ensure that submitters are legal" question better than X-tube would be providing a service that would really take off.
