Oh, definitely hindered, but it's kind of a network effect deal. Sex education isn't a high priority, so most people barely know sex, much less sex + tech, which is very much its own thing. That makes building technology like this extra fraught, because of the amount of thinking I have to do up front in order to try and guide things in as safe-ish a direction as possible.
As for talking to people about the project, I've been a public face for the field of sex tech since like 2005, so by this point I'm pretty used to it. It's on my resume, I have academic publications and book chapters on the subject, I've spoken about it at all sorts of conferences around the world, so I've kinda settled into being "The Buttplug Guy".
It took a ton of hard work and image building to get here though, so it's a cliff I don't really recommend anyone else try to climb without realizing how much work it is.
What you are doing is important work, not because of butt plugs, but because it is helping normalize talking about sex, and "niche sex," in the tech community (also YouPorn engineering!). Having engineers in the west be open about sex is far better than having nobody open about it.
Openness about sex really is one way to improve the health of the societal zeitgeist.
Thanks! This is why I say the project is as much social as it is technical. The technical topics are definitely important, but the project as a whole invites scrutiny not just from developers, security engineers, etc, but also from those interested in or critical of how consent and control work in technical means, what it means to be intimate over remote mediums, etc...
As an example, one of the things I was working on right before COVID-19 hit was a book chapter on digital proxemics, i.e. how we map and relate personal space in digital realms. This project and how it's been utilized to augment online intimacy was a big part of that, and I turned in the book chapter to the publisher the week COVID-19 lockdowns started to hit in the US (still no pub date tho :( ), so it's been a lot of seeing how those ideas play out in large scale since.
Hi, I commented on the last YCombinator post you did. I had created an Ethereum based library on Github for the Lovense and created the now defunct Porntoken on the Ethereum blockchain.
I find that the industry is being steered away from UGC. If you look at how Visa/Mastercard cracked down on Pornhub recently, it's a big example of this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/10/business/visa-mastercard-...
How do you see this succeeding where UGC for adult content is headed in the other direction at this time?
OnlyFans?
As for talking to people about the project, I've been a public face for the field of sex tech since like 2005, so by this point I'm pretty used to it. It's on my resume, I have academic publications and book chapters on the subject, I've spoken about it at all sorts of conferences around the world, so I've kinda settled into being "The Buttplug Guy".
It took a ton of hard work and image building to get here though, so it's a cliff I don't really recommend anyone else try to climb without realizing how much work it is.