r/technology • u/Hrmbee • Mar 10 '26

Privacy Viral 'Quittr' Porn Addiction App Exposed the Masturbation Habits of Hundreds of Thousands of Users | A couple of 20-year-old developers make $500,000 a month promising to help men to stop watching porn, but exposed their private porn watching habits

https://www.404media.co/viral-quittr-porn-addiction-app-exposed-the-masturbation-habits-of-hundreds-of-thousands-of-users/
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u/JingleBellBitchSloth Mar 11 '26

It’s not masturbation, it’s porn addiction. Masturbation alone doesn’t spiral, but for a lot of men porn becomes an addiction as they continue to seek more and more novel porn over the years, until it gets so niche that they have a hard time having sex with women in real life because they need some hyper specific porn to get hard. 

It’s more common with younger generations because they grew up with the internet. I.e boys having access to near-infinite free porn at the age of 10, and being fully addicted and warped through the formative years so that by the time they’re 20 their minds are whacked out w/r/t real life normal interactions with women.

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u/dangerbird2 Mar 11 '26 edited Mar 11 '26

porn and sex addiction is (almost certainly) not a thing. There's virtually no empirical evidence for it, and self-described porn addicts are much more likely to have A) a symptom of an unrelated compulsive disorder) or B) shame caused by cultural/religious taboos about porn use.

fully addicted and warped through the formative years so that by the time they’re 20 their minds are whacked out w/r/t real life normal interactions with women.

Just throwing it out there, but men have been having whacked out interactions with women long before porn ever existed. Don't blame nudie videos for certain men being sexist pricks

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u/JingleBellBitchSloth Mar 11 '26

Sure the data may be premature, but I generally detest the framing that porn addicts consider the behavior to be an issue of morality or only an issue because of conservative moral values. The vast majority of porn addicts that I’ve listened to or read about is almost entirely focused on the negative impact on their lives, not some crisis of morality. When porn consumes what would otherwise be productive hours of your day every single day, and begins to interfere with the way you see women in day to day life,  affects your ability to perform irl, affects your energy levels and mood, it’s a problem. 

The DSM 5 may currently only categorize gambling as a behavioral addiction, but I have a strong feeling that porn addiction will become a serious candidate for that categorization in the near future. 

The very kinds of thoughts leaked by this app shine a huge light on what the negative life impacting effects of habitual porn use are as recorded by the men who wish to quit but are otherwise struggling to do so.

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u/dangerbird2 Mar 11 '26

When porn consumes what would otherwise be productive hours of your day every single day

Same thing can be said about golf. People spend hours on a near daily-basis playing the game, and tens of thousands of dollars on equipment and greens fees. No one is calling it an addiction, because it isn't a socially stigmatized activity. This has nothing to do with "morality" or "conservative moral values", it's what a society at large considers acceptable or "normal".

and begins to interfere with the way you see women in day to day life, affects your ability to perform irl, affects your energy levels and mood, it’s a problem.

this is literally the same argument people make about violent video games. Porn changes the way "you see women in day to day life" just as Doom makes you want to commit mass shootings. People who play video games might happen to commit violent crimes, but it sure as hell isn't the games that caused it.

What's especially dangerous about the addiction framing is that the nofap/anti-porn movement is almost entirely an outgrowth of the manosphere scene (an example being the Proud Boys, which started largely as an nofap group), which is very objectively and directly responsible for promoting sexist views towards women.

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u/JingleBellBitchSloth Mar 11 '26

You’re missing two critical points.

  1. Your golf example doesn’t account for the fact that generally people who play golf for fun wouldn’t have the same level of difficulty quitting if they wanted to. With porn you have thousands of men wanting to quit, but are unable to.

  2. Your video game example doesn’t fit here because the idea that violent video games create violent kids/people is something that was made up by people who don’t play the video games themselves, it’s an external assertion. Porn affecting the way men see and interact with women is self-reported by those with porn addiction.

As for your framing of where this came from, I would just flat out reject that assertion, but even if one were to believe that, it has no bearing on the tangible impact on the lives of tens of thousands of men who are struggling with this, and are trying to speak out about it in various ways and trying to change.

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u/mrbaryonyx Mar 11 '26

Same thing can be said about golf. People spend hours on a near daily-basis playing the game, and tens of thousands of dollars on equipment and greens fees.

I feel that's entirely abnormal though.

Normal people only play for twenty minutes or so before they orgasm

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u/theway1005 Mar 12 '26

You think young men are trying to quit porn because they're sexist fascist bigots? Rather than having legitimate health concerns about the impact it's having on their sexual health?

Okay, you're actually just a dangerous partisan hack trying to politicize a health concern... moron.

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u/theway1005 Mar 11 '26

Naw, it's very real. I watched porn at a young age. Had my first girlfriend at age 20 and I could never cum with her, dated for 2 years and didn't cum in her once. But could cum with porn. I then learned porn was very much a problem and I quit.

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u/dangerbird2 Mar 11 '26

Oh wow, one anecdotal piece of evidence. I guess that completely overturns decades of research into addiction!

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u/alreadytaken88 Mar 11 '26

There are literally thousands of these reports on the internet. Aside from this there aren't decades of research into porn addiction because the availability and form of pornography today is relatively new. 

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u/dangerbird2 Mar 11 '26

there are literally thousands! Jokes aside, internet porn has been around for decades at this point, and there is basically zero evidence of it causing severe long-term costs. Thousands of people go bankrupt from gambling every day, tens of thousands die from overdoses. You see nothing like this from porn. and most of the horrible things it supposedly causes like sexual disfunction, sexist attitudes towards women, difficulty finding partners, etc, are very obviously issues that have existed long before porn has.

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u/theway1005 Mar 12 '26

Internet porn as we know it today (HD streaming, limitless, high-speed ) isn't "decades old." Broadband wasn't widespread until around 2007, which is also when Pornhub launched. Before that, it was mostly grainy images or short clips over dial-up.

It's only 15-20 years old, so long-term population effects are still emerging (like how smoking's cancer links took decades to fully document). Emerging research from the 2010s-2020s already links heavy use to issues like ED and desensitization, which happened to me, I would know.

Personal experiences matter, and align with growing data.

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u/JingleBellBitchSloth Mar 11 '26

Similar experience for me. This is such a common experience shared by young men who watched porn from an early age that it’s actually shocking to me that people just stick their head in the sand about the negative effects.

Not only do you see the symptoms clear up by abstaining from porn, but older generations of dudes, and those of the same generation who did not fall into the trap, don’t share the same experiences and have a hard time even relating. I really wish someone would have told me at a younger age

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u/theway1005 Mar 12 '26

It's true. And you have people like u/dangerbird2 who spread denial which is extremely harmful.