Columnist: Entrepreneurship Reduced to Adult Content and Gambling Paths
The columnist states in a lengthy post that entrepreneurs currently face only two paths for product-market fit: creating adult content or establishing a casino; for stronger fit, one could combine both.
The trigger was a weekend post: someone envisioned that an actress would immediately become the world's richest woman by launching a product on a subscription platform. The author disagrees with this conclusion but is annoyed by middle-aged men publicly discussing such content on social media. She traces the idea that "sex sells" back to backup dancers in music videos and Tom Ford's 2007 male fragrance ad that was rejected for its explicitness, stating that San Francisco is catching up to Los Angeles in terms of beauty competition: hot lists, dating lists, and public blessings that "attractive people elevate the city's population aesthetics" are appearing simultaneously.
She mentions a controversial advertisement shot by an actress for a predictive market application, emphasizing that regardless of praise or criticism, the key is to capture attention first. The subscription adult platform is cited as experiencing approximately 16% annual growth, leading venture capital to redefine profit and traffic as the same thing. She and a friend plotted commonly used apps on two axes: the ability to find adult content and the ability to provide instant gratification, resulting in a matrix of "adult content multiplied by gambling." A colleague's sentence is placed at the end: in the crypto industry, true bravery is refusing to be a slot machine.
In market mechanisms, buyers are trained by algorithms to pursue instant rewards, while sellers are startups that can integrate bodies, odds, and notifications into the same product. The event-driven nature comes from celebrities, predictive market ads, and subscription platform growth numbers colliding on the same timeline. Beneficiaries are platforms that have already proven they can monetize adult content and gambling separately or together, while those under pressure are products that still tell stories based on rational tools but find user engagement shifting towards slot machines. Funding has shifted from "solving a problem" to "occupying a reward loop."
Public discussions frame the choice as two paths rather than a single technological curve.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
The generation from PayPal to Palantir treats attention as advertising inventory, while this generation turns attention directly into bettable, subscribable account balances. The thought experiment of celebrities aligning with subscription platforms is not a product plan but a valuation language: whoever can make the body and payment a single button can price at platform multiples. San Francisco catching up in the beauty competition is the same optimization set migrating from model parameters to faces and body fat. Predictive market ads use controversy to boost open rates, and the rejection of the 2007 perfume blockbuster is the same demand curve, just with distribution shifting from magazines to timelines.
The capital path overlaps the profit curve that venture capital desires with the approximately 16% annual growth of adult subscriptions, thus "adult content plus gambling" is written as the shortest product-market fit. Crypto turns tokens into chips, predictive markets turn news into betting lines, and short videos turn swiping into levers. The two axes of the matrix—content scale and instant feedback—determine whether applications can retain the bombed reward systems. Refusing to be a slot machine becomes a moral stance because the default path is already a slot machine.
Benchmarking is like Las Vegas turning hotels into casino attachments, shale oil towns turning bars into ATMs, and social networks turning likes into monetizable inventory. The cultural agenda named after Peter Thiel and the city beauty lists indicate that capital buys not only companies but also who qualifies to appear on camera. The industry has shifted from "making better tools" to "creating denser rewards."
Structural changes belong to technological substitution. What is being replaced are products of delayed gratification, not moral debates. The mechanism is algorithms compressing reward intervals to seconds, with adult content and odds being ready-made high-intensity stimuli; after their combination, other categories must either connect to the same loop or accept that their engagement time is siphoned away. Pricing power has shifted from functional lists to who controls the dopamine switch.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
The shortest product-market fit is often the densest reward loop.
Attention is sold first, and products are invented later.
Refusing to be a slot machine is because the default blueprint is already a slot machine.