In 1996, a Stanford PhD student created a website with the most innocent of intentions. It was called FriendFinder, because he wanted to make friends on the internet. CS students sometimes have difficulty making friends.

To the guy’s assumed disappointment and surprise, people uploaded a bunch of homemade porn onto his site. That’s a good way to make friends.

Anyway, FriendFinder CEO Andrew Conru then created Adult FriendFinder to give these deviants a separate-but-equal place to go. Kind of like how SF set aside the Tenderloin so poor people would stop hanging out in Union Square. And like how Los Angeles set aside Skid Row to keep homeless people out of Beverly Hills.

The easiest way to make troublemakers go away is to give them a place to go. Adult FriendFinder quickly overshadowed regular FriendFinder, and I don’t know if Andrew Conru ever found himself any friends. I hope so.

In light of these anecdotes, I’m going to leave this right here. Just in case.

Hat tip to Warren, who seems to know a lot of random stories like this.