DISCLAIMER: The following is a somewhat wordy rant. I didn't mean to summarize the progression of porn availability; just the progression of porn availability as I experienced it.
Back in the way old days, you were lucky if you saw your friend's older brother's Playboy.
Then, once you turned 18 you could get your own Playboys, but wait... there were other magazines behind the gas station counter or in the back room of the comic book store which were even better! And there were movies! The internet was still just one part of AOL or Progidy for most people; the only free porn was in tiny sample images from pay sites which took 45 seconds to load.
Around the same time DVD came out, the internet was picking up too. In high school you could prank people by telling them to go to pk.com (Persian Kitty - still around today). Besides nearly-fruitless random metacrawler searches, the best way to find free porn was at sites which listed (some were updated daily) links to sample pages from pay sites. Those sample pages even had thumbnails! A few tiny grainy video clips were even sometimes offered. Imagine, video on your computer!
Then came the early 2000s and BOOM! Those computers which managed to survive Y2K were able to access thumbnail gallery posts, a branching network of free porn images. With increasing bandwidth came increased image size and video resolution. Pay sites were easier and more reputable. You could download a whole site's catalog of samples with some basic knowledge of URLs. Suddenly your hard copy porn seemed pretty inefficient. DVDs were still the best way to get video, but magazines were beginning to look like quaint relics of a different era.
In the past few years, there has been a similar explosion. Bandwidth and storage have become so cheap. It's now possible (although I don't advocate this, but we all know it's happening) to see a sample scene that you like, find out what movie it's from, and download the whole movie in HD for free within an hour. Piracy is rampant. It's just as easy now to download the entire hi-res photoshoot as it is to view the sample page.
(Oh, and somewhere along the way non-anal porn was moved to the fetish section, not that I'm complaining.)
This is all well and good...it's the natural progression I suppose. But what bothers me is that it IS so easy now. It's analogous to a picture of a scantily clad babe being more enticing than a cheap spread eagle pic. Nothing is held back. There's no mystery anymore. TGPs are still popular, but they all link to the same sites they have been for years. Those sites still use a lot of the same models and actresses they have for years. High res pics and videos are so easy to get, there's no rush anymore from 1280p video or 400 hex 3500 pixel images. I've pretty much zeroed in on what I like and with the web of info out there, I know every producer who shoots every star that does exactly what I like. And I know every movie containing it, and can DL them all for free with little effort. What I just described has been my ultimate dream for the first 90% of my porn-getting career. But now that it's here it seems so cheap. The worst part is that there's no undiscovered country. I feel like I've finally "caught up" to the industry, and now I have to wait til more content is produced instead of digging through the piles of it already out there, not knowing when I'll stumble upon something good. I guess it's one of those "the chase is better than the catch" things. Maybe?
I don't know...I just wish someone would tell me I've somehow been missing half of the porn out there all this time, and there is tons of new content to dig through, and tons of stars and movies I've never heard of, but that might suit my fancy. But I know that's not the case, because the internet is too good.