This isn't sexy. No judgment if you do get off - I mean, this is a porn site, it's a strange place to start kinkshaming. But if you do, it's a really specific kink you have.

No, it's more like a long-form bug report. Namely, ImageFap is full of half-developed features that show promise but don't really deliver. I'm not even going to touch on the mid-2000s web design. While it's undoubtedly outdated, I get the sense that it's part of the charm of the site. Which, so long as it does everything it should, is fine by me. I'm not remotely qualified to comment on what 'everything it should' even covers.

No, I'm talking about user experience. Ths is my third account in about ten years, and I was an unregistered user for some time before that. I think this gives me some grounds to talk about the user experience. I know some people find adverts annoying - and they are - but they're a fact of life unless we all want to pay for membership. 

Newsfeed

The newsfeed feature was embarrasingly late coming on the scene. It's still as buggy as hell - how many users find that it reloads the same entries four or five times as they try to scroll through? Equally odd is that it's restricted to galleries, status updates and comments, excluding blogs and videos. I can understand not wanting to include new favourites.

On just about any social media site - and like it or not, ImageFap is a form of social media, albeit a porn-centric one - the newsfeed  is the core of user experience. It's where users go to find the content they've selected for themselves. On ImageFap, it's treated like an afterthought. This is, to my mind (and apparently that of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and so forth) entirely the wrong approach. Expecting users to primarily find content in the Big List means that there's little incentive to create an account; without an account, interacting with content uploaders isn't possible.

Clubs

Clubs are quite an old feature. They were fairly well established when I first joined. And yet, they are still officially in beta testing! Is this the longest beta test ever? I don't know, but it seems quite possible. The idea is a good one, but adding content is unintuitive (in fact, the whole 'My Fap' section of the site is unintuitive) and the discussion forums seem totally dead because they're buried out of the way.

What clubs should do, but don't, is allow users to follow particular user-curated sets of content without necessarily wanting to follow the users who create it, and to create communities around particular interest areas. But, because they don't appear in the Big List or on newsfeeds, club content is easily missed.

Beta Site

The beta site has some promising features, particularly the slideshow-style gallery display. The way adding new favourites is handled in the beta site is also better than the classic site. But at the same time, many other features aren't supported  - child comments, videos, blogs, clubs, the newsfeed, even notifications don't work. All of that means that the beta site is significantly more limited. Those features are only supported on the classic site, which is challenging to use on a mobile device. Obviously I don't have statistics for ImageFap specifically, but in general internet users increasingly use mobile devices in preference to a traditional desktop browser. Many don't even have a desktop or laptop computer.

Even this newer site is starting to look dated. It's been in 'beta' for what, six years? Seven? Eight? By now, the beta test should have concluded and the new site- with any lessons learnt - replaced the classic site. That isn't what's happened; it might be forgivable if it was being used to test new features, but instead it's stagnated, with ImageFap admins now maintaining three sites - the classic one, the old mobile site, and the beta site.

Without addressing these isssues, ImageFap is becoming increasingly outdated and losing ground to alternative sites. Tumblr shutting down its' adult content should have been taken as an opportunity to bring the site up to modern standards and expand the user base. Instead, it is far less active than  it was five or ten years ago.

So what would I recommend?

Update the site, based on the experience of the beta site. Bring all the features of the classic site in. Make the newsfeed front-and-centre of the user experience. Integrate clubs into that experience - including putting club content on the newsfeed - or ditch them entirely. In a lot of wayss, the ImageFap site reminds me of the old Bebo social network from the mid-2000s. That had a lot of the same features ImageFap has, in a similar style, to the point where I wonder if one influenced the other. They failed to evolve, and died. ImageFap has also failed to evolve, and is clinging on largely because the 'porn social network' niche doesn't have a Facebook or Twitter to drive it out. That means ImageFap has a chance to avoid  withering on the vine, but it needs to modernise to achieve that.