For more than a decade, the site commonly referred to as RedBook served as a vast catalog of carnal services, a mashup of Craigslist, Yelp, and Usenet where sex workers and hundreds of thousands of their customers could connect, converse, and make arrangements for commercial sex.
RedBook tapped into the persistent, age-old, bottomless appetite for prostitution and made it safer and more civilized. The site was efficient, well stocked, and probably too successful for its own good. Omuro also added a key functionalityβhe made it possible for sex workers to advertise their services. RedBook may have been full of racy talk and the promise of erotic assignations, but the site itself was anything but sexy.
Its ugly, bare-bones design was straight out of the early s. It resembled a web page you might use to find a new job or a secondhand bike. If you were careful to stay away from the sections where photos automatically displayed, you could easily browse potential sex partners at work and your coworkers would never suspect a thing.
RedBook was made up of three main elements. Then there were dozens of message boards. Bruce Boston, a data scientist who works for one of Silicon Valley's major tech companies, initially came to the site to find out which strip clubs had the best dancers.
He ended up sticking around for four years to join what he describes as the intelligent, provocative, and honest conversations on the site's forums.
