Rule 34

Rule 34 of the internet simply states that “if it exists, there is porn of it.” A quick visit to Rule34.xxx and a look through its incomprehensibly massive three million plus images will verify that rule. Though, for accuracies sake, the site itself adds the additional statement “if not, start uploading” to their tagline, to ensure that all subjects are covered under its roof.

Though the URL has varied over the years, Rule34.xx is likely the internet’s first ever site dedicated to rule 34 porn, and undoubtedly the largest and most popular. It was initially formed over ten years ago, in 2007, and due to its simple and powerful design and ease of uploading, quickly grew to become a massive collection of high-quality images featuring all of your favorite characters from video games, anime, TV shows, movies, and every other type of media.

The implementation of Rule 34 means that nearly every fictional universe to have ever existed now has numerous porn pictures scattered throughout the internet. Prior to the creation of Rule34.xxx, these were typically created to be posted on 4chan’s /b/ then either scattered throughout the internet or lost to time.

But now that Rule34.xxx exists, that problem no longer occurs. The site is a complete destination for viewing, creating, and discussing Rule34 porn. While there are other smaller sites dedicated to the same niche, this is the best and most popular of the bunch.

If It Exists, There Is Porn Of It

As with any site with such a large collection of content, navigating Rule 34 can be overwhelming. Thankfully, they do have a fairly robust set of tools in place to make the best of things. The main page starts you off with an array of recently-uploaded photos, which vary massively in quality. Some might be the hottest thing you’ve ever seen and others might look like they were drawn by a child, but that comes with the territory on this type of site. You can’t both have three million plus images and have every single one be excellent, so it’s a necessary sacrifice.

A group of popular tags appears on the left sidebar. Although you can use these to start your discovery, Pornsites.com recommends just quickly reviewing them to see a bit of what’s on offer, then moving to the search bar. Rule 34 is about indulging in your own personal fantasies, not following what others like, so use the massive catalog to your advantage and explore the site to see if it can meet your needs.

If you’re stumped for what to look for, the Tags tab up top can be used to help narrow things down. Unfortunately, it’s not perfectly implemented. There are just too many tags to list properly, and the filtering and sorting tools that you can apply to the tags don’t quite work as well as they could. You can sort and filter in a few different ways, but in Pornsites.com’s experience, the number of tags is just too great for this to be effective.

Likewise, the Artists tab is somewhat flawed. It is indeed a complete collection of all artists who have uploaded content to Rule 34, but you can’t really do anything with it. There are no filters, sorting options, or tags to be used—essentially, all you can do is search for the name of your favorite artist and click to go to their page. If you don’t have a favorite artist this section won’t do a thing for you, as there aren’t any discovery tools baked into this feature.

Once you do find a group of favorite artists, though, this can be one of the best ways to get around Rule 34. Since there aren’t any quality checks before uploading, the quality of the porn here can vary. So, Pornsites.com recommends finding a couple of people that you know produce quality work, and then diving into the site’s catalog through their contributions. That way, rather than wading through questionable pics to find gold, you can ensure that your time on the site is spent viewing images that are completely worth viewing.

The Pools tab suffers from similar problems. In theory, this page allows you to find user-curated collections of the porn uploaded to Rule 34. But, again, you can’t sort the pools, and this time you can’t even search. What you’re left with is a list of the most recently created pools—some of which aren’t even publicly viewable—to click through at random.

There are a few other somewhat useful features of Rule 34. The forum is incredibly active, although the actual quality of the discussion is somewhat variable and tends to be roleplaying related. Similarly, there is an incredibly active Discord chat server, with over thirty-five thousand members.

There is also a surprisingly useful iCame counter, which sorts content by characters who users have marked that they’ve came to, rather than focusing on content by its creator or tags as elsewhere. If you’re completely at a loss as to where to start your Rule 34 journey, this might be the best way to introduce yourself to the content.

It May Not Be Pretty, But It Works

The only other downsides about Rule 34 are a few minor quibbles that don’t really ruin the site. The background color is a hideous seafoam green—a quick shift to a more neutral color would go a long way towards making the site much more palatable, but it’s been nausea-inducing green as far back as Pornsites.com can remember, so don’t hold your breath.

The site also somewhat suffers by attempting to load the site with features that aren’t really necessary. Ninety-nine percent of visitors will spend ninety-nine percent of their time exploring the content through the posts, artists, and tags tab—while the majority of the rest of the site is dedicated to features that nobody really needs. The Comments tab, for example, can easily be ignored—unless for some reason you’re interested in reading the most recent comments on random images.

Likewise, the Aliases tab seems like a dev tool that users for some reason have access to. It shows linked nicknames that have been applied to various users, but Pornsites.com can’t think of a single reason why anyone would need to know, let alone want to know, this information. It exists only to take up space and as a distraction.

Thankfully, none of these problems go far towards ruining or damaging the site. They’re strange additions, but once you’ve explored the site and determined that they’re not hiding anything worthwhile, they can easily be ignored.

If there is one upside to the site's minimal feature set, it’s that everything works lightning quick. Every single click brings you to the next page nearly instantly, and even high-resolution images load in a snap.

All of the same is true of Rule 34’s mobile site. All of the design and navigation options translate perfectly to the smaller screen, so you shouldn’t have any issue getting around no matter what kind of device you’re using.

A Piece Of Internet Porn History

Rule 34 is flawed, but when you consider the fact that it is by far the most popular site in its niche, you have to forgive these flaws if you want to look at this type of content. The site is ugly, and a few poor design choices make finding the type of porn that you’re looking for harder than it needs to be. That issue is exacerbated by the absolutely enormous amount of content the site has: with more than three million images proper sorting and filtering is even more important, so the fact that Rule 34 dropped the ball here really stings.

But, what can you do—if you want to find hundreds or thousands of drawn and computer-generated images of fictional characters, it’s not like you’ll find them elsewhere. You might be able to get bits and pieces on other sites, but Rule 34 is where the content creators hang out, so it’s where most of their content stays. Instead of turning up your nose at the incomplete site features and looking elsewhere, Pornsites.com recommends biting the bullet, learning to get around the site to your best ability, and enjoying the incredible porn that Rule 34 contains.