OnlyFans will prohibit "content containing sexually-explicit conduct" (but still allow nudity) starting October 1, at the request of banking/payment providers
This is so unbelievable that I had to look to make sure this wasn't a prank. Most people only know about OnlyFans specifically because of the porn content; "check out my OnlyFans" is a meme at...
This is so unbelievable that I had to look to make sure this wasn't a prank.
Most people only know about OnlyFans specifically because of the porn content; "check out my OnlyFans" is a meme at this point. It must be the biggest source of income they have. This announcement is like hearing that Ford is exiting the automotive industry or Apple is going to refocus on selling actual Apples.
"willingly" at the behest of not being cut off by Visa/MasterCard. Unfortunately, I've followed the adult market for quite a while so this is no surprise to hear. I guess many of the big ones will...
"willingly" at the behest of not being cut off by Visa/MasterCard.
Unfortunately, I've followed the adult market for quite a while so this is no surprise to hear. I guess many of the big ones will still keep business around, but it seems time to move on to the next head of the Hydra.
Very likely, but it’s not their choice. If the financial system cuts them out, they are also dead in the water, unless crypto becomes a much better payment system in a very short amount of time...
Very likely, but it’s not their choice. If the financial system cuts them out, they are also dead in the water, unless crypto becomes a much better payment system in a very short amount of time (not likely).
Can’t run a business if you can’t accept money. Dispensaries are cash only for a reason, and it’s not like OnlyFans can take subscriptions by mailing cash and still have customers.
I don't really understand the motive of the payment processors here. I guess 'puritanical family values' is an option (although their shareholders would probably have something to say about that)...
I don't really understand the motive of the payment processors here. I guess 'puritanical family values' is an option (although their shareholders would probably have something to say about that) but then how does pornhub et al. get away with it?
Pornhub haven't. Visa and Mastercard blacklisted the site a few months ago in response to an illegal content scandal. It was the main reason why Pornhub removed all user submitted content except...
Pornhub haven't.
Visa and Mastercard blacklisted the site a few months ago in response to an illegal content scandal. It was the main reason why Pornhub removed all user submitted content except from verified accounts. There's also the GirlsDoPorn lawsuit alleging that Mindgeek intentionally exploited sex trafficking victims.
Currently Mindgeek can only take Pornhub Premium subscription payments by SEPA (A form of Euro bank transfer) or cryptocurrency.
Apparently chargeback is a massive issue in the porn industry. People pay, consume, chargeback. I don't remember the source, but I think that was one of the driving factors. I don't think...
Apparently chargeback is a massive issue in the porn industry. People pay, consume, chargeback. I don't remember the source, but I think that was one of the driving factors. I don't think financial institutions would have a problem with it otherwise, they've profited off of worse things.
Payment processes have their arms tied by the bank that they have a merchant account with. Payment processors just sit in the middle of the transaction. When you make a visa card transaction with...
Payment processes have their arms tied by the bank that they have a merchant account with. Payment processors just sit in the middle of the transaction. When you make a visa card transaction with only fans for instance, what happens is that first the issuing bank of the visa card sends money to the merchant account of the payment processor. Then, the merchant account initiates a transaction to the creators bank account.
All that would take multiple days to do the ach transactions, so usually the PP will funge it for the users and make it appear instant, or at least as if it went straight from the issuing bank to your bank. They'll just take on that risk and track settlements internally.
But the bank they have the merchant account with is key - its the actual bank account that the money from the transaction is going. If that bank is puritanical, then theres not much you can do about it.
Part of me doubts it's a financial system problem. If the financial system was trying to go on a puritan purge of internet porn, why has PornHub been the only other site targeted by such a purge...
Part of me doubts it's a financial system problem.
If the financial system was trying to go on a puritan purge of internet porn, why has PornHub been the only other site targeted by such a purge thus far?
They could easily turn around to sites like Reddit, Twitter, Imgur or any non-Mindgeek porn site and effectively cancel them off the internet if they don't purge NSFW content off of their platforms.
This has been happening to many sites (as well as individual people and smaller sex-related businesses) for many years, it's not something new at all. Most sites' terms preemptively ban this kind...
This has been happening to many sites (as well as individual people and smaller sex-related businesses) for many years, it's not something new at all. Most sites' terms preemptively ban this kind of content so that it isn't a situation they ever get themselves into.
Have they? I think it would be a pretty big deal if the courts suddenly decided that constitutional protections apply outside the context of government. Seems like a serious reach to imply that...
Have they? I think it would be a pretty big deal if the courts suddenly decided that constitutional protections apply outside the context of government. Seems like a serious reach to imply that the first amendment prohibits private businesses from deciding who they want to do business with.
Is there a source for this? I know the government can't do so outside of obscenity laws (which is so hard to prove that effectively 99.9999%+ content is fair game), but I heard nothing about...
Is there a source for this? I know the government can't do so outside of obscenity laws (which is so hard to prove that effectively 99.9999%+ content is fair game), but I heard nothing about protections of sexually explicit content from private business intervention.
This was me misinterpreting @Deimos's source, because something else was found unconstitutional relating to government. I'd be very surprised if a landmark case found this unconstitutional.
This was me misinterpreting @Deimos's source, because something else was found unconstitutional relating to government. I'd be very surprised if a landmark case found this unconstitutional.
Without commenting on the sex work side of this, banks having this power is fucked up. I mean, they're infrastructure of modern life, much like the internet, roads, electricity... they shouldn't...
Without commenting on the sex work side of this, banks having this power is fucked up. I mean, they're infrastructure of modern life, much like the internet, roads, electricity... they shouldn't get to pick and choose their customers on an arbitrary basis. Everything that's legal should be allowed. (One could argue that even if the company considers something to be illegal, that they shouldn't just get to ban it without risk, for fear of overblocking.)
Shame the EU market is so dependent on US credit card companies.
Banks themselves don't have this power, it's the card companies (and payment processors in general) that do. I think this is a really important distinction. It's also important to understand why...
Banks themselves don't have this power, it's the card companies (and payment processors in general) that do. I think this is a really important distinction.
It's also important to understand why this is the case. Banks do not have the power because they are regulated at a national level. Card networks do because they are private American companies.
There are alternatives within the EU but thats the rub, EU only. And i myself like using my card (though i try to do so less and less when I can use one of said alternatives such as SEPA transfers or iDEAL).
Maybe the card networks will die of irrelevance as competing schemes appear. I think google and apple have a real shot at killing them thanks to their gradual acquisition of customers via Google pay and apple pay. Of course replacing visa and Mastercard with Google and Apple is not a win. But it could be the opportunity to instill serious changes to the way the networks are run and regulated.
Fair enough, as far as the difference of bank vs payment processors goes. Though my argument still applies, they're basically infrastructure and should be regulated as such. (Exceptions might...
Fair enough, as far as the difference of bank vs payment processors goes. Though my argument still applies, they're basically infrastructure and should be regulated as such. (Exceptions might apply, such as if a company does not prevent you from using other similar companies, and no network effect exists, i.e. recipients need not be clients of the company.)
I know right? We see the same thing in a microcosm with hate speech laws, where companies will block anything ever so slightly suspicious, because a false positive is a disgruntled user and a...
I know right? We see the same thing in a microcosm with hate speech laws, where companies will block anything ever so slightly suspicious, because a false positive is a disgruntled user and a false negative is a fine. I get that courts have way too much to do to busy themselves with such petty matters, but in the case of financial transactions, where certain organizations might not be able to do business at all, you'd wish the people deciding whether what you did was illegal would actually be qualified and authorized to do so in a legal sense.
Appointing corporations as arbiters of the law; what a splendid idea that is :-/
Many porn industry people have discussed this at length in a few places. There are limits to what payment processors will agree to process and agencies and studios make very, very certain that...
Many porn industry people have discussed this at length in a few places. There are limits to what payment processors will agree to process and agencies and studios make very, very certain that they stay within it. They have seen what happens when someone goes over that line: those people are effectively blackballed and cannot make a decent income ever again.
One clear example of their influence: you will never see fake blood in a porn scene. Even though cutting fetishes are a common enough one, and fake blood is such a basic part of many arts industries like film and theatre, you will never find a porn scene involving fake blood (during the actual sex portions). It's a hard rule from the payment processors.
That said, we don't know what reason the payment processors have put the kibosh on OnlyFans for but it might be in the realm of revenge porn, same as PH was hit for.
It says in the article it is, and I know that only fans has had issues in the past. Before they had to split their payment flow - non-adult went to stripe, adult went to a shadier processor I...
It says in the article it is, and I know that only fans has had issues in the past. Before they had to split their payment flow - non-adult went to stripe, adult went to a shadier processor I forgot the name of. If the latter also shut them out, or is raising interchange fees to exorbitant levels, they'd be forced to obey.
Wonder if it's related to this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-14/mastercard-rewrites-rules-for-banks-backing-pornography-sellers Seems like at least MC is fine with adult content...
I just have a hard time believing that in current_year there isn't a bank willing to make money selling sexually explicit content. Seems like it would be harder to find one that wasn't tbh. I...
I just have a hard time believing that in current_year there isn't a bank willing to make money selling sexually explicit content. Seems like it would be harder to find one that wasn't tbh.
I could be wrong, but to me this seems like something else. I've seen some people claim there are way more chargebacks and fraud associated with this type of content which makes sense and perhaps makes it cost prohibitive to do business with them. Not sure if that's true either though.
Banks are some of the hardest things to establish as a business. Even if you make one, you want decades and decades of trust before people start trusting you with their income. So in a way, it's...
I just have a hard time believing that in current_year there isn't a bank willing to make money selling sexually explicit content.
Banks are some of the hardest things to establish as a business. Even if you make one, you want decades and decades of trust before people start trusting you with their income.
So in a way, it's not surprising that the biggest banks are all under leadership of baby boomer generations and older. So policies won't be changing for a long time (for one reason or another; be it the old guard simply being succeeded by a different generation, or newer banks eventually being trustworthy enough to get business).
You can start a new bank... If you have $20-25M in assets to start it with, and all the appropriate expertise. There's a thriving business of founding new small local banks, building up a client...
You can start a new bank... If you have $20-25M in assets to start it with, and all the appropriate expertise. There's a thriving business of founding new small local banks, building up a client base, and then selling out to a big bank. Functionally, selling off the depositors. Then they can start another.
To be fair it’s not that the bank is getting money directly from the transactions. The bank gets paid by the payment processor and also benefits from having an account with likely tens of billions...
To be fair it’s not that the bank is getting money directly from the transactions. The bank gets paid by the payment processor and also benefits from having an account with likely tens of billions of dollars in float on it on any given day. More volume from adult payments is not that big of a difference from their side.
It is the case, in the end. Poor pornhub takes premium memberships by crypto for a reason, and it’s not that they want to exclude all the easy ways for people to give them money.
But what about every other porn vendor that takes credit cards? Or Reddit? To me it seems like Pornhub got punished for illegal content and maybe that relationship is too soured to continue even...
It is the case, in the end. Poor pornhub takes premium memberships by crypto for a reason, and it’s not that they want to exclude all the easy ways for people to give them money.
But what about every other porn vendor that takes credit cards? Or Reddit? To me it seems like Pornhub got punished for illegal content and maybe that relationship is too soured to continue even after they've made changes to address or maybe payment processors don't want to take the PR hit or whatever.
Reddit isn’t selling adult content, it just happens to have adult content. Arbitrary? Sure, but that you’re selling Reddit gold, not access to porn matters. As for other porn sites, it’s about...
Reddit isn’t selling adult content, it just happens to have adult content. Arbitrary? Sure, but that you’re selling Reddit gold, not access to porn matters.
As for other porn sites, it’s about what kind of payment processor you can get. The more willing to do “shady” (well, by banks consideration) processing, the higher the fees, and the worse the service.
OnlyFans in particular is more of a platform than a porn site. They take transactions on behalf of users and then give users those money with a cut taken. That’s something you’d want something like stripe connect for - payouts is a hard problem and the level of payment processor they’d have to stoop to would likely not be acceptable in either cost or functionality offered.
It is far worse than Tumblr's dilemma. Tumblr has lots of social justice and SFW fandom blogs, so they were going to take a substantial hit from banning porn but not enough to outright sink the...
It is far worse than Tumblr's dilemma.
Tumblr has lots of social justice and SFW fandom blogs, so they were going to take a substantial hit from banning porn but not enough to outright sink the site. That and Yahoo probably lost so much from the platform anyway that they sold the site to Automattic for a bargain-bin price.
Anyone that has been seeing their ads on YouTube saw this coming. They've been advertising as a Patreon-like website, where you get to support artists you like. I know this is going to sound...
Anyone that has been seeing their ads on YouTube saw this coming. They've been advertising as a Patreon-like website, where you get to support artists you like.
I know this is going to sound terrible, but I'm glad it's gonna effectively shut down. The culture behind OnlyFans was getting incredibly annoying and was increasingly becoming creepy. I would see OF models telling young women to join, painting it as some beacon of sexual freedom where you also get to make hundreds of thousands of dollars. Almost like they're salespeople or something. (By the way, getting DMs from random twitter accounts advertising their OnlyFans was creepy as hell). The majority of the women on OF don't really make that much money. And there's a huge chance that whatever you post on there will get leaked. And whether it's right or not, there's a stigma that comes with that and there are consequences for having a bunch of naked images of you freely available on the internet.
People are free to do what they want, but it always irked me when women were being told that this is some amazing opportunity, and guys were being told that this is "ethical porn." As if camgirl sites haven't existed for years with similar promises only for things to go to shit and suddenly sex trafficking becomes part of it.
This means nothing. Premium Snapchats have existed prior to OnlyFans, and even if women want a different website, one will come up anyway. It's just the cycle of this type of thing.
It's like Twitch but 10x worse. Imagine subscribing to a Twitch streamer and he adds you on Discord. You two can talk in DMs but every 3 messages you get a blurred link to a game highlight that...
It's like Twitch but 10x worse.
Imagine subscribing to a Twitch streamer and he adds you on Discord. You two can talk in DMs but every 3 messages you get a blurred link to a game highlight that costs $5 to unlock. You chat a couple times a week and he's always making references to playing a video game together but you know it's just talk.
I honestly think it's a very predatory and exploitative culture, not just because it glorifies the fact of selling your body like it's a commodity, but because it emotionally and psychologically...
I honestly think it's a very predatory and exploitative culture, not just because it glorifies the fact of selling your body like it's a commodity, but because it emotionally and psychologically exploits lonely men.
I don’t understand what’s wrong with glorifying selling your body. Online sex work seems like the safest way to do sex work, so it fixes the main problems with prostitution. However I agree with...
I don’t understand what’s wrong with glorifying selling your body. Online sex work seems like the safest way to do sex work, so it fixes the main problems with prostitution.
However I agree with your second point. It’s certainly possible for someone to maintain a “healthy” parasocial relationship. They’d need to be persistently aware that it is parasocial. But I’d assume that most people using a service like OnlyFans interactively are vulnerable to the pitfalls of parasocial relationships.
Here's something that is (to me anyway) a bit of a mindbender: Can an (voluntary) act among two people be mutually exploitative? (We can surely say that the scenario above is exploitative of...
Here's something that is (to me anyway) a bit of a mindbender: Can an (voluntary) act among two people be mutually exploitative?
(We can surely say that the scenario above is exploitative of either side at least some of the time. However, exploitation implies someone who benefits off of the other. Also, how would one deal with such an act being voluntary?)
What's going on with OnlyFans (and indeed a lot of these sites) is the cultivation of a parasocial relationship. All those things laid out in arp242's post are written as if they're just written...
What's going on with OnlyFans (and indeed a lot of these sites) is the cultivation of a parasocial relationship. All those things laid out in arp242's post are written as if they're just written to him alone, but it's not true. It's structured to make each subscriber feel like they're having a real relationship, but they're not. They're paying for a relationship that they feel is real, but the person on the other side doesn't know or care about them. This is voluntary, sure, but I'm not sure it's emotionally equitable.
Oh, I fully agree, I get what's going on here. I'm asking more of a philosophical question, I guess, kind of assuming that OF models are being exploited themselves. The way we think about...
Oh, I fully agree, I get what's going on here. I'm asking more of a philosophical question, I guess, kind of assuming that OF models are being exploited themselves. The way we think about exploitation, we always assume there's one person who profits and one person who suffers. If both person profit, it's mutually beneficial trade, yay capitalism. What if both people suffer? (Forgive the words 'suffer' and 'profit', I don't feel they fit quite right. Replace them if you like.)
I guess it depends on how you define exploitation? I'm interested in a deeper exploration of the topic; not trying to set up a gotcha. How are the OF models being exploited? (Outside of the...
I guess it depends on how you define exploitation? I'm interested in a deeper exploration of the topic; not trying to set up a gotcha. How are the OF models being exploited? (Outside of the standard forms of exploitation not inherent to OF but absolutely possible anywhere work is happening, especially sex work.)
Even if I disagree, I don't see what's to be glad about on this end. You say yourself that this means nothing on a cultural scale. So you understand the counterargument already. more OF...
I know this is going to sound terrible, but I'm glad it's gonna effectively shut down.
Even if I disagree, I don't see what's to be glad about on this end. You say yourself that this means nothing on a cultural scale. So you understand the counterargument already. more OF competitors will keep popping up and maybe most of them will be hit over time.
Also, I think "effectively shut down" is an overstatement, as many people underestimate the softcore market. It may not be as strong a draw, but paying some $5-10 to see even non-sexual nudes will still bring in the kinds of customers that the non-top 1% tend to get; often people aquainted with the model that is curious
That culture never started with OnlyFans. For months prior, there were a lot of e-girls selling access to their premium Snapchat or Kik. OnlyFans merely provided a centralised platform that didn't...
That culture never started with OnlyFans. For months prior, there were a lot of e-girls selling access to their premium Snapchat or Kik. OnlyFans merely provided a centralised platform that didn't risk termination of service (fun fact: using platforms like Snapchat, Kik, Venmo and Paypal for sex work is actually against their ToS.)
For years prior. I remember seeing lists of premium snapchats back in 2016. I didn't see it advertised that often though. At least not to the extent that we got during this OnlyFans phase. Every...
For months prior
For years prior. I remember seeing lists of premium snapchats back in 2016. I didn't see it advertised that often though. At least not to the extent that we got during this OnlyFans phase. Every NSFW subreddit became an advertising ground for OnlyFans. So much so that subreddit moderators started implementing rules against blatant advertisements. So no it didn't start with OnlyFans, camgirl sites have existed since I was a literal child, but it exploded with OnlyFans and became a much more ubiquitous presence on the internet compared to three or four years ago.
This is infuriating. This truly proves how OF was only using sex workers as a leg up and now that they have no need of them, OF is shoving them aside. I think this tweet I saw says it best: This...
This is infuriating. This truly proves how OF was only using sex workers as a leg up and now that they have no need of them, OF is shoving them aside. I think this tweet I saw says it best:
Hard not to see the vicious institutional attitudes about sex work paralleling those of homelessness. "If we continue to make it harder to exist, maybe they'll all just disappear"
On the bright side—to me as a queer man—maybe the OnlyFans spam on queer NSFW subreddits will finally be curbed. Commercial content from OnlyFans hustlers—some of whom aren't even queer—has been...
On the bright side—to me as a queer man—maybe the OnlyFans spam on queer NSFW subreddits will finally be curbed.
Commercial content from OnlyFans hustlers—some of whom aren't even queer—has been displacing organic content by regular folks, similar to how MeetUp has become infested by people promoting paid workshops and classes. It's been very frustrating.
One of the things I struggle with the most to understand is the sort of diffuse, cultural ills. It's a tricky thing to know who to blame (if anyone) or what possible fixes are. As a hobby I...
Exemplary
One of the things I struggle with the most to understand is the sort of diffuse, cultural ills. It's a tricky thing to know who to blame (if anyone) or what possible fixes are.
As a hobby I contact juggle (and some other circus-y things, joints permitting). In the past I've used a thing that happened in that community as a low-stakes/emotionally-neutral example of a sort of cultural appropriation.
In 2010 an informercial for the Fushigi was made. It implied that contact juggling was something that involved a special ball instead of skill, renamed the art, and did it in a cheesy way to sell a comparatively cheap product.
I got practice in while walking around, and almost immediately after the airing of the infomercial the sort of encounters I had changed. The occasional encounter with someone that might be a fan of Labyrinth or gypsy punk was replaced with honking and shouting "Fushigi!" from cars.
My discomfort with being associated with the sort of person that buys things from infomercials was a bit petty, but it also effected professional performers, who from what I heard starting getting more frequent rejections and generally having their skills devalued as a gimmick of a $20 ball. The tutorials and tricks they contributing to a community they loved got tainted by the opportunity for it to be profited from.
I guess I'm writing this because I saw a lewd-ish exchange with a lady that hoops and does the cosplay/only fans thing and I don't know what I think about any of it. Having had acquaintances who got extra harassment for hooping.
The post is pretty clearly an ad for her adult content in a non-adult sub. She's also a skilled performer and seems completely into that fantasy Renfair-sexual lifestyle.
I don't have any issues with voluntary sex work. It just sort of sucks to have a voluntary community switch to something where anything could be an ad and everything might have a price.
Anyone harassing women streaming games or in often-sexualized hobbies (e.g., cosplay/hooping/belly dancing?) is obviously doing something wrong. I don't know if there's anything blameworthy in the exchange above though, or what I think about responsibilities to a group vs. a Western individualism. I guess a global pandemic kinda highlights the merits of valuing a collective responsibility.
This articulates a feeling that I have. I think that porn and other sexual media can be positive (as well as negative). I consume it myself. I have a friend who's a moderately successful...
Exemplary
I don't have any issues with voluntary sex work. It just sort of sucks to have a voluntary community switch to something where anything could be an ad and everything might have a price.
This articulates a feeling that I have. I think that porn and other sexual media can be positive (as well as negative). I consume it myself. I have a friend who's a pornstar moderately successful professional porn actor. I'm involved in the queer kink community and am thankful for the broadening of modern sexual imagination and possibilities.
And yet...
I am wary about over-sexualization and the encroachment of sexuality into other areas of our culture. I fear a Warhol-esque "everyone will be a pornstar for 15 minutes" future where the internet becomes a digital arena for sexual competition, and where seemingly innocuous things become just sales funnels for porn.
I noticed a niche trend where very attractive but also economically successful men are running their own OnlyFans accounts. (I know a few myself.) They clearly don't need the money. But it's about status.
It's one thing to be 'hot'. But it's entirely another thing to be '300-paying-subscribers-hot'.
One could argue that it's a free society and they can do what they want. But I don't know if I want to live in a future culture where people feel compelled to put their bodies out to be bid on by the free market in order to feel validated.
I'd like to write a longer reply since I think there's an interesting discussion to be had about cosmetics in a future where you can invest a lot more into physical/digital augmentation. The way...
I'd like to write a longer reply since I think there's an interesting discussion to be had about cosmetics in a future where you can invest a lot more into physical/digital augmentation. The way that shifts the bar of expectations, some issues of classism or rewarding disingenuousness.
I'm also fond of a sort of philosophy of contentment which internally I link to Earthbound's 5 moles who brag about the power of being 3/5th best.
There was some old Amanda Palmer talk which (iirc) boiled down to her experience with the intimacy of busking-->her label calling her selling only 10k albums a flop-->her having a very successful Kickstarter with "only" ~10k supporters.
In a way the scarcity of a performers time/attention may be a soft-cap on the size of communities, leading to a shift away from the unhealthiness of fully one-directional parasocial relationships (ala Hollywood/KPOP?) to something closer to supporting local artists. Maybe it will just make an industry where you outsource Intimacy-as-a-service.
Unfortunately that might be better in a different thread and a shoulder issue is keeping me from being at a computer too long at the moment. (I'm also blaming that for my typos and rushing)
I definitely agree that the spam was annoying, but to me that's more on the owner/mods of the subreddits than anything else. Even as someone not at all involved in SW, I think it's important for...
maybe the OnlyFans spam on queer NSFW subreddits will finally be curbed.
I definitely agree that the spam was annoying, but to me that's more on the owner/mods of the subreddits than anything else.
Even as someone not at all involved in SW, I think it's important for them to have a location where they have more control over their content and payment which OF seemed to be providing, even if it wasn't perfect.
As one of those mods, that's not a fair take. The seller spam (because OF isn't the only game in town) is pervasive and it's a constant, unpaid, job to address it. Normal subscribers don't read...
I definitely agree that the spam was annoying, but to me that's more on the owner/mods of the subreddits than anything else.
As one of those mods, that's not a fair take. The seller spam (because OF isn't the only game in town) is pervasive and it's a constant, unpaid, job to address it. Normal subscribers don't read rules all that often, let alone sellers and then you get the modmail barrage of "Why was my post removed? Why was I banned? You're all pieces of shit." and so on... Not to mention the bribes or doxxing threats.
As someone who mods another subreddit you're right, maybe I should have put more on the admins. That said, we ignore a ton of modmails asking why posts are removed/users banned or just respond...
As one of those mods, that's not a fair take.
As someone who mods another subreddit you're right, maybe I should have put more on the admins. That said, we ignore a ton of modmails asking why posts are removed/users banned or just respond telling them to read the rules.
They've got a number of blacklisted sites, would take 30 seconds to add onlyfans to the list. I ignore most modmail as it's usually idiotic questions answered by reading the rules, but I've had...
They've got a number of blacklisted sites, would take 30 seconds to add onlyfans to the list.
I ignore most modmail as it's usually idiotic questions answered by reading the rules, but I've had everything under the sun slung at me as a mod of various NSFW and SFW subs over the decade+
Does it? I don't get the impression that this is something done as some long con by OF that always wanted to "Go clean" eventually. Nor that OF won't be hit hard by this.
This truly proves how OF was only using sex workers as a leg up
Does it? I don't get the impression that this is something done as some long con by OF that always wanted to "Go clean" eventually.
OnlyFans is more synonymous with lewd content and pornography than Tumblr was... So much so that you know that when someone says they have an OnlyFans, it means that they are selling nude pics and...
OnlyFans is more synonymous with lewd content and pornography than Tumblr was... So much so that you know that when someone says they have an OnlyFans, it means that they are selling nude pics and videos of themselves on a subscription or per-upload basis.
Tumblr banning porn definitely led to a major exodus towards alternatives that were more accepting of NSFW content. For OF, a ban on sexually explicit content would outright kill the site.
That being said, OF's porn ban has apparently come amid pressure from payment processers (like MasterCard, Visa, Stripe, AMEX, PayPal, etc) and banks. I wonder if OF's shutdown is down to a puritan agenda from these aforementioned stakeholders, or if they (like Tumblr) were only being targeted because apparently CP had been spotted on the platform...
That is hilarious honestly. Given how much money onlyfans makes, i wonder if this will be a catalyst for some serious non-card-scheme providers to become popular.
That is hilarious honestly.
Given how much money onlyfans makes, i wonder if this will be a catalyst for some serious non-card-scheme providers to become popular.
I can only imagine this is going to cause a scramble to find a replacement platform. In this instance, they are being "de-platformed" so I wonder if they will experience the same effect hate...
I can only imagine this is going to cause a scramble to find a replacement platform. In this instance, they are being "de-platformed" so I wonder if they will experience the same effect hate groups experience when they are removed from sites.
I don't use OnlyFans but it really does suck for the people out there who do use it as a means of income or supplementing their income.
Quite a few "ordinary" content creators (mainstream Youtubers, indie artists, etc) have recently started migrating to Onlyfans, presumably as an alternative to Patreon, despite them producing no...
Quite a few "ordinary" content creators (mainstream Youtubers, indie artists, etc) have recently started migrating to Onlyfans, presumably as an alternative to Patreon, despite them producing no sexually explicit content whatsoever. And this move certainly explains why Onlyfans seems to have been making a concerted effort recently to market themselves more towards that crowd... since they are likely about to take a massive revenue hit from this due to the majority of the content producers on their site currently being pornstars, camgirls/guys, and other creators/influencers with a sexually explicit content side-hustle.
Why though? Patreon don't make much of a cut from subscriptions and those who were banned from Patreon for controversial content like Sargon of Akkad or Paul Joseph Watson have flocked to...
Why though? Patreon don't make much of a cut from subscriptions and those who were banned from Patreon for controversial content like Sargon of Akkad or Paul Joseph Watson have flocked to SubscribeStar instead.
Having an Onlyfans doesn't mean you can't also still have a Patreon, and giving fans more options for ways to support and interact with you is generally better than less. Patreon is also pretty...
Having an Onlyfans doesn't mean you can't also still have a Patreon, and giving fans more options for ways to support and interact with you is generally better than less.
Patreon is also pretty clunky for interacting with your fans through its now rather outdated, lackluster community features. And it also lacks video hosting so instead relies on creators linking to unlisted YouTube videos in order to release their Patreon "exclusive" content, which is problematic since the only thing needed for non-patrons to see that content is the URL (which can be leaked/shared). Whereas Onlyfans has really solid, modern community features, offers image and video hosting, as well as livestreaming, all of which can only be accesed by actually paying to see that content.
So despite all the doom & gloom in this topic, IMO Onlyfans will probably be fine in the long term. And if I was Patreon I would honestly be pretty worried about Onlyfans making this move since it's currently a much more appealing, feature-rich platform for creators and fans. And unlike Patreon, which AFAIK is still operating at a loss so is going to struggle to reach feature parity with Onlyfans, Onlyfans undoubtedly has a substantial amount of funds in the bank to see them through this revenue dip while they transition away from explicit content creators and court more mainsteam ones away from Patreon.
Possibly tangentially interesting: here's a subreddit wiki page for payment methods for independent online sex workers. Crypto is at the top, and for good reason IMO. There's also OF competitors...
Possibly tangentially interesting: here's a subreddit wiki page for payment methods for independent online sex workers. Crypto is at the top, and for good reason IMO. There's also OF competitors like JustFor.Fans that someone I know is switching to.
I was under the impression that this wasn't discrimination based on erotic content per se. It sounded like the issue is that Only Fans has a massive amount of fraud leading to credit card...
I was under the impression that this wasn't discrimination based on erotic content per se. It sounded like the issue is that Only Fans has a massive amount of fraud leading to credit card chargebacks which are costly to the credit card companies.
Because the sexual content is the content that's attracting the fraud. Also, laws around consent and age verification mean keeping a lot of paperwork for all of the people in erotic videos you...
Because the sexual content is the content that's attracting the fraud. Also, laws around consent and age verification mean keeping a lot of paperwork for all of the people in erotic videos you show to users. It appears they don't wish to do the work involved. Only they can tell you for sure, though.
I'm having trouble finding a primary source on this (their blog doesn't seem to mention it at all). All the articles I've found either do not cite a source, or point to some random twitter account...
I'm having trouble finding a primary source on this (their blog doesn't seem to mention it at all). All the articles I've found either do not cite a source, or point to some random twitter account with a screenshot of some text with no indication of where it came from.
That "random twitter account" being linked to by a bunch of other outlets is Dan Primack's, one of the authors of this Axios article. But apparently Bloomberg was the first to report this news,...
That "random twitter account" being linked to by a bunch of other outlets is Dan Primack's, one of the authors of this Axios article. But apparently Bloomberg was the first to report this news, and a bunch of other outlets have now received confirmation from Onlyfans, so I don't think its veracity in really worth doubting at this point.
OnlyFans, which has amassed a base of more than 130 million users largely for adult-oriented subscription fan pages, announced that it will ban sexually explicit content this fall.
The U.K.-based company said it is making the changes “to comply with the requests of our banking partners and payout providers,” in a statement provided to Variety.
So Axios' only reference is their own author's Twitter. I can't get into the Bloomberg article to see if they link to a press release of any kind either. I'm only skeptical because, as other...
So Axios' only reference is their own author's Twitter. I can't get into the Bloomberg article to see if they link to a press release of any kind either.
I'm only skeptical because, as other people have pointed out, this basically flushes their entire business down the toilet. I've seen claims (also unverified) that they are actually going the PornHub route and requiring creators of explicit content to undergo a more thorough verification process.
I think you have it backwards. Their reference is undoubtedly the press release they received from OnlyFans, which the author then took a screenshot of a portion of and posted to his twitter. And...
I think you have it backwards. Their reference is undoubtedly the press release they received from OnlyFans, which the author then took a screenshot of a portion of and posted to his twitter. And they are clearly not the only one to have received that press release either, since many other outlets (including highly reputable ones like Bloomberg, BBC, Financial Times, etc) have all been using the same wording along with "Onlyfans said", "the company said", or "in a statement provided to <outlet>", in their articles about this. Whereas if their only reference was an unofficial or third-party source they would have explicitly said so.
Also, keep in mind that they are not banning all explicit content and nudity (which likely still makes up a sizeable portion of their users' content), merely depictions of "sexually-explicit conduct" (i.e. hardcore porn). And they have also been making a concerted effort recently to market themselves as an alternative to Patreon for mainstream content creators, celebrities, and influencers who produce no sexually explicit material. Which actually seems to be working too, since many high profile Youtubers, recording artists, and mainstream celebrities have migrated to Onlyfans recently. So I absolutely wouldn't count them out just yet.
I wonder if this has anything to do with things: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58255865 Given how quickly things moved after the PornHub story, maybe this is them trying to get ahead of things to...
If an alternative has the choice of giving OnlyFans features with crypto and/or NFTs this is their moment, not sure what moot OnlyFans has left if they ban porn content.
If an alternative has the choice of giving OnlyFans features with crypto and/or NFTs this is their moment, not sure what moot OnlyFans has left if they ban porn content.
This is so unbelievable that I had to look to make sure this wasn't a prank.
Most people only know about OnlyFans specifically because of the porn content; "check out my OnlyFans" is a meme at this point. It must be the biggest source of income they have. This announcement is like hearing that Ford is exiting the automotive industry or Apple is going to refocus on selling actual Apples.
I know it's August but this definitely had strong April Fool's vibes.
"willingly" at the behest of not being cut off by Visa/MasterCard.
Unfortunately, I've followed the adult market for quite a while so this is no surprise to hear. I guess many of the big ones will still keep business around, but it seems time to move on to the next head of the Hydra.
So they want go so soft-porn? Fucking insane, it'll be the death of it. It's even worse than if Tumblr disallowed adult cont- ... Oh.
Very likely, but it’s not their choice. If the financial system cuts them out, they are also dead in the water, unless crypto becomes a much better payment system in a very short amount of time (not likely).
Can’t run a business if you can’t accept money. Dispensaries are cash only for a reason, and it’s not like OnlyFans can take subscriptions by mailing cash and still have customers.
I don't really understand the motive of the payment processors here. I guess 'puritanical family values' is an option (although their shareholders would probably have something to say about that) but then how does pornhub et al. get away with it?
Pornhub haven't.
Visa and Mastercard blacklisted the site a few months ago in response to an illegal content scandal. It was the main reason why Pornhub removed all user submitted content except from verified accounts. There's also the GirlsDoPorn lawsuit alleging that Mindgeek intentionally exploited sex trafficking victims.
Currently Mindgeek can only take Pornhub Premium subscription payments by SEPA (A form of Euro bank transfer) or cryptocurrency.
Apparently chargeback is a massive issue in the porn industry. People pay, consume, chargeback. I don't remember the source, but I think that was one of the driving factors. I don't think financial institutions would have a problem with it otherwise, they've profited off of worse things.
Payment processes have their arms tied by the bank that they have a merchant account with. Payment processors just sit in the middle of the transaction. When you make a visa card transaction with only fans for instance, what happens is that first the issuing bank of the visa card sends money to the merchant account of the payment processor. Then, the merchant account initiates a transaction to the creators bank account.
All that would take multiple days to do the ach transactions, so usually the PP will funge it for the users and make it appear instant, or at least as if it went straight from the issuing bank to your bank. They'll just take on that risk and track settlements internally.
But the bank they have the merchant account with is key - its the actual bank account that the money from the transaction is going. If that bank is puritanical, then theres not much you can do about it.
Dispensaries aren’t cash-only. You can use multiple different cash apps and debit cards.
Part of me doubts it's a financial system problem.
If the financial system was trying to go on a puritan purge of internet porn, why has PornHub been the only other site targeted by such a purge thus far?
They could easily turn around to sites like Reddit, Twitter, Imgur or any non-Mindgeek porn site and effectively cancel them off the internet if they don't purge NSFW content off of their platforms.
This has been happening to many sites (as well as individual people and smaller sex-related businesses) for many years, it's not something new at all. Most sites' terms preemptively ban this kind of content so that it isn't a situation they ever get themselves into.
Here's an article on the topic from 2015: PayPal, Square and big banking's war on the sex industry
That's interesting. Especially since a federal court has deemed their ban on sexual content being unconstitutional.
Have they? I think it would be a pretty big deal if the courts suddenly decided that constitutional protections apply outside the context of government. Seems like a serious reach to imply that the first amendment prohibits private businesses from deciding who they want to do business with.
Is there a source for this? I know the government can't do so outside of obscenity laws (which is so hard to prove that effectively 99.9999%+ content is fair game), but I heard nothing about protections of sexually explicit content from private business intervention.
This was me misinterpreting @Deimos's source, because something else was found unconstitutional relating to government. I'd be very surprised if a landmark case found this unconstitutional.
Without commenting on the sex work side of this, banks having this power is fucked up. I mean, they're infrastructure of modern life, much like the internet, roads, electricity... they shouldn't get to pick and choose their customers on an arbitrary basis. Everything that's legal should be allowed. (One could argue that even if the company considers something to be illegal, that they shouldn't just get to ban it without risk, for fear of overblocking.)
Shame the EU market is so dependent on US credit card companies.
Banks themselves don't have this power, it's the card companies (and payment processors in general) that do. I think this is a really important distinction.
It's also important to understand why this is the case. Banks do not have the power because they are regulated at a national level. Card networks do because they are private American companies.
There are alternatives within the EU but thats the rub, EU only. And i myself like using my card (though i try to do so less and less when I can use one of said alternatives such as SEPA transfers or iDEAL).
Maybe the card networks will die of irrelevance as competing schemes appear. I think google and apple have a real shot at killing them thanks to their gradual acquisition of customers via Google pay and apple pay. Of course replacing visa and Mastercard with Google and Apple is not a win. But it could be the opportunity to instill serious changes to the way the networks are run and regulated.
Fair enough, as far as the difference of bank vs payment processors goes. Though my argument still applies, they're basically infrastructure and should be regulated as such. (Exceptions might apply, such as if a company does not prevent you from using other similar companies, and no network effect exists, i.e. recipients need not be clients of the company.)
I agree with you, in case it wasn't clear :)
I know right? We see the same thing in a microcosm with hate speech laws, where companies will block anything ever so slightly suspicious, because a false positive is a disgruntled user and a false negative is a fine. I get that courts have way too much to do to busy themselves with such petty matters, but in the case of financial transactions, where certain organizations might not be able to do business at all, you'd wish the people deciding whether what you did was illegal would actually be qualified and authorized to do so in a legal sense.
...is exactly what it is.
Many porn industry people have discussed this at length in a few places. There are limits to what payment processors will agree to process and agencies and studios make very, very certain that they stay within it. They have seen what happens when someone goes over that line: those people are effectively blackballed and cannot make a decent income ever again.
One clear example of their influence: you will never see fake blood in a porn scene. Even though cutting fetishes are a common enough one, and fake blood is such a basic part of many arts industries like film and theatre, you will never find a porn scene involving fake blood (during the actual sex portions). It's a hard rule from the payment processors.
That said, we don't know what reason the payment processors have put the kibosh on OnlyFans for but it might be in the realm of revenge porn, same as PH was hit for.
It says in the article it is, and I know that only fans has had issues in the past. Before they had to split their payment flow - non-adult went to stripe, adult went to a shadier processor I forgot the name of. If the latter also shut them out, or is raising interchange fees to exorbitant levels, they'd be forced to obey.
Wonder if it's related to this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-14/mastercard-rewrites-rules-for-banks-backing-pornography-sellers
Seems like at least MC is fine with adult content if you meet their requirements.
Even if MasterCard is fine with it, you need to find a payment processor whose merchant bank in the US is fine with it.
I just have a hard time believing that in current_year there isn't a bank willing to make money selling sexually explicit content. Seems like it would be harder to find one that wasn't tbh.
I could be wrong, but to me this seems like something else. I've seen some people claim there are way more chargebacks and fraud associated with this type of content which makes sense and perhaps makes it cost prohibitive to do business with them. Not sure if that's true either though.
Banks are some of the hardest things to establish as a business. Even if you make one, you want decades and decades of trust before people start trusting you with their income.
So in a way, it's not surprising that the biggest banks are all under leadership of baby boomer generations and older. So policies won't be changing for a long time (for one reason or another; be it the old guard simply being succeeded by a different generation, or newer banks eventually being trustworthy enough to get business).
You can start a new bank... If you have $20-25M in assets to start it with, and all the appropriate expertise. There's a thriving business of founding new small local banks, building up a client base, and then selling out to a big bank. Functionally, selling off the depositors. Then they can start another.
To be fair it’s not that the bank is getting money directly from the transactions. The bank gets paid by the payment processor and also benefits from having an account with likely tens of billions of dollars in float on it on any given day. More volume from adult payments is not that big of a difference from their side.
It is the case, in the end. Poor pornhub takes premium memberships by crypto for a reason, and it’s not that they want to exclude all the easy ways for people to give them money.
But what about every other porn vendor that takes credit cards? Or Reddit? To me it seems like Pornhub got punished for illegal content and maybe that relationship is too soured to continue even after they've made changes to address or maybe payment processors don't want to take the PR hit or whatever.
Reddit isn’t selling adult content, it just happens to have adult content. Arbitrary? Sure, but that you’re selling Reddit gold, not access to porn matters.
As for other porn sites, it’s about what kind of payment processor you can get. The more willing to do “shady” (well, by banks consideration) processing, the higher the fees, and the worse the service.
OnlyFans in particular is more of a platform than a porn site. They take transactions on behalf of users and then give users those money with a cut taken. That’s something you’d want something like stripe connect for - payouts is a hard problem and the level of payment processor they’d have to stoop to would likely not be acceptable in either cost or functionality offered.
It is far worse than Tumblr's dilemma.
Tumblr has lots of social justice and SFW fandom blogs, so they were going to take a substantial hit from banning porn but not enough to outright sink the site. That and Yahoo probably lost so much from the platform anyway that they sold the site to Automattic for a bargain-bin price.
OnlyFans on the other hand... They're fucked.
Anyone that has been seeing their ads on YouTube saw this coming. They've been advertising as a Patreon-like website, where you get to support artists you like.
I know this is going to sound terrible, but I'm glad it's gonna effectively shut down. The culture behind OnlyFans was getting incredibly annoying and was increasingly becoming creepy. I would see OF models telling young women to join, painting it as some beacon of sexual freedom where you also get to make hundreds of thousands of dollars. Almost like they're salespeople or something. (By the way, getting DMs from random twitter accounts advertising their OnlyFans was creepy as hell). The majority of the women on OF don't really make that much money. And there's a huge chance that whatever you post on there will get leaked. And whether it's right or not, there's a stigma that comes with that and there are consequences for having a bunch of naked images of you freely available on the internet.
People are free to do what they want, but it always irked me when women were being told that this is some amazing opportunity, and guys were being told that this is "ethical porn." As if camgirl sites haven't existed for years with similar promises only for things to go to shit and suddenly sex trafficking becomes part of it.
This means nothing. Premium Snapchats have existed prior to OnlyFans, and even if women want a different website, one will come up anyway. It's just the cycle of this type of thing.
It's like Twitch but 10x worse.
Imagine subscribing to a Twitch streamer and he adds you on Discord. You two can talk in DMs but every 3 messages you get a blurred link to a game highlight that costs $5 to unlock. You chat a couple times a week and he's always making references to playing a video game together but you know it's just talk.
I honestly think it's a very predatory and exploitative culture, not just because it glorifies the fact of selling your body like it's a commodity, but because it emotionally and psychologically exploits lonely men.
I don’t understand what’s wrong with glorifying selling your body. Online sex work seems like the safest way to do sex work, so it fixes the main problems with prostitution.
However I agree with your second point. It’s certainly possible for someone to maintain a “healthy” parasocial relationship. They’d need to be persistently aware that it is parasocial. But I’d assume that most people using a service like OnlyFans interactively are vulnerable to the pitfalls of parasocial relationships.
Here's something that is (to me anyway) a bit of a mindbender: Can an (voluntary) act among two people be mutually exploitative?
(We can surely say that the scenario above is exploitative of either side at least some of the time. However, exploitation implies someone who benefits off of the other. Also, how would one deal with such an act being voluntary?)
What's going on with OnlyFans (and indeed a lot of these sites) is the cultivation of a parasocial relationship. All those things laid out in arp242's post are written as if they're just written to him alone, but it's not true. It's structured to make each subscriber feel like they're having a real relationship, but they're not. They're paying for a relationship that they feel is real, but the person on the other side doesn't know or care about them. This is voluntary, sure, but I'm not sure it's emotionally equitable.
Oh, I fully agree, I get what's going on here. I'm asking more of a philosophical question, I guess, kind of assuming that OF models are being exploited themselves. The way we think about exploitation, we always assume there's one person who profits and one person who suffers. If both person profit, it's mutually beneficial trade, yay capitalism. What if both people suffer? (Forgive the words 'suffer' and 'profit', I don't feel they fit quite right. Replace them if you like.)
Seems like a profund thought only to me? Ohh, ok.
I guess it depends on how you define exploitation? I'm interested in a deeper exploration of the topic; not trying to set up a gotcha. How are the OF models being exploited? (Outside of the standard forms of exploitation not inherent to OF but absolutely possible anywhere work is happening, especially sex work.)
TIL
Glad I could help. It's an important concept for modern living.
Even if I disagree, I don't see what's to be glad about on this end. You say yourself that this means nothing on a cultural scale. So you understand the counterargument already. more OF competitors will keep popping up and maybe most of them will be hit over time.
Also, I think "effectively shut down" is an overstatement, as many people underestimate the softcore market. It may not be as strong a draw, but paying some $5-10 to see even non-sexual nudes will still bring in the kinds of customers that the non-top 1% tend to get; often people aquainted with the model that is curious
That culture never started with OnlyFans. For months prior, there were a lot of e-girls selling access to their premium Snapchat or Kik. OnlyFans merely provided a centralised platform that didn't risk termination of service (fun fact: using platforms like Snapchat, Kik, Venmo and Paypal for sex work is actually against their ToS.)
For years prior. I remember seeing lists of premium snapchats back in 2016. I didn't see it advertised that often though. At least not to the extent that we got during this OnlyFans phase. Every NSFW subreddit became an advertising ground for OnlyFans. So much so that subreddit moderators started implementing rules against blatant advertisements. So no it didn't start with OnlyFans, camgirl sites have existed since I was a literal child, but it exploded with OnlyFans and became a much more ubiquitous presence on the internet compared to three or four years ago.
This is infuriating. This truly proves how OF was only using sex workers as a leg up and now that they have no need of them, OF is shoving them aside. I think this tweet I saw says it best:
This blatant bigotry must stop.
On the bright side—to me as a queer man—maybe the OnlyFans spam on queer NSFW subreddits will finally be curbed.
Commercial content from OnlyFans hustlers—some of whom aren't even queer—has been displacing organic content by regular folks, similar to how MeetUp has become infested by people promoting paid workshops and classes. It's been very frustrating.
One of the things I struggle with the most to understand is the sort of diffuse, cultural ills. It's a tricky thing to know who to blame (if anyone) or what possible fixes are.
As a hobby I contact juggle (and some other circus-y things, joints permitting). In the past I've used a thing that happened in that community as a low-stakes/emotionally-neutral example of a sort of cultural appropriation.
In 2010 an informercial for the Fushigi was made. It implied that contact juggling was something that involved a special ball instead of skill, renamed the art, and did it in a cheesy way to sell a comparatively cheap product.
I got practice in while walking around, and almost immediately after the airing of the infomercial the sort of encounters I had changed. The occasional encounter with someone that might be a fan of Labyrinth or gypsy punk was replaced with honking and shouting "Fushigi!" from cars.
My discomfort with being associated with the sort of person that buys things from infomercials was a bit petty, but it also effected professional performers, who from what I heard starting getting more frequent rejections and generally having their skills devalued as a gimmick of a $20 ball. The tutorials and tricks they contributing to a community they loved got tainted by the opportunity for it to be profited from.
I guess I'm writing this because I saw a lewd-ish exchange with a lady that hoops and does the cosplay/only fans thing and I don't know what I think about any of it. Having had acquaintances who got extra harassment for hooping.
The post is pretty clearly an ad for her adult content in a non-adult sub. She's also a skilled performer and seems completely into that fantasy Renfair-sexual lifestyle.
I don't have any issues with voluntary sex work. It just sort of sucks to have a voluntary community switch to something where anything could be an ad and everything might have a price.
Anyone harassing women streaming games or in often-sexualized hobbies (e.g., cosplay/hooping/belly dancing?) is obviously doing something wrong. I don't know if there's anything blameworthy in the exchange above though, or what I think about responsibilities to a group vs. a Western individualism. I guess a global pandemic kinda highlights the merits of valuing a collective responsibility.
This articulates a feeling that I have. I think that porn and other sexual media can be positive (as well as negative). I consume it myself. I have a friend who's a
pornstarmoderately successful professional porn actor. I'm involved in the queer kink community and am thankful for the broadening of modern sexual imagination and possibilities.And yet...
I am wary about over-sexualization and the encroachment of sexuality into other areas of our culture. I fear a Warhol-esque "everyone will be a pornstar for 15 minutes" future where the internet becomes a digital arena for sexual competition, and where seemingly innocuous things become just sales funnels for porn.
I noticed a niche trend where very attractive but also economically successful men are running their own OnlyFans accounts. (I know a few myself.) They clearly don't need the money. But it's about status.
It's one thing to be 'hot'. But it's entirely another thing to be '300-paying-subscribers-hot'.
One could argue that it's a free society and they can do what they want. But I don't know if I want to live in a future culture where people feel compelled to put their bodies out to be bid on by the free market in order to feel validated.
I'd like to write a longer reply since I think there's an interesting discussion to be had about cosmetics in a future where you can invest a lot more into physical/digital augmentation. The way that shifts the bar of expectations, some issues of classism or rewarding disingenuousness.
I'm also fond of a sort of philosophy of contentment which internally I link to Earthbound's 5 moles who brag about the power of being 3/5th best.
There was some old Amanda Palmer talk which (iirc) boiled down to her experience with the intimacy of busking-->her label calling her selling only 10k albums a flop-->her having a very successful Kickstarter with "only" ~10k supporters.
In a way the scarcity of a performers time/attention may be a soft-cap on the size of communities, leading to a shift away from the unhealthiness of fully one-directional parasocial relationships (ala Hollywood/KPOP?) to something closer to supporting local artists. Maybe it will just make an industry where you outsource Intimacy-as-a-service.
Unfortunately that might be better in a different thread and a shoulder issue is keeping me from being at a computer too long at the moment. (I'm also blaming that for my typos and rushing)
I definitely agree that the spam was annoying, but to me that's more on the owner/mods of the subreddits than anything else.
Even as someone not at all involved in SW, I think it's important for them to have a location where they have more control over their content and payment which OF seemed to be providing, even if it wasn't perfect.
As one of those mods, that's not a fair take. The seller spam (because OF isn't the only game in town) is pervasive and it's a constant, unpaid, job to address it. Normal subscribers don't read rules all that often, let alone sellers and then you get the modmail barrage of "Why was my post removed? Why was I banned? You're all pieces of shit." and so on... Not to mention the bribes or doxxing threats.
As someone who mods another subreddit you're right, maybe I should have put more on the admins. That said, we ignore a ton of modmails asking why posts are removed/users banned or just respond telling them to read the rules.
They've got a number of blacklisted sites, would take 30 seconds to add onlyfans to the list.
I ignore most modmail as it's usually idiotic questions answered by reading the rules, but I've had everything under the sun slung at me as a mod of various NSFW and SFW subs over the decade+
Does it? I don't get the impression that this is something done as some long con by OF that always wanted to "Go clean" eventually.
Nor that OF won't be hit hard by this.
OnlyFans is more synonymous with lewd content and pornography than Tumblr was... So much so that you know that when someone says they have an OnlyFans, it means that they are selling nude pics and videos of themselves on a subscription or per-upload basis.
Tumblr banning porn definitely led to a major exodus towards alternatives that were more accepting of NSFW content. For OF, a ban on sexually explicit content would outright kill the site.
That being said, OF's porn ban has apparently come amid pressure from payment processers (like MasterCard, Visa, Stripe, AMEX, PayPal, etc) and banks. I wonder if OF's shutdown is down to a puritan agenda from these aforementioned stakeholders, or if they (like Tumblr) were only being targeted because apparently CP had been spotted on the platform...
That is hilarious honestly.
Given how much money onlyfans makes, i wonder if this will be a catalyst for some serious non-card-scheme providers to become popular.
I can only imagine this is going to cause a scramble to find a replacement platform. In this instance, they are being "de-platformed" so I wonder if they will experience the same effect hate groups experience when they are removed from sites.
I don't use OnlyFans but it really does suck for the people out there who do use it as a means of income or supplementing their income.
What are they for, if not sexually-explicit conduct?
Quite a few "ordinary" content creators (mainstream Youtubers, indie artists, etc) have recently started migrating to Onlyfans, presumably as an alternative to Patreon, despite them producing no sexually explicit content whatsoever. And this move certainly explains why Onlyfans seems to have been making a concerted effort recently to market themselves more towards that crowd... since they are likely about to take a massive revenue hit from this due to the majority of the content producers on their site currently being pornstars, camgirls/guys, and other creators/influencers with a sexually explicit content side-hustle.
Why though? Patreon don't make much of a cut from subscriptions and those who were banned from Patreon for controversial content like Sargon of Akkad or Paul Joseph Watson have flocked to SubscribeStar instead.
Having an Onlyfans doesn't mean you can't also still have a Patreon, and giving fans more options for ways to support and interact with you is generally better than less.
Patreon is also pretty clunky for interacting with your fans through its now rather outdated, lackluster community features. And it also lacks video hosting so instead relies on creators linking to unlisted YouTube videos in order to release their Patreon "exclusive" content, which is problematic since the only thing needed for non-patrons to see that content is the URL (which can be leaked/shared). Whereas Onlyfans has really solid, modern community features, offers image and video hosting, as well as livestreaming, all of which can only be accesed by actually paying to see that content.
So despite all the doom & gloom in this topic, IMO Onlyfans will probably be fine in the long term. And if I was Patreon I would honestly be pretty worried about Onlyfans making this move since it's currently a much more appealing, feature-rich platform for creators and fans. And unlike Patreon, which AFAIK is still operating at a loss so is going to struggle to reach feature parity with Onlyfans, Onlyfans undoubtedly has a substantial amount of funds in the bank to see them through this revenue dip while they transition away from explicit content creators and court more mainsteam ones away from Patreon.
Most likely onlyfans paid them to move. Many social media platforms pay popular people to use the platform and shill it to their fans.
Possibly tangentially interesting: here's a subreddit wiki page for payment methods for independent online sex workers. Crypto is at the top, and for good reason IMO. There's also OF competitors like JustFor.Fans that someone I know is switching to.
Do payment processors discriminate against erotic content in countries other than the US?
I was under the impression that this wasn't discrimination based on erotic content per se. It sounded like the issue is that Only Fans has a massive amount of fraud leading to credit card chargebacks which are costly to the credit card companies.
Why are they dropping sexual content, than? :/
Because the sexual content is the content that's attracting the fraud. Also, laws around consent and age verification mean keeping a lot of paperwork for all of the people in erotic videos you show to users. It appears they don't wish to do the work involved. Only they can tell you for sure, though.
I'm having trouble finding a primary source on this (their blog doesn't seem to mention it at all). All the articles I've found either do not cite a source, or point to some random twitter account with a screenshot of some text with no indication of where it came from.
That "random twitter account" being linked to by a bunch of other outlets is Dan Primack's, one of the authors of this Axios article. But apparently Bloomberg was the first to report this news, and a bunch of other outlets have now received confirmation from Onlyfans, so I don't think its veracity in really worth doubting at this point.
E.g. From Variety:
So Axios' only reference is their own author's Twitter. I can't get into the Bloomberg article to see if they link to a press release of any kind either.
I'm only skeptical because, as other people have pointed out, this basically flushes their entire business down the toilet. I've seen claims (also unverified) that they are actually going the PornHub route and requiring creators of explicit content to undergo a more thorough verification process.
I think you have it backwards. Their reference is undoubtedly the press release they received from OnlyFans, which the author then took a screenshot of a portion of and posted to his twitter. And they are clearly not the only one to have received that press release either, since many other outlets (including highly reputable ones like Bloomberg, BBC, Financial Times, etc) have all been using the same wording along with "Onlyfans said", "the company said", or "in a statement provided to <outlet>", in their articles about this. Whereas if their only reference was an unofficial or third-party source they would have explicitly said so.
And while being skeptical is good, I think you might want to redirect some of that skepticism towards all the people currently freaking out and claiming this is the death knell of Onlyfans, which is a serious overreaction IMHO. Onlyfans had processed over £1.7bn in transactions in total as of April last year (which they took a 20% cut of), and reported £281m in revenue last year as of Nov, which netted them £53m in profits... so they are very likely sitting on a fair chunk of cash right now to keep them afloat while they change course.
Also, keep in mind that they are not banning all explicit content and nudity (which likely still makes up a sizeable portion of their users' content), merely depictions of "sexually-explicit conduct" (i.e. hardcore porn). And they have also been making a concerted effort recently to market themselves as an alternative to Patreon for mainstream content creators, celebrities, and influencers who produce no sexually explicit material. Which actually seems to be working too, since many high profile Youtubers, recording artists, and mainstream celebrities have migrated to Onlyfans recently. So I absolutely wouldn't count them out just yet.
I wonder if this has anything to do with things:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58255865
Given how quickly things moved after the PornHub story, maybe this is them trying to get ahead of things to save their non sexual content?
If an alternative has the choice of giving OnlyFans features with crypto and/or NFTs this is their moment, not sure what moot OnlyFans has left if they ban porn content.