Under the skin of OnlyFans
bbc.com
bbc.com
Not 100% related to the article, but directly related.
I worked as developer for a product in the same niche ("democratizing adult content"). I spent almost 2 years working on the frontend, devops, and building out the analytics engine (all pre-covid).
Anyway, on to the comment at hand.
We had a small number of users compared to OnlyFans (when I left, there were about 20K active content creators). The average monthly payment was $5000 (skewed massively by the top 5%).
We had phone support for our larger creator. One very common request was to instantly delete all data and stop processing future orders. Usually, the requester was in a pretty agitated/distraught state (I'd occasionally get escalated calls to "confirm" that all data would be deleted ASAP and no copies would be kept).
I spoke to a few of our creators and most would be desperate to scrub all of their content form the internet because:
a) A parent/relative found out.
b) A fellow employee at their 9-5 stumbled on their account.
c) A 'fan' went nuclear and was waging all out digital war. One creator had a former subscriber sending data dumps to all their Facebook and Instagram friends (they also spammed every public email address at their 'normal' workplace, which was a local government).
We would occasionally get demanding letters requesting the removal of content from third party sites (Pornhub, Reddit, etc). The creators would somehow be surprised when they realised we couldn't remove content from other websites.
The experience was very depressing.
But also possibly be besides the point: the internet doesn't keep secrets.
A choice to put content out there in public form, is de-facto a choice to make it available to anyone. Whether they paid the $10 or not.
That's a reality that has to be contended with wherever someone sits on the fence about the morality of it all.
I totally agree the content creators should assume the content will remain public forever and they will be doxxed at some point.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/16/16654800/twitch-gaming-t...
Sites like OnlyFans could have mandatory training about not revealing sensitive details (close the curtains before you shoot, take your diploma off the wall, use a stage name, etc.). But yes, your face is a giveaway; and every day it becomes easier to turn a couple breadcrumbs into a full dossier of someone's life.
That's a practical proposal that would help.
Onlyfans creator Aella did a guide on camgirling a few years back: https://knowingless.com/2018/11/19/maximizing-your-slut-impa...
Source needed. A quick Google search turned up nothing.
The whole point of this thread is about how poorly OnlyFans is managing this complex space.
Social media in all forms grooms young naive women into feeling these types of careers are lucrative (which they can be) and even empowering, but I almost see it as drug dealing, with the drug being intimacy and attention, and by nature it is a transaction where the dealer always uses their own supply.
I feel like these dangerous aspects of sex work are often ignored in the current zeitgeist of de-stigmatizing, or of rebranding sex work in western society. While things like onlyfans have helped with issues of exploitation, it has really changed the game into one that is not well understood yet.
We might say the same thing happens with bad crypto schemes. Young people get excited and they can lose a lot of money. Though the stakes are potentially higher when you lose your reputation.
Is stigmatization always an objectively bad thing? I suppose it depends on your frame of reference. I don’t think any person should be stigmatized for what they do, but certain activities may well deserve it. I suppose that’s also a recurrent theme in the New Testament.
One thing I think ought to be stigmatized more is video game usage. I know many people (mostly men) my age (late adolescence) whose lives have been/were destroyed by chronic video game addiction. Similar with porn and “sex-work adjacent” things (on the consumer side).
I still play some titles sometimes that feed my SciFi or History interests, like MassEffect or Ck2/TotalWar, but I don't enjoy them like I used to.
The decline in alcohol addictions is often attributed to gaming, particularly among men. I also personally prefer people who are addicted to games over those addicted to alcohol, and long term it is much safer for everyone involved.
I have never seen this. Like, this is literally first time I see this attribution being made.
While I have not seen a study on it, I would expect to see a correlation between the need to escape reality and the use of tools that allow escaping. With this follow also a link with social status and class. It is why alcohol use traditionally was associated with the lower classes, and laws directed at consumption of alcohol was basically laws direct at the lower classes.
> [0] "Descriptive data showed no general decline in binge drinking across European countries. In contrast to our prediction, the association between binge drinking and computer gaming was not negative [b = 0.26, one-sided 95% confidence interval (−∞, 0.47), P = 0.98, Bayes Factor = 0.21]. We found the same pattern of result in a secondary analysis on six Nordic countries that have experienced declines in adolescent drinking recent years. In analyses with covariates reflecting engagement in other activities, we only observed statistical evidence for an effect of going out."
[0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dar.13226?af=R
> [1] "Low-level gaming was positively associated with patterns of problematic alcohol use in the crude analyses; these associations became non-significant when controlling for demographic variables. High-level gaming was inversely associated with patterns of problematic alcohol use when controlling for demographics, personality, and mental health covariates."
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235285321...
Why stigmatize something instead of the addiction itself? I knew someone who poured themselves into music production and fantasy to the detriment of everything else. Would you stigmatize music?
Perhaps if something is almost always destructive then some social or legal regulation is warranted. I don't see that with gaming, despite the damage caused by outliers.
That said, perhaps there are some activities which are not addictions which are still destructive and should be stigmatized mainly to protect the person performing the activity (such becoming an "OnlyFans creator").
This is something that's really been bugging me when looking at Reddit's porn subs. There has been a really noticeable change in the last 2 years. Back then, a majority of the posters seemed to actually be amateurs getting their kicks from online exhibitionism. Now it's 99% OnlyFans advertising. I guess that professionalization was bound to happen.
But what bugs me are the titles: they used to be descriptions of the content, sometimes addressing the audience as a whole. But now, most titles personally address the viewer with things like "Be honest, would you lick it?".
I bet that raises engagement and gets subscriptions, but seems like a really bad idea in terms of, as you wrote, mental health for the women, and reinforcing toxic attitudes among the men.
Another cultural thing, they've recently started automatically translating the titles to my native language, and I don't know why but the titles sound so much more vulgar in Dutch than they do in English to me. Automatic translation is always annoying but here it's especially jarring.
It's the other way around: you're less emotionally connected to your second language. You're not phased by the most scurrilous elements of English, because of a combination of factors (like the way your brain processes a second language, and the fact that you did not grow up in a native English culture). Whereas you have a primary connection to Dutch and its native culture, so you instinctively know what is vulgar or disgusting in a much more direct way.
I'm a native English speaker and I've noticed that swearing no longer feels like a big deal. Our media and online discourse are saturated with the worst swears our language has to bear, to the point none of it hits with gravity.
I also think some of it has to do with changing generational attitudes. Millennials and Gen Z use swearing as friendly banter. You can call your casual friend a "fucking asshole", and as long as you're smiling and laughing, it's an endearing gesture. And if it were truly meant as a jab, it doesn't even sting.
The only words you can't (and shouldn't!) say are racial epithets. Those are untouchable. It's almost like what swear words themselves felt like when I was a child and knew I would be punished for saying "shit" or "damn".
> In medieval Bristol, one casually referred to a glade called Fuckinggrove, while up in Chester, one could proudly sport a name like Roger Fuckbythenavel. Only later did fuck become a word so dirty that generations of lexicographers pretended that it didn’t exist. And just as a word can attain the power of profane status, it can lose it....
> More broadly, while the sacred status of most of the words Carlin mentioned has weakened considerably, new words have arisen that occupy the same place in the culture. Aunt Ruth might have walked out of the room rather than listen to Carlin's disquisition when her nephew Craig played it on his record player. She seems so old-fashioned today, but how many of us would be up for watching a hot new comedian on Netflix gabbing cockily about how we need to get over n[*****] and f[*****]?
Edit: in reply to dead comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27896373: I'm pretty sure your comment is dead because you didn't "prudishly" redact the words I did, but I can add the brackets if it makes you happy.
If you are using symbols indicating quotations, then you don't do unmarked editorial alterations. The quote from the article is “...get over nigger and faggot?”
By making the changes without marking them as editorial alterations (e.g., “...n[*****] and f[*****]”) you are misattributing your prudishness to the source article.
Shit and damn used to be taboo, but they haven't been now for a while. However (in the American dialect, I think) "cunt" is pretty taboo, as well as the various racial terms, and "fuck" can be taboo depending on the context (i.e. you wouldn't use it to address your server at a restaurant).
I feel the same way about apologizing in a 2nd language.
I'll overly apologize on minor inconveniences because the words don't carry the weight of saying "sorry, sorry, sorry" in English.
I don't feel quite the same about Spanish, although the expletives that are more layered in metaphor amuse me more than anything else. Me cago en la leche!
I suspect that has more to do with your own culture's relationship with Russia than something specific to the language.
I was astonished at their offense and didn't understand it for a long time.
I don't agree. Even the most misogynistic stuff there doesn't actively try to draw in the viewer to the same degree, and most importantly, it allows the women a much clearer separation of what they're doing before the camera and who they really are. They don't have to advertise it and tell random strangers "you can have that too!".
Youtube also - sometimes - translates video titles, which in some cases is convenient (like Japanese videos). But that's the thing, from a Dutch standpoint you can read English titles just fine, but sites like Pornhub, Youtube are international affairs, and assuming everyone knows some English, while fair enough, is not actually a global truth and there's plenty of non-western countries where English is a lot more uncommon. I do believe 'our' generation (in NL) knows good English because we grew up with the early internet, which was a lot bigger if you could read and write English. But the current generation is landing in a much more internationalized internet.
Huh, I wonder if there are tools to do A B testing on sites like Pornhub..
Every word you add is another tag or search your video is related to.
For example, if you're just browsing for thumbnails that look good, and you click forward to the action, there's a decent chance you're unknowingly watching some kind of rape or exploitation scenario. Some are just silly, like stepmom's arm is stuck in the couch, but others are sleazy and many would be crimes in real life. I don't think such content should be censored, but it doesn't make a great fantasy for me, and I don't like the undercurrent of wondering if my engagement with whatever video I'm watching is contributing to some marketing drone saying, "The stepdad-punishing-teen-daughter-with-sex genre is trending, let's push it hard today!"
Another thing that vividly stuck in my mind was seeing a photo of an actress I recognized in a news headline: teen victim of car accident identified as 19-year-old runaway. The reason it stuck in my mind was the realization that I had been jerking off to her videos for easily four years, maybe longer. Such a thing shouldn't be shocking. If people will obtain forged proof of age documents to win Little League tournaments, they'll do it to make money, right? But that was pretty sobering and made it hard to look at young attractive women on my laptop without wondering how old they are and if maybe I should watch something else instead.
Don't get me wrong; I don't abstain completely. I've just developed a distaste that keeps me away a lot of the times when otherwise I would gladly partake.
It was, but the last couple of years have accelerated the process significantly beyond where it would otherwise have moved in this amount of time.
The pandemic had created changes in both the supply (people jobless without support, or at least support that fully covered their living costs, people at home and bored, etc.) and demand (people working at home taking breaks in a way they couldn't at the office, people at home not working and bored and able to pay for it (supported by furlough schemes for instance), and people unable to pay but similarly bored and so future "I spent my savings and got into dept on porn" stories.
> now, most titles personally address the viewer with things like
That sounds like the good ol' "call to action" of the advertising world, it engages the mind, even if only subconsciously, especially if the wording means it could be directed personally, and gets more attention. If course when most titles follow the pattern the benefit will drop off precipitously but the pattern will stick around until the next big idea comes along and saturates the market.
> and reinforcing toxic attitudes
Including the "abuse of power" fantasies, either directly or through "she made me do it" inversions. Though porn has always had these there seems to have been a mad scramble towards "step family" crap in the role play as porn makers have realised it is legal in most places and recent (or recently surfaced) big scandals have made their previous go-to options (like the casting couch) less palettible. All the mainstream providers pushing the same thing, and the smaller/independent ones following so they appear in "related content" lists, poses a threat of normalising these dynamics in some minds which can put already vulnerable people at greater risk.
I'm guessing that is just a thing some men do but it is bound to be made worse by women correctly figuring out the high-engagement equilibrium is tantalising without promising. But a lot of them probably aren't going to realise that they're dealing with unexploded ordinance; that could foreseeably lead to some spectacular meltdowns for men who were already mental health edge cases when it dawns on them that their time is being wasted.
That's why in places like strip-clubs you usually have at least a couple of strongly-built bodyguards who can address this issue right there on the spot, on the Internet there is no such thing.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/506723/how-did-o...
Of course not all fans are like this but it just takes a very vocal minority to create a big problem.
But then again, it takes some insanity to become a brand fan in the first place.
I’m sure that when trading desires and emotion like on OnlyFans, the things I’ve mentioned become 100x worse.
I've never experienced it as a target but I've seen fan rage explosions (not necessarily direct customers, depending on the particular industry, but entitled downstream fans targeting the upstream objects of fandom) in all of these non-sex-work industries:
film/television, music, video games, tabletop hobby gaming (particularly RPGs), sport, software (particularly open source), ...probably some that I am forgetting.
https://collider.com/last-of-us-2-controversy-explained/
Too many people have too much time on their hands.
Stock and currency trading forums were early instances of these challenges.
After all, the origin of the term Stan is exactly about this kind of parasocial toxicity.
The internet connects people, sometimes 1:1, sometimes 1:N.
A Youtuber asking for comments they may or may not have the time to read is one thing, a camgirl writing 200 subscribers "Haven't seen you in a while, touching myself now imagining your dick inside me" is a very different thing.
Or it could just be normal, expected behaviour.
I bet that raises engagement and gets subscriptions, but seems like a really bad idea in terms of, as you wrote, mental health for the women, and reinforcing toxic attitudes among the men.
I believe since this is HN, it isn't a radical claim to suggest reading/ comprehension isn't the problem. But since I can't make guarantees I'll give a succinct answer in the interests of time.
Expected by whom?
The Pope.
I would say every culture around the world before the last 20 years or so understands this perfectly well. It's just the conclusions that this vast majority have come to do not agree with the current society.
That leads us now to express misunderstanding and bewilderement.
On the contrary, everyone is talking about mental costs, implying that they do not know what they are doing. I know a person who changed her work from being a cashier at a supermarket to a sex worker. Mentally, she benefited a lot. In one job, she felt like an automaton serving people. I other she had personal relationships with her clients. You can guess which is which.
Or another one, also from a sex worker:
"We don’t ask the barista, the plumber, or the mail person whether they really like their job as a measure of whether their industry should be criminalised. Imagine criminalising the whole clothing industry because of bad working conditions in some factories. Or health care. No, we understand that people who work under bad conditions need labour rights. That that is going to help them much more than criminalising their jobs. Why is this so difficult to understand when it comes to the sex industry?"
https://web.archive.org/web/20200220124433/http://rosieheart...
To make it clear - yes, there are risks, short and long-term. I guess some underestimate long-term risks (e.g. revealing one's face online, which is a point of no return; or if they ever do unprotected sex). Yet, "sex workers don't know what they are doing" is a patronizing approach.
The men who drive by want to cum as fast as possible with as little damage to their pocketbook as possible. So they drive in, maybe critique her appearance, say, "tits" or "ass" (usually it's just singulars as imperatives), cum, then leave.
She's started keeping a list of clients who say thank you. Almost none.
The far left has really hijacked the discourse around sex work and used language of empowerment to encourage young girls to get in and get what's theirs. Mostly what they're getting is trauma that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
When there exist no labor protection, the traditional approach when someone died on the job was to replace them with a new desperate person. Livestock in, livestock out.
Becoming a sex worker today in most countries is like becoming a coal miner of old. The only thing that matter is what you produce, and if you get hurt you will be replaced by someone just as desperate.
You are narrowly focusing on a single sentence from a larger rebuttal to the notion that sex work is a healthier pursuit for women than retail.
However, I think it’s dangerous to shape the conversation about sex work solely around such cases. A person from my old flat share was a nurse on a terminal cancer ward for mostly children. > 90% of the patients died. They burned out within two years on the job. My aunt had to quit her job as hospital nurse because it physically ruined her body. She’s still suffering from that, decades later. A friend of mine spent his (then mandatory) social service caring for a quadriplegic person who deliberately tried to destroy my friend mentally, sort of their revenge for what happened to them. It took less than half a year for my friend to end up in stationary therapy, due to risk of self-harm and suicide. Yet, we don’t discuss these cases in terms of “being a nurse is a ruinous job. It needs to be banned.” - nor should we. Those cases need to be discussed in terms of “how can we ensure these jobs are safe and receive the support needed.” I believe that making sex work illegal and driving it back underground is not helping that conversation.
Just because normal jobs suck, doesn’t mean sex work is good.
What I’m saying is that deriving policy from anecdotes is dangerous.
Anyone can cherry pick data and present a few cases to support their world view.
What policy should we derive from your friends personal experience? None! Because we should consider all the data and not your friends story.
My explicitly expressed view is “do not base any policy discussion on anecdotes, even the ones I cited.” Recounting the anecdotes only shows that I can pick sufficient anecdotes to support both sides of the argument and as such, basing any reasonable discussion on them is futile.
> What policy should we derive from your friends personal experience? None! Because we should consider all the data and not your friends story.
Exactly.
Just because sex work sucks doesn't mean that you improve sex workers conditions by criminalizing their work while creating no legal opportunity.
Criminalizing sex work just makes it suck more, and the reduces the best case for people for whom it was their best available option (whether or not it still is.)
Why do we make killers lives worse with criminalization of murder?
Because there are negative effects to individuals and societies at large.
Sex work is not the only way for people to support themselves, anymore than professional killers who can also find other means of work.
Well, no, because most illegal trades aren’t illegal to protect people voluntarily engaging in one side or the other of the trade.
> Why do we make killers lives worse with criminalization of murder?
No one argues for criminalization of murder to protect people who would be murderers if it was legal, but people do argue for criminalization of sex workers to protect people who would be sex workers from exploitive labor conditions (but tend to fail to have a narrative, when so doing, about how narrowing their options to include only options that they would, were legal sex work available, see as worse than legal sex work—including illegal sex work—does that.)
I never indicated either of these would be solutions. I don't believe elevating sex work to a pedestal in the cultural consciousness is right or ethical. That is primarily what I am taking issue with. It can be lucrative but the toll on young women, often very young women, can be great. It's a damaging profession both to its consumers and to its creators.
Banning it will not stop it. What we need is to have a frank discussion about what it entails and stop the trend of fetishizing or glorifying it as a desirable career. It is by and large ugly and violent.
With age and life experience, I'm actually finding it increadibly difficult to agree with this statement. Sex work might be damaging for many providers, that's for sure (although, as others mentioned, so are other professions deemed essential); but damaging for consumers, I don't know. If it were so bad, it wouldn't be "the oldest profession". (Male) society undoubtedly needs periodic release, and sex work is one of such valves.
"Whatever a monk keeps pursuing with his thinking & pondering, that becomes the inclination of his awareness. If a monk keeps pursuing thinking imbued with sensuality, abandoning thinking imbued with renunciation, his mind is bent by that thinking imbued with sensuality."
We have a choice every time a thought, a desire, a feeling comes to us. We can follow it, pursue it, foment it. Or we can see it, acknowledge it, and drop it. People will do what they want and never have I advocated we tell people they can't do with their bodies whatever they want to do with them. But we can encourage a wiser eye in our consumption.
As Online sex work as increasingly adopted the 'influencer' mentality to it's marketing, I think it is damaging to consumers. Maybe you think things like NLP don't have an impact on you, but they certainly do on others. As other comments on this thread have mentioned many of the ads/content have become a lot more targeted.
On the other hand it's also weird to me to see progressive elements talk of normalizing such a personal commodification -- perhaps like some progressives, I am not sure there is as big a difference as we'd like to believe between selling one's spring days to be a cog in any commercial operation and selling participation in sexual gratification. But nobody talks of normalizing or glorifying the former! On the other hand, no one stigmatizes being a cog in a commercial operation. Maybe what's going on is that it's hard to argue for the dignity of removing personalized stigma without overcorrecting.
So the solution is probably conversations (like this one) elaborating on the dynamics of the ways it can go wrong. No one's freedom to choose or dignity if they choose sex work is hurt by clear-eyed explanations of the hazards.
There is! In the first case, you work with colleagues who may become friends, you learn how to treat people and build stronger relationships. The "cog in [a] commercial operation" quip is an abstraction. Generally, people have relationships with their peers and are not "cogs."
Whereas on the other hand, the sex worker deals with people who treat them badly precisely because they've paid to do that. They even enjoy it. This is a twisted model of human relations, and the sex worker is both the enabler of that awful exchange and has a target on his or her back.
So the progressive "view" of this thing is absolutely insane. It's constructed from a position of privilege where the reality constructed by toying with such ideas need never be encountered.
Speak to statistical distributions within each if you must (preferably from well-researched statistics including polls of people involved) but what's actually less than sane is the construction of a rigid dichotomy in which the abuse happens over here in this sex-work-bad-place and the positive-human-interaction stuff happens over here in happy-commercial-peer-space.
However, if MY attitudes are adopted, then the locus of control returns to the individual. Who will do better in the end: the one who goes home every night feeling that the "enterprise [is] badly suffused with exploitative and adversarial interactions" or the one who takes personal responsibility for each interaction in which he or she is involved?
I know who I think will do better. Who will have a more positive impact on their surrounding environment. This may be unsophisticated.
It's not being put on a pedestal. It's being pulled up from the gutters.
> It's a damaging profession both to its consumers and to its creators.
There are far more damaging professions that are well respected and accepted in the modern world. However, because the stigma attached to them is generally positive, they get more assistance and help with that damage. Sex workers don't get that benefit.
> What we need is to have a frank discussion about what it entails and stop the trend of fetishizing or glorifying it as a desirable career. It is by and large ugly and violent.
That starts by not treating it like it's "by and large ugly and violent." If you want to have meaningful change, start by respecting it. Otherwise, you are really just part of the problem.
My wife is a sex worker. She has been for five years, four of those together with me. Before I met her, I was a part of a community of sex workers I had known since I was in my twenties so add 5 years more of direct experience with the lives and minds of those workers. My friend who has worked as a domme for the last decade once called me "a friend to sex workers". I deeply care for the people who choose this profession. Ten years ago, five years ago I would say you were right. But I have seen the damage first, second, and third hand.
> It's not being put on a pedestal. It's being pulled up from the gutters.
There is nothing to "pull up". To touch it is to touch a viper that will bite and hold on until you let go. The vast network of clients, which I hear of every day objectifies, commits violence, and minimizes the humanity of the people engaged in sex work.
Yes, it is "by and large ugly and violent". Violent to the prostitutes who risk their lives every time they meet a client, violent to the peace and stability of the mind. Ugly to peel back the spectacled layer and discover the worst of ourselves: covetous, vain and brutal.
I do not make this observation as one uninitiated. I write with the weight of a decade of contact with these people I call my wife and friends.
This doesn't change anything I said. Nor change the fact that your attitude is part of the problem. You are not unique in your point of view, but having that point of view doesn't mean your opinions are immediately valid.
> I do not make this observation as one uninitiated.
But you are. You are just an observer. You are not a SW yourself.
> I write with the weight of a decade of contact with these people
If that's true, then it should come as no surprise that there are more people in your position that disagree with your attitude. Otherwise, you don't know as much as you think you do.
Edit: In fact, I'll say that by using your position to push the narrative that what your wife does is "ugly and violent," you are doing more to support the idea that people should treat those like her in an "ugly and violent" way. If you don't respect what she does, why should others?
[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@profitfromtrauma/video/6926281617094...
I could say the same thing to you.
Because I have. I've been doing it for 20+ years now.
But also because you literally admit to ignoring sex workers. You can't just pick and choose those that support your narrative.
I'm done with this conversation. It's clear you aren't interesting in having a real discussion, and just pushing an agenda while at the same time insulting your friends, your wife, and ignoring the people you pretend to support.
I never admitted to this, anywhere. In fact, I stated I've been listening for the last decade. Sex workers, especially women, experience extraordinary levels of violence, daily. [1] Sex work is violent, one of the most violent professions in the world.
My father used to drive prostitutes between their appointments to keep them safe because the level of danger to their person was so high. This is in Denmark, one of the safest countries in the world to live in. My friend who works as a domme in the Bay Area was stalked and physically harassed for a year by one particularly obsessive client.
I don't appreciate you using accusatory language to describe me or my relationship to my wife or friends. I never did anything of the sort to you, so please treat me with respect.
This cannot be true. Anyone can find ample porn online (definitely enough to cum) for free. Therefore it follows that people engaging with OnlyFans and other paid-for porn services must be getting something else out of it - the illusion of an intimate (two-way) relationship, the feeling of dominance (uttering commands that the performers then act out), novelty (a bit far-fetched, there's almost certainly more free porn online than anyone can watch in a lifetime, except maybe extremely niche interests...), or something else...
My porn tastes are not fully mainstream, but not far off the path either. You can definitely hit a point where it feels like every clip that matches your interests is one you've seen before. Every actor is one you've seen before. When visiting Pornhub or similar I noticed myself going straight for the "sort by newest" option more often.
And that's why I went to Chaturbate for the first time, because it's live video I've never seen before.
Chaturbate and other live cam sites have their own issues...the two-way stuff can be pretty creepy in both directions. But it is always fresh video and that is its own attraction, even with what seems like an endless sea of porn available.
Camsites are expensive, especially camsites catering to the one-to-one format. Per minute the rate is extremely high and most men can't afford it so they take what they can get. The ones who pay for longer shows often have both specific fetishes not easily catered to and disposable income exceeding what most clients come prepared to spend. Or else the peak experience gets them cumming earlier than they expected and their guilt and shame drives them to leave as soon as they finish.
Arguing that the facts seem to contradict your (or your wife’s) interpretation (an argument I am observing, not endorsing) of the situation is not questioning either of your honesty. People can draw false conclusions without lying.
Some people would call removing you loved one's agency to make their own decisions abuse.
In the abstract, though, I think yes, if you see someone being abused repeatedly and you support and encourage them to continue going back to the abusive relationship, you are enabling the abuse.
I don't think any of us have any idea what the facts of the situation is. So it's not clear to me anyone is "enabling" anything.
(I also believe sex work is necessarily self-destructive, as it commodifies, commercializes and depersonalizes the closest, most intimate way of relating to and bonding with another human that we have.)
Your phrasing of "why do you let your wife..." implies OP can and should control whether his wife does this self-destructive behavior.
He can't, literally, and he should not try to.
He is responsible for his choices, not hers.
Yes, if he sees this as hurting her and he's not trying to persuade her to stop doing it, he's responsible for that inaction on his part, and I'd say he should take action.
But, he needs to always remember he does not and should not control her.
Obviously you should not use violence or force to cause a change but if my wife was working in a profession such as this I would absolutely give an ultimatum of either stop or the kids and I are leaving. Sometime tough love is still love. With that said I don't know OP's situation and they will do whatever they think is best in a situation.
That is knowing what you are going to do, and when, and communicating that to your partner.
It is not about controlling what they do, which is what the wording of "let your wife" implies (whether intentionally or not).
But you can't make them stop choosing to take the next hit.
All you can do is try to persuade them to stop.
Sometimes defining boundaries of what you'll tolerate is part of that, as I've described elsewhere in the thread.
That's about knowing what you will do and when, then communicating it to the others in the situation. It's not about controlling what they choose to do.
Being able to make some money with a self-defined schedule is appealing, and the idea of selling your own porn probably starts out as a thrill.
Like anything else, any job turns into a grind. A gig where you’re essentially a circus animal performing sex acts for a crowd probably becomes fairly numbing.
OnlyFans creators aren't all from the US, or even the developed world, and minimum wage isn’t a global constant; also, the stat on median income you cite excludes tips, so it understates things potentially quite significantly.
My friend works for MFC, and is a "contractor", not an employee.
Thanks so much. Its awesome to know there is a site that cares enough about their models to provide support for therapy.
No, it hasn't. The far left is anti-capitalist, and includes both pro-and-anti-sex-work factions; the attitude you describe is more that of the pro-sex-work portion of the pro-(possibly somewhat tamed)-capitalism center-to-center-left.
The pro-sex-work portion of the anti-capitalist (including far) left sees sex work largely as just work, and agrees with many of the (not explicitly gender-based) popular arguments about harms associated with sex work as accurate of sex work within a capitalist system, but not as particular too sex work, but rather as endemic to labor within capitalism.
It's a far left I've experienced both in the US and here in Denmark and I think it's largely the far left people think of when it is mentioned.
I wouldn't describe you as having any useful knowledge of the left (even to the extent of being able to identify the part that is the “far left”.)
> What I've observed is a political group largely held together with
The far left isn’t “held together” at all, but riven with fairly deep internal divisions. Whatever group you see that seems unitary and held together by anything is a much narrower faction than “the far left”, even if it happens to coincidentally overlap with it. In the particular case of the one held together by:
> an obsessive compulsion to root out any element not in line with its own brand of correct thought, which contains a variety of maximalist interpretations on everything from sex and gender to race and institutions.
It’s mostly a fairly narrow vocal largely petit-bourgeois faction of dilettantes inspired mainly by a weird blend of identity politics messages concocted by center-right groups to look progressive while preventing class solidarity occasionally (but not consistently; a lot of them are pretty much exclusively focussed on non-economic-class identity politics) mixed with progressive economic slogans that that are, at best, dubiously compatible with their particular brand of identity politics.
Being extremely generous based on the subset incorporating, however poorly, leftist economic messaging as a component of their platform, one might consider this group to overlap with the far left, but it certainly is not the same as the far left.
Problem is that is in direct conflict with actual reality.
No, they don't.
I mean, if you stop before “free from” that’s almost a good, though somewhat exaggerated, description of extreme libertarianism (whether left, right, or center) but even far left libertarians don’t believe in that being free from judgement, responsibiliry, repercussions, or accountability (but would probably agree with free from prejudice.)
And the non-libertarian far left doesn't even approximately match the description even before the “free from” part.
Never being thanked never came up, but I suspect most people dealing with the public could relate to how shitty people can be. I wish we made a bigger deal about the mental health of folks working regular service/hospitality jobs and that companies made a better effort to protect their employees from rude customers and abuse.
Webcam stuff at least seems somewhat ideal in terms of safety and in reducing exposure to drugs. It also gives people the ability to instantly drop anyone making them uncomfortable or being obnoxious. I can't imagine most people going that route will have any lasting harm, especially as we move toward a society that wont judge and condemn men and women who do that kind of work. Right now, there are still risks to people when their employers or others in their lives find out they do sex work, but eventually I'd like to think that'll be a thing of the past.
All influencers hoping to make decent money on OFs already need to have some kind of platform, so they already massively traded away their privacy. Selling a nudie is the next step if you're struggling to make money.
This guy (a fellow Software Engineer actually) is a growing YouTube channel who's doing a sort of vlog / reality show about his family and friends. Once he started approaching 1mln subs by consistently putting out great content, his friends and family launched their own social channels as well to benefit from the clout.
His mom and his girlfriend have their own YouTube channels but they're not as popular. Still, their onlyfans passed his YouTube's channel revenue in a very short time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQsp54kyMwE
I agree entirely. I heard of one young lady who started an OnlyFans, apparently did quite well, but decided to stop it because of the psychic damage.
I'm going to be heavily downvoted for this, but I'm going to say it anyway ...
We need to stop all the bullshit about how it empowers women. Certain sections of the Women's Lib movement are particularly to blame for this, and it is right to heavily censure them.
Sites like OnlyFans exploit lonely young men who are poor at making connections with women. It's morally wrong to engage in exploitative behaviour. Period. I don't care if they're "beta cucks", "incels", "losers", or whatever de-humanising manshaming words one cares to use, exploitative behaviour is still wrong.
Sure, if you bounce your tiddies over on OnlyFans then it doesn't make you literally worse than Hitler, but these people should be discouraged from what they're doing.
That is a common assumption shared both by social conservatives who think any sex outside marriage is wrong anyway, and certain feminist circles who seem to have a problem with seeing male sexuality as anything but a threat.
But I don't think that assumption is correct. Sure, sex work can be exploitative, and it often is. But it doesn't have to be. Just like the hospitality industry has an endemic problem with workers being exploited financially and tolerating verbally abusive behaviour from customers - yet nobody suggests restaurants in general are morally wrong and should be discouraged.
It is possible to do sex work in a non-exploitative way that maintains respect and boundaries between sex worker and client.
The problem is that you can increase short term profits by blurring boundaries, and the network effects of online platforms probaby magnify that.
The appeal of sexwork products is that they can be used to simulate a needful human interaction, one that implies the highest degree of intimacy even when intimacy is explicitly not present.
The necessary deception inherent in the consumption of sexwork products is normally voluntarily performed by the consumer of the product, but even so, failure to successfully self deceive shifts the onus of deception onto the performer, either with or without their knowledge.
The complex and inherently (usually consensually) deceptive nature of sexwork makes it a minefield of misadventure and unintended consequences. Add some unstable people in there, and you have all of the necessary elements for extreme negative outcomes.
I think there is an argument to be made that for the 30 percent of the population on the backside of the bell curve of intelligence, emotional agency, or socialization there is a high probability of an inherently exploitative interaction with most live sexwork.
Sex work is empowering because it gives opportunities to people that they wouldn't have otherwise.
It's also very exploitative and risky, both for workers and clients.
In an ideal world, we would find a way to make sex work less exploitative and risky. In the real world, prostitution is a complex problem as old as humanity itself...
I don't see why I should be denied access to all of this fun paid sex stuff (consuming and producing) just because other people can't handle themselves. Should I also not be allowed to drink or gamble or play video games just because some other people abuse these hobbies in a dramatic and harmful fashion?
In my view, onlyfans is a net positive for society. Would you rather like sex trafficking? Because face it, humans have hormones, and our social norms encourage men to go for status and women for appearance.
These facts create the atmosphere for sex work.
My experience of not wearing makeup in lots of places, over many years: Nothing happens. It’s fine.
They don't expirence anything directly, but through time they get better treatment versus their non makeup wearing counterparts.
Source? My office expirence, also my gf's master thesis was on how apperence affects office atmosphere.. (something in this line)
I learned long ago that woman "get pretty" either for other woman or for themselves.
The biggest problem is that their professional skills are fleecing men out of money.
"Who has deep pockets and how can I get the most money out of them?"
It's not like you can just turn off that mentality once they quit.
> stigmatizing… rebranding…
People are just seeking equal treatment of what they do as men treat things like video games. While I would never wish upon anyone to be abused, and while I develop video games, I am not a blowhard, there are in absolute terms more people sick people aggregating in League of Legends than in Only Fans.
That is to say that some underlying trauma, like major depression or poverty, is concentrating people in endless video games playing and sex work, and that is the underlying problem.
I started using a cam-girl's services when I was dealing with a break-up.
Where things went wrong was, this worker happened to be local to me, and happened to know the person who I broke up with. When I said I wanted to find someone with a personality like theirs but in real life, they offered to meet me in person.
The short version? I was catfished for 2 years while helping them build their career (their partner, who I never knew about despite asking if they had one before trying to enter a 'relationship', didn't want to be active in helping her, since he was a pre-med student and was worried about the social fallout between that and his family.)
I got to learn a lot about the industry, more specifically around Reddit. I also got to deal with the pain of trying to get my videos removed, polite requests didn't work and I had to go right up to legal threats to finally make it happen.
What I was able to figure out:
- There are cases where this line of work results in a grooming 'feedback loop'. A surprising number of these girls had partners, many times said partners were successful individuals in other careers. And also involved in various other scenes (BDSM comes to mind.) It often struck me as a cover for predatory behavior; some of these workers will find it hard to shy away from the money that can be made, yet at the same time the constant barrage of misogynistic behavior from clients almost certainly has an effect on them. Their partner gets someone conditioned by the environment.
- My abuser, last I was aware, was fairly resigned to working small office jobs and/or sticking to camming until they finally decide to have a child. When I first met them they wanted to be a teacher. Make of that what you will.
- There were cases of extremely controlling behavior within the communities themselves. I heard stories of one of the more successful workers having a sort of 'ranch' for workers that wanted to come by and up their game (and, of course, play with them and their partner.) The ranch itself was almost cult-like with it's management of time and tasks.
- A lot of these workers have serious mental health issues, often unresolved. Some of these women are abusive and manipulative towards their clients. I experienced this firsthand, and when I made the mistake of trying other camgirl's services long after the incident noted above, I had my consent regarding hypnosis violated by more than one. Unfortunately, the common case of stalkers/creeps means that predators are usually able to get away with their actions, because any attempts to call them out results in the perception that the victim is a stalker/creep for trying to pierce the corporate veil behind a bad actor in the industry.
Um, blaming the victim much? Those men have full agency not to be psychotic jerks towards them. No one is forcing them to abuse, harass, and/or threaten sex workers.
But I agree sex workers are being groomed and subsequently exploited by sites like onlyfans with unrealistic promises of quick money for relatively little work. But so are tech workers by sites like this and other VC funds, so should we ban venture capital too? It's once again the inclusion of sex that makes sex work distinct, no?
I wish we had a society that provided better preparation and opportunity to everyone, but we don't right now, and sex work beats living on the street or getting stuck in an abusive household IMO.
"I almost see it as drug dealing, with the drug being intimacy and attention, and by nature it is a transaction where the dealer always uses their own supply."
Which is an entirely new subject wherein societies that experimented with total legalization got a better outcome than societies that hyperfocus on drug wars. Neither choice seems ideal, but one does appear to be unambiguously better given the available data.
I used to work in the direct carrier billing department of a large telco and I'm still amazed by the phenomenon of whales. We'd get 98% of people spending 20 bucks on Spotify and the odd app here and there, and then there were people who would consistently spend 15k+ on Candy Crush (and pay their bills). Not the same level as what you're talking about but I couldn't help but wonder about the millionaire sitting on their couch playing terrible mobile games all day.
I feel like people have this default reaction to assert that median is as or more important than mean. When, in reality, median is useful for in only specific distributions.
I think people say "median", but what they are really interested are the moments of the distribution. Median just is a key moment in Guassian distributions, other distributions have different important moments, and median isn't necessarily one of them.
Given assumptions about the distribution, you may even be able to fit (or at least narrow down) the exact shape based on these two values.
Sounds like a very successful money laundering operation.
It ain't exactly a dry cleaners
We stored every transaction and user in a graphDB. It was fun seeing normal flows, until you see the money laundering flows show up.
It was above my pay grade to deal with them, so I still don't know how that turned out.
This “whale” phenomenon describes exactly why online poker is so profitable for the site operators.
The profits don’t come from the masses of people cautiously playing on micro stakes tables, but the whales, who will give the poker rooms thousands each month in rake.
Poker is weird because the largest chunks of all monies go from one player to the other. But I assume rakes, at higher stakes, do add up really quickly...
I used to deal poker in a past life, here's an anecdote.
We started a low limit game and everyone (10 players) bought in for 60$ - 100$. Over the course of the next hour no one rebought and no new players came in. It was a pretty average game, no one was really 'hot'. After an hour one player noticed that everyone had less money than when the game started (even players that only won hands). He got up and left and I never saw him again.
We took a 5 + 1 rake (1 for jackpot) per hand. 40 hands an hour. 240$ removed from the table in that time span. Basically taking ~3 players money off of the table an hour.
Thing is when they asked him if he felt bad spending all that money on a game he said "oh no, I'm saving money, before I picked up this game I would go out in NYC with my friends and blow a grand every weekend".
I guess it's all relative.
20k times $5,000 = $100M/month. Still quite impressive.
OnlyFans just broke a 2B USD GMV after the COVID surge; and, at their 20% cut, that's a $400M per annum revenue stream.
The revenue was nowhere near 1.2B.
(I wrote the below in another comment, but it's relevant to this comment):
Both of the claims in my original comment are correct as stated:
* Roughly 20K active creators (VAL_A).
* An average monthly payout to creators of $5K (VAL_B).
HOWEVER, that does not mean that VAL_A * VAL_B = total monthly payout. The below details are relevant:
1. Not all active creators made money.
2. There was a payout minimum (well, a free payout minimum, which the majority of users waited to reach).
Average = sum / count. Multiply both sides by count. Sum = count * average.
Cool trick anyway, thanks for clearing it up!
- The average streamer makes $x
- Streamers make an average of $y
-avg streamer makes $x. Total = $x * # streamers
-streamers make an average of $y. Total = $y * # streamers
Average is always sum/n?
The average income of all streamers (including super popular streamers and streamers with 1 follower) makes is $y. Because the streamers in the top 1% make several orders of magnitude more money, $y is skewed higher than $x.
You're obviously right mathematically.
Both of the claims in my original comment are correct as stated:
* Roughly 20K active creators (VAL_A).
* An average monthly payout to creators of $5K (VAL_B).
HOWEVER, that does not mean that VAL_A * VAL_B = total monthly payout. The below details are relevant:
1. Not all active creators made money.
2. There was a payout minimum (well, a free payout minimum, which the majority of users waited to reach).
I should have been cleared with my numbers considering the audience (HN is a stat-aware place it appears!)
Both of my numbers were accurate as stated:
* There were 20K~ active creators.
* The average monthly payout was $5K.
HOWEVER, those numbers are not intended to be calculated together for a total payout valuation (doing that would assume every creator received a payout every month, which was not the case).
However, those numbers can't be multiplied to get the monthly payout total.
1. A large portion of active creators made $0 per month.
2. There was a free payout minimum (otherwise you were charged a fee), so a lot of smaller creators would get their payouts every few months.
The total monthly payout was much less than 100M.
c) Was this done as blackmail? There is a somewhat common dating site scam where someone gets you to friend them on FB, and then to sext with them-- then they threaten to send the material to your FB friends. I'd imagine OF girls would almost be a captive audience for this.
--- While I find OF personally distasteful, I realize that I paid for sex the old fashioned way, "With a wedding ring, a house, a child and half the stuff when you leave." I can't help but see this as an acceleration of that. I know plenty of people in miserable marriages.
Women have always traded beauty for money. Just before it was through marriage.
---
and lastly... I think we're ignoring the elephant in the room.
I'd wager that a much higher percentage than average of OF girls have likely been abuse victims at some point in their lives. There's this paradoxical thing where, yes, they're adults they have every right to sell pictures, but often what leads them to this is... abuse, which makes the whole thing very murky.
Source? Anecdotal-- having dated a cam girl, and my SO works with girls who have been abused and it's just depressing. I have very causal interactions with this girls, but, they'll either be afraid of you because you're a man, or recklessly flirt because you're a man, or in the case of neglect/absentee fathers-- cast you in the role of the male role-model they need. I have about 6 girls who call me "dad." :-/
One girl here actually gave someone a blowjob for a Lunchables snack pack (worth $2.99).
No, it wasn't blackmail. The creator never received any messages from the fan that went nuclear (they only know it was a 'fan' since they had the entire catalogue of pay-per-access content and some had very few purchases).
It seems they just woke up one day and said 'fuck it, time to wreck a life'. They persisted for a few months. From memory, they started with the creators LinkedIn account and then moved to Facebook -> Instagram -> mass emailing the creators 9-5 company.
The creator deleted most online accounts and started using an alias (which sadly the ex-fan also discovered and continued spamming).
> and lastly... I think we're ignoring the elephant in the room.
Yeah, I think you're on the money with your core point. Very few of the creators I interacted with directly seemed to be thriving in other parts of life sadly.
A childhood friend I had turned out to be one of the "crazy stalker" type individuals. I do not know what psychologically leads to this position, but I do know his family was very dysfunctional. I cut him off as a friend when he had a blowup because he discovered his g/f was also dating another friend of ours, and he went to the guys house to beat him up.
So, 20 years later I'm reading the local Facebook feed, and some poor woman has posted this crazy guy she met at a bar was sending her death threats and stalking her and the police were looking for him. And yea, it's my former friend. I replied that I had known him previously and hoped this was all a misunderstanding, but I'd be happy to talk to the police if needed.
And then the sardonic moment: numerous women replied saying, "Yea, he stalked me too." Including one gal I was fairly close to.
My point is only-- mental illness sucks and is widespread. I can see by some twisted logic he felt that stalking this woman was sort of, doing the work in the relationship, being devoted to her, and then being angry when she wasn't returning his affections, and somehow thinking that anger, would get her to fall in line.
I think OF invites these types of creeps and while unfortunate, it should not be unexpected.
I got one once by posting a single comment on an internet forum. I like to use aliases (thankfully) so all he could do is burn that one alias. They started following me around on different topics to continue the conversation.
My wife had a guy who would randomly show up at her work, house, friends, stores... He confused that they were in a band together that somehow she would want to hook up with him.
For this case some of these people think they have a relationship with the other end. They get emotionally attached but when they realize it is not going to be what they want they become unglued. It does not take much to set them off.
When my wife was pregnant and we didn't know the gender yet I did a lot of reading on attachment theory and what truth there is to "daddy issues" etc. in case it was a girl. It's a trope, but there's something to it.
As it turns out we have a lovely baby boy. Now, to avoid traumatizing him...
I also believe there will/are people who will take over this kind of thing for a fee - like rather than running the low orbit pinger to cause damage which could be traced to you, you can pay someone in a another country 20 bucks to do it for you - claim the old, 'my phone was hacked' sucks for you game - hard to prove.
would be nice for facebook to detect when revenge pics are being shared to someone's fam/friends/work colleagues and stop the messages from going through / being seen.
But that's not going to stop emails being sent to employers / other places and such.
Having strong laws that are known may be a deterrent for some and that's great - but I don't think it's solvable - this kind of thing has been posted on hackforums/ewhoring scams / blackmail how-tos for a long time. And there will always be some crime group that'll send some emails for the cost of a subway card - and they'll update instructions for how to zip up files and bypass dns blocks and such to get the data they need to complete the task.
digital literacy about sharing pics with people who say they like you that later turn out not be the person you thought they were - things like that could help.
Teaching new 'performers' and others who want to share nudes for money that there will always be possibility that suck files are easily shared and can escape to others would be good too.
if you don't want others to see it or it to be shown in a court in public don't send it - internet, sms, etc.
What you described is the danger of getting into any kind business without fully understanding the risk, market, and potential outcomes.
If I where to change profession it is things like this that would push me towards psychology. I am deeply fascinated by actions of, well, assholes. How are they broken and why?
And what mother lions in packs do to cubs other than their own.
There are more examples than just those two.
Don't you have skin in this, too? I would expect that you would want to protect your content in much the same way a film studio protects their content when it pops up on 3rd party sites. I don't know if you're being obtuse with your wording here, but whether or not your customers realized that you can't physically remove content from others sites directly is beside the point when there are well known legal options.
My feeble understanding of the law is that it would be more appropriate for copyright holders to sue in instances of illegal distribution. I understand why this isn't an option for most people (they don't have the resources a studio does), but I'm just trying to trace back who has the right to press for charges.
She was happy with her job, and as I know, she is still satisfied with the money she gets from it. Usually, it's around $500-1000 and even $2-3k for one day of work. It's happened because we live in a poor country where it's hard to find a job even with a degree, so you need to survive somehow. And we were younger and more naive.
Anyway, the thing is that she was part of the community of webcam models, and most of them working 4-8 hours a day and got around $300-500 in a week. Most of the money goes to 5% of models that appear on the first page.
It's a super competitive job, and your only way is to find regular customers who will visit all your streams to tip and talk about random things. There was an old dude who takes private and talked about his daughter and family issues. He was lonely and just want to speak anonymously to someone.
But there are also real creeps, one of them even somehow found out where we live and our city and travel here (to Eastern Europe from Korea) to report my ex to the police. He demands that she must have sex with him if she wants that to stop. He was nice to her, and everything was fine, but one day she rejects his request (some crazy fetish things), and he goes mad, and all that happened. You're right. The most significant fans are also the ones who go apeshit when something goes wrong for them, and it's scary to think about people like that and what they can do to break someone's life.
But "A" and "B" are becoming less of a concern for a lot of people thanks to rapidly changing attitudes towards sex work. Most people I know who do some kind of sex work either aren't concerned about a family member of employer finding out, or their family members and employer already know about their work. I hope we can all do our part to continue pushing our society towards being more accepting and less damning of sexuality (market-oriented or otherwise).
I don't have a solution here. But I also agree that there are plenty of other horrible jobs in the world and it's also striking that the same people who lose their minds over sex work would not raise a peep over those other professions that have little or nothing to do with sex.
Judge not lest ye be judged? Yeah right.
I don't like it, but I'm not sure what a good solution is. I mean, people are free to do what they'd like, but it's hard to police screen time 100% of the time and their peer group has a lot more access than they do so even if I can block it 100$ they'll be exposed to it somewhere else. We've talked about it and I feel like that's all I can do now. I just hate how normalized it feels when many of their social media "role models' turn to porn.
My ol' grandpa looked at my generation and just didn't understand how we were OK with things like interracial marriage, same sex relationships, drug legalization, etc. He resigned himself to the fact that he was just getting old and inflexible and the world was changing out from under him. Maybe the same thing is happening to us, now.
Curious if you meant drug legalization here... or is this in reference to studies about younger generations using fewer recreational drugs than children of the 60s?
UPD: rafale is right, I misunderstood the parent. It's not about any change, it's about allowing more freedoms.
But is it? When does it become bad? Should a parent be accepting that their daughter opens an OF when she turns 18? Should society be accepting of it as a side "gig economy" kind of job? How about the boys who are usually on the consumers/payers end?
We are monetizing intimacy and sex at a level like nothing before. Sure, it's always consenting adults exercising their constitutional rights and freedoms. But it feels wrong. Like the parent said, maybe I am just getting old.
No, because in a "good" society, people should be able to find work that they're happy/willing to do that pays well enough that they don't need a "side hustle" to survive.
I remember someone being enthusiastic that "our young are exploring their sexuality". What will happen if they don't? Nothing. They will explore something else and be fine.
Every generation since the history of time in this situation has asked this question themselves and has consistently answered wrong. Nothing good has ever come from a previous generation suppressing a later generation's right to self-determination.
> Like the parent said, maybe I am just getting old.
It really is just this. Our formative years are when we are young, and human nature is to simply reject what we're not used to.
Love, joy, excitement, mourning, creating art, singing and dancing… All of these are unconditional, intimate, and creative acts.
When they are turned into slot machines and side hustles they lose their humanity. There is nothing creative about the 50,000th “influencer” joining social media platforms to shill their low-grade reaction videos or porn or other entertainment cruft.
Most of the 60’s era liberation was a matter of being free to create in one’s chosen way, or with one’s desired people. Commodification, OTOH, is about extracting value from lonely people to enrich a vanishingly small minority of platform builders and “content creators”.
Commodification is an extremely alien form of “liberation” when compared with drug legalization or interracial marriage or what have you.
This isn't "juvenoia", I was born in and am living in this generation.
The vast universe of freely available junk and time wasters available now is a radical shift from even my early childhood, when there were distractions, but they were not purposely made addictive by teams of psychologists and programmers to increase the profits of huge corporate advertising behemoths (à la TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc.).
If you were born in and living in this generation, for any living generation younger than maybe the Baby Boomers, that's only even potentially technically true because the teams optimizing stickiness of entertainment of all kinds including youth entertainment, didn't involve programmers (in the computing sense) until fairly recently. But they absolutely have for a long time included psychologists, and the have been serving the intereste of corporate behemoths including in the advertising field.
You can binge watch or binge on social media or binge on anything, with unlimited supply. It's completely unprecedented.
I notice little compulsive ticks in myself now too — they're hard to escape. I have many friends I only contact through WhatsApp or Instagram. That pulls me into my phone and a nightmarish sea of influencer garbage every time I want to talk to someone. It sucks!
"Consistently" is too strong a word. We have ended up where we are today, but let's not pretend societies didn't explore a lot of dead ends along the way. Sometimes very destructive dead ends, with many dead.
Nor can we state that today is the "best of all possible worlds", and that we wouldn't have ended up somewhere better had the advice of elders been heeded more often.
This is a case of survivorship bias.
No, we’re divorcing the monetization of feigned intimacy and sex from pretense into more honest exchange like nothing before, and (arguably) moving it more from a pre-capitalist patron-servant model to a capitalist market exchange model.
Unpopular view in this day and age but maybe you're getting wise. Whatever the thing you're out of touch with, gig economy prostitution essentially, isn't worth being that in touch with. Maybe I'm just an old man too, but this sort of hyper-commodification of sex mixed with the nightmare that is social media just seems like a dystopic nightmare on so many levels. This sort of thing is not a good direction for society. The obvious emotional emptiness and moral bankruptcy that underlies this is stark.
I've had a talk with a friend who was about to propose the other day. The elaborate planning that went into a questionable display of extravagance (it involved - amongst other aspects - skydivers and a banner being flown behind them) probably put him into more stress than asking the actual question. And worse: this idea of the extravagant proposal has been hammered into this generation ("If he can't even do this for you, is he worthy?"). In the 1920s, when there was maybe a ring (and not a particularly expensive one, either), and a question, things were easier, and people were less stressed about this.
And it's not "only" attracting and "securing" a life mate, it's every aspect of our live that has been blown out of proportion. We have forgotten about the good things in life, like taking some time to watch a vineyard in early autumn as the colors change. Having time for oneself. Having meaningful communities.
Much like Facebook and social media, these products cannot truly satisfy the interpersonal/social/sexual needs of their users, but they provide enough of an illusion that many people will spend their time, money, and social energy on those sites instead of getting so consciously lonely and bored that they'll undertake the much greater effort to meet real people and form true social/romantic bonds–which comes with many complications, compromises, conflict-resolution needs, and reciprocal dynamics.
I'm not so much outraged that there's sex involved, I'm actually equally concerned about parasocial Twitch streamers/influencers and OnlyFans. Learning what social relationships and hanging out with friends is like from performative ad-supported performers is like learning what sex is like from porn; both are bad influences on (especially but not only) young people that can significantly stunt them.
I couldn't point to any one thing that was wrong about the arrangement... I just had this feeling that it wasn't something I should let myself get too comfy with.
If you've got a robust social network then it's not all that harmful, and if you don't then it's at least something, but you can trick yourself into thinking that something is enough when really it can be quite a shallow and ephemeral social experience.
Doesn't that also apply to any kind of interactions though? Every single group I've ever participated with in my entire life has always been shallow and ephemeral. Especially the in person interactions.
'Change' is not 'Progress' - I think that when we are young we tend to way over conflate those things. Usually there might be some reasonable impetus, I find 'change movements' usually lack nuance.
Marx was dead right in so many of his observations and yet nobody is seriously a Marxist today i.e. 'legit concerns' don't necessarily map to 'good change'.
Though change is inevitable ... the nature of the change is not inevitable.
There is some good to OnlyFans, at least in that 'creators' get paid instead of middle-men, but on the whole, I think it's a bad thing. I just don't think we're going to look back on this as a good idea.
I think impressionable young minds are not going to be able to grasp what it means to have that content 'out there forever' and when they get a little older they'll probably have a significant shift in their view.
Every generation will be forever perplexed as every year the world changes. continuously. The old ways will continuously be outdated. It's literally limitless as limits are removed.
What type of things do you think our kids will be puzzled about in the future? Where is the world headed?
For many people around the world they do not see the world headed in a positive direction as morality goes, and wisdom from past generations is dismissed. For many others they see it as a great thing, a libertarian paradise where anything is possible!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generat...
If in 30 years we live in a society where people post nudes like they do facebook posts, is there anything wrong about this? Could you describe the harm caused which doesn't boil down to attitudes of society?
Trauma, anxiety and desperation are so common that I'm not sure what isn't impacted by them, I guess is my meaning.
But it wasn’t always this way. Not even close. I’ve met many people who grew up in pre- and post-WWII Germany, and from how they describe it, the concept of status didn’t really exist then as it does now.
Yes, there were rich and poor. But people fell in love with and married people in their towns and villages, and were not unhappy in doing so. With the exception of the war (a significant exemption, true) people’s lives seemed clear-cut, and no one felt the need to constantly be posting or drip-feeding off of likes or views or even money.
These apps and platforms are recent inventions, and they are dangerous. Status is no longer a local or regional commodity, it is global. And your status is constantly being evaluated against every metric.
Instead of being satisfied with being the best wine-grower in the region, for example, one is now forced to also compare oneself to the best bodybuilders in the world and the richest businesspeople.
Though at times overdramatized, ”The Social Dilemma” is a great documentary on this topic. I would also recommend Tristan Harris’s podcast episode with Joe Rogan.
We're just like polar bears being confined in a zoo and pacing up and down.
Some people and marriages were happy, but definitely not all of them were happy.
The society was changing on all directions leading to conflicts. Young women in particular tended to move away from villages to cities for greater freedom and economic options, followed by backslash over proper female place.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I'd like to go back and live in the 20th century, but I do think some ways of life in those times were simpler and better acclimated to human nature.
From after WWI till dictatorship, Germany was violent place with regular street fights and tons on social problems. After Hitler took power, it continued to be violent place, tho in somewhat different way.
Well, a main issue is society isn't a monolith. Some people might not want to post nudes (just like some people don't want a FB account) but feel societally pressured to do so. Some people, specifically people hiring or electing, might look down on those posting nudes, making people whose nudes happen to be better known more difficult to get jobs. Some people may post nudes and then regret it later, and combined with pressure could lead to them developing some complexes.
Personally, I wouldn't want to live in that society. I can already get porn when I want, so I don't see a huge upside for me. On the other hand, if you think FB/IG/SC stalking post breakups is insane now, let me introduce you to the future.
This happens... subconsciously and, I think, unavoidably. Commodifying core human interactions will affect sellers whether they want to or not.
Just think of most women's opinion of the majority of pornography, sure they could pick out some they like, but they find a lot of it disgusting. I can't imagine having to grow up with the feeling that the opposite sex is constantly consuming content that's exploitative of your sex.
At least most of these TikTok/OF creators have some level of dignity, and power over their own lives.
There's nothing that special about sex work. If you are a parent, teach your children to build respectful, healthy relationships.
> If you are a parent, teach your children to build respectful, healthy relationships.
If you actually think it's that easy you're minimizing the fight for equality and rights for all women.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1095186/tiktok-us-users-...
The smarter one won’t tell me how he installs apps on his iPad after his mom uninstalls it. I suspect he figured out his moms password.
Personally, I don't see why subscribing to a $9 onlyfans account in order to see some tits is so much worse than buying a game.
> Have you considered the alternative that this is not an evil
We have considered it, and came to the conclusion that it is evil. A society that has its morality purely based on "consent" has accepted its own demise.
We are allowed to rank them by our preferences.
I do not wish males to be treated more expendable than necessary. I wish they would live fulfilling life.
Catholic church was around in Europe as a force since early Middle ages. Wouldn't call it new, unless you have sources to contrary.
You mean the kind in which we live right now, and where birth rates are well below replacement values?
> The current society we are in where we expect or desire pair bonding for life with an exclusive mate is rather new and unstable.
This is wrong. Stable pair bonds are a feature of nearly all advanced societies. The reasons are game theoretic.
You can argue that about literally anything. Everything is a matter of "a different society" once it's been accepted as the new default
So far, the results aren't good. But for the sake of science apparently we have to run the experiment to the end.
..then the calculus will be different. Current culture is what it is, and we live within it.
Imagine a culture where prostitution is "no big deal." It's acceptable for parents to encourage college kids to take a summer job in a brothel and it affects their life in the same way as a summer job at a car wash. Just because you can imagine such a culture doesn't mean that the same advice applies in our world
Similarly, there are plenty of cultures where premarital sex is totally unacceptable, especially for girls. You might think that's silly, and other cultures do exist that aren't like this. Taking your advice might profoundly affect their life, their ability to marry and live within their culture.
We only get to "then" by challenging the norms we are faced with "now". The question is do we want to move forward to a more accepting world, or settle for the narrow, judgmental mess we've inherited.
Seems perfectly reasonable that OP doesn't want his kids engaged in it.
And yes, I absolutely do think that normalization of sex, both for profit and otherwise, is an indispensable part of a more accepting world. OnlyFans has already helped move that needle considerably.
Prostitution is legal in my country and it should remain this way. But there are mechanism to keep it in certain locations. I think that should also apply to adult content on the net.
Of course there are also repercussion to most forms of intimacy you experience or do not experience later in life. The average 18 year old doesn't pay too much mind to it.
They specifically talk about their kids being targeted with porn. Targeting kids with porn is grooming behaviour it results in a lot of evil, not something we want to normalise.
Why is it bad? First, teaching children to monetize and sexualize in a capitalistic system, rather than how they evolved which is a more personal and toned down sexual experience. Their psyche is developing, their habits from teenage time will carry forward and affect their only life. It's too risky to gamble on our society's minds by letting any company sell whatever they like to children.
Second, do we want young people wasting their limited money on this content? There's a lot of free things, even if someone is 18, why should they be giving away money for what they can get for free? Is that a sound financial habit?
A very similar comparison would be “thots” on Twitch, though.
The harm caused is that an action you take that is socially normative, legal, and accepted today, may not be in the future, and if that action is documented online, it will inevitably be judged by an ever-changing set of standards and morals as time marches on.
I’m fine with de-stigmatizing sex work and pornography, but a lot of the content you find online is hyper-stylized and portrays some really unhealthy views on sex and both women and men.
I disagree, I think it's perverse that creators try to create artificial one-way relationships with their viewers, especially for kids, but also for people at large which aren't adapted to deal with these kinds of relationships (which imo is abusive).
It doesn't devalue personal interactions offline or make me feel like a soulless void. I feel like most of the issues that the general public has on this issue is not fundamental parts of humans or society, but simply norms which we have come to embed so deeply they feel fundamental.
I used to think porn is pretty neutral in the terms of the harm it does to the consumer, but over my years in the internet, I encountered many people who invest much of their time into porn, or structure the way they view others (women mostly) based on porn and I've come to the conclusion that consumption of porn, specifically during one's teenage years, is psychologically damaging. It does change the way you view sexuality, what you perceive as attractive and your sexual preferences. I was exposed to porn at a young age and I'm pretty sure it did me no good. I worry that kids who are nowadays exposed at even younger age might develop maladaptive sexual preferences and views.
Your post seems to suggest you would not be happy for your kids to do what they like when they get older. Often people seem to be happy for other peoples children to do what they like but not theirs. To me this seems like the wrong attitude towards ones neighbours.
There's 2 options therefore, for me, if I am honest with my family: disapprove of porn as a life choice or approve and encourage it including for one's own children.
I think most parents around the world would choose the first option, but the second is gaining in popularity and acceptability especially in the west.
I think you miss the important concept, that people can have different world views and different things might be acceptable to them. So I may not approve my kids/family/myself doing something, living some kind of lifestyle, but I accept that there are people who have different values and it's OK for me (as long as it doesn't infringe my freedom, of course).
Otherwise, we have religious fundamentalism.
Your children do not grow up in a vacuum. You as parents have limited influence, the society they grow up in is having at least an equal impact. You cannot successfully transmit values such as "porn is bad" if everyone around you, the media and the teacher in school is telling your kids the opposite. Humans to not get raised and live in isolation or a vacuum, society matters. A lot.
> Otherwise, we have religious fundamentalism.
If you extrapolate your point of view, hopefully finding that is destined to fail, you will have made the first step in realising why religions exist.
That strikes me as odd. There are some areas of life that have competition on them. I accept the fact that there are "losers" in life, but I want my kids to be "winners". I love my kids more than I love others, and want better things for them — who wouldn't?
(I specifically don't mention porn here, because I don't make a point about porn, but rather about being happy for other children to do something but not mine. Also, I put "winners" and "losers" in quotes because obviously it's a very primitive description of reality, and I actually don't think of sex workers as "losers").
I don't recommend becoming a single parent at 16 and dropping out of school. But I can respect the strength, determination and shouldering of responsibilities.
I don't recommend joining the army and getting shot at in some afghan village at some septuagenarian senator's say-so. But I can respect people who choose to serve.
I don't recommend taking on a lifetime of debt to get the absolute best education in poetry. But I can respect someone who's dedicated their life to mastering an art, and honed their skills far beyond anything I could achieve.
Build up their awareness and defenses at an early age, so they’ll be less vulnerable and more prepared when they go out on their own one day. Dark patterns, psychological manipulations, emotions and biases are all things they need to be aware of.
Once people are aware of how they’re being manipulated and can recognize it in real-time they’re less likely to fall victim to it.
Some resources:
[0]:https://www.darkpatterns.org/
[1]:https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49176 (Games People Play)
[2]:https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/133203 (Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense)
[3]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
[4]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_manipulation
[5]:https://fs.blog/great-talks/psychology-human-misjudgment/
I am far from religious or straight edge, but the ways of debauchery are nothing new or surprising. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that these are just … debauchery.
Understand that "I don't like it" is not a convincing argument to anyone but yourself. Be aware of the consequences, but don't over dramatize it. If you only share the worst case examples, your kids will understand that you are using scare tactics and what you are saying is unlikely. They live in this world and will know plenty of counter examples where nothing bad happened to the person in question.
So, be informed, and be reasonable. Express caution, and concern around linking porn to your "real" identity, and the trouble that this causes people. Discuss things protecting your privacy by avoiding showing your face, house, etc. Don't re-use usernames. A person who is informed on the real dangers of how people get found, will be more likely to think twice before posting a nude.
And if your children are of the female persuasion, it's worth pointing out that women tend to get the brunt of "punishment", while men often are not really affected. Maybe if your children are male, you might not want to mention that, but it's probably good for you to be aware of it.
I suppose it's different that "influencers" are pushing it instead of companies, but the basic problems seems fairly similar.
These sad lonely sexless men spend all their money on this shit. It consumes them, until they are out of money, then it destroys them. It warps their expectations of relationships further impacting their datability, driving them even more towards onlyfans.
Now, this is only a minority of their users, but makes a large proportion of their revenue. For healthy people, only fans can be great.
IF I’d be that desperate I’d rather stick to a prostitute. Regular uploads aren’t even guaranteed. You could be paying something where you don’t even know the value of.
I hate this world of, everything needs to be a subscription…
On another note, I’m also glad that I’m in a healthy and happy relationship in my late 20’s because tinder in my area is 90% Instagram and OnlyFans ads.
They twist and warp anything so that its fits that worldview. Maybe they buy a video, and in it the performer says, “this is just for you”. Now, they may say that any lots of videos as part of the role play or whatever. But to these people, thats a sign of their special relationship.
That’s why they can be dangerous. If that spell is ever broken for example they find out the performer has a boyfriend. They can lash out violently, or look to humiliate the performer by sending their work to friends and relatives.
I agree that what they do is economically genius and legit; but it’s morally dark grey and adds fuel to the fire.
It is really a symptom of a wider problem where years of sophisticated A/B testing and social manipulation in businesses has been honed to such an extent that small pockets of the population find it impossible to resist the dopamine hit, be that some porn or an item in a game.
I really don't know what the solution is, regulation I guess? I'm not sure in what form that would look like though.
And could you not paint an equally disturbing picture about other industries and interests? Like gambling, drinking or people who eat bugs competitively? And should the presence of deeply troubled people scattered about different hobbies cause us to determine that businesses engaging with those hobbies are "evil"?
I seriously do not think so.
You're casting this as a situation where sex workers are preying on people, when I think it's equally true that sex workers are helping people cope (in a way that can be mal-adaptive).
There is nothing wrong with enjoying buying content from sex workers. There's nothing wrong with selling it. The people who spend in ways that are unhealthy for them (which is common across many industries) were not put into that mindset by the sex work industry. The industry just doesn't have that much power.
The official definition for substance use disorder is when use starts to damage other parts of the patients' life. In situations where there are some users of substances who lead happy lives, blaming the substance alone is desceptive - it's the combination of factors that have led a particular person to use it in an unhealthy way. It is common for people to act in even less healthy ways if you abruptly cut them off from their mal-adaptive coping mechanism.
I hope that you do not just direct this critique towards the marginalized group of people that provides a relationship-like service, but also towards the far-more-powerful forces that grind people down to the point that they cannot turn away from parasocial relationships.
Unlike Patreon, they do not charge only once a month but continuously as subscriptions renew, as pay-to-view videos are purchased etc. A hundred dollar monthly Patreon bill is much more noticeable than a few bucks every few days.
Also, it's possible to tip on posts but the minimum tip is five dollars.
The sum of these policies mean using Onlyfans requires real careful budgeting and I do not think most people are good at budgeting especially at budgeting for porn... So I wouldn't be surprised if we were to read stories about people getting bankrupted by this site -- obviously most people would not be particularly forthcoming about getting bankrupted by porn...
I got an insight from "The Surprising Psychology Of OnlyFans Simps by Charisma on Command" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auG2E53dFas) that subscribers buy attention rather than sex.
That's like one of the oldest i and vest known insights about sex work generally, so I’m not surprised that it is reflected in OF. (Its even more obviously true of its more celebrity- but less porn-focussed cousin, Cameo.)
That's how the Minitel[1] got popular in France. They had these chat services where one paid per minute to chat with "women in your area" (It was mostly male operators handling multiple conversation simultaneously[2])
These services have always existed, and were always in demand, the only difference is technology and business models.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel (basically the french version of the internet, ahead of its time)
[2] In French: https://www.nouvelobs.com/rue89/rue89-rue69/20120629.RUE0957... "My name is Jean-Marc and I was 'female moderator' of erotic Minitel"
What if your specific kink was red-headed twinks with a scottish accent and freckles? Can you easily google up some of that?
Or maybe if you found one on OnlyFans, would you cough up the $10 a month for that exact content?
If onlyfans happened in person, the people behind it would be in prison. They market to teenagers, and as soon as they turn 18 encourage them to prostitute themselves to men over the internet. It is a disgusting, horrible company that we should be ashamed exists.
This company, like other pimps before them, have persuaded young, often times desperate women, into packaging and marketing their humanity to people. It taught them that their friendship and companionship is a product to be sold.
While I might ethically disagree with their business model I don't think your assessment is fair. Their platform is certainly a step up from those same individuals getting into the industrial porn industry.
one could believe it is low harm for a young person to use OF, but massive harm to be in the traditional porn industry, and conclude that OF is a net plus. Ie, this argument is circular and based on preconceptions rather than a critical examination of the evidence.
Well, yeah and with a deontological argument, chosen moral axioms are what determine the morality, which are equally arbitrary. All arguments of “should” have arbitrary values at their root.
If you wish to say that most philosophical arguments are people reinforcing their previously held beliefs, I would not argue with you.
No I wasn't. I was making an HN comment, not engaging in moral philosophy, which I find boring and arbitrary. It's no coincidence that the preferred moral philosophy under any regime is one that is favorable to that regime. Thus the Greeks had virtue ethics, Nazis a bastardized Nietzscheanism, and our contemporary society Rawlsianism.
I actually agree with your criticisms, they were obvious to me when I wrote the comment, but we must ultimately decide what sort of world we want to live in (or have it decided for us), and I would prefer one without OnlyFans, that such a world is a fantasy for the foreseeable future is besides the point.
An alternative argument, if you wanted to avoid such droll dry topics, would have been to say "I don't want OnlyFans to be a thing." Instead, you made an argument based on moral philosophy to support your opinion. That's totally fine! It also doesn't change the fact that your comment evaluated the moral utility of whether our world is better or worse for existing.
Edit: Also, as I learned from a post-modern adjacent philosopher, Richard Rorty, there is sometimes benefit in making arguments in different moral frameworks even if you believe they are all ultimately arbitrary: different people are convinced by different lines of reasoning. But ultimately, I post on HN because it is fun.
If moral philosophy is boring an arbitrary, then what study or language is a better vehicle for discussing these ideas?
Uh, what?
Since when is that the preferred moral philosophy in contemporary (presumably American?) society?
Edit: The reason I chose Rawls is because no one will agree on what moral framework modern society operates under but Rawls is compatible with most such proposals.
Edit 2: I am interested in what you would propose as an alternative, however.
I would, rather than suggest a candidate for the prevalent moral framework under which modern society operates, reject as fairly obviously false the notion that such a thing exists; modern society is characterized (even, say, in the US on isolation) by conflict between multiple competing mutually-incompatible moral frameworks, with temporarily dominant coalitions characterized by groups coming together against others that the see as a greater current threat than their current transitory partners.
This is a great claim that has no evidence.
Whether or not you agree with the high goals of the (US?) military; for a great many people it is a solid career, a role model they never had, and possibly a stepping stone out of an awful life. Also a very small percentage of these are actually fighting in infantry risking their lives.
This is much different than saying "Ooh youre 18 now, look how much money these 3 people make selling their naked videos! And there is absolutely no consequence at all to this, for you or your society!"
Choosing the extreme version of one and the benign version of the other seems pretty handy.
You can also close your OF account the second you don't want to do it. Try doing that with the military :)
The idea that risk of life in the military is exclusive to the infantry (or even “combat arms” more generally) is...pretty ludicrous.
And the military is systematically and manipulatively marketed to young people at least as much as online sex work is.
You can't expect customers to be courteous and professional with you if the product is sex, all the more so if you're leveraging the illusion of a social relationship. It's a one or the other proposition. There's no in-between, there's no picking both.
The entire thing is schizophrenic.
Quite the opposite, I assert that because it is not simply « a job », you can't treat it as such and blur boundaries while expecting to be safe, be it physically or mentally.
I think the entire model is noxious, save for whoever's collecting the money and conveniently washing their hands of any responsibility.
It's true that these problems are unavoidable in the current status quo of society but that's almost tautological. The question is why that is, what factors contribute to this and whether we can and should overcome them.
EDIT: To be clear, this does not mean that sex work wouldn't/shouldn't ultimately be abolished, but saying essentially "well, you try to sell sex as a service, so of course you'll be abused and violated" borders on victim blaming and doesn't address the problem anymore than a doctor saying "if it hurts when you touch there, just stop touching there".
are you saying that because people are selling pictures/videos of them selves doing sexy things, we should expect and accept that people are violent to them?
I mean, chat shows are pretty much the same thing, an illusion of a social relationship, but we don't accept stalkers on those platforms?
why does nakedness change that?
Accept no, expect absolutely. Which is why boundaries and control mechanisms are needed, the removal of which is the entire premise of OnlyFans.
>I mean, chat shows are pretty much the same thing, an illusion of a social relationship, but we don't accept stalkers on those platforms?
Are you referring to Twitch ? That's not the same thing, at all. Sex isn't a minor variable. It re-frames the entire problem in a context where people lose the ability to appropriately parse and manage their para-social relationships. Furthermore Twitch itself (other platforms aren't really worth mentioning) doesn't encourage entertainer-user relationship beyond the only tools it provides : the chat box and the stream. Everything else is external, and that includes OnlyFans !
What is the reason people lose the ability to appropriately parse and manage themselves in the context of sex?
Because you've lost the context of what sex is and what it has been in society, and in humanity as a whole. Sex is inherently primal, bestial, even brutal in nature. We've been trained over hundreds of thousands of years to build ourselves up to it and in return we get rewarded with brain chemicals and the continuation of our species. You can't just expect to rewire millions of years of evolutionary drive and wrap it up in a cute discrete transaction. You're ludicrous for even trying. Every job has its occupational hazards. These the hazards of selling your crotch online. Either accept it, or move on. Stop trying to frame it as some sort of empowering path when in reality peoples' lives just get ruined.
for ducks, yes.
For primates, it varies.
> rewire millions of years of evolutionary drive and wrap it up in a cute discrete transaction
I don't think one can safely make that assertion. in Humans, sex is mostly cultural. Its not like we all return to the place of our birth to spawn, or spread our gametes in sync with the moon. We have huge amounts of control over how, when, where and what rules are applied to sex. It is common to have life partners, but in practice the average life span of a sexual relationship varies from hours to many years
I suspect that you are seeing it through the lens of second hand middle class Victorian dogma. (like I do.)
We (I say we, middle class class british) are taught that a good woman is one that is faithful and obedient. A good man however is heroic, and beats women off with a stick. Other cultures are not like that. Indeed Georgian England was not like that, especially in the upper and mercantile classes. (just look at the shit that happened in Vauxhall gardens.)
But to answer your implied point, that selling one's body has always been seen as the lowest of the low. I don't think thats the case. Even in america a top quality brothel was held in higher esteem than dockers, Gong farmers or indeed peasants.
You're expected to not abuse the meat counter clerk.
Its centrality to a billion year old process of sexual selection and reproduction.
I wasn't directly. Twitch is just another broadcast medium. The only thing that's different is that its normally private, so young teens/adults can view the stream without the parents being aware.
What is perplexing to me is that in our[1] society, public violence against women is almost never accepted. Men are shamed[2] and hung out to dry for doing it(if they are caught)
but we as a culture accept intimidating and violent behavior towards women on the internet. If I were to hurl abuse in the street at a woman in the same way that is done online, I'd be punched.
So I'm not sure why there is a divide between online/offline here. I have a few ideas, but nothing concrete I would sum up here.
[1]Anglo saxon, western
[2] I'm not going to go into the whole issue of women being "protected" from violence, its a large and complex subject full of holes.
Online you're not in a physical space with other people that can punch you or confront or arrest you.
Sadly for many humans, that immediately sucks all the accountybility and responsibility and human decency out of the equation.
Whatever the product, even if there is no product, one should expect others to be courteous and professional and sex "workers" (I do believe it's real work, yes) deserve to expect this just as much as others - it's just a shame that so many men (not always, but generally) let them down so much.
For various reasons I happen to know personally many (>10) women who've created an OnlyFans or otherwise participate in online sex work. I know these people well enough that we discuss things like our mental health state / conditions. One commonality that I have found is that many of the women who start an OF are already suffering from a mental health condition that has as a symptom hypersexuality or a need for attention / attention-seeking behaviors. One of the more common diagnosed mental health issues these women have is bipolar disorder, where in their manic states they experience hypersexuality.
One perspective is that online sex work provides a monetarily lucrative outlet for urges these women have to cope with regardless of their participation online. On the other hand, the consequences for online sex work to your "regular" life are much more far-reaching vs expressing these urges with individuals in person.
Of a bigger concern to me is that my conversations with these women have indicated that participating in OnlyFans actually deepens their trauma and mental health issues and may exacerbate their attention-seeking behaviors. Many of them have a traumatic past which directly ties into their relationships with men and sex, and participating in OF reinforces the outcomes of that trauma rather than providing them a pathway to reforge how they structure relationships with men and how they think about sex in their lives. Being involved in online sex work can be deeply traumatizing for the workers, and it is tied directly into the fact that they're both selling attention while seeking attention, and the facsimile but not the reality of a human emotional connection.
I don't know what the answer is, but I really wish that in the US we had universal healthcare including for mental healthcare. There are whole generations of women who are deeply traumatized by their upbringing and the lack of strong male role models in their lives. The epidemic of single motherhood across demographic boundaries within the US has massively contributed to our current mental healthcare crisis, and lack of a father figure that is a /good/ father heavily contributes to broken relationship models with men for these women.
Don't get me wrong, I despise the people that even try to guess the password, but calling it "hacking" is a missed opportunity to inform people about the dangers of simple passwords and single factor authentication.
Again, not saying it wasn't "hacking" in this case. Or maybe I have the wrong definition of hacking (I'd even prefer they called it black hat hacking if it were real "hacking" but ah well).
She say, they kept stealing her password, so it was probably that the hacker had access to her email then he was able to keep changing the OF password
Again, not saying this was her mistake, I know many people that would react this way. I hope they call me when it happens.
> Many creators who spoke to the BBC felt this policy was misused by fans and some said it can incentivise them to be rude or provocative, as their monthly subscriptions come to a close. Others added this made them feel penalised for being mistreated.
Client-side block. They can still see your content, and pay for it, but you won't be reading their messages (whatever they are). Since its send by platform, and not E2EE, the content is available for the platform and/or LE.
As for OnlyFans not responding to "I'm going to kill your children." and "I'm going to rape you." (among others), that makes me very emotional that they don't do anything with this. Threatening to rape someone should be illegal, and threatening to kill someone's children is for me worse than threatening to kill me. They should have reported this to authorities, but instead they went for short term benefits by pulling the ostrich card. Shame on you, OnlyFans.
> But in January, a hacker seized control of [Tina Bean's] account, blackmailed her for $150 and uploaded streams of IS terror videos.
This is complete bullshit. And continues to worsen.
What's the fix? How do we prevent sockpuppets, impersonation, account seizures? What should we call this category of crime?
Stop using username & password credentials? Issue everyone key fobs? Use the secure enclaves in our phones (iOS, Android)?
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Repeating myself: One of my coworkers passed and their Facebook profile got pwned. And there was no recourse. I'm still so angry about this I could just spit.
My family has been doing eldercare. The predation is just terrible. It's an industry. And the people targeted have zero ability to protect themselves.
Of course, at some point I'll also become the prey.
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PS-
FWIW, I'm trying to figure out how to advocate for a fix.
I've made some pathetic attempts to draft a position paper, problem statement.
Next step would be draft model legislation. Then start shopping it around.
My first motivating "use case" is prevent profiles on DoorDash, Yelp etc from being seized by imposters. So do something like require those profile hosting services to link to IRL licenses. Most every trade has some kind of licensing and credentialing authority. Restaurants, nail salons, health care providers, etc.
Ideas?
It's only a bit trickier with video games because those actually need to stay in their original format to be useful, and may use DRM, but so far that didn't stop people either.
The onboarding and experience of OF is somewhat odd in that it didn't ever say "this is for you to post explicit content". It's structured for it sure, but every page is isolated.
Even on the splash it just kinda vaguely suggests it is for pornography. Their blog doesn't really suggest it either: https://blog.onlyfans.com/ In fact they seem to want to get away from it. Aaron Carter, Tyga, Cardi B are on it and earn millions from it. Actress Blac Chyna might be pulling in $20mil from it (https://influencermarketinghub.com/onlyfans-top-earners/)
I wonder how much non-pornography is on there. The tools and structure are generic enough for essentially any kind of content; say meditation, tutoring, someone doing an audiobook. A fitness instructor Jem Wolfie supposedly pulls in around $30,000/day, about 8 million total (https://blog.onlyfans.com/meet-jem-wolfie/). I assume most of the accounts are porno though. All the messages I get are from sex related bots trying to sell me products/services assuming I produce adult content or are looking to consume it.
I wonder if OF just sort of adopted the primary use case like Tumblr unintentionally became one of the biggest porn sites.
It's an interesting platform to answer the problem of trying to monetize an online following.
The primary issue (and one i have with it even if i am assuredly not a prude) is that Twitch is aimed at people under 20, their largest self-reported demographic is ages 13-19. Twitch (and let's be honest here, this is Amazon we're talking about) recently banned the top two female streamers for "showing hips in a suggestive way" or whatever. Both of these women have OF pages prominently advertised as well. Both are back now, and there's no indication that they've changed their overall model / operation on Twitch.
I imagine that Twitch telling the 4,000,000 'followers' to these two streamers that they didn't want their money anymore probably backfired. My understanding is that money transacted through amazon for twitch is split in two - that is, the streamer gets $2.50 for every subscription, Amazon gets the other $2.50. If the conversion for those 4 million followers is 1% subscriptions, Twitch taking a hit of $200,000 a month might seem insignificant, but that's just the conversion for those two streamers - not the overall loss of subscriptions by annoying 4 million people!
LA weekly did this with Backpage famously about 15 years ago. It essentially became exclusively sex work ads and they were the financial driver that funded the local journalism for years
> sex related bots trying to sell me products/services assuming I produce adult content
That sounds neat
I’m not justifying their actions, but also don’t be surprised when they happen. The world isn’t perfect yet.
I don’t care much about OF, but I’m sure assholes send threats on any platform, and it’s not really a platform issue as long as they implement blocking and some sort of spam prevention.
Using a platform like fansonly allows the star to moderate and use the platform to guard against safety issues. Fansonly is pay only which limits the spam can help identify the crazy.
Sure, doesn't make it a good or socially acceptable job though.
*insert locally-relevant pariah job here
The way we stigmatise "dirty" jobs is a bit weird, in the above scenario the "dirty" job would have likely paid better and is definitely more essential to society. It really stuck with me how the girl in the programme didn't just dismiss the job as dirty, but the person doing the job too as though taking a better paid but physically less pleasant job is somehow a dishonourable thing to do. This isn't a class thing either, both people in this scenario were from a working-class background so I don't think this is an issue of class-based snobbery.
But it's easy to forget that most people engaging in this type of work are in their late teens and 20's and though I hate to stereotype, we know that a lot of people in those age ranges are less skilled at assessing risk and thinking longer term.
The solution is probably education and removing stigma.
It reminds me in some ways of "Locked Up Abroad" episodes where the person is easily making incredibly money smuggling drugs from southeastern asia and then is shocked when they are given an extremely harsh prison sentence.
Like yes, there's a reason why a lot of other people didn't want to do this. The hourly premium was there for a reason. There's a downside. (Obviously it's not identical because Onlyfans is legal, but you get the gist)
Storytime - a girl at my uni mentioned in our school's subreddit that she does OnlyFans. She made the comment from the same reddit account she used to advertise her profile and she also wrote many regular SFW comments and posts. So... she was pretty hot, and me being a horny and curious college dude, I tried to see if I could casually ID them.
Yes, kind of creepy, I know. Horniness aside, the point is, it took me like 10 minutes to find their real name and identity, based only on information they decided it would be safe to publicly associate with themselves. Rest assured, I didn't do anything with that knowledge and I have no intention of ever doing so, obviously. Really big school, completely different majors that spend time in completely different parts of campus, I doubt I'd even notice if I ever crossed paths with them.
People who aren't techies who always have privacy on the mind often drastically underestimate how little information is needed to uniquely ID them. In this case, a) she posted in a specific school sub, b) she posted about her grades in a major-specific class, c) she mentioned her ethnicity in a regular SFW post, and d) she shared plenty of pictures of her body sans face from a variety of angles.
Well now I can know that there's an X-ethnicity person in Y grade of Z major at ABC university who has an identifying tattoo and a relatively uncommon hairstyle... Literally 2 or 3 Google searches later and I had a result. As I'm sure is often the case, she wasn't particularly concerned about the privacy of her regular, real life identity, presumably with the assumption that it wouldn't ever be connected to her OnlyFans. Name on school project websites, articles in the school newspaper, LinkedIns, public instagrams, things like that.
It doesn't take long to scroll through google images and recognize a body. And that's probably what's unintuitive about this risk - someone might think "well there are another 300 people who fit that description, so I'm good". But with computers, it's trivial to look through 300 people. Someone crazy enough could easily sift through 3000 pictures searching for you. They know roughly what you look like. And if the number of people fitting your description is only around 30, it's hard to even call that a search - a few seconds on a page or two is all it takes to ID you.
The good thing is that the vast majority of people are probably harmless. The occasional overly curious person like me might cross some boundaries and find out who you are, but it's not likely they'll have any desire to contact you in any way. The bad thing, of course, is that it only takes 1 nutcase to instill a lot of fear.
I don't think there's a solution other than more education - assuming this kind of content creation continues to exist without heavy regulation. Maybe OnlyFans could play a part. I'm sure most OF creators vaguely know the risks, but they may not be used to thinking carefully about sharing seemingly innocuous and vague details. Like, "Did you know you might be stalked? Yes. Did you know you might be stalked and identified if you share a picture of your dog at the park? Uh, what!?".
A quick 15 minute video on protecting yourself from the crazies could probably prevent a lot of dangerous situations. "Don't share your school or major", "Don't take pictures near street signs or stores", "Don't wear jewelry you usually wear", etc.
Great you know where she lives.
You have seen her naked and paid for her pictures.
You are worried someone is going be as smart as you but take it a bit too far and go knock on her door? And what.. Ask her for a date? Kill her?
I would think if you go to the same school you could follow home anyone. And you have the opportunity to see lots of girls naked in person while in school.
Not seeing the risk of a low level star here. It's the same risk as being your neighbour and leaving the blind open.
Are you against women using their looks and charm to get famous?
Given the status of sex work, there are many reasons why many who do it do not want to associate their private identity with it.
You can't blackmail someone making a few bucks on fansonly. If you tried to do it to someone at the top who had money the platform, police and dmca notices would come flying your way.
Professors marking you low because of fansonly seems like a stretch. They can mark you low because you sleep in their class and are more likely to.
That is an extremely privileged take. When other people take their prejudices to extreme levels, you can and sometimes must live in fear of them. Anti-sex work prejudices in modern day USA may not be as bad as anti-gay prejudices in Saudi Arabia, but the principle is not entirely different.
> You can't blackmail someone making a few bucks on fansonly. If you tried to do it to someone at the top who had money the platform, police and dmca notices would come flying your way.
Imagine you are a college-age girl working anonymously on OnlyFans and you receive a message asking you to do something small - go out on a 'date', send more nudes, help cheat on some exam, even send some amount of money - or they will reveal your identity to parents and peers. Do you think you could be unfazed and calmly assume that authorities will take care of it?
> Professors marking you low because of fansonly seems like a stretch.
What if this was a religious college, or just a particularly religious professor? Do you think that having a reputation as a sex worker will not impact the way you are treated by some?
The risk of some bitter, lonely guy living three states away, going off the rails and deciding that you are a bitch who needs to be taught a lesson, after years of having his attitudes messed up by hot women trying to make money by telling him "I need your cock right now!" - that is not a risk you run by hooking up in real life.
Most channels are not pushing messages with 'I need your cock now' and if they are they are probably run by a professional operator.
A lot of channels aren't about sex. A lot of channels have males.
If all of your fears were valid I would recommend getting off instagram, facebook, etc because someone could find a photo clothed or not from those sources. It could lead to..
Of course, OF itself would never scare off prospective sources of income like that.
Previously, only a very select few people would be able to be the subject of such a relationship. So, it's fairly easy to protect them from the pitfalls of it. Bodyguards, gated communities, limited in-person socialization with non-peers, etc. In other words, celebrities. Of any stripe. They've been dealing with this issue for years.
But now, we have YouTube, Twitch, OnlyFans, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and probably dozens more I can't even think of and have never been exposed to.
And someone making rent by slinging nudes on OnlyFans doesn't have enough cash for an entourage. They don't have the lawyers and accountants available to advise them and help them set up companies to make certain transactions to disguise certain facts about themselves. Like where they live. They also don't have anyone who is decent enough at public relations to help them navigate the fine line between seeming personable while not sharing too many facts about themselves.
But they'll have a segment of people completely engaged with them in one of these parasocial relationships. And in a way they do encourage it. And in another real way, it's the job they've chosen. When any of them talk about "building relationships with viewers" and how it's important, that's the kind of relationship they are talking about: a parasocial relationship.
The vast majority of people do not have the means to deal with parasocial relationships that go wrong. And even those with the means sometimes get hit. Ronald Reagan was shot by a man trying to impress Jodie Foster.
And I think those building parasocial relationships that contain sexual intimacy are particularly at risk.
Drat! If only there were some way a moderation system could detect these clever variations. Hackers are always one step ahead with pluralization.
On the other hand, it is very difficult to prove that someone is faking being a fan, so laundering can be as easy as giving a friend N dollars of suspect cash or cryptocurrency and having them pay you N minus the hassle fee through Twitch/OnlyFans/etc. from their credit card.
Also, only accepting credit card payments to move money into the system goes a long way to protect you from money laundering.
The problem is that the amount of money you could flow through it would be very little before it starts raising red flags compared to other methods.
Would be ideal for a small time drug dealer who wants an easy way to get cash though.
Wow, that's not a very robust moderation system...
I think I saw a comment about how they are looking to IPO soon - is their press office working overtime?
> The company said Tina did not report the racial slur and it was not detected by the site's moderation system because it was pluralised.
Wow, what a shit-tier auto-moderation system.
The most common route is some automation and outsourcing. Although the typical outsourcer may simply not be able to take on only fans content.
Goes deep on the idea: “some moral laws might limit pleasure and enjoyment in the short term but in the long term minimize suffering and maximize human fulfillment.”
Like a meta analysis on the societal level. Not an exact science, but an interesting concept in light of the depressing second order effects we see in how our current society operates sexually.
My theory is that the 'changed lives' will most often not be prosperous.
Call me wrong, but I imagine it's going to be right.
When a website starts moderating user generated content, its legal status changes and suddenly the company could be held responsible for what happens on the platform. On a platform that's used mainly for sex work (which is still strictly legal in many countries around the world!), that distinction may be all that stands between fines, bans or even jail time, even in what would be considered more progressive countries.
The easy refunds are essential because the payment provider networks will drop you the moment you get too many chargebacks filed against you. The sex industry in general has a problem getting payment from most credit card providers, because people will often do chargebacks when their significant other/family/friends find out about statements on their credit cards, increasing the risk for the payment provider. There's also a certain sense of puritanism in many payment providers, especially American ones from what I've read, and that doesn't help.
As for copying and sharing illicit material, that's a risk that comes with selling any digital media. OnlyFans can't do anything about that. The biggest entertainment companies in the world have tried, and high quality rips from Disney+ and Netflix still reach the web.
In general, OnlyFans is a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that it brings freedom to individuals to perform sex work from the safety and comfort of their own home, without shady back alley deals whatsoever.
However, it's also a curse because popularisation of sex work inevitably reinforces the sexualisation (mostly) of women. Easy websites also have little to prevent abuse from forced sex work, and I'm sure the scum willing to trade human beings and force them into brothels have seen the opportunities here. Lastly, easy entrance to sex work might lead to more people joining in reluctantly because they see no other way to pay for rent or education.
Sex workers are part of any society, have been for all of history and will probably always be in the future. I don't see that as a problem, as long as people do it out of their own volition. However, these websites don't exist in a vacuum, and as long as others stigmatise sex work, joining the industry will come with certain risks for exposure and blackmail. No platform can prevent social issues, no matter how hard YouTube and Twitter claim they're on top of things like misinformation and illicit material. The problem is simply not one of a technical or a business nature.
Having said that, I'm sure there's a market for DeepFake-style face/environment replacements. Deepfake a convincing face from thispersondoesnotexist.com onto yourself, replace the background with furniture from a similar generator, and you could severely reduce the risks that come with selling explicit media. It still doesn't solve the core problem of blackmail and such (people can and will find out, and stalkers are obsessed enough), but it can reduce the risk of those conscious about their privacy despite the nature of their job.
Basically there's two sets of victims in these places. First, the girls are only learning one skillset. That is, how to identify marks who have money, and how to get that money in the least amount of time. Once they learn that skillset in their twenties, its very difficult for them to transition to an apprenticeship in any other profession, because the entry level in other jobs will never compare in earning potential to what they make with their sexual grift. Essentially they are mentally damaged forever and its difficult for them to become, for example, a nurse or a developer.
The second set of victims are the guys who are getting fleeced. Perhaps the word victim here is wrong. Maybe the right word is marks. The guys who participate in these transactions are mentally what one used to call "losers" but again I hate labels. Lets just call it what it is.
These are men, who for various reasons, are not able to attract the kind of female attention they want without entering into a monetary transaction with said females. That's very simple, and should be non-controversial to say. Just like we say, someone who goes to a restaurant enters into a monetary transaction for Chicken Vindaloo, because they aren't capable of getting the Vindaloo they want by using non-monetary means (i.e. cooking).
There's no value judgment, but guys who use strip clubs, Hooters, and Only Fans are basically screwing their brains up permanently. They think the kind of attention they get from pretty girls at these venues, is the kind of attention they "deserve". So their expectations in the real world become badly calibrated. Have you ever seen a fifty year old doofus hitting on 20 year olds in a bar, getting rejected hard, and being surprised? That's a habitual strip club client right there.
The other way their brains get screwed up is that these men hang around so many grifters that they think all women are grifters. I'm not going to get into George Bernard Shaws theory that all marriage is a grift, but I think we can all agree that the level of grift in the average marriage is much different and has a different effect on you then the kind of grift that happens in strip clubs and on Only Fans. Basically if you hang around strippers, you'll start to think every woman has a hand in your pocket.
It's very sad. It's kind of like when a kid is abused they start to mistrust all adults. Same thing. These men can become misogynists because their sample data has become so skewed.
Anyway, I'm' kind of sick of how media treats online grift as somehow creating a set of problems that wasn't already there. Go to any small town with poor economic prospects and there's some number of desperate young women who are training in the grift. And there's also some number of men who are the marks. Moving all of this online just makes it so more highly sought after people in both sides of the market have more opportunities. But the problems are the same no matter where the grift is happening.
BBC could have done a bit more to summarize calls to action instead of helping readers conflate multiple issues with preexisting biases. It is also a pretty decent reality for what creators can expect, right now. But, despite that I felt it was decently balanced. They accurately say the site has associations and can be used for other things.
Just saying Youtube, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and others have the same issues would have been useful.
This article seemed to be about a number of issues, not so much about the content.
Maybe onlyfans does these things (i have no idea) and its not 100%, people will still get hacked but things that come to mind:
* have educational material on how to secure your account (they probably have the only audience in the world that would actually read something like that)
* rate limits/login captcha/etc
*Handle suspicious logins (diff geoip) differently
* password requirements (not the stupid one symbol thing, but the ban every password that has ever appeared in haveibeenpwnd version)
*making it easier for people with hacked accounts to get meaningful help. Response is just as important as prevention.
*mandatory 2fa (people who willingly use 2fa are usually people who have strong passwords and benefit the least)
Onlyfans is in an industry with a higher threat profile than average tech company, they should have a higher account security standard.
Dismissing people critical of the porn industry as "anti-porn puritans" is certainly not helping your argument nor doing justice to all the people who have to deal with the consequences of the victimization of women in these 'industries', something the clientele never cares about of course.
Many of them might well be. How can you really tell what kind of situation is going on behind the camera? Abusive relationships can hide in plain sight for years.