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Comment by DaniloDias | Hacker News Reader

Seedy, sad product.

I'd love for you to expand on that opinion. In some ways I think it's a good product that gives some measure of control (and a _lot_ of the money) back to the people who star in and create pornographic content. The existing industry is exploitative and predatory, and from my admittedly not-very-well-versed vantage point, OnlyFans is much less so due to the very nature of its product and who its content creators are.

Not OP, but IMO onlyfans is especially predatory because it makes it look easy to trade nudes for large amounts of cash. In reality very few people are going to be making above minimum wage, onlyfans is just like the rest of social media - a lottery that pays millions to a few winners and asks all the other participants to create content for next-to-nothing just to enter the lotto.

> onlyfans is especially predatory

if this is what you call predatory, then why isn't sports stars and film/music celebrity culture not predatory in the same way? I don't see the difference.

I say let people do what they want, as long as they understand what they're doing and is informed of the (potential) consequences.

Sports is predatory, see the NCAA monopoly. Music was well known in the last century for predatory contracts. People like Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey from the film industry are often called predators, and the casting couch is legendary. Celebrity culture is highly predatory with obsessive fans and stalker paparazzi.

You’re right, no real difference.

The NCAA is much more predatory. Yes you get free college but sports can be the focus 100% of the time, then there is no focus on academics.

So when you don't get drafted, there is a little problem...

Onlyfans is stupid, hopefully noone has faced violence in the real world from it.

the article made is clear that people are currently receiving violence.....it's not a hypothetical.

Almost like we live within a certain economic system engineered to alienate us from our own sense of self that can convince people to squeeze every last drop of their own personal value out for the hope of not having to continue to scrape by.

People are free to do something else if their dream job doesn’t pay them a wage they feel is fair.

Throw in author, professor, forensic crime specialist and the American dream.

If you fail at a sport or music, you move on.

If you fail at OnlyFans, then everyone whoever lives for the rest of history can possibly see you nude / playing with yourself / having sex aka 'doing porn' of some threshold for the rest of time. This may not be a problem for some, but for large swaths of others it will be, especially for quantities of individuals who have second thoughts and regret their decisions.

The consequences are not very comparable.

Maybe things will change in the future (i.e. privacy laws etc)

Who's saying it isn't? Between Britney Spears' conservatorship, and the sexual abuse contract dispute between Ke$ha and Sony, (among many, many others) it's hard not to see the music industry as predatory towards pretty girls. I'm sure others familiar with sports and film can give examples from other industries.

People do say that about the music industry. Ask Kesha or Britney!

All of those are predatory. So is academia.

I’d posit that OnlyFans operates on the freemium video games model where a few select whales generate all their money. You just really need to catch one person who is into you.

How does that make it predatory, is there an upfront fee or debt? Or is it just the nude content being posted that makes it predatory from your view? It was not clear to me.

Maybe predatory was too specific, I agree it fits better when someone is on-the-hook for debt.

My thinking is just that it’s enticing people into this line of work, like a bait and switch, you thought you would be getting a steady monthly income but instead you get a few bucks a week and entitled creeps sending you death threats.

Exploitative might be the better word.

> OnlyFans is much less so due to the very nature of its product and who its content creators are.

This is an extremely generous view. It's well known that cam sites often feature trafficked victims. Why wouldn't you also assume that an OnlyFans is also run by a trafficker?

You cited yourself that the industry is predatory and exploitative. Do you honestly believe that most of these woman truly made this choice themselves?

I can't speak for the person you're responding to, but I don't think an assumption of human trafficking by the site's owners is supported given that some other site's owners did human trafficking. By all accounts I've been exposed to, models on OnlyFans earn much better than models on other sites. That seems like a prima facie reason to believe it's overall a good thing, and the evidence would need to be presented to demonstrate otherwise. Starting with the assumption the owner of something you don't like is a human trafficker is not a good way to make a convincing case against OnlyFans.

I believe he is not saying the site owners are traffickers but that some OF channels could be trafficker run.

Oh, if that's so then I'm even less clear on what we expect OnlyFans to do about it, unless we are going to ban the whole sector of sex work. Some restaurants launder money for the mob too, but we still have restaurants. If there are sensible steps OF could take to reduce the incidence of this, then they should. But it's hard for me to think of what that might be, given any response made over the internet could easily be coerced. Are there ideas I can read up on?

Let's engage in a hypothetical to flesh out your position; if 10% of only fans accounts were victims of human trafficking, acting at the behest of their traffickers, what course(s) of action would you recommend for only fans (as a company), and from regulatory bodies?

I think all regulatory regimes that have any chance of addressing this would require government support. Perhaps something like requiring any model to first go alone to identify herself to the police or other authority and certify her age. This would provide an opportunity to escape a captor. Perhaps this would be an annual thing.

But the proper incentives would need to be in place. She'd need to be allowed to stay in country if she is a foreign victim of trafficking, for example. We would want to prevent this from becoming some type of guild where incumbents can keep out new competition. And the police would need to be supportive in this process (i.e. promptly inform OF of models' eligibility, and otherwise participate in the process in good faith). It's hard to see that happening in, e.g., the United States.

How would OF know?

On one hand not requiring to go through a studio would make it easier for trafficking, but porn studios don't exactly have a fantastic track record when it comes to human rights.

On the other hand for individual content makers using this platform gives them far more control over the type of content they produce and a fairer share of the profit.

You've summed up my opinion entirely in two sentences haha, well done. That's why my original comment was prefaced with "in some ways".

Earn, (which was acquired by Coinbase and shutdown/rebranded), did the same thing as OnlyFans, charging for direct messages. There are many services like that. Many content producers on OnlyFans switch away from subscription model to just freemium with paid direct messages.

It is unnecessarily gendered to treat OnlyFans differently just because the many content creators on OnlyFans are women leading with their bodies. Maybe you weren't aware of other services that let people charge for DMs that simply didn't get associated with adult content, maybe that's not what you meant, but the comment you replied to said the OnlyFans platform is less about the nature of its product and more about who its content creators are, which you seemed to disagree with but then replied with a completely different comment.

>It requires pure misogyny to treat OnlyFans differently just because the content creators on OnlyFans are women leading with their bodies

So if we took misogyny out of the equation no one would think OnlyFans favors attractive women?

It is no reason to treat the platform differently than other platforms

Doesn't seem to be the case: https://mobile.twitter.com/aella_girl/status/133572526734025...

Has MLM level distribution where only the top 2% or so make anything of consequence.

That doesn't really disagree with anything I wrote. I was mainly implicitly comparing it to "regular" pornography and cam-sites. The latter take huge percentages comparatively, and the former don't give percentages to most of their performers at all.

What that says is of the accounts that make anything the average person makes $500. Which is about 7% of all accounts.

Which isn't bad.

I agree with you. It's yet another boil on the internet's ass. Shameful shit.

I think it's pretty great actually. How would you make it better?

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