OnlyFans to block sexually explicit videos starting in October
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237274&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237274&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237274&p=4
(Comments like this will go away when we turn off pagination. Sorry for the annoyance.)
I say greater because OnlyFans is/was still on a massive upswing whereas Tumblr was 10 years past its peak already when the nails went in the coffin.
Edit: I understand this is supposedly not their choice.
Also, weird that they would give up an entire market because of prude payment providers. Are these providers from Afghanistan? They should not have that much power over their customers.
Maybe a crypto spin off could work.
I always felt porn was an exploitative business so was never into it, But I gained respect for OnlyFans as a platform because it enabled people to move from dangerous, risky work to relatively safe work. As with any content platform, I understand that only perhaps top 5% might make sustainable business out of it but still it's a choice available.
Now they've blown it, In order to chase after scale OnlyFans has decided to sacrifice their original customers. Fans of those music artists who are supposedly joining now should inform them that OnlyFans is robbing the livelihood and would be pushing many back to dangerous physical-sex work.
[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/211-aella-savannah-solo
Just a note that Tumblr's anti-porn policy has been fairly leaky and users basically adapted to it. After a decline, the site now hosts nearly as much porn as previously.
The problem is that onlyfans has a much bigger spotlight on it. So yeah, one wonders how people justify just killing their product.
"The children selling explicit videos on OnlyFans"
Tinder was initially sometimes described as an app to find people nearby who want to hook up. Like a one-night-stand-radar. It quickly positioned itself as more traditional dating app (although very focused on visuals).
And although not sexual, I think what happend to YikYak is similar. They started as this anarchic platform where you anonymously could talk shit about local topics and people. And then they realized that is probably not what they want because it causes outrage, so they tried to nerf that aspect (which is the whole allure of the platform).
Sometimes the sanitizing works (Snapchat), sometimes it kills the app (Tumblr, YikYak). But in any case I'd wish there would still be a place for the anarchic, 'unmoral', wild ideas in our society.
> OnlyFans is getting out of the pornography business.
HN:
s/of the pornography //1) There is a high chargeback and dispute rate on porn. I don't know why.
2) OnlyFans has underage performers who get on there using fake IDs and there is not a very good way to stop that.
EDIT to add :
If you argue ad absurdam that everyone is going to be exposed to everyone for moral judgement of their rights to online existence, then maybe we need a more sophisticated and practically judicious and efficient system of adjudication of the legal entitlements and freedoms endowed to everyone, than "I know it when I see it ".
This needs a logical codex. Literally a logical reduction of the comprehensive semantics used to describe unacceptable content. From which we can apply triage to emergency cases of accused indecency. Too many cases are heard so immediately in the courts of public opprobrium exclusively in hostile environments where the most sympathetic media is bound and restricted from venturing any actual support virtually ensuring that the rights of the publisher are lost. This is ignoring the issues of commercial withdrawal of essential services.
Strong disagree. They lined their coffers and now it's time to pivot. In fact, it's probably the perfect time to pivot. They are still relatively unknown, and their reputation hasn't been tarnished. Patreon is ripe for disruption.
Pornography is not how you become a billion-dollar unicorn, which is I'm sure what they're eyeing (especially after their most recent raise).
Clone the full experience on a dedicated site, OnlyFantasy.com, duplicate the whole userbase, and give a simple warning that I can find my favorite stars on another site. In time, the user bases will diverge naturally depending on interests.
Yes, the payment processors will bark at the porn site. Move to a more expensive processor for that site only, pay 5%, 10% fee, it doesn't really matter, it's free money.
If PH is having trouble processing any form of credit card, a smaller company will have no chance at all. We're seeing a sterilization of legitimate porn on the internet, done by legitimate tax paying western companies. It'll be left to whoever can operate beyond those constraints, which is kind of a sad state of affairs for free speech, separation of church and state, and policing in general.
You are, absolutely, a genius.
This is exactly what Gfycat did. They took the same backend infrastructure, made it into a porn site (Redgifs), and moved all the porn gifs on Gfycat over to the new site.
Also, there seriously needs to be a reckoning with the payment processor issue, somehow.
Visa & Mastercard are happy to ban an entire company from their platform (see PornHub).
I have a fair number† of friends and acquaintances who have OnlyFans. Some for side income, some for a substantial portion of their livelihood. And to see that get taken away because the payment processors want them to fall in line…I guess I’m on the crypto train now.
†Yes, I have a slightly strange life, I know.
And forgive me if this seems ranty, but it isn’t just payment processors, it seems to permeate so much that comes out of the USA. See the various App Store rules too.
And this isn’t about fraud rates. Because why are the fraud rates high? It’s because the sex whole industry is pushed to the fringes, and loaded with shame. “Oh that payment wasn’t me, my card must have been stolen”.
I feel pretty angry how much this puritanical nature in a foreign country affects the people I care about around me.
If you can let China censor your platforms, you can let Europeans have porn.
Ok, rant over. Please don’t downvote too heavily.
I think a lot of people think the processors are doing this out of some moral high ground to try and kill off the pornography business, but that's not what's happening. It's all about risk and opportunity cost. I forget the exact numbers, but pornography and gambling are near the top of the list when you look at industries with the highest number of fraudulent transactions. When someone reports a transaction as fraudulent, the money to refund the customer comes out someone behind the scenes pocket and often that money gets tied up in limbo while everyone points fingers at everyone else. Dealing with fraudulent transactions is a massive headache that wastes a ton of time.
Most major processors just don't want to deal with the hassle and the ones who do charge extremely high fees to offset the extra risk. OF has probably been using a processor that doesn't allow for pornography this whole time, but the processor has been letting it slide. My guess would be the risk has finally grown too large and the processor is cracking down. Like I said, there are other processors out there who are happy to work with the porn industry for a much higher fee, but it seems like OF has decided for one reason or another that that isn't as lucrative as just banning explicit content all together.
I'm not against the promises of crypto - but the tech so far has failed to deliver anything but a platform to streamline illegal activity, asset speculation bubbles and a whole bunch of wasted energy/hardware along with reliving the problems people had historically with bank fraud in free banking and the likes (banks printing their own notes without cover till you get a bank run - this is why central banks were invented ...)
I wonder how we can be more open minded as a society while still keeping enough skepticism to not accept literal garbage.
There was a story about an online dildo seller who couldn't sell specific colour of dildos because American Express didn't like them. I think it was lovehoney
It bothers me that they have the power to shut businesses based on what appears to be their own subjective moral code. If a website is shutdown for any reason it should be due them breaking some law, not the payment processors feelings.
Regulation should passed to stop this from happening. While a lot of people may agree with their actions so far, it shouldn't be their decision to do this.
No you don't. There are many people who are become porn actors as a result of only fans. That is likely why this is happening.
So, they are trying to get inclusive by excluding most of their community...
I understand it is bullshit and the only reason they do it is because porn is a difficult investment, with a lot of credit card fraud and limited opportunities for partnership. But still, OnlyFans made a name for itself with porn, and even managed the impressive feat of staying mostly clean regarding abuse and copyright infringement.
It is a difficult niche to fit in, but by abandoning it, they will compete with everyone else, including Google, Facebook, etc... and I don't think they will stand a chance. It is like, say, a shop that sells craft beer next to Walmart. Craft beer suppliers may be unreliable, have limited stock, with wild variation in quality, etc... it is much easier to deal with large industrial breweries, but if you stop selling craft beer because it is too hard, people will not buy your new, "guaranteed profit" industrial beer, they will go to Walmart, because Walmart if bigger and can negotiate lower prices, and people can get their beers with their groceries. The only reason the craft beer shop can make money is because they do the kind of thing Walmart refuses to do.
> Creators will still be allowed to post nude photos and videos, provided they’re consistent with OnlyFans’ policy, the company said Thursday.
So I am guessing the distinction is nudes vs sex acts?
Even dead ones get it better. I took one look at it recently and saw lil peep on there. My first thought was wow they're really putting a dead rapper's meat out there like that? But nah, it's like unreleased music videos and shit. Gotta wonder who is milking that.
> That popularity also brought with it additional scrutiny, and OnlyFans is positioning itself more as a forum for musicians, fitness instructors and chefs than sex workers. While many of its most-popular creators post videos of themselves engaging in sexual behavior, several mainstream celebrities like Bella Thorne, Cardi B and Tyga have also set up accounts.
I get that it's a de facto situation for some, but let's not drop the onus on "morality police", payment processors, and OnlyFans for a massive societal failure to help vulnerable people. You could take that argument as far as you want (prostitution, drug sales, etc). There is some level of dignity that everyone's entitled to. If someone does OF by choice because they love it, good for them. If someone is compelled to in order to feed their kids or leave an abusive partner, then we should all be ashamed of that.
OnlyFans is only a lucrative option for a small group of people - young attractive women. How is it that every other segment of the population can keep out of abusive relationships and beneath a roof (to the extent they can) without the benefit of OnlyFans?
Second, OnlyFans is an abusive relationship. It's using women during the few years they are attractive enough to exploit the instincts of men. The instant their looks wear off, they're out.
https://twitter.com/danprimack/status/1428420774449266691?s=...
Your bank can't block shit and has to process whatever transaction you want short of the terrorist watchlist.
But sounds like OnlyFans could have complied with verification requirements, like PornHub had done?
What if they decide people can no longer buy dildos or lube or condoms or guns or alcohol or meat on Fridays?
There’s no law with respect to “payment neutrality”??
I think they should start taking Bitcoin or Monero. Fuck MasterCard and whoever dictates what they do. If you are going to be forced into bankruptcy, at least do it in style.
Here is opportunity #3928 for Stripe to step in and earn their valuation and flex their payment muscle and allow adult payments.
This whole cam-girls making a fortune this way seems somehow more dishonest than normal porn to me, maybe because it’s about these guys (who can never have relationships with these women) building a personal and intimate relationship as one of her “fans”. I almost see this as being like gambling where people need to acknowledge maybe how powerful sex is and being a technology that should be regulated similarly.
I wonder if nobody calls out this exploitation because society keeps suggesting that all men are privileged, which is definitely not true for at least 60% of the male population.
Anyway I’ll probably get downvoted for this but these double standards have been irritating me for a while :-)
Male mental health is ignored a lot and it's sad.
There seem to be a lot of assumptions here that I don’t agree with. So perhaps this comment isn’t for me, in which case feel free to ignore the following.
People seem to add so many values into the mix when it comes to sex work. If these old lonely people paid carers to visit them at home, would that be somehow different? Are these old lonely people somehow exploited because there is sex involved? If they cannot make rational choices because sex is involved then I’d say that is the problem.
Also, where does being able to “have” someone figure into any of this? There is no ‘you must be at least this hot to enter’ scale, people get together for all kinds of reasons. Plus, “have” sounds a lot like possession of someone, which I think we all think is bad? Right?
I think there are a lot of values encoded in the above comment, but I also know it wasn’t intended negatively.
On average I don't think it is particularly healthy to replace real social/ sexual relationships with parasocial ones and I think that is the primary use for these services. For the most part they lack real meaningful intimacy which is a significant benefit that real relationships provide. I don't think many who maintain healthy social and romantic relationships are the majority of users of the platform.
https://www.engadget.com/2017-10-27-patreon-adult-content-cr...
Much of the pressure came from payment processing partners and banks, much like is described in this article.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbqwwj/patreon-suspension-of...
It seems like for any crowdsourced funding platform there is a volume cap for NSFW content imposed by the need of those platforms to seek wider audiences and funding sources.
This is why many people who post fetish-y art (even stuff like mind-control kink) moved from Patreon to SubscribeStar. Even erotic roleplay site F-List moved to SubscribeStar.
Reddit seems to have resisted whatever calls it must be getting to eliminate porn. So far at least. It will ban or quarantine some heretical ideas, but porn is still there.
> The company handled more than $2 billion in sales last year, and is on pace to more than double that this year. It keeps 20% of that figure.
So they're killing the golden goose to placate outside money when they already are making ~800M a year?
Something here doesn't really add up but I don't know enough about this field to see what I'm missing.
Based on the tweet, I would presume their ability accept payment via the established payment networks is being threatened.
When Google, Apple, Amazon, et al. simultaneously took actions that resulted in the shutdown of Gab it seemed a lot of people supported it.
Now they could very well be completely disjoint groups, but I’d be interested if anyone who opposes the payment processors pressuring OnlyFans but supported the actions taken against Gab could explain how they reconcile the two positions. In both cases we have companies with dominant positions in the market denying or threatening to deny crucial services to another company.
This feels akin to saying something like, "Oh, you were onboard when the government criminalized murder, how do you feel now that they're criminalizing weed?!"
I think most people would reconcile them fairly easily. Do you think there’s a surprising answer to be had here?
Personally I don't really care about either of these scenarios and a whole lot of the people complaining about this one are doing it for pretty obvious self-interested reasons, but you're being disingenuous by acting like these are the same thing. Visa and Mastercard are a government-enforced duopoly (with a few minor similarly-enforced exceptions). No tech company is as meaningfully.
The other one is naked people.
It's the difference between suing someone because they yelled "fire!" in a crowded adult theatre and being an actor on the stage of that theatre.
mounting pressure from banking
partners and payment providers
This looks like one.
I'm not being facetious. I believe it's a one of a kind opportunity for crypto currencies to step in, show the middle finger to the established payment pipelines and prove that a smooth, reliable and safe payment system can be operated even for the adult industry.
According to the Guardian[1] the adult industry clears between $10bln-$100bln a year. That's a lot turnover and clearly they are not being served well by the current providers. I'd imagine the fees are also acceptably higher (due to the increased fraud, etc..) so the profit margins should also be potentially higher.
If you make basic payment processing for services criminal, then, by definition, cryptocurrency's primary use case is for criminal activity.
I bet this move could somehow be traced to machinations from the big porn industry players. I think if people want to make money doing this stuff and they're legally of age in a place they do it, and if they're not hurting anyone, then you shouldn't get in their way. If it's a free choice to engage in it and they are not trafficed nor coerced nor debt trapped, it should be a way that people can access to generate income or express themselves is that if that's what they choose.
I've heard of onlyfans but I've never even seen any content on there and the screenshots I've seen have just been sort of racy but not explicit and i don't know anything about the background of this decision, but... just in general I think it's easy and useful to frame it from the point of view of freedom of expression and commerce versus a moral panic or crackdown on independent content creators who are empowering themselves with content in a market that pays premiums and they can achieve a better standard of life than by doing other things, and it's better than them working at the behest of or in contract to someone else. So from that point of view I think it's a great thing that people could do this (like uber for racy content or if you want to take it to the extreme: Uber for explicit content) and it's really sad that this platform seems to now be disallowing that I think to the great harm and detriment of all the people who could formerly freely engaged in making their money that way.
It seems to me that the government needs to take some of that power back from tech companies by clearly delineating which services can and cannot be refused and in what circumstances. For instance, I think it is perfectly right for Google to remove Gab from their app store if they wish, but I think it would be wrong if Gab was refused internet service by their ISP, for example. Similarly, as we transition to a cashless world I think there need to be limits on the authority that payment processors can exercise over which businesses are allowed to receive payments and which are not.
According to here[0], banks need approx $20 million in startup capital. Now I don't know what onlyfan's costs are, but they seem to be sitting on a lot more than that or alternatively they could get financing.
Is there a reason this isn't a direction they've explored? The fact that they've not swapped to a more expensive payment provider implies that it's not a good option, but that may be a simpler solution, or they could provide a competitive option in this space?
You can use proxies if you are a small company. But at onlyFans' level, the solutions are limited.
PS: By experience, I can also confirm that most of the CC acquirers evaluate your business not on its legality but on its morality.
PS2: With mandatory 3DS2, the excuse of high fraud/complains rates (which were true 10 years ago) does not make sense anymore.
State-backed capitalism has its faults, but they usually try to move billions into a strategically important area that benefits a large enough section of the economy.
There are plenty of porn sites out there operating legally, wonder why the banks are giving them issue.
My guess is that they presented themselves to banks as just ordinary non-adult transactions and now the banks are seeing that they are almost entirely adult so they want to put them into the higher and more expensive "high-risk" category and OF won't be able to get away with only taking 20% from the models.
I guess I'm getting back into the adult website game. I work with tons of adult models as a photographer and got out of making websites due to OnlyFans.
Either PornHub/OF got too big even for CCBill's approach to dealing with fraud, or CCBill is pulling the plug on websites that take market away from "traditional porn" probably because of pressure from the later.
May people do have one (55%) as it sometimes comes with a payment package, but they are generally frowned upon as tech from the stone age and insecure.
This paragraph contradicts itself:
- The company will prohibit users from posting any sexually explicit
Versus
- Creators will still be allowed to post nude photos and videos
What is this article trying to say?
https://angel.co/l/2vyMwb https://angel.co/l/2vA8yr
HMU lucy@sunroom.so
https://angel.co/l/2vyMwb https://angel.co/l/2vA8yr
HMU lucy@sunroom.so
That's one of the advantages of cash.
"The company will prohibit users from posting any sexually explicit conduct, starting in October. Creators will still be allowed to post nude photos and videos, provided they’re consistent with OnlyFans’ policy"
This is a real concern especially on the cam content. It’s quite tempting business for some pimp on low-income country to get house, few cameras and put ladies to work.
Kind of same issues with the porn in general, but I assume there’s lots of paperwork happening on background for large production companies.
This split - and it's going to be a split (as they'd be insane to let that much porn money walk) is just to leave behind a nice investable onlyfans to rival patreon.
Edit: Apparently the same thing happened to them too. Thank you to the person who linked the other discussion below.
Anyway, it seems like OF is about to accomplish an epic maneuver: raise money at a $1 billion valuation based on a product you just cancelled.
In general, internet is mostly about porn or sex (Tinder, Facebook which is really for hookups when it's not for paid political propaganda), or for illegal activity (fintech, darknets) or for scam (adtech, freelance sites). I wonder what people who opt for "none of the above" are thinking.
I genuinely struggle to understand the obsession of these payment processors have to block services that focus on displaying the naked human form. Are we as a species so despicable that a nipple offends us? We are all born naked and are essentially part of the larger ecosystem on this planet.
Sure, I could understand the high chargeback rates argument , but then again, huge Bahamuts like MC and Visa can surely absorb the cost here.
These systems provide a safe channel for sex workers to profit _directly_ from their services and yet here we have society pushing them to an unsafe alley to profit.
I hope the hypocrisy of western nations supporting the sexual liberation of women whilst cracking down on their ability to do as they please with their bodies should not go unnoticed .
The extreme religious institutions and people supporting these policies should go down in history as villains.
I sincerely hope that future generations drive change and that one day we can look back at this time and chuckle.
Prediction:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38963007
Also relevant... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_o8vYUU-jo
Don't even blame onlyfans because it's the demands of banks and VCs in this case and society at large who still treat sex workers like some kind of caste of undesirables they don't want to be associated with.
I mean also overseas, for sure the extra costs (if any) are better than basically killing the golden goose.
The odds of Onlyfans becoming the huge phenomenon that it is were so slim, it seems like a waste of luck to just throw it all away because of banking problems.
Fintech's finest financially suffocating OnlyFans, forcing them to ban explicit videos off of their platform.
Somebody has got to lose.
What's their argument here, is there a law being broken or is the pressure motivated by ethics or something else?
Arguments against it scale down to "because there is exploitation, we shouldn't have any porn". This is the drug war mentality. Guess where it leads
Why does an globally established and growing company with a proven business model want to raise a billion dollar investment?
It's money they'll have to pay back with interest and I assume there would be other strings attached (like the high risk implied by the title of this article). How is possibly better than organic growth at this point where they are probably close to market saturation (in the sense that further exponential growth is implausible)?
Makes sense
It feels like the only way to solve the payment processor issue is to somehow have a change to US laws that no longer criminalize sex work.
They're really just helping the adoption to mainstream crypto.
So nude is OK but it may not sexually explicit?
That seems like a very fine line to walk, with much associated drama.
For sex workers, there is ManyVids that will eat their lunch.
Only benefit out of this, maybe nsfw Reddit will be worth a visit again when most of the OF ~~spammers~~sellers have gone.
Anybody interested in building a clone and taking over of their core business?
Based on the Indie Hackers interview with two active Only Fans content makers, it also sounds like their app is kinda shitty and slow.
Seems like they're opening the door wide open to a new competitor.
Centralized services like this will always fail eventually. We need better models than our current megacorp/client stack and the incentives that creates for most services.
In this case though it may be a factor of liability changes on high risk content: https://www.wired.com/story/how-a-controversial-new-sex-traf...
It's not so much the tech companies and payment processors that are making policy, but a reaction from them to changes in government policy that increases their exposure.
Your entire business model was crushed by payment companies so you pivot in whatever direction you think you can.
Wasn't (soft) porn their business model?
I see 2 losers here OnlyFans and the banks.
The argument seems to be that "our payment partners don't like explicit content". I think the same excuse was thrown around for Tumblr's porn ban too.
* If this was a single (or small number of) player(s) objecting, why aren't they being competed around? Any payment platform that refuses to service the porn industry is, by its very nature, leaving money on the table.
* Again, if we're dealing with a centralized point of objection, I could see "name and shame" pushback being very effective. Imagine the backlash from both porn enthusiasts and libertarians closing their accounts if they said "It's XYZ Bank, they don't want you buying pornography."
* The worst-case scenario I could imagine is that it's at the card-brand level, driven by non-US/EU regulations. They can switch from (for example) Stripe to Braintree to Auth.net, but they can't escape Visa and Mastercard so easily. They might feel the need to regulate because it's required as a condition of market entry in, say, China or the Middle East.
But that still opens the door for domestic-focused alternatives (ACH? The old ATM-centric debit card networks?) In fact, in today's politically charged environment, I could see momentum to explicitly develop a payment product designed for "Western Sensibilites and Values" with an explicit "Hell no, it doesn't work in Beijing/Moscow/Baghdad" message. Suddenly, supporting pornography is a patriotic endeavour that you can use to demand special treatment and subsidy.
* Why now, when they're trying to go public? It's not like people suddenly woke up and said "OnlyFans had PORN?" If they maintained their relationships with their payment processors until now, it's not like there's a sudden, earth shattering revelation here.
I'm wondering if maybe the truth is less dramatic and grand. The angle I could see is that a hypothetical "OnlyFans - Porn" is a lower merchant risk profile than "OF as it stands". The high merchant fees for that industry are a well-established cost centre. If they could say "we slashed our merchant fees nn%" it looks good while preening the balance sheet for the IPO. However, I'm skeptical if that's the case-- any sort of "digital video delivery" and "subscription service" are still pretty high risk merchant types. I'd also think it's still less of a revenue risk to just split the business: a high-fee porn-only site and a cheaper-to-operate non-porn site, using shared technology.
ftfy
Google blocks search and Twitter blocks politics
If there is a case for cancel culture, free speech or capitalism issue, this sounds like it. Few powerful players systematically destroying speech and business because they don't like it.
Makes sense
Onlyfans is extremely exploitative, and part of the business model is to groom underage girls into doing pornography. There have been many news reports of only fans ignoring reports that underage girls are selling pornography of themselves on their website; something which onlyfans profits off of.
They are pimps, and seem to be okay with pimping out children and encouraging children to enter the sex trade. I hope that some of them end up in prison.
(not a judgment on what they do but the reality of the situation)