Hacker News Reader

Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

I totally agree that OnlyFans is a legitimate and ethical site, but let's not kid ourselves about PornHub. It was mostly pirated content with a lot of videos of people being harmed.

View on HN

While both those things are true, the 'mostly' part is not. There are a lot of couples and singles posting their exploits and OnlyFans creators trying to drive traffic to their feed. What are you searching for that got you those results??

Let's not kid ourselves about PornHub...

Nobody was being harmed on Pornhub. Don't feed the lying anti-sex work media.

There were many examples of voyeur, creepshot, revenge and ex-partner videos.

None of which had the consent of all parties involved.

Having those on porn sites is fundamentally harmless. No one stumbles across a coworkers revenge porn in practice, they get sent it by a vengeful person who acquired it by other means.

Sending a pic or video is not substantially more difficult than sending a link. The revenge porn stuff is a red herring.

So in your opinion, revenge porn is harmless unless an acquaintance sees it?

That's an incredibly repulsive take. It's also increasingly illegal, so your opinion of it is thankfully irrelevant.

Also consider that we will eventually have face search for the internet, so someone could take a photo of you from LinkedIn and find all the places that face appears.

They were, In 2020 they removed over 600,000 videos that contained abuse.

https://www.engadget.com/pornhub-first-transparency-report-1...

What about the company Girls Do Porn that PH refused to take down?

Some of those were literal rape videos.

You are grossly misinformed. So much so I have to wonder why. PornHub JUST took down 600k videos of minors and consensual acts. https://www.engadget.com/pornhub-first-transparency-report-1...

Either you're commenting without being informed, or you're intentionally lying. Either way, you are harming people.

I need to amend my comment here. OF's model is legitimate and ethical (let people post media of themselves, rather than being pimped out by a porn production company).

Unfortunately, the company seems to be pretty morally bankrupt: https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/19/22633411/onlyfans-banned-...

> I totally agree that OnlyFans is a legitimate and ethical site

"IRL", abusive relationships can be hidden in plain site from people who think they know the couple well. How do you stand any chance of knowing there isn't an abusive pimp behind the camera of an onlyfans account? Ultimately you only have intuition and guesswork to go off of, but both are fallible. Even if the platform itself is trusted and does a good job of verifying identities, that doesn't preclude abuse.

This is no different to buying any kind of service or good. How do you know that cheap editing job on fiverr is not made by an enslaved worker?

> How do you know that cheap editing job on fiverr is not made by an enslaved worker?

That's my point, you don't and can't. You should be cognizant of the possibility of abuse, not write off the possibility. Don't pretend to know when you couldn't possibly know. People who claim that abuse doesn't exist on Onlyfans are almost certainly wrong. How much abuse content exists on OF is unknown; unknown to everybody in this conversation, and unknown even to OF. Whether OF is ethical depends on how much abusive content is on OF, which none of us know, and how much abuse somebody thinks should be tolerated, which is subjective.

Anybody who claims that Onlyfans is ethical is making a claim about the rate of abuse which they can't back up.

That's a high standard for being considered "ethical". I'd argue that as long as the platform incentivizes voluntary work more than forced work, it goes in the right direction and is thus "ethical", or at least not "unethical".

What the platform incentivizes is not all there is to consider. Actual outcome must also be considered. Nike can go through all the motions of incentivizing the use of ethical labor in their factories, but if it turns out that despite their efforts, a significant portion of their sneakers are made by child slave labor, then I'm not going to go around claiming Nike is an ethical business. Maybe I'll buy a pair of Nike shoes anyway, because I don't see a better option, but I still won't claim that Nike is ethical. I'll leave extolling the virtue of Nike to the Nike PR department. Anyway, intentions do count for something I think, but outcome is more important.

Note that I am not claiming Onlyfans is unethical. I don't know if Onlyfans is ethical or not. I don't know what the rate of abuse content on Onlyfans is. That's information I simply don't have. Furthermore, I'm not even sure what rate of abuse content society should tolerate from a company. Probably if these are only isolated incidents that are swiftly recognized and rectified, it shouldn't damn the whole platform. Also, I think it probably matters whether that rate is trending up or down, but I don't have any information about either possible trend. I lack the information I need to support the claim that Onlyfans is ethical, and I think the rest of you do as well.

Why are you holding them to a higher standard than any other business? They're ethical in the sense that they follow the same ordinary business ethics standard that we apply to everyone else; none of us know and none of us can possibly know how much abuse is going on in, say, Apple's supply chain, but few would say that means they're an unethical company.

I don't understand the argument you are trying to make.

Are you arguing that all sex work should be illegal because it is possible that there is an unhealthy relationship involved?

Would you also extend that to the modeling industry as well?

What about professional cheerleading?

Hooters waitresses?

If there is a couple who decides for the guy to be a stay at home dad, and the wife pays the bills via sex work, is he a pimp?

What if you reverse the genders in the above?

I know couples in both situations. I wouldn't characterize their relationships as abusive, but you might?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com