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Comment by jachee | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who does will face the same pressure from payout vendors.

No one corporate wants to be actively involved in paying sex workers.

Is this still true? Porn sites seem to have no problems selling ad space, although it may not be to major brands. I suspect that eventually even that will change. How many people are really so put off by human sexuality that they'll refuse to buy a product that advertises on a porn site? How many of those people are going to porn sites to see those ads in the first place?

I think that slowly corporations are going to dismiss the loud puritanical few that complain about it and that those who do will find advertising their brands along side porn is extremely profitable. Corporations have been using sex to sell their products for ages specifically because it's so effective. It's just a matter of time until they start being honest about it.

The original article in Variety[0] there’s a quote that specifically states “complying with our banks’ and payout vendors’ policies.” as the reason for the change. This seems to allude that the direct payments to the sex workers themselves are what were at-odds with those policies.

0. https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/onlyfans-ban-pornograp...

Maybe it's high (past) time we collectively told The Banks to face the corner and go f*** themselves?

It is, but they have all our money and all the leverage.

Seems like the heads of banks and payment processors themselves may be the ones with puritanical views. Time for companies to push for and support alternatives (including cryptocurrency) to free themselves from those in the financial industry who are holding them back from profit and progress. If they are so entrenched and powerful that it's impossible for a new company to meet the current needs of the market than the government has to step in. Maybe it's time to break some of these old financial companies up or strip away some of the regulations they've had put into place to keep their monopoly position

I've heard that it's generally the Federal government and anti-porn groups that pressure the payment processors. Remember how PornHub was accused of hosting all kinds of stuff, and then Visa and Mastercard stopped processing payments until changes were made? That was because anti-porn groups had applied pressure.

https://www.salon.com/2020/12/30/the-anti-porn-religious-lob...

I haven't seen much evidence for federal pressure on payment processors directly. The article seems to be mostly about pornhub's over-reaction in response to the over-reaction of payment processors who pandered to the anti-porn groups.

The government really did screw over websites like Craigslist and Backpage, but that was due to changes which would have made the site operators responsible for the content their users post which I don't think would have an impact on someone like mastercard.

I suspect the payment processors must support the anti-porn agenda since I doubt they really fear that any appreciable number of people will resort to using cash only for the rest of their lives in protest. It's entirely within Visa's power to say "If you don't like porn don't pay for it, but it isn't our place to police what free people can do with their money. Our role is simply to facilitate any legal transaction. If you feel something shouldn't be legal speak to your representatives and change the laws"

FOSTA/SESTA has been cited as an incident of the Federal government working against sex workers being normalized, at least in the realm of payments and digital outlets.

I think the difference is with porn sites the actors have signed contracts and gone through several legal requirements to ensure a "safe" enviorment. They also generally don't do the more extreme porn fetishes that are illegal in some countries (Think rape/incest roleplay. But the list is massive.)

Onlyfans and sites similar often attract the small fetish sex workers because the demand isn't big enough for a major company to pick up on them on a regular basis but the demand is enough they can make serious money freelancing.

Just use cryptocurrencies.

Sounds like a market opportunity for new, non-prudish payment provider.

The problem has never been payment providers' morality. Porn payments come with significantly higher chargeback rates than traditional payments. If someone can find a way to stop red-handed husbands from claiming credit card theft when the wife checks the bill, there's a market opportunity.

The vendor already eats that risk though, right? Chargeback fees cover the credit card company against that risk.

The problem from the credit card companies' point of view is that "I got caught by my wife" isn't a valid chargeback reason, so the vendor can dispute the chargeback, have every incentive to do so, and that's not a fight Visa want to get into.

Of course the reason given isn't "I got caught by my wife", it's "I don't know how that charge got there, it must be ... fraud".

Payment processors are required to maintain a certain chargeback rate with the card companies and so that risk gets passed on to the merchants.

This is all exceedingly well documented and a Google search away if you'd like to learn the inner workings of it.

100% correct, it's sad that we still use hopelessly insecure credit cards, a better system would have non-repudiation built in, charge backs from the customer claiming "I didnt authorise that" would go away

Unfortunately, this would incentivize bad behavior on the part of disreputable merchants. Dark ui patterns would abound in some parts of the internet.

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