Comment by nonameiguess | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonameiguess | Hacker News Reader

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At least this explains why normal porn sites keep living on perfectly well using MasterCard and Visa. They already have to follow regulatory requirements to demonstrate they are complying with age and consent laws, each video includes a front-matter frame saying where you can get the documentation of their compliance, and many include behind-the-scenes extra content showing all of the performers presenting government-issued IDs and signing consent forms.

This brings this conflict out of the realm of adult entertainment and into a broader conflict between incumbent central providers that are held to regulatory standards and apps providing a platform for individual contractors that don't follow those requirements. It's in the same field as people arguing AirBNB is only able to exist because it's allowing people to operate hotels without having to comply with hotel regulations, and Uber allows people to operate taxi services without complying with taxi regulations. OnlyFans was giving individuals a way to produce adult films without having to comply with adult film regulations related to age and consent verification of the performers.

If that's the case why can't OF impose these requirements on their creators?

Presumably because of the costs of verification and record keeping.

A single adult video studio might have a maximum of a few hundred people who they have to keep records for. Those people are paid per shoot, and the content is owned by the studio. There is a high ratio of revenue to number of people whose records must be kept.

On OnlyFans, they have a huge amount of people producing a small volume of content and making very little money, of which they only get a cut.

That can't possibly be it. We're talking about a billion dollars business burning its main revenue source to the ground, and the main reason would be that they can't afford to do the easily-automated paperwork? The math doesn't make sense.

>that they can't afford to do the easily-automated paperwork?

if this tweet is true, that's the issue. they don't want just automated paperwork:

>, but review all posted content before publication, including real-time review of livestreams

It's virtually impossible to discriminate criminal content with an algorithm (and extremely hard to even with a human, but I disgress. This policy isn't rooted in logic to begin with), so any non-professional studio is basically being demanded to have some massive team pre-screen every single piece of content before it lands on site. The labor would either be massive and/or they'd have to massively delay how quickly the site can deliver content.

Imagine needing to wait in a queue for 1-4 weeks before a single post can be shown publicly. That's unacceptable in modern websites. And expesnsive in 2 ways.

Exactly. It would change OnlyFans from an almost no-overhead (just servers and storage) business to one that would need a huge increase in staff (payroll, offices/equipment, benefits, etc) to do the verification reviews, as well as a bigger HR deparment to handle the recruitment and hiring of these people. Their overhead costs would explode.

Also, they need to view the footage before it's published. Studios do this when they're editing it. It's literally part of their process. A big one will deal with processing four 60 minute videos a day maybe? Onlyfans would presummely be dealing with multiple minutes of footage per minute of the day they would need to screen.

The reason some creators use OF is because of the convenience. If you make it takes weeks and tons of work to get on the platform, they might as well start their own site.

Also from a legal perspective it is very risky to take on that liability for so many creators. All it would take is one screw up on checking date of birth on an ID, and now OF is accessory to sex crimes.

Considering there is no garbage collection for regulations, and incumbents apply huge pressure to further entrench bad tradeoffs, I see apps that subvert the laws and demonstrate immense benefits to both the workers and the consumers as positive trends.

Uhh pornhub takes btc and ach only

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