OnlyFans banning sexually explicit content b/C of MasterCard rules starting Oct

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28245221 - Aug 2021 (411 comments)

Previously:

OnlyFans to block sexually explicit videos starting in October - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237274 - Aug 2021 (1306 comments)

I think the arbitrage opportunity isn’t nearly as large as people imagine. Payment processors aren’t run by ideological zealots who refuse certain transactions on moral grounds. On the contrary, they are ruthless capitalists who’d love to get a slice of any and every multibillion dollar market under the sun.

I’m sure actuaries at MasterCard ran the numbers and found that the risk of accepting payments for live adult content (e.g. high level of chargebacks, extreme legal consequences for processing payments for blatantly illegal material, e.g. child pornography, that’s hard to filter out owing to the transient nature of live streams) far outweighed the benefits. And if you’ll excuse my appeal to authority, I assume those actuaries are correct, given the amount of money such a profit-focused company is walking away from.

What's more free than Mastercard doing what it wishes?

It started about 2-3 weeks ago. It seems it's being rolled-out progressively, because some people don't see the nag screen. It's very annoying.

If you're on Firefox, try the Privacy Redirect extension which re-routes to Nitter.

blocking Twitter cookies solved the issue, in Opera. But this user hostile / dark pattern is going to get worse with time for people who do not want to browser Twitter with a Twitter account. Ironically, Twitter will automatically ban the brand new user from doing almost anything on their website if they refuse to give their phone number to Twitter.

i'd just use https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1428584131835748359.html rather than the twitter web.

Remember reading others facing this as well and that it was pretty recent.

Clearing your cookies and cache for Twitter seems to stop this.

Hmm not true for me, in Switzerland, latest Firefox, never had any Twitter account nor anybody else around me. There is just small box with login on the upper right side of the page which can be easily ignored.

You still need to convert between a token and money, until you can use your Coinlyfans to buy food at your local grocer and pay rent it doesn’t actually help.

Current cryptos are too slow to process and have too many onboarding steps many of which are also quite slow and require more involved from the customer which increases drop outs.

You can’t buy crypto with a credit card easily, even on the big exchanges and you have to go through a KYC process and then use debit or bank transfer usually.

Also Onlyfans is a British startup I’m not even sure it’s hosted in the US.

> Also by moving their servers to a jurisdiction less oppressive than the Democratic Republic of America.

It's a UK-based company.

They're not banning sex workers, they're just banning sexually explicit content. So you'll be paying on OnlyFans and getting "the goods" via a WhatsApp/FaceTime video call.

There is also normal stuff there. Clown porn is not classified as "sexually explicit".

Because the US government told them to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

Fraud rates are often higher on porn sites than elsewhere on the web. At least that used to be the case.

Too volatile and takes too long to process, and you still need to convert it to fiat to make actual money.

Because for the most part this situation has been only weaponized against those who are out of ideological compliance with the tech industry. As long as it is a tool for punishing what a small geographical area considers wrong-think, it will go on with the blessing of Bay Area tech scene. With OnlyFans there's some uneasiness because suddenly those who have been cheering on the use of this weapon are starting to realize it might expand into areas that could harm them.

The NCAA instituted a rule[0] on the confederate flag that led to Mississippi changing their state flag[1].

Some changes, like them or not, come from very unexpected places.

[0] https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/29334498/ncaa...

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/mississippi-lawmakers-vote-remove-...

Startups gotta pivot.

It's a pretty trivial CRUD app, if you want to be dismissive about the actual tech involved, but if you've read any of the discussion, you'd see that the tech largely isn't what's being discussed here. (And I'll bet the tech stack that powers FB messenger or Snapchat is endlessly fascinating, but you could similarly derisively call those CRUD apps.)

OF is fun to talk about because, well, it's porn. But looking past the empowerment of mostly young women (top earners make O($100,000/month)), OF is of particular interesting to the HN crowd because it exposes a lie: digital money is not the same as physical cash. Having a gatekeeper say what you're allowed to spend your money on, is antithical to freedom. Whiiiiiiiich leads to cryptocurrency, which many a reader here finds interesting.

The other theory that was previously being floated about was FOSTA-SESTA laws, which purports to be against sex trafficking, but ends up hurting the very group it says it's against, sex workers. Those laws are what closed down Craigslist personals and Backpages, for better or worse. (Which, according to sex workers, worse, since it has lead to sex workers being killed.) But see this is also of interest to HN readers because those bad laws mean a founder-CEO could face jail time if the police believes their MVP app/website promotes sex work in a primary way.

Like somebody mentioned, companies trying to impose on people what their morals should be. The first time I heard about it was when a nurse/doctor got fired. Although some restrictions can be consider, what people do in their private life should not be anybody’s business unless it affects others.

Because payment companies or banks with a history of shady shit are dictating morals.

because they moved the porn industry to the digital era, the same way that things moved from tv to youtube. there are no porn studios in OF but individual performers and this is a "disruption". Of course nobody knows if this will work for other types of content, but at least it worked for porn.

OF pulled what youtube and google do when they "demonetize" people they don't like. It's generally a downgrade from an open market to one where there is not even the possibility to be in a low-volume nice.

Because CC companies (who are being forced by the government) can hold companies and startups in a chokehold until you play by their rules.

And as much crap as crypto gets for its usability, this seems to be a legit opportunity for some cryptocurrency or service to shine through.

(With that said - what's stopping banks from refusing to offer their services to crypto brokers?)

OnlyFans were mentioned on HN quite regularly before these news. Whenever topic of porn or relationships or social networks appeared.

I learned about OnlyFans from here, months ago.

Same here. Honest, guv.

...and then that company will face the same MasterCard-imposed issues as OnlyFans does now.