OnlyFans drops planned porn ban | Hacker News Reader

OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

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My biggest shock was how much "PR" was generated on Reddit, and how many sexworkers really do use the platform.

I knew it was a thing, I knew of the memes, but to see both sides in arms over a company vs branding, creating their own website and content - and vanity domain as well.

People really do just want a one click solution for creating adult content, and consuming adult content.

And the memes, I think they're pretty toxic, 4chan, incel, reddit, twitter memes - I never knew there was that much angst.

it's pretty huge

COVID hit recently graduated Gen-Z incredibly hard. There's huge groups that are/were unemployed and then there's huge groups who are sexually repressed due to quarantine. Across the whole world, too*. Many can easily make more than min wage, and in certain niches you probably don't even have to be 'conventionally beautiful' (sorry to use this term, but it's important I think) to make a living or solid portion of a living on there.

For $$ per hour worked, why would they field low wage, menial jobs with a risk of COVID?

And if you price model right, you don't need thousands of fans, just a couple really dedicated superfans/whales.

* Consider the value of dollars/euros/pounds in poorer countries!

Bhad Bhabie (cash me outside meme girl) made over $1M in 6 hours and said she could retire right now from the amount of money she has made off OF. And she's not doing "porn" or even posting fully nude photos.

There's a big movement to gain a lot of followers on social media like TikTok and then redirect those followers to their $5/month OnlyFans. There are a lot of people making a living or at least significantly boosting their income from this model, and they don't have to leave the house to do it.

https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip-hop/9550662/b...

OF is probably similar to Etsy, where the 95th percentile make millions and the median income is $0.

I have an acquaintance who I know made ~$1500 in 2 weeks, just after work occasionally. She had been on the site already, the only reason I know the amount made during that time is she did it as a fundraiser and donated it all to a non-profit. I'm sure it's a distribution with a long tail, but I think it's probably easier to have a side gig on OF provide you with a little supplemental income rather than Etsy.

Twitch is certainly that way as well.

The median viewer count is likely single digits.

Though I can say with considerable certainty that a lot of wannabe Twitch streamers think that being a streamer just means having people watch you play a game, which may be true for story-driven games that don't get a lot of viewers, since it creates a more movie-like experience, and may be true for highly-competitive games where you can watch someone make amazing plays. But for the rest, you need to have the charisma and creativity to create entertaining commentary and audience interaction.

Nobody wants to watch an average Joe play World of Warcraft.

In the Justin.tv days, the median viewer count was zero: At any given time, 2/3 of the live channels had literally nobody watching.

I was proud of my JTV channel. I actually used to vlog and chat to people. They regularly featured me too. I wonder how much I could have made in today’s market..

that's just the web for you, really. 95 percentile is FAANG and friends, median income is peanuts.

Every “social” or user generated platform is like that. Handful of people make serious money, then a small middle class and 90% are just trying to chase their dream while making <$100 a month

I'd say the average user puts in next to no effort though. I'd be more interested in the average profit per hour spent working on the platform.

OF is significantly different from other social media in that the adult market has a lot of really weird market factors that make even new market participants able to access significant revenue. Most OF people aren't making 10 million, but it's better to compare OF to patreon where most small users are still pulling in a few hundred dollars a month at least - and that's a pretty significant amount if you've graduated from school into a pandemic market.

I also wonder if OF customers prefer paying girls who have less fans. This allows the person paying to have more personal interaction and to have more influence/control over the girl for less money. So market forces therefore would drive a long tail

The median estimated OF income is $180.

Taleb -> Extremistan.

It's super toxic for society since it's literally "winner takes all".

I can't speak to Bhad Bhabie's Only Fans, but I will say her song Gucci Flipflops is a good jam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsp7IOr7Q9A

The top earners on OnlyFans make a lot of money indeed. There was recently a great interview with Amouranth [1] where she talked about her work.

Making $1.4 million per month and growing, has 4 employees, outsources every chore she can, posts content on all the social media platforms, and grinds 12 hour days on Twitch. [2] Doesn't spend most of the money, is learning about and trying out investments.

Interestingly she doesn't think that this type of top-heavy earnings situation will be sustainable, that the revenue will be more evenly distributed in the future. Even so, she considers her biggest competition to not be up-and-coming people, but instead existing influencers who might bring their audience to OnlyFans.

Definitely not a common success story, but it's pretty interesting how it is possible to have insane success when applying well-reasoned growth strategies and keeping up the grind.

[1] https://investmenttalk.substack.com/p/confessions-of-an-only...

[2] In the linked interview she still says 8 hours for Twitch, but she has stepped it up since June.

> COVID hit recently graduated Gen-Z incredibly hard

Aren’t women over-represented on the supply side while men on the demand side though? I don’t think gen-z as a wholesale cohort makes sense.

Women are also overrepresented on the side of loosing job.

Mostly artly because women work in segments that were hit harder - services and the like. And partly because childcare is more on them, mothers were even more likely to loose jobs.

>For $$ per hour worked, why would they field low wage, menial jobs with a risk of COVID?

Because after shit pay being the desk girl at Walmart Tire Center for 2yr you can easily convert that into a service writer job <fast forward 40yr> and then retire from your job as regional support manager for <company that makes industrial doodad>

Compare with thotting around on the internet where you can make a ton of money up front but you're basically racing the clock because your body won't be nearly as lucrative of an income at 30 and you'll be starting from square one-ish. Can you potentially take the cash and pivot into a career that will carry you to retirement? Sure, but it takes a work ethic and level of discipline that is uncommon.

It's like the female equivalent of being a marine rifleman for several enlistments. You get out at ~30 with few marketable skills, hopefully a good work ethic and a high liklihood of f-ed up knees.

That's too many regional managers, I don't think the economy will support that.

The economy won't support that many Walmart Tire Centers either. That was just an example. My point was that there are paths from these "crap jobs" to "real career" and traveling said paths require about the same level of "how do I tee up my next move for more money" long term thinking as being a successful camgirl.

A growing economy can support more managers in the future. A stagnant economy will not.

Ah, the old forever growth strategy.

You float the idea of perpetual growth in any other context, and you'd be called a fool, but apparently the economy doesn't obey the same rules of common sense.

Well, I hope you're right.

Well, insofar as an economy is characterized as people at work, then whats to say people in the future cannot find something useful to do?

> Ah, the old forever growth strategy.

Ah, the old everything that goes up must come down strategy.

> You float the idea of perpetual growth in any other context, and you'd be called a fool

You float the idea that global information communications are going to shrink and you'd be called a fool.

There is no reason one cannot thot and do something else. Many of them seem to be enrolled in advanced education. Likewise, a good thot income can fund a future, either going to school at 30, when you have a much better idea of who you are, or funding a more traditional business, or snapping up a few properties.

Likewise, they might be cagey enough to learn the backend of their backend business, and come out of it with video editing skills and whatnot, possibly segueing into an advanced education in media.

Advanced education is a rough form for most sex workers as most companies will not hire people who have their porn all over. Certainly not in America and definitely not in the rest of the world. Sometimes we think of Europe as being more 'liberal' for example, but they are really more communitarian. Open minded but still culturally very traditional.

For some professions and companies it won't matter but for others it'll matter a lot.

Because we have just started with all of this, and we also don't know the future, it's hard to 'price in' what the future cost of doing this kind of work with respect to future options.

That said, Sylvester Stallone did porn films, but that's also a specific industry, pre-internet.

Well, it should not be that big of a challenge to leave it out from one's resume. Especially if you are studying at the same time so there would be no gap in the CV.

Yes, because it's impossible to ever change careers or apply your work ethic to gaining new skills. The idea that you don't have marketable skills having been in the military is also the biggest piece of bunk I've ever heard and you really have no idea what you are talking about.

-former infantryman

When you leave the military with an infantry MOS and without leadership experience (which is the situation most people who quit after 4yr are in) all you have is a proven ability to work hard and put up with bullshit. You're on roughly equal ground with someone who's been a warehouse laborer or janitor for an equivalent period of time and on lower ground than someone who at least has industry adjacent experience. Being able to show up and work hard confers a much stronger advantage than it used to when applying for entry level jobs but it's not particularly unique. Yes you can apply a your work ethic to learning skills but that requires a kind of self-starting that we both know not everyone in the military develops.

If you do a 4 year stint in the infantry and don't come away with some sort of leadership experience, the problem isn't your lack of experience, it's you didn't take advantage of the opportunities presented to you.

> When you leave the military with an infantry MOS and without leadership experience all you have is a proven ability to work hard and put up with bullshit.

But, from the contact I’ve had with the military (been close to several people who have either enlisted or commossioned experience, did the ROTC basic camp but chose not to contract) that's not particularly likely unless you are either actively avoiding or completely unsuited for leadership.

And even then you’ll probably have some leadership experience.

> You're on roughly equal ground with someone who's been a warehouse laborer or janitor for an equivalent period of time and on lower ground than someone who at least has industry adjacent experience.

Even if you somehow manage to be in that place skill-wise (and I think, leadership skills aside, that's unlikely), you are still better off career-wise, because essentially all public and many, especially large, private employers apply systematic positive preference for veterans in hiring.

This is kind of a narrow view.

You've learned a variety of skills, probably had to face some challenging missions, been exposed to other cultures, learned to work within an organization, probably have highly conscientious posture.

Anyone in 10 years and never had a leadership position at all you'd have to question a bit (they should for sure be sergeant) but ideally would be prepared to be a regional manager for retail or Wallmart Center Manager. The more easy going and communicative would work in sales. Almost anything operationally oriented.

Contrast that with a sex worker who will unfortunately have a narrow set of options because a lot of companies just won't hire for that reason.

Just out of curiosity. What are the marketable skills you gain from that?

I can think of a few obvious ones just thinking about ‘military’, but wonder if there’s anything specific to being an infantryman?

A million jobs related to guns. It would be a good start for a security career transition. Law enforcement.

Yeah, that was the obvious one. I was hoping for something that would indicate something other than security guard or cop.

Leadership, accountability, management, planning large scale operations, cross-team coordination, team building, dealing with bureaucracy and large organizations, dealing with rapidly shifting priorities, etc. There are so many marketable skills that you will gain from being in the military and the infantry has one of the fastest paths to leadership positions.

The worst managers I have worked with were ex-military. They had no clue how to deal with highly skilled knowledge workers. They were probably fine leading grunts but the skills doesn’t transfer.

absolute best managers i have worked with were ex-military. in general, academy grads are all very good. also well connected across society. a lot of difference between a 10 year Staff Sgt and a flag officer.

when the take is so bad you need to go look and see if it matches other takes the person has posted. 'high liklihood of f-ed up knees' dear god who raised you and why. 'easily convert that into a service writer job' this is bias confirming insanity. There is no easy conversion from tire center desk girl to anything but tire center desk girl II for 3% more pay.

Reality check is that desk girl don't have as much upward mobility as you suggest. Most of low level employees in these jobs don't have the opportunity to go much up.

Practically nobody in any job has upward mobility without jumping ship. You have to job hop to move up in pretty much every industry. That's how it is these days. Selling a ton of brakes for Firestone or Jiffy Lube or whatever certainly puts your resume among the ones that get seriously considered for a service writer job.

> For $$ per hour worked, why would they field low wage, menial jobs with a risk of COVID?

Median OF revenue per creator is $180/mo for equivalent of a full time job.

https://sea.mashable.com/culture/17130/top-onlyfans-creators....

Which is around the minimal wage in places such as Ukraine (which isn't the ultimate low either).

> Median OF revenue per creator is $180/mo

Many factors can lead to this, but that's not surprising, the law of distributions when it comes to things like this is that there are incredible earners and then a massive drop off and long tail.

> for equivalent of a full time job.

You added this, I don't doubt that some people put in a lot more effort than the monetary amount they get back- but the inverse is also true and no source claims that "you get $180 for a full time workload", because that's impossible to measure at scale.

FWIW that's an average not median income with a ton of caveats ^ from the source. I'm confident though that only the first two screens of OF content creators make the bulk of the income though.

^ https://mrq.com/blog/only-fans

> https://ranking-fans.com/ - Seedlist and Fans Sorted by total fans; accounts where fans are not available have been excluded. Many accounts listed as having the most fans are free accounts used by OnlyFans models who also possess paid accounts. However, as fan numbers were only available for the free accounts, these have been disregarded for the purposes of this story. Likewise, "free" accounts where subscription is free but photos provided required payment have been disregarded. Accordingly, the only data shown is for paid accounts with high subscriber numbers. In some cases, models possessed multiple paid accounts. In these cases, only the one with the highest subscriber numbers has been tracked. Monthly earnings are based exclusively on the individual account assuming no media requires additional payment and disregarding tips and similar voluntary costs. Similarly, free trials and discounts have been excluded. Accordingly, all monthly earnings are estimates reflecting the monthly payments of subscribers over the long term.

In Germany, all Craftsmen are just laughing. Tiler, Carpenter, electrician, etc.. all of them have enough to do, can choose their clients and their wages. I understand that HN always will tend to talk about CS, but Craftsmen are doing their 40k/year, easily. The Salary potential is just increasing.

You know Devs can relatively easily get around 250k in NY / SF right?

Trades are solid career choices but it's hard work and you expire at about the same rate as a software dev.

So sick of seeing these wildly inflated numbers, they increase after every post I'm sure. Most of us here who are software devs are not earning close to 150k, stop using a few SF salaries as the baseline for the rest of us. It is really annoying.

I don’t know the breakdown, but I’m a (remote) dev in Arkansas making right at $150k with ~10 years experience.

The numbers aren’t inflated, they’re just not equally distributed.

Is easily doable have 2 100k jobs without burnout. Do you really spend 8 hours coding each day?

Ok, so let's not use inflated Numbers for the trades either. According to the BLS, the median Software Developer makes $110k. The median carpenter makes $34k. There are also nearly 5x the number of Developer jobs then carpenters.

It's a similar story for other trades, machinist is $47k, welder is $44k, plumber is $56k, HVAC is $50k.

Then when we look at other technology jobs, PM, IT, etc, the story is similar to developers, high median salary with a multiple of jobs available over the trades.

I know that your talking about the US, but I assure you no Danish carpenters work for $34K, unless they are still in training. You can easily triple that $34K which places you nicely in the same area as a developer with 10 to 15 years of experience.

The SF saleries are inflated BS because they are insanely high even compared to one of the most expensive countries in the world.

Sorry, but without some sort of source, I am skeptical, but also acknowledge that different markets and economies will reward labor in different ways. So when it comes to the US this is a common talking point on the English speaking internet, "the trades pay well", "my buddy makes $150k a year as a carpenter, so you should think about becoming a carpenter too", etc. The fundamental problem is that while yes, there are people who make good money in the trades, on average, it simply isn't true, as opposed to being a software engineer, where the average employee is compensated quite well.

My sister has a trade and has talked about the salary distribution enough that I think it’s going to be very hard for anyone to ever agree on numbers.

She describes it as a bimodal distribution. One (smaller) group of people with trades are willing to work anywhere whenever. They work in fly-in camps with limited work seasons and practically unlimited overtime. Since there’s nothing else to do, they log enough hours to get into double and triple time. The other (larger) group goes home after work and their overtime is limited to nonexistent. The pay is so different between the two groups that if they’re analyzed together, the statistically typical tradesperson looks nothing like the typical tradesperson.

I actually wouldn't be surprised to find that most labor markets are bi-modal (but certainly not all). Which is why I used median wage and not average wage, because the median is very likely to grab the common tradespersons compensation experience whereas the average is likely to be skewed high by the upper distribution group.

Median Danish carpenter makes $63k/yr. Very few make over $75k

https://www.erieri.com/salary/job/carpenter/denmark

Yep officially. Unofficially they milk the black market.

Sfba is one of the most expensive areas. The 250k tc number is completely reasonable for sr level (~10yoe) engineers here especially if they changed jobs in the pst few years. If that’s your family’s single source of income you can barely afford a mortgage here.

The big upside of the trades is that after working for journeyman wages for a while, learning the job, and establishing a reputation, it becomes possible to own your own business, either by founding or buying out a retiring boomer, of which there are many. At that point your earning potential skyrockets into the millions.

The problem with this is the same as assuming that every developer is earning a GAFAM salary. It just isn't applicable to the average employee in the given profession. I'm also extremely skeptical that yearly profit potential is in the millions for trade businesses except in extremely rare cases.

It’s pretty easy to search business broker websites for $1 million and up EBITDA businesses. I can’t answer your question about prevalence from that since I don’t know on average what percentage are for sale.

I do know though that it’s pretty common for the seller to write the note financing the deal, especially when the buyer is a soon to be former employee. So financing is often within reach.

Another example is trucking. Plenty of trucking businesses were built by a lone operator rolling profits into more trucks and hiring drivers. Given the intense competition for CDL drivers today though it wouldn’t be my first pick.

If you start selling millions in contracts, then are really doing trades any more? You are a business manager and you need business management skills. Many people go into trades specifically to avoid that kind of life, they could have gotten a business degree instead if that is what they wanted.

> It's a similar story for other trades, machinist is $47k, welder is $44k, plumber is $56k, HVAC is $50k.

A good plumber in my area (Seattle) is pulling in $60/hr minimum, and that is after the employers cut.

A plumber with some seniority is going to be making over 100/hr.

An experienced electrician is also well over 100/hr.

Granted if self employed they all have a higher tax burden and pay their healthcare costs, and driving between sites is a pain, but 100/hr makes up for a lot of that.

The trades people I know are booked out months. The general handyman I use is only booked out 2-3 weeks, and he comes in at an affordable $60/hr!

Next time a plumber stops by to fix your water heater, have a chat with them. Some of the ones I've talked to live in very nice custom built luxury homes that they designed themselves.

It really puts in context how software development isn't a particularly good career, depressingly.

The money may be approximately comparable (outliers in both camps excepted) but all the trade people I know that have established themselves have very flexible work schedule. They have all the demand they can take so when they want to work 60 hours weeks they do. But since work is per job, when they want to work a few hours a week or take time off, that's also possible without repercussions.

Meanwhile in software land it's either great pay at 60+ hours a week, or nothing. Oh and "unlimited vacation" (aka don't dare take vacation ever).

Tradepeople also don't have standups or agile soulcrushing BS and their experience is respected.

Meanwhile in software land it's either great pay at 60+ hours a week, or nothing

This is just not true. There are loads of FAANG developers making well into 6 figures with 40 hour weeks.

> But since work is per job, when they want to work a few hours a week or take time off, that's also possible without repercussions.

I realize it's rather irrational but I personally don't think I could stomach the non-salaried lifestyle. A day of vacation is a day's wages lost. I'm sure it's something you learn to live with but I appreciate that the cost of taking time off is quite abstract for me.

Keep in mind that most trade work isn’t mentally stimulating. That may sound fine to you, but as someone who bounces back and forth between a job that is and isn’t - it can be rough in it’s own way.

It’s boring and you can practically feel your brain turn to slush.

I feel the same way - even a well paid but not mentally stimulating job would suck.

Getting challenges on the job is a requirement for a good job.

I've never worked 60 hours. I've managed 40h or under for 20+ years. I've worked two full time jobs and have done 60h for periods. I would not recommend it.

I feel like you may be suffering from the grass is greener on the other side.

First, work schedule. Keep in mind that, as another commenter pointed out, tradespeople often go through booms and busts, just like any other profession. The difference is that with tradespeople its a lot more obvious, since they still on a job for a few weeks, rather than a few years. On the boom, the tradespeople get a better deal out of it, because they get more work, whereas office workers of course only have the one job. In the busts, the office workers come out better, as the tradespeople have less work, whereas the office workers remain the same as they were in the boom.

Next, hours and vacation. I may be an outliner here, but my hours are the standard 9-5 and I get a fixed 30 days vacation a year, and flexible working (including working from home). As for unlimited vacation = no vacation, and 60+ hours is required, that seems more like a bad office culture/employer, no different than a tradesman would get a bad client. Again, its only more noticeable in office jobs because your there for a long time, whereas a bad client will only be a problem for a number of weeks (though potentially more if they hold off on paying). While we're at it, the same could be said of "their experience is respected". That's based on your employer, not your job.

Finally, standups, agile and office politics (assuming thats what you meant by BS). Its true, tradespeople don't need to suffer with that, but they do need to suffer through a hell of a lot of health and safety precautions and government red tape. Of course you can get some cowboys who don't bother with that, but that seems no different than the programming teams that don't do standups, agile or office politics (apart from the fact that one team is less likely to kill people). I would also mention the physical health issues that it can cause, but programmers get a similar thing through sitting for so long and you graciously didn't mention that.

I don't think being a tradey is a bad job, not at all. Its just not perfect, and like any job has its pros and cons. I too have fantasised about going into that line of work, but I imagine if I did, I'd end up fantasizing sitting in a comfy chair all day building software. As I said, the grass is always greener on the other side.

Sure but now you're talking about an above median plumber in an above median col area. A similarly above average software dev in Seattle is probably pulling in 250k/year all in.

You can get that as a new grad. Levels.fyi

The two major employers in Seattle (Amazon and Microsoft) aren't paying 250K to new grads. Their packages are closer to 175K starting.

Speaking of "250K" as a number, every single offer over 250K+ for someone with no experience, on levels.fyi, in seattle, was either for someone hired at L4 at Google or Facebook (usually this means a PhD hire), or a Facebook "rockstar" signing bonus, which I think levels.fyi mis-estimates (the "recurring" comp is lower than 250K, you get something like 120 base, 40 stock/yr, 100K signing (+ your normal annual bonus of ~15K). That's 200K/year over four years, not 250).

> Their packages are closer to 175K starting.

And last time I checked those packages had serious compensation cliffs after the first few years!

Software developer compensation is seriously bi-modal, most developers even in big cities are working at a fraction of FAANG pay, doing routine maintenance work.

Median Journeyman Plumber in Seattle earns $40/hr

https://www.indeed.com/career/journeyman-plumber/salaries/Se...

Ok but the person you are replying to literally just went with average to avoid rare geographic salaries.

Finally in seattle a top electrician makes 100/hr or ~200k/year. A top developer with similar years of experience makes $500k and never has to crawl around in your nasty attic and gets amazing healthcare and free food.

They are not inflated numbers they are what you can get working for a set of top companies with deep pockets competing over the same talent. It varies but 150k is entry level comp pretty much anywhere they hire in the United States [0].

It’s not “fair” but it’s worth your time to look into getting into the US tech sector. Your skills have the most market value their.

0 - http://levels.fyi

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted because this is accurate. If you are a low level dev at a big company in a major city you will get a salary of at least $100k, a bonus, and stock options. They easily combine to get you to $150k, and I’m talking entry level roles, it goes up considerably from there.

Well I'm obviously in the wrong market then! Down here in Oklahoma, I'm a Senior Software Engineer, and I'm only at $110k, plus around $10k in bonuses a year. There's very few opportunities for salary increases unless I start looking for remote work outside of the state or I opt to move into a management role.

Most senior salaries around here seem to be in the $95-120k range, so when I see similar numbers for "entry level" roles, it always perks me up a bit.

People make more in big cities, it’s actually been studied across the globe and the data is rather compelling.

Seriously consider remote then. You could easily pull in double that working remotely for a west coast tech company.

If you're in the US, don't be annoyed with these numbers; learn from them. If you get on LinkedIn and expect > $200k, you may be surprised by what you can achieve.

You should line up several interviews all in the same week and play the offers against one another. At least one should be over $150k, and possibly over $200k. That highest number then sets a floor that everyone else will need to rise to as you negotiate. Politely ignore claims that offers will explode; they won't. Add options/RSUs, and you may be shocked at the amount of compensation you can get.

You can actually do it.

Yeah, honestly if you're in SFBA/Seattle/NYC, this is not an unreasonable salary expectation for someone with a decade of experience. Especially if you're carefully selecting job opportunities that line up well with skill growth.

I make $200k as a mid-level and that’s considered low. I’m not in NYC.

Side note - fan of your username.

What languages do you use?

I only have 1 YOE and I'll say the numbers sound right. A friend with 2 YOE got 2 290K offers. Another friend/former co-worker with 8 YOE got a 400K+ offer.

These numbers are all for remote roles for SV-based companies. You can also check salary on levels.fyi.

You won't believe it, but 300K+ for new grads (undergrads) isn't even unheard of if you look at places like Citadel & Jane Street, tho of course the hiring bar is very high at these places.

People do that with every job it seems. Always somebody talking about random tradesmen making $100k+ but in the vast majority of cases they make nowhere near that.

Please stop implying that $150k+ salaries are reserved for FAANG tier companies and SF only. It might have been true 5-10 years ago (and even then, i am a bit skeptical of that lower boundary of 5 years), but it is far from the truth in 2021.

Literally interviewed with a small startup (around 20 people total headcount) less than a week ago. The offer was for a base salary of $180k+grand promises of equity given out that should grow 15x and make one rich, but whatever, because equity at this point is just imaginary monopoly money worth pretty much nothing right now, so lets omit that part completely. But even with that in mind, $180k of pure cash just from base salary is more than doable. And I am not even a senior level or anything like that. Technically the company is in NYC, but the position is fully remote, which makes it even more lucrative for people who want to live in cheap COL states (no salary adjustment, which works out great for this scenario).

This is very true, but you hear the same thing from craftsmen. Another commenter further up said that a HVAC repairmen told him that making $200k/year in that job was pretty average, and a reply to that pointed out the median was $50k/year.

Not saying I disagree, but yeh, its not unique to software dev it seems

Ok, but I'm not from NY/SF but I'm assuming based on the small amount of time that I spent there, that every thing is more expensive there, including housing and medical care... In Germany (Europe?) I would say that a Software Developer salary floats between 30k/y - 100k/y.

Yeah, it’s more expensive in the big cities, but if you by a house you tend to profit from that increase. It’s hard to see that when in the early stages of your career, but I’m glad I stuck it out and didn’t move to a low cost area.

Im in the late stages of my career and after owning my home for 15 years my mortgage is far less than rents in my area, my salary has gone up a ton over the years, and my house has appreciated a ton.

If you are a dev early in your career and in a big city, stick it out. Get into a big company that gives you stock options that are worth something, but a house when you can, and start working to max out your 401k. In all likelihood it will pay off in the long run. My old boss called it the “get rich slowly plan”. As a person that grew up really poor and has been in tech over 20 years, I can assure you it pays off.

I don’t know if the price increases will keep happening at the same historical rates. Although it isn’t out of the realm of possibility, I have a hard time believing that the houses in my neighborhood in 5-10 years will go from $2-3m to $4-6m.

Real estate is a tricky thing. I wouldn’t buy it for the sake of expecting it to go up in value. I’d buy it because you need housing.

Yes buy a house. If it goes up you are (potentially) rich, if it goes down, you have a house :)

It's not hard to believe. First, the big caveat, what I'm about to say ignores the possibility of huge catastrophe (environmental collapse, world war, meteor hits the earth) because if such a catastrophe happens, most of this won't matter a whole lot.

Barring catastrophe, it will almost certainly go up if your time horizon is longer than 10 years. If you are in a big city, the populations are growing faster than new housing is being built. On top of that, there is no space to build many new single family homes so those will go up even more if you own one instead of a condo or townhouse.

I bought my first house at the peak of the last bubble. Ten years later I sold it for more than I paid for it, and those last few years my mortgage was a fair bit lower than rents for a comparable place.

Most people simply haven't wrapped their head around exponential growth. Our economy grows exponentially, and our population has historically (there are signs this might be changing). Unfortunately, I think our environment can't sustain that, but as long as it does, things will go up if your time horizon is long enough.

Edit: also, I’m not suggesting that your home value will double in 10 years. Not sure where you got that idea. My point does not assume or require doubling in 10 years.

> I don’t know if the price increases will keep happening at the same historical rates.

Although you're not wrong, and crashes absolutely happen, I feel like I have been hearing that for at least 30 years now.

Just when it seems like things can't continue, the market always seems to find a way to support the higher prices.

For example: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/mortgages/what-is-the-40-year...

It's probably only a matter of time until the 40 is the new 30 year loan for everyone...

It's actually a more complex topic that it appears at first. Some things are much more expensive, but some are identical to everywhere else - eg:

- vacations

- cars

- all online purchases

- most hobbies

- etc...

When I moved to NY, I expected that my (much higher than before) salary would barely allow me to buy a car. Instead, I ended up with the best car I had ever owned up to that point, and went on craziest vacations. I also lived in the shittiest place ever before and after.

Google has an office in Frankfurt, and SWEs there get paid far more than 30k - 100k/yr. The comp delta between google SF SWE and google Frankfurt SWE is less than 30% (at same level obv).

I totally agree that the non-FAANG companies have terrible dev pay. But most of the FAANG companies have offices well beyond just SF/NYC, so the opportunities are definitely available.

And in Germany senior devs make 50-100k€. You can’t compare salaries without taking location into account.

Craftsmen who are willing to do a small job for me are so hard to find right now, they're busy enough NONE of them in my area need the business. Every quote I get is either overblown "to make it worth my time", or I simply get declined. Ontario, Canada.

That’s interesting- this is the third time I’ve heard this about Ontario in less than a week. Do you have any idea what’s driving this? Another person in the same boat believes that a lot of people are fixing up homes to sell while the market is hot. Another person believes that it’s a supply problem - trades people left Ontario for Alberta, lost their jobs there and can’t afford to move back.

Ontario and BC have extremely hot housing markets and the demand is off the charts - a lot of tilers and plumbers in BC get sucked into reno contracting companies and simply have enough work to keep them busy for years. I don't think there was an exodus to Alberta - tradesfolk bring in serious cash in Canada so they can definitely afford to live in hot areas... I'd be more curious if it was actually early retirement that was driving things with tradesfolk building up enough of a nest egg that they can afford to retire early.

In my experience, having been a homeowner in Alberta first, then Ontario second - it's similar to software development...

Most tradespeople prefer to work on new builds, large amounts of stable work, without the hastle of renovating existing structures and all of the hidden issues that are quickly exposed once the surface has been taken away. (So... technical debt...)

As a contract IT consultant - sure, sometimes I take small "side-hustle" contracts if I am not swamped by my primary gig - but, I couldn't pay all mortgage if I was reliant on just taking small/odd jobs. Same goes for tradespeople.

> lost their jobs there and can’t afford to move back.

This isn’t 1800. Moving back for a job is trivial when the alternative is being unemployed.

Not if you need to buy a car, relocate, or find some child care, for example. There are important upfront costs when your situation changes, and if you’re unemployed (i.e. with not necessarily that much money available) they can be a significant hurdle.

similar thing happens in Austin, TX area. It took me several months to find a general contractor to just give me an estimate for the repairs (and he charged quite a lot for just that)

Many trades are boom/bust cycle industries and it is in boom mode right now on top of inflated material prices. This is just the wrong time to need/want one.

Not Germany, but similar situation in Belgium:

Skilled crafts here can generate a more money in the first 10-20 years of a career than what you make with a university degree desk job. One factor is that you can get into the labor force much earlier, don't neglect that 3-5 years head start when saving for your first house loan. After that, it depends if you're doing the extra hours, weekend and night shifts.

After that the masters degree jobs get the advantage. The craftsmen either they worked their way into a more supervising role or are not able or willing to do the lucrative labor hours.

The decline in crafts like baker or butcher is attributed to the long and weird hours, more than the pay. There are simply not enough to replace the

Your comment was cut off at the end, mate.

Right you are!

+ the aging work force.

Comparing jobs solely based on income is a nonsense comparison.

The two class of jobs are so different. Scalability, physicality, career path, longevity etc all comes into picture.

The discussion has been going around in cycles for many years.

What I wanted to point was that talking about "employability", people don't have to go to a university to get a degree and then try to find a job. There are other great ways to make enough money to don't have to end on OnlyFans.

A lot of places around the world have been in lockdowns that have made manual labour difficult, while doing sex work from home has been made much easier.

Well, some of those destroy your body in 25 years (Roofer/back, Tiler/knees), as a Carpenter you have to work with toxic laquer without getting compensated for it like Painters do. If you don't have your own shop at 40 you are pretty much screwed.

In Germany there must be an undersupply of these laborers. Come to California and you will find electricians with years of experience, all sorts of craftsman, woodworkers, tilers, roofers, hvac specialists, approaching you with your three cans of paint and asking you for work in the home depot parking lot. Maybe that's just what happens though when you get your working experience in another country like Mexico or El Salvador and these trades in the U.S. are protected by a licensing process that doesn't care about relevant unlicensed experience.

> approaching you with your three cans of paint and asking you for work in the home depot parking lot. Maybe that's just what happens though

Where in live in the US, the housing market is exploding. It is impossible to find these workers, licensed or not.

I live where the median home is 900k and there is still no shortage of handymen and general contractor labor here if you are willing to pay for work under the table. It's an interesting dynamic.

It’s not an issue of how expensive houses is, it’s an issue of how many houses are being built. California has the slowest housing starts of any major state in the country. That same carpenter would have his pick of job sites in Florida.

The licensing process helps make sure that the electrician that has 10 years of experience in El Salvador understands American wiring codes and practices before he does something that'll burn your house down.

For sure there are common skills that all electricians share regardless of country, but there are still significant differences between countries, like in the UK ring circuits are common, but are against code in the USA.

licensing process that doesn't care about relevant unlicensed experience

The problem with unlicensed experience is that it provides no assurance of knowledge of code or safe wiring practice. Like when I found that my house had several MWBC's, but on one of them, the previous owner (or someone he hired) had replaced the tied-handle breakers with untied breakers, which leads to a very unsafe situation (another common mistake with MWBC's is moving breakers around and putting the hots on the same hot leg, which can lead to an overloaded neutral). Or worse, when I mapped out my outlets and found that the owner had put a 30A breaker on the 12 gauge wire leading to the garage outlets, presumably he was tripping the code compliant 20A breaker and "solved" that with a bigger breaker.

What is ironic about your examples is that you had all these problems with unlicensed work in a place where licensing is still required. So whats the point of the license even if so much work is done that isn't licensed? People who will cheap out will cheap out no matter what the laws say, and people who pay for good work will continue to pay for good work.

In my jurisdiction, minor electrical work can be done by the homeowner (as long as it's a single family home). I think technically even major electrical word can be done by the homeowner as long as it's inspected and signed off, though it's possible that the inspector will require electrician signoff first.

But if a guy who is a master electrician in El Salvador can sell himself as an electrician here, then a homeowner may trust him to do major electrical work "Permits? Naa, you don't need permits for this, that'll just make it more expensive. Trust me! I'm an Electrican and I've been doing this work for 20 years back home"

Good luck with the insurance claim after the house burns down.

>all sorts of craftsman, woodworkers, tilers, roofers, hvac specialists

He also does landscaping, tree removal, fence repair, house painting, trash hauling, electrical, plumbing and general dentistry (if you ask).

I had to have my HVAC system repaired and I got to talking to the guy who was working on it and during the course of our conversation we started talking about pay... 100k-200k USD/yr he said wasn't unusual once you were done with school and got a little experience. I was floored, I called a family friend who does HVAC and he said that was about right. If I didn't love CS I'd be working in HVAC right now.

Median HVAC tech salary is $50k. Is it possible to make $200k or higher? Sure. But the HVAC people pulling down that comp are generally at that level primarily because of their business skills not their HVAC skills.

It’d be like saying you can make a million as a waiter or cook, because of a small business owner who opened a restaurant.

https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-HV...

In Australia craftsmen (called "tradies") are booking 18 months out, will only work on the things they want to (i.e. new builds, because they're easy/clean), and are easily making $100k - $150k a year.

Most of them still prefer to surf than work !

You have to wonder though, is this because of a genuine gap in the market where people are yet to realize there is money to be made, or is there something else that these stories are leaving out. Is everyone in the industry making this much money? If you joined the industry today, how long would it take to start making good money?

You have to do a 4 year apprenticeship, during which time you won't make great money.

Then you work for someone else and probably make $80k or $90k, then you start your own business.

In terms of supply/demand Australians are extremely house proud and spend an insane amount of money on renovations, upgrades, etc, so all the trades are always slammed. Have been for 20 years.

Right so it seems somewhat similar to the profits you can make programming. Doesn't seem like a crazy get rich quick scheme, just years of hard work paying off.

Pretty much. There's probably also an "in crowd" aspect to it as well. Everyone I know makes $100k+ as a dev here at least after a few years, but I've had Uber rides with older Indian dev drivers complaining that they can't find a job. I imagine anyone lumped into the whole "dodgy lebo/bogan/asian tradies" stereotype might struggle in a similar way.

And don’t forget the amount of money tradies can make “off the books”. Tradies do exist that make 80k officially and $300k unofficially.

40k in germany is not a good salary

Depends where you live, depends on your life style. It is however the average salary in Germany:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...

https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/164047/umfrag...

https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/gehaelter-so-hoch-i...

> huge groups who are sexually repressed

Men I assume given the amounts of money they’ll spend on OF and the m/f ratios on dating apps?

> COVID hit recently graduated Gen-Z incredibly hard.

Gen-Z is less sexually active than previous generations. Significantly so. They've been exposed to porn at an earlier age (owing to earlier access to the internet and the ubiquity of pornography online). Porn use was already common among them. The lockdown made things worse, but the status quo was already in place.

> There's huge groups that are/were unemployed and then there's huge groups who are sexually repressed due to quarantine.

This false anthropology must die. Pornography is incredibly harmful to those that consume it. It enslaves a person to his passions. It feeds his lusts and deranges his desires. It makes him or her incapable of relating to the opposite sex in a healthy way, whether in the strictly sexual sphere or not. Lust blunts the mind and renders one incapable of thinking clearly. The consumption of pornography only feeds the sexual passions, further entrenching lust and often generating paraphilias and fetishes as the titillating novelty wears off. Emotions become disordered. Someone who has a porn habit becomes locked in him or herself. The stereotype of a lonely and smarmy 40 year old locked in his parents' basement masturbating to porn is a pithy illustration in many ways. It is the image of an emasculated, impotent wretch deranged by his vices and disorders. This has nothing to do with his lack of a sexual relationship and everything to do with how he views sexuality. He is not master of himself.

Frankly, we'd be better off permitting (regulated) prostitution. There seem to be plenty of women willing to provide these services and plenty of men who are slaves to their lusts (men tend to be more vulnerable to porn addiction and lust than women, but yes, it is true that it is not a problem exclusive to men). At least with prostitution, you're having sex with a human being instead of abusing yourself alone in your room. But ultimately, our view of sexuality must be restored to a healthy one and not the depraved one proposed by liberalism. I suspect the "asexual movement" is a subconscious reaction against the obsession with sex in our society. Excess in one direction tends to produce excess in the other. But maybe it will at least legitimize celibacy again. You don't need sex to have a happy life, contrary to the propaganda of the last few decades or so.

I will add that porn use is an industry fueled both by a corrupt society and people in power who recognize that those who are slaves to their passions (and lust is but one of them) are easy to control. Oligarchies are prone to let such vices flourish because it keeps the populace impotent and consumed with themselves instead of threatening the usurpers who have managed to gain tyrannical control. Porn appeals to prurient interest which is why it is so useful in psychological warfare (a rather stark example is the broadcasting of porn on captured Palestinian television by the Israelis; you think they were trying to liberate them?). Sexual liberation has made people easier to control. It has truncated their humanity, warped them, and turned them into sex robots.

Wow, I've never seen such a prudish comment so amply stated.

> Sexual liberation has made people easier to control. It has truncated their humanity, warped them, and turned them into sex robots.

This is entirely based on nothing. Even worse, it ignores the much more direct and relevant innovations in the area of controlling populations - propaganda and advertising.

> a rather stark example is the broadcasting of porn on captured Palestinian television by the Israelis; you think they were trying to liberate them?

No, they were trying to shock and humiliate Muslim sensibilities, similar to stashing pork on busses. Sexuality is not some secret sauce of controlling people - there are much more direct ways of doing so, especially with the power of a state like Israel.

what? most folks have looked at porn. most folks end up just alright.

People turned out all right even when it was possible to watch bloody executions in the streets of what is now the developed world.

I wouldn't put it so prudishly.

Or rather: Paradoxically, what's truly prudish -- and I mean this literally, "overly prudent" -- is to short-circuit your sex drive with porn, because you fear the consequences of real sex.

Lust is good. It helps you overcome social risk aversion, and bond with another person.

But that's the point: You have to have those relationships.

You'll be happiest if you have lots of sex, as part of how you form and participate in a committed relationship. And your "base" urges, far from being bad, can help drive that.

I can't believe I am reading this in 2021, seriously.

What year could you believe reading this in?

1621 sounds about right.

by the tone ("It enslaves a person to his passions. It feeds his lusts and deranges his desires.") I'd say 17th century puritans. The author is missing the word "sin", but it's sort of implied.

Surely this is a joke? The amount of tin foil thinking going on is jaw dropping. I am imagining a crazy homeless guy screaming to people walking by while reading this.

So... "if only people weren't so busy wanking and fantasizing about sex they'd get out of the house and have a revolution."

Ridiculous.

The success of OF is more a question of demand than offer honestly. During the lockdowns they were a lot of guys with money to spend but could not spend it on social activities, so a lot of it went on internet websites.

But there is also a more long term trend of people having less and less sex and more and more porno consumption. But that can't go forever, at one point if all girls in the world are on sex workers then they will be much more offer than demand.

A girl on OF, to make a living, let's say 3k per month, needs to have 300 guys paying for her. But a guy is not paying for 300 girls, maybe 10 max, so the platform needs to have 30 times more guys than girls. Which is unsustainable in a world with 50% girls/50% guys.

Which is a good news imho. The day that having sex for girls is a normal thing (No this is not normal thing today). Then a lot of things will be much simpler for everyone

I would love to see their metrics. I would imagine, like most things, they have a ton of whales so that even if a minority of guys subscribe to 50 girls there probably are plenty of people with addictions shelling out $500 or $1000 a month on this stuff. And this people could represent the majority of all payments on the site.

It also seems (from actual published data) that the distribution is super weighted towards the top performers. That being said, even an extra 1k a month is pretty sick for posting topless photos if your regular income is less than 40k or you are in school.

everthing is a pareto distribution, across both buyers and sellers. Would be neat to see a better breakdown though.

A long-term trend of less sex and more porno? Could you show some stats on this?

I only question that line because I can't even deal with the rest of your post.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

Thanks for sharing that link! Interesting that the study notes that the drop in sexual activity was mostly in low-income/underemployed men, and students. So probably not the demand side of OF.

There are plenty of bi and gay people, or people whose porn interests diverge from their attractions. It's only a problem if you assume everyone is 100% heterosexual.

It's a hard thing to get good data on, but Gallup estimated in 2017 that 4.5% of the US population was gay or lesbian:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/234863/estimate-lgbt-population...

That would shift the numbers a little, yeah, but not enough to account for the OP's estimate of a 30:1 male/female ratio.

Females just have different/complex drives/needs for sexual attraction than males, who are mostly just drived by libido/horniness. You can observe this in nature too. Seems the males are the "abnormal" ones here, addicted to chemical reactions in the brain. (Didn't expect to see this line of thinking on HN...).

Even if they do have different needs that men (I feel so too, but have not scientifically studied the subject) you can't ignore the pressure of the society all their life on the topic

I don't think just any old person can make money off OF though, like presumably you need a reasonable camera and maybe lights or something, you need to be able to edit photos, the time and energy and motivation to learn how to use those things etc. It's not like some random struggling single mother can take a few pics of her feet on her 5 year old iphone and be expecting to make decent money.

I think OF has also become a one-click outlet for nontraditional sex workers, e.g., those who wouldn't otherwise have done this type of stuff. From what I've read OF has even more "amateurs" than platforms like MyFreeCams.

Part of the reason they've gotten so much heat is because of cases of underage girls selling photos on that site for some time before they're caught. I don't know if they've found a solution to that problem or just come to some agreement with their payment processors

a good friend of mine is a sex worker, a cam girl to be precise, and uses OF as it is safer than other platforms. it should be noted that she is a brilliant individual and do this job due to severe psychiatric problems that prevent her doing more "normal" jobs. she feeds one child with this money, as a lot of sex workers that are also loving moms.

it is important that such platforms do exist (if they implement proper safeguards) and that these content creators are not stigmatized.

There is a good chance that any given reddit post in the widely viewed subreddits is posted in order to get people to look at the user’s profile or other posts and follow it back to their only fans page.

That's pretty right. In particular, there is a (huge) subreddit devoted to selfies where a high number of users that post in there have a OF link present in their biography.

Of course there was a big outcry. It's like if Etsy announced they were gonna ban candles, or Kickstarter said they were gonna ban dice and cards. You think all those people would want to go create their own sites? You think it would make any sense for them to do that? Come on

It could be better for some of them in the long run, who knows. The fact is that there's no absolute security in either choice, but with a personal website at least you are in control, you have your “domain”.

I've noticed that a large portion of women submitting in the /r/Gonewild subreddit have an OF these days.

OF has ruined amateur porn. What used to be genuine and casual is now mostly bored-eyed pros with bad lighting.

You've summarized all my most important thoughts into two succinct sentences, thank you.

It's the opposite for me. The value for amateur porn is that they don't look or act like traditional porn stars. I don't find much value in abstract notions like "genuine interest".

That's simply not true, because /r/gonewild are extremely strict about not allowing OF creators. They can post under a seperate account but any mention of they're main account or OF results in a swift permanent ban.

/r/gonewild is actually one of the few subreddits that prohibits posts from sellers. But every subreddit that doesn't outright prohibit sellers is flooded with them. The OF girls all got kicked off of Facebook, Instagram, Snapshot, etc... Reddit is comparatively more friendly to sex workers as far as site wide policy goes.

> People really do just want a one click solution for creating adult content

They want a solution for distributing adult content and getting paid for it.

By far, the single biggest hurdle here is payment processing - as evidenced by this whole OnlyFans fiasco. It's Visa and Mastercard who are pressuring OF - they've been doing this to sex workers for decades, but finally picked a fight big enough that it's getting real media backlash.

> People really do just want a one click solution for creating adult content, and consuming adult content.

Once they know it's possible, people want a one click solution for anything. The subject being taboo has nothing to do with it.

This is one reason why Youtube, Spotify, Steam and Netflix did such a good job combatting piracy for music, video games, and movies, while ROM sites are still a ubiquitous problem for 20 year old consoles. Youtube, Spotify, Steam and Netflix made content easy to get. There's no equivalent for most ROMs, so they're still widely pirated.

there'd probably be a netflix for ROMs if there were enough demand (I imagine the copyright holders would get onboard if the demand and $$ was there)

I can see it now. Most ROMs would be available, but Nintendo would be notably absent from any of the platforms and only allow their ROMs to be streamed from their own service.

>Nintendo would be notably absent from any of the platforms and only allow their ROMs to be streamed from their own service.

They already do this, you need a Switch online subscription to access the NES/SNES ROMs they have available

Oh, I know, but in the theoretical world where there's a Netflix like subscription, I would assume that means a lot of different IP was also gathered there, like Sega, Atari, older Playstation and Xbox titles, etc.

There's not a lot of incentive for some of those groups to come together, but I imagine even if most could be assembled, Nintendo would be particularly resistant.

I doubt that's going to happen any time soon. Nintendo would rather publish its old games on its own store. Ditto for Microsoft and Sony. The older consoles now usually have a collection of ports for old games sold on the newer platforms, though those don't always behave true to the original platforms without special hardware.

The only thing that prevents this from existing is the licensing nightmare of trying to track down who still owns the rights to those old ROMs. So many defunct companies and cases where even the people who worked on it have no idea who currently owns the rights.

Had we kept the 28 year copyright duration from 1831 almost all ROM images would be in the Public Domain now.

And some of the licensing conflicts are because of an alliance that existed and made sense in say 1995 and today seems like inexplicable nonsense.

For example indie creator studio makes video game for the PS1. It's a huge hit, they go on to make other popular games, and one day Microsoft buys them, morphs them into an in-house team. And then one day you realise you're arguing that, Microsoft (now the owner of the license) should release this Sony Playstation game. No. Not going to happen.

When this stuff happens for individual humans, often even if the money doesn't mean anything to one person who is an obstacle, it does mean something to their co-creators and they'll do it for that. For example it would be possible for Alan Moore to have blocked a lot of stuff that uses his work, from the V for Vendetta movie (which lots of people liked but I felt missed the whole point) to the re-issues of Miracleman, but while Alan doesn't care about money, the artists on that work do, and him blocking it would hurt them. So e.g. that's why modern copies of Moore's seminal run on Miracleman say they're by "The Original Author" in big text but never mention Moore by name, that's his condition, he doesn't want the Mouse's money, but his artists do.

Corporations don't care though. If they can inconvenience a modern competitor by snuffing out an important cultural artefact that is exactly what they'll do.

I'd actually advocate outright abolition of copyright. The associated moral rights have some place, but copyright is almost entirely a means for corporations to try to control culture for their own profit and we don't need it. But 28 years is a more acceptable middle ground I guess.

Sorry that should credit Moore as "The Original Writer" for Miracleman not "The Original Author". Had to go check my actual copies of the books.

It's difficult in some cases but demand is absolutely the main driver.

Much like Netflix, the reality is that people aren't actually very interested in old shows apart from a handful of super famous perennials which are already available anyway.

They say they are in surveys, but consumer behaviour does not back that up. They just use newer content in practice.

There is always interest in old shows, but not enough to deal with the licensing issues. You could have much wider libraries if the licensing was less of a nightmare.

Conveniently enough, actual public libraries do resolve a lot of issues for "older content". But they don't do computer games generally.

There should be a rule that if an IP was broadly commercialized at any point (eg. offered at a retail store) the owner can’t resist any abandonware offering unless he’s still offering the IP at RAND terms

That still protects the individual artists and perhaps the Banskys but doesn’t unnecessarily lock up these old games

The issue is that the VG industry is pretty far behind in this respect, not that there's a lack of demand. Just look at how the NES/SNES classic consoles sold out in the blink of an eye and there were mass shortages.

The demand is there, it's just a question of having a convenient enough package

I think Nintendo in particular revels in the scarcity. They value their IP above all else, and they know that's what their customers value, and they want to squeeze it for every last drop of fan loyalty they can. See the artificially limited-time (digital!) release of "Mario 3D All-Stars": https://www.nintendo.com/products/detail/super-mario-3d-all-...

Sony kinda wrote the book on artificial scarcity with the first 2-3 playstations...

Probably not. Most cartridge games outside of first party titles are mired in a confusing mess of IP ownership. Consider what happens when the developer doesn't exist anymore, the publisher was acquired, the brand for the franchise is owned by one company, and the code for the original game is owned by a different company, which has no interest in making games.

GameTap had a Decent collection of Sega consoles and arcade titles back in the day, though it unfortunately never got off the ground. Nintendo has been particularly aggressive regarding ligating against ROMs historically and sold them as individual units, though with the Switch's online service's free NES/SNES games it seems like they're dipping their toes into the model. I think the risk to them is if someone winds up playing say the GB version of Link's Awakening for free instead of the $60 remake.

I worked on GameTap! Old ROM websites at the time had these click-through agreements that would say things like "you may only download these ROMs if you have explicit, written permission from the publisher" and I may be on of the only living people who've clicked one of those "I agree" links in good faith.

Technically, GameTap had some really neat little features. For example, it would track your high score for most emulated games, and for really old games where the score would rollover to zero, it noticed that and would let you see your effective grand total score. So there would be a global Galaga leaderboard that could happily go into the millions.

Regarding the success of the service, Gametap was live for a few years. It totally had its shot. GameTap was regularly advertised on TV. It had a pretty big library covering a dozen or so platforms: Several Ataris, ColecoVision, Intellivision, Sega, PC games, and more. They did a few high profile things like buying some failed MMOs and keeping the servers running for all GameTap subscribers.

At the end, I think it turned out that the folks who get really excited about playing ColecoVision games are the same folks who are very comfortable downloading ROMs.

Reading back I definitely come off a bit too harsh on gametap - It was a good service from the start. but I remember it seeming like there was trouble figuring out a pricing/content model that worked, as you said a lot of people who were excited for those sorts of games are often able to download roms as well.

I think it may just have been ahead of it's time in terms of model in the era of battlepasses, paid online and gamepass, as well as monthly paid streaming services in general.

It's true. It was a plausible idea that certainly MIGHT have worked, but whatever form of the idea GameTap went with clearly didn't catch fire.

Here's a fun technical secret about GameTap. Several of the companies that we bought licenses from barely knew they owned the games and definitely didn't have any original binaries or source, and for the obscure consoles/titles, we sometimes could only find cracked versions online. Those would usually have crack intros (it was the birth of the demoscene!), though, and we clearly didn't want to use them. Ultimately we cheated. We just launched the game by loading a save state just past the crack intro.

Until then, archive.org has lots playable in-browser.

e.g. https://archive.org/details/internetarcade

https://archive.org/details/sega_genesis_library

https://archive.org/details/atari_8bit_library_games

haha, the genesis library is about 90% just different hacked versions of Sonic 1, with different sprites replacing Sonic. And one I found particularly cute, "Sonic's Unexciting Quest", which starts in a level called "Straight Line Zone".

That one sounds hilarious.

I didn't know how to filter out the romhacks, if you scroll down the majority of the collection is original games.

And also why piracy is increasing again as the movie/TV series space is becoming so fragmented.

I've actually heard that quite often and it seems anecdotally true to me, but is there actually any study to prove this?

Nope.

There was a little upkick at the start of the pandemic according to Sandvine, but Sandvine's methodology is not watertight and lots of people staying at home with not much to do seems a more likely culprit than service fragmentation.

anecdotally, I freeload on a Netflix account paid for by a friend, and last year I was tempted to get my own subscription. Then I noticed Netflix had fewer and fewer movies I was interested in, and just went back to sailing the high seas.

Yea, it's their Achilles heel.

You can throw money at directors, and actors, but there are just so many great movies, and most were made by hollywood years ago.

The owners of those great films, started their own streaming service.

Yeah. The attraction of Netflix was the ease of access to a lot of desirable content even faster than finding it online somewhere else*

But, nowadays it feels like Netflix’s catalog is full of its self made titles(Some of them are great), but less and less “popular” ones that we heard of somewhere and just want to watch.

If I am expected to shuffle around multiple streaming subscriptions, and pay for them individually, it is not that different from the cable TV model that these guys took on against.

Sailing the high seas indeed!

It is one of the biggest reasons to use torrents. You see, this is the only non-fragmented service that has all media content!

Now, of only there was a way to have a moderated search for all content on all trackers.... Maybe there is one already, and its just that i don't know it?

... Pirate Bay? We're back in the early/mid 2010s now.

PirateBay became a haven for false torrents infested by malware. I'm ta lking about rutracker.org

It has mostly russian-dubbed content, but it usually has original soundtracks, too.

Also, now it is probably better than ever (didn't watch anything for quite a while, so it's a guess), because films are currently released on VOD concurrently with premieres in theatres, and that means that good quality content appears immediately, and not after theatrical window

Netflix seems like a split brained company. Most of its original movies are terrible, and are in sharp contrast to many of the Netflix original series which are very good. I personally wouldn’t (and don’t) look for movies on Netflix.

https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-and-filesharing-traffic-surg...

I found this site from the torrentfreak link below and thought it was pretty cool.

https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/stat/annual/2021 If you flip thru the years at least the top movies in 2018 have more downloads than the top movies in 2021. I think that can somewhat safely answer your questions.

EDIT: WRONG because as a comment points out below older movies also might just have been downloaded more over time.

From this site, it doesn't look like their was much of an uptick in top downloaded movies from 2019 to 2020. And in general torrenting has been growing less popular.

However, the numbers on this site in general don't sanity check very well for me. For example, the End Game Avengers movie, which was incredibly popular, was only downloaded: 2,890 times in 2019? That doesn't seem high enough to me.

It does make some sense that movies which have been available for three years could have more downloads than movies which have been available for one year.

I didn't think of this at all. This throws the tenuous conclusions I was drawing completely out the window.

Yeah but if most people have services - I have three - then the most popular movies for that year will be on all the services almost. Endgame has been on all my services at some point over the last couple years. I've seen it probably 20+ times. Probably also the people who are most likely to want to watch Endgame have services.

By services you mean, Netflix, Hulu and similar right? Not plex, or the various illegal streaming sites?

right.

A friend who torrents these things just checked for me and saw well over a 100,000 'snatches' for that Avengers flick on just one private torrent tracker.

So yeah, not 2,890. Think millions.

> A friend who torrents these things just checked for me and saw well over a 100,000 'snatches' for that Avengers flick on just one private torrent tracker.

This makes far more sense, I wonder why their numbers are so bad.

Additionally, I guess there are also many people, myself included, who download stuff again, but I don't use torrents, as I have indeed been burned in the past by that. I now use forums that link to encrypted Mega accounts or similar.

I don't torrent when I pirate anymore (or use usenet). Torrent stats might be going down because there are easier alternatives.

Do you mean the common streaming sites that are all over the place now? Or some other better method?

Easier alternatives such as?

The stats can be collected only from public torrents where DHT is being used (AFAIK). There are many private trackers that are closed to the outside world and have tens of thousands of members, each of whom may not only download from the peers within that private tracker, but also share the downloaded content with others.

I had completely stopped downloading movies in 2018, and even for that year, I downloaded very few. I had been tapering off since 2015. These are real numbers from my NAS. I got a seedbox 2 months ago. This was my last straw: trying to rent some movie on Amazon and was told I had to subscribe to some service to watch it--there was no price to watch it once.

The other things I did recently: 1) paused Google YTTV because NBA season was over 2) canceled Netflix because I never watch it

I've been watching content (some of it very old, like The Larry Sanders Show) on HBO Max, but the app on Roku is *SO HORRIBLE* I'd rather pirate content and watch it on PLeX.

The Amazon app/UI is *HORRIBLE*, too. Like multiple seasons are separate items? WTF. I'll download series I have access to on Amazon just to avoid that app.

I was pretty pissed off to discover the HBO Max Roku app is such garbage - after paying for HBO Max for a year.

If you have a T-Mobile Magenta plan with unlimited data, you get HBO Max for free btw.

> The Amazon app/UI is HORRIBLE, too. Like multiple seasons are separate items? WTF. I'll download series I have access to on Amazon just to avoid that app.

Not only that but I've even seen the seasons presented in no order whatsoever: i.e Season 2 followed by Season 8. It is nonsensical.

Ironically, the biggest russian torrent site is just a phpbb forum and it is wonderfully organized and very well moderated. Easy to find the content you want.

Fun fact: previously it tried to cooperate with the content owners and removed content by request, so the UX was considerably worse. But then, someone successfully litigated to block them 'forever' in Russia, so... They restored all prevoiusly removed content and now it has almost everything I ever wanted. Great win!

Sorry, who is the them here? The people who sued? The pirates? Users? The Russian site itself is blocked on Russia?

'them' is rutracker.org, it is blocked in russia. 'someone' is some copyrast litigator who's actions backfired.

What is their site?

I guess rarbg.to.

rutracker.org

> The Amazon app/UI is HORRIBLE, too.

Zero control over playback speed is the deal killer for me.

I subscribed to watch season 8 of alone. Each show had about eight thirty second commercials that you couldn't skip. Last time I'll try that way to watch something.

Why would you reply with an anecdote to someone specifically mentioning they’ve heard plenty of anecdotes but want data?

Went to watch Beavis and Butthead on Amazon and it had no music videos... They were all edited out. How is that remotely acceptable?

The Beavis and Butthead music video thing is a decades old problem, unfortunately. The DVDs were like that too. Something about failing to obtain the music video rights for the show outside of its original airing.

The only reasonable option is to pirate.

Happens sometimes with some video games as well. In the past when remasters came out they couldn't secure or couldn't afford the music licensing costs so they had a cut or replaced score.

That became worse in recent years when titles on digital distribution platforms e.g. Steam had music removed due to expiring licenses. This meant a game you had already downloaded and installed would be downgraded unless you were quick enough to stop the automatic updates for it.

Huh I'd never heard of this.

I genuinely do not understand how Amazon can have dropped the ball on their UI for this long, this bad. Given their drive to get customers to consume shipped product, their track record with digital products is abysmal. Video games is a product problem and that's a different discussion, but "television" and movies are a different matter. The product and consumer appetite are there, but the roadblock is the UI. Does no one who is in upper management use the product? I know they treat their testers like crap, but surely someone in the marketing or graphics department has at least done some usability polling. Right? Right?

I don't understand it either. It might be hard to quantify the affect of their Prime streaming business on their sales and thus they don't prioritize it ? That's my only guess, it feels to me like their most public product and its received the least attention.

The UI and general use of these apps are so bad - that I literally find myself torrenting things from Netflix, Prime, and Disney+ rather than use those apps, purely to be able to consume it on Plex.

The VPN jumping lunacy bothers me. I moved countries - great so I can't use Disney+? I get it, but that now means I have to download (your new) content because you won't actually let me buy your content, directly from you. For the first couple of months I continued to pay for the service. Eventually I decided that if you don't want me as a customer, I don't feel bad about downloading it. Sad really.

Still an anecdote...

And, no qualms of conscience there at all?

Why would I? Most of the content on my PLeX is paid for elsewhere. And, anything I pirate which I like I buy. I watched _Pig_ and immediately went to Amazon and paid $14.99 for it. If I pirate something that is terrible, there's no point.

I don't have a numerical proof based on numbers myself either, but myself and everyone in my circles has increased.

It's harder to study now that torrents aren't the only alternative.

Specifically for the example of Australians watching pirate rips of television programs, the percentage of us doing it dropped like a brick after Netflix launched here back in 2015 and has climbed back slightly since the fragmentation occurred.

It's nothing like the old days where we had to wait several weeks to watch Game of Thrones legally, though.

I don't have the exact numbers on hand, but from memory it was something that around 40% of us were doing back in 2013, had dropped to around 15-20% by 2018-2019, and is now at just above 20%.

My parents asked me to help them get into streaming a few months ago after they got a new iPad. So I bought them a Chromecast, taught them how to switch the input source between the Chromecast and Cable on their TV, which they were cool with.

Then I tried to set them up on the iPad.

There was about 5-10 specific shows they wanted to watch, what I found was that they were literally spread across more than 5 services, with one show each. Not a single one of them had 2 of the shows they wanted to watch.

They were already set up with Foxtel and had been using it for a couple of years, they watched shows on it regularly and knew how to do everything up to hitting the 'cast' button.

So I set them up with the other services, bummed an Amazon account off a sibling, signed them up to the 3 or 4 free services we have in Australia, think I subbed to one other one or something too. I can't even remember what they all were there was so many. I put the icons all in the same place on their home screen so they knew those apps were all the streaming ones etc etc.

I logged into a few of the accounts a week or so ago and they haven't watched a single thing. Not even on the Foxtel, which they were already using, and now they've stopped using it.

It seems to me like they've just hit a wall of complexity and thrown their hands up and said fuck the whole thing.

And you know what? I'm right there with them. Half way through the set up, trying to do the right thing, I was an inch away from throwing my hands up and saying fuck the whole thing as well. It would be far easier for everyone involved if I just brought a hard drive with new shows around for them every few months.

There was another thread here yesterday where some bloke was going on about how he couldn't understand why people wouldn't just spin up a linux box or something instead of using Discord.

Well, this is it. It took my parents months to get used to using one app, and adding something as simple as another couple of apps to the mix has turned them off the technology entirely.

When you introduce anything other than the absolute most simple UX, you risk losing part of your market entirely. You're not building stuff for other software engineers or other TV network execs or whatever your job title is. Everyone trying to carve out their own piece of the pie is just smashing the pie to bits for everyone else.

When it was just Netflix, piracy was almost dead. Now, it's going to come back, unless content distributors can find some way to work together. That goes for music, TV and games. All 3 ecosystems are running into the exact same problem.

I'm right there with you. I'm increasingly frustrated by the experience of using my various streaming apps. I don't even mind having to bounce between different apps for different content. But just _finding_ the content I want is such a fucking chore sometimes.

One of the most annoying scenarios I seem to find myself in all too frequently is trying to get to the episode list for a series. The assumption that most of my services make is that when I click on the series card in the list of shows, the thing I want is to automatically be taken to where I left off. This is fine when it works (although it's a big damn assumption that the app correctly preserved where I left off, and even when it does that often dumps me into the credits for the episode I finished last night). But when I want to see the episode list, I feel like I just have to flail about and curse at the TV until I stumble upon the right sequence of buttons to get to what I want.

That's not even to mention the incredibly disheartening recent changes to the home screen of my (Shield) Android TV, where half the home screen is now taken up with ads for programs I will never watch on services I don't even use.

It does make one rather miss the days of a folder full of AVIs and VLC. I also had a nice Plex setup at one point. Maybe one of these days I'll get off my ass and heed the call of the open seas.

> It would be far easier for everyone involved if I just brought a hard drive with new shows around for them every few months.

I do this for my family. 3TB external HDDs, each time I see them they give me the old one and I give them a another one freshly topped up (things added/removed based on suggestions/requests).

It's been a smashing hit and they all love it.

We all loved Netflix when it came out and paused doing this for a while, but it wasn't long until the fragmentation and geoblocking led to more requests for certain shows popping up again, and now we all pretty much got rid of all our streaming services and are back to the HDDs.

When it was just Netflix, piracy was almost dead. Now, it's going to come back, unless content distributors can find some way to work together.

Right. They need to swallow their pride and realise there needs to be a way to have one interface that shows you all the content you can access from the subset of services you subscribe to, in a searchable way. My Netflix shows, Prime shows and Foxtel shows should show up side-by-side in the interface. They can put a ribbon on it and/or an opening title to tell me who the distributor is.

Purchasable/rentable content can appear in a separate section, and when I can buy content from two or more services I have an account with, present them all and let me choose which one to use.

After my sister died, my brother in law was in a deep hole. I wanted to cheer him up somehow, and so I ended up giving him a 2TB hard disk connected to an old laptop. Then plugged a gen 1 Chromecast into his TV, and installed Plex onto an old tablet. He said it was a life saver. It helped get him through a really bad winter. I can't even think of a way I could have given him that content "legally". Some of it was great but obscure stuff ripped off DVDs that I bought over years. It's not just the complexity of multiple apps and devices - some content just isn't there. Like a shitload of really decent TV series and movies from the 60s onward.

My anecdata is definitely this. I used to pay for almost all my media, but switching regions, logging in and out of shit, buying iTunes cards on ebay, checking through 4 different streaming apps, and then extra work when you do find what you want and try to watch it only to be told your subscription doesn't actually cover it but you can pay extra (looking at you, Amazon Prime), it's just so much fucking work when tracker -> torrents dir -> plex is so much easier and user-friendly.

And I pay for Plex.

University libraries

It seems like there isn't a widely available service to just bundle everything and serve what you want (?) Anyone kmow is that a cost restriction or do the companies disallow it?

It strikes me the best cure is to restrict copyright to force federation - if you sell to one company who retails to consumers in a geo locality then you're required to make available to any company at that price.

Streaming services would be forced to compete in everything except content. Creators would still be paid.

What are the problems with this?

My personal views, of course.

If copyright law said that the price a piece of content is available for is the highest amount any provider in a region is willing to pay then you're setting up for a monopoly, as Netflix or Amazon Prime with their near infinite content budgets set the price of everything they like higher than any new competitor can afford to pay.

Sorry, I don't think I expressed that well, I intended to say it was akin to a "most favoured nation" situation; if Netflix get a lower price per person, then you have to offer that price to others.

I can't see how Amazon and Netflix could push prices up without unlawful collusion? But if they did push prices up for all media how would they sell their service?

It's not unheard of for major players to have contracts that say 'if you're offering this to another company for less per unit than you are to us then you agree to reduce our price accordingly', the idea is just to make that lowest price universal so that.

I sell license for prints of my painting to Acme for £5 then ABC can print the same painting and pay me £5. As creator I can choose not to sell the work for £5, but that's no different to now; what I wouldn't be able to do is restrict who - in the wholesale market - could buy the work for that price.

On the other hand, I firmly believe that creators must be able to choose any distribution way they want (similar to "right to burn"). E.g creators may choose to sell unrestricted copyrights to the most evil companies they want, it's their ultimate right.

Consumers have a right to consume or not consume, but they may not limit creator's freedom, nor by "restricting copyright to force delegation".

Why? How does that serve the demos?

Creators may choose who to sell to, with you there. But then we (the demos) may choose to not give copyright protection. We're not limiting creators freedom, we're limiting who we choose to protect from the open market.

I mean this particular part I have a problem with: "may choose to not give copyright protection" -- we, consumers, don't have a say in creator's copyrights, because we don't have these copyrights, creators do. Creators may as well be with us and sell their content to a company that abides by these laws of restricted copyrights (e.g. GPL license is particular example). Or not.

It's our job, though, to make that available and easy for creators (e.g. kudos to RMS for making and popularising the GPL).

But no one should be able force anything on _all_ creators.

PS: Well, the outcome would be that creators would stop create at all, and in some cases that might be fair and just, but that's another topic completely. E.g. some societies regard as fair and just limits on drawings of humans and animals, so there's no such drawings. And they see it as fair and just.

> I mean this particular part I have a problem with: "may choose to not give copyright protection" -- we, consumers, don't have a say in creator's copyrights, because we don't have these copyrights, creators do.

But demos doesn't mean "we, consumers" -- it means "we, the people". As in, the body politic, from whom all laws and therefore copyright ultimately emanates. Creators only have those copyrights because we've granted them. This is a law of man, neither God-given nor a law of nature -- we can, if we want, un-grant them.

> What are the problems with this?

The fundamental trust of copyright is literally to make things worse for consumers to the benefit of producers. If you see consumers being inconvenienced in an expensive way as a problem then you haven't engaged with the problem copyright is here to solve.

[I fear you were being sarcastic, but in any case ...]

Copyright is to enrich the public domain. It's foundation in the West is Queen Anne's statute which followed on from printmakers making their own regulations. It shifted power from the printmakers to the creators, buy it served the public domain by having a limited period of protection and by preserving copies of works which could be referenced.

It made things better for the public because after 7 years (IIRC, I think it was later extendable to 14 years) the work was free to get printed anywhere vastly aiding the spread of culturally important works. The fundamental bargain also aided the demos (as opposed to the consumer, per se); that bargain being that a creator could exclusively - with the backing of the law - control reproduction during those 7 years and so profit sufficiently to continue creating further works without having to seek a patron.

Copyright is supposed to be, and was, about liberation of creators from control; and democratisation (making available to the people) of works.

The change I propose aids creators getting paid, and aids works benefiting the public. Moreover, it wrests some control from the "printmakers" in keeping with early copyright laws.

I'm the US copyright is to allow creators control over their creation, for a time, presumably so the can monetize it. This incentives creators to create. Yes, in the long run, public domain wins. But so do the creators. Forcing them to sell to everyone takes a lot of control away from the copyright holders.

There already are compulsory licensing schemes that work like this. For example, in the United States, there are “mechanical licenses” [1] available by statute for streaming and downloaded music recordings. In practice, most big platforms negotiate with a rights organization or with the artist directly[2], but the statutory rate operates as a price ceiling.

One big problem with compulsory licensing is that rights organizations that manage the payment of royalties often become very powerful themselves and are sometimes seen as copyright bullies. For example, ASCAP, which represents composers and licenses musical compositions rights, pursued the Girl Scouts for unlicensed singing of campfire songs. [3]

[1]: https://www.copyright.gov/licensing/m200a.pdf

[2] example: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/24/taylor-swif...

[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/12/17/nyregion/ascap-asks-royal...

This presumes piracy is bad. Which I'd say is mostly true, but I'd go so far as to suggest that, e.g. Spotify is worse.

Essentially, they both mean that creators don't meaningfully get paid, only that Spotify appears legitimate due to the breadcrumbs and "exposure" they do give out.

E.g. Bandcamp is better than piracy, but I'd argue piracy is better than Spotify.

always find this argument so weird - The amount of people who can create music and find an audience now vs a decade ago is exponentially higher; subsequently, the market price of a song has fallen and Spotify pays accordingly.

Except now, as an independent artist I can get easier exposure on Spotify and build up more income from live shows, merch and whatever else as a result. My closest fans will still often buy from band camp, or buy a vinyl or whatever. Except now I have a ton more fans than I could have reasonably achieved in the iTunes era

And the distribution of wealth has stayed relatively similar - huge artists (The Taylor swift’s of the world) continue to be minted, small unknown artists continue to make a comparatively tiny living - except now many, many more people can make that living and stream music

These files are so simple to distribute - there’s no engineering challenge and it’s very hard to justify building a moat. That’s one thing the notables you list did, beyond merely gatekeeping content.

Netflix is getting into games for a reason. It's unclear if they only play to make new ones or also license old ones.

But I agree with you, I'm surprised Steam doesn't have a way to get old ROMs.

> But I agree with you, I'm surprised Steam doesn't have a way to get old ROMs.

Not quite old ROMs, but gog.com sells old computer games prepackaged for Dosbox, which because of that work on Windows, Mac and Linux. That's basically the old PC computer equivalent of what I believe Nintendo does by shipping the emulator with the ROM when you buy it through the Virtual Console so it runs as a whole.

I am abandonware collector of sorts, and one thing I liked is how all major abandonware site happily link to GOG.com when the game is up there.

GOG has been earning a lot of my praise recently for not only hosting binaries - but actually putting labour into making sure their games run on modern systems. This is particularly important for games from the era of weird sound cards that can't render audio quite right without a vintage soundblaster - but also goes for games that were simply designed with DOS expectations in place.

Back in the day I was a big fan of an SSI game called Imperialism - this game pretty much refuses to run on modern software - it needs DOSBox to run smoothly and even then it does custom cursor stuff that tends to screw up very obviously on modern systems - the GOG version of the game runs smooth like butter.

Why would I ever pirate a copy of Imperialism and spend a day actually getting it set up to run sorta decently on my machine - when I can grab it off GOG for 1.89 CAD? A day of my time, even an hour of my time (even my leisure time), runs well above 2$ at this point - the convenience is there so pirating becomes a bad value proposition.

GOG is great and reasonably priced. I never pirate what I can find on GOG.

The Sega Genesis games they sell are basically just ROMs. You can go into the folders where they are installed and grab them to use in a different emulator.

> Steam doesn't have a way to get old ROMs.

Licensing hell.

I am sure it is, but I figure if anyone can crack that nut, it's Valve.

Yeah, I'd settle for being able to buy No One Lives Forever and NOLF2 again on Steam, and those games are a lot younger.

Those games are an interesting case: it’s very likely Activision or Warner owns the rights for them, but since ownership could be in the hands of at least one other party and the games themselves aren’t popular nowadays, it isn’t financially worth it for them to do the work to verify it, even though people have tried to work with them in the past.

https://kotaku.com/the-sad-story-behind-a-dead-pc-game-that-...

Uh, you can get them for free.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/no-one-will-sell-no-one-liv...

Great games. Recently - well a year ago - played through them with a friend coop.

They'll have to compete with SuperStonk GameStop... (and GeForce Now, and Stadia...)

> But I agree with you, I'm surprised Steam doesn't have a way to get old ROMs.

They sell old games, e.g. Sonic the Hedgehog: https://store.steampowered.com/app/71113/Sonic_The_Hedgehog/

That's a Windows program that runs a Sega Genesis emulator that loads the game's ROM.

That doesn't entitle me to run the game on a much better emulator with RetroArch or apply fun ROM hacks on it.

It doesn't stop you either.

Yes it does. It literally installs raw ROM files that can be opened in any Mega Drive Emulator directly into your steamapps directory.

But does it give me the right?

IANAL, but yes. If you don't copy something, copyright is not invoked.

In many jurisdictions (AU, UK), it would be legal to copy them to another device you own, such as a hacked PSP, under the "format shifting" exemptions.

"ROM sites are still a ubiquitous problem for 20 year old consoles. Youtube, Spotify, Steam and Netflix made content easy to get. There's no equivalent for most ROMs, so they're still widely pirated."

The only example I can think of is Nintendo Online. You can play select NES and SNES games on the Switch with a N.O. subscription.

I collect ROMs, I've got damned near 4Tb worth. I collect for two reasons:

1. Archiving 2. Most of the "good" vintage games carry ridiculous prices. Games that had over 10 million copies pressed going for $100+. Even if we assume 1 million were destroyed, that's still 9 million copies floating about. Not exactly rare or worth $100.

I swapped my NES cart of Dragion Warrior IV with a friend for his copy of Dragon Warrior III in high school; it was supposed to be temporary but we both went off to college and never saw each other again. I looked into buying a copy of DW IV online and choked on the prices ($150 cart only). Apparently that game was a limited run though.

Yep, I recently bought Dragon Warrior 1, 2, and 3. I’ll buy 4 soon, but wow - it is not cheap. I play them on a Retron 5 which can play NES, SNES, GBA, Sega, and even Famicon cartridges. It also lets you set hot keys and toggle turbo mode. It’s pretty great.

If it makes you feel any better it cost $100 in 2021 dollars new ($50 in 1990)...

> If it makes you feel any better it cost $100 in 2021 dollars new ($50 in 1990)...

That does actually make me feel better knowing that DW4 would cost $100 if it were "new" now.

These days a sealed copy of DW4 graded at 7.0 will run you $1549. I'd be nervous paying anything less than $170 for a working cartridge alone right now.

As a consumer of these things, I've thought many times how easy it would be for someone to just print off "original boxes and content" for these old games, and sell them as if they were mint. As someone who wants this kind of thing... please don't be afraid to charge premium prices for replicas! As long as you tell us it's a replica, and it's high quality - everyone wins. Once enough time passes, replicas and forgeries all just become history.

No clue if it's legit but there are NES cartidge replicas on alibaba:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001027903131.html

Game prices are part rarity, part demand. Pokémon games aren't rare, but they're always in demand so they always command decent prices. Plus even if millions of copies were sold the majority might not be English versions which are often most popular. Chrono Trigger for example sold millions in Japan and can easily be picked up for less than $20 in Japanese. US copies sold more like 500,000 and collectors outside the US are interested as well since English is much more of a common 1st or 2nd language than Japanese.

Almost all old games in Japan are dirt cheap; on the order of US$1-$2 for a typical loose SFC/N64/Game Boy cart if you don't go to the tourist traps in Akihabara.

$20 is exceptionally expensive for a Japanese game.

It's ridiculous that games like super smash bros are the same price whether you buy them new on a switch or used for a 25 year old n64. No clue why nintendo bothers ending production runs on games when they know people still buy sell and play 30 year old titles. They could just license the reruns to someone else to produce the cartriges and disks and make money hand over fist. It always seems like nintendo has blinders on and self sabotages with stuff like this all the time (nintendo online being a huge fail compared to something like xbox live which has been around for almost 20 years now). In my opinion they could easily overtake xbox and playstation marketshare just by being smarter with their IP and taking back this market that is currently totally owned by people on ebay and craigslist because of nintendo's short sightedness with their production runs.

I don't think they can undertake Xbox/Playstation. Nintendo is a niche while Xbox/Playstation another. I guess they just want people to buy newer consoles and games, which make sense for them.

I don't think selling smash bros 64 again will hurt their nintendo switch sales very much.

They did this for a number of years on Wii/Wii U. You could buy Smash 64 from them for $10. It wasn't nearly as popular as their current games. Paper Mario 64 for $10 was sick, though. Loved it after having played TTYD.

For that matter - why not sell N64-compatible consoles? You could make them incredibly cheaply now, and they're definitely still in demand. Are they scared of cannibalizing their "high end"?

Why do you think they would be cheap? Many of the relevant chips have been out of production for decades. Sure you can emulate a lot on a logic device like an FPGA, but those are still expensive compared to a microprocessor, and your engineering costs will go up. Then you’re facing stiff competition- a vintage gamers ideal is exact hardware. Any sort of emulation will have slight quirks- timing changes, mildly perceptible audio frequency shifts, etc. if your product isn’t an exact match for the hardware, it’s competing with the hundreds of ARM based emulation oriented systems that popped up after the RetroPi concept took off. And for what, a few thousands units of sales? Most people fall into “fine with emulation + ROM”. A select few stick with vintage hardware, which is not expensive. The market for “very close to original hardware but not quite” is a hard sell.

You're Nintendo, you have all the original specs, you can literally make an exact clone on an FPGA (or whatever's cheapest).

I don't disagree that the market is small, though. But Nintendo does have a chronic problem of under-manufacturing desirable hardware. Like, if you want a SNES Classic (good emulator, fantastic controllers), you'll have to pay 2-3x the original price. Nintendo could do another run of them every year for basically no effort, and they just...don't.

For the SNES classic, the limit on their production runs is probably the licensing of third-party content. They put blinders and only license titles up to a certain amount.

This Kickstarter aims to do just that:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2134113860/warrior-64-c...

But yeah, Nintendo could have done this years ago had they wanted to.

Aren't they going to soon. They did the mini NES and SNES already

If you mean the Nintendo solution I think the [system] Mini trend has finally died out for good outside of a handfull of pathetic outliers like Amiga 500 mini. At any rate Nintendo seems to prefer to release these things on their existing consoles, as emulated roms, as it's cheaper anyway.

If you mean third party solutions I think there is at least one project that aims to be compatible with various original cartridges but its name eludes me at the moment. [edit] It's Polymega though it doesn't support N64 it does support SNES/Megadrive/NES/TG16 and a number of CD-ROM based consoles.

How are there 4TB of ROMs? Does that number include non ROM dumps like CD, DVD and BD games too?

CD, DVD and BD are all ROMs too. In a computer (and therefore videogame console) sense, these all are technically called CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, and BD-ROM.

I’d think of them as ISOs. But I can see why they’d be considered ROMs too.

Yeah. The storage medium changed so much, but the functional shipped object was still "a chunk of read-only memory containing the (probably) sole version of a game that got shipped to a market".

I too tend to think of ROMs as strictly images of non-volatile chips, alone, but it's interesting that when we're in computer emulation territory, it's really only the size that's different; a CD iso feeds into a PS emulator pretty much the same way a rom file feels into a SNES emulator - it's just a document.

I guess it’s complicated by the notion of ROMs needed to boot machines like BIOS dumps and then software.

I just saw this video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvLFEh7V18A ) on why vintage video games cost so much money now. It's almost an hour long piece of effectively investigative journalism by someone in the speed running (and thus vintage gaming) community.

The evidence presented does seem like a bubble, with scam/fraud properties.

Well there is BitTorrent and filesharing but they made it illegal

It's never been more legal than it is today - it's not like in 1997 KaZaA and Morpheus were bastions of legal activity.

For a very long time in the Netherlands you could download movies and music from unauthorized sources, as you were indirectly paying content creators because of “copy taxes” on data drives, burnable discs etc. It was sort of a loophole but it was completely legal. Those were the days.

Then suddenly the highest court disallowed it. Guess what, we still pay the copy tax.

Clarification: The copy tax was meant to compensate copyright owners for consumers making copies (for private use) of purchased media. It was widely interpreted as to allow downloading from the internet as well (even from pirated sources).

Ah sorry yes - my comment was made from an American/Canadian perspective - I know that other parts of the world have been significantly more progressive in the past.

Why is piracy of games for a 20-year-old console a problem? Is anyone still selling new games for those consoles?

The rightsholder wants to be able to sell the game to you again on a new platform to keep collecting revenue off it

If that's the motivation, it's pretty misguided, since it is a completely different motivation to buy. I buy (or pirate if I can't) the old games for nostalgia fun, not so much for the gameplay or graphics. I then also buy the new game for the modern experience & gameplay.

They want to have the option to resell you the exact same game emulated on the new systems too, see Wii Virtual Console I think it was called, and NES classic system, all of those.

People getting ROMs to play on another device doesn't stop them from doing that any more than the original systems and game carts stop them.

like 7 , maybe 8 people

Yes actually. You can still buy brand new copies of titles like Kingdom Hearts, FFXII and others for PS2 directly from Amazon.com and not a third party seller. For a while Square Enix was selling PS1 versions of FF games too although they have seemed to have stopped in the last few years.

Can confirm, I got a brand new still-shrink-wrapped copy of FFIX for my birthday just a few years ago.

Oh I see, that's a surprise for me heh

Because copyright holders like the idea of reselling the same games to you hundreds of times. Nintendo resells the exact same games to people every time they launch a console. Companies create low effort compilations all the time.

You'd think they'd make their money and move on to new creations. You make something, it's successful, you make your money for 5 years or so and then it's public domain. You'd have to make new stuff to make more money. No. Copyright holders feel entitled to extract value out of their "property" essentially forever. It's the ultimate in rent seeking.

The copyright issue is what sucks most. For the US the first implementation of copyright allowed max 28 years.

Since then the cycle to make/market/distribute/profit off a product has gotten much faster.

If anything, copyright should be shorter than 28 years. Not longer.

I love the original The Matrix(1999) movie. But it has had it's day in the sun, earned money and become "old news" at least 10 years ago.

In a "free market" sense, 12 years is a long time to have a monopoly on IP. If you have failed to make whatever money you are going to make of this IP by 12 years, then you are sucking at your marketing/use-of-IP and there should be "competition in the market" with your IP, to best make use of it.

Apologies for linking to something I wrote; I believe convenience is addictive: https://markpapadakis.medium.com/convenience-is-key-2aad97d5...

It's funny how the wheel goes round and round. I loved it when Netflix had a lot more content, but now that each studio/production/company offers its own, it's ending up like nothing more than streaming a la carte and people are returning to piracy rather than spend hundreds across various streaming services (like cable/dish...).

Analyst Ben Evans frequently refers to cycle of bundling and unbundling of produtcts in tech.

Once the market becomes completely fragmented, a new service offering to bundle it back up will inevitably come along.

The other thing is that a lot of games from 20 years ago can't even be bought anymore from the original source. But from ten years ago is even worse --- you just CAN'T get any piece of WiiWare without pirating it. You can't buy it used.

YouTube was an absolute cesspit of copyright violation until (well after acquisition) it wasn’t. Move fast, break things, but I guess it matters which things.

> Once they know it's possible, people want a one click solution for anything

Agree, I think a more general term for 1 click solution is ease of use.

Its the same reason why people compromise for privacy and use main stream products like google maps.

Seems like more of a benefit than a problem. Current games that need a server side will die off this decade with no chance of being played ever again. Zero long term marketing/awareness for the brand, developer, console maker.

A good thing overall, tbf.

I don’t see how ROMs for a 20 year old console would be a problem. The console and games are no longer sold. The producers have made all of the profit that they would make, on the original sale. They don’t see any profit on sales of used consoles and games.

Wondering what the memes were and this article (https://www.newsweek.com/onlyfans-memes-flood-internet-after...) displayed some. There is also https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/onlyfans-adult-content.... Are those that an correct representation of the memes?

I don't think it is just the One Click Solution they want (though I don't deny that is probably very attractive). I'm pretty sure we would see more vanity URLs and one-off sites if payment processors weren't so strict when it comes to selling adult content/services. Spinning up a CMS website of your own, even with commerce/membership functionality, isn't difficult. But the payment processors are the unspoken guardians of internet commerce, and without VC level backing good luck getting them to touch something like adult content.

I think this is a missing piece of OFs popularity and usefulness to creators. Not only is it a centralized and (by now) well known site for this kind of content. OF deals with the payment processors, the charge backs, and the disputes. It is relatively seamless for the content creators in that regard.

> But the payment processors are the unspoken guardians of internet commerce, and without VC level backing good luck getting them to touch something like adult content.

You're completely correct here. The only other real option in this space is CCBill - and they:

a) only do payments - not hosting and everything that OF does

b) still take a ~18-20% cut, in addition to annual flat fees

c) are really fucking unbelievably terrible

This is exactly the sort of problem cryptocurrencies were created to solve. Nobody should need some payment processor's permission for anything. People should be able to get paid in cryptocurrencies as if it was cash.

Monero is ideal for this sort of thing.

Sex Workers are well aware of crypto bros saying "you should be using crypto for this"

It clearly doesn't meet the needs of these customers, regardless of whether or not it's "supposed to"

Why do we call pornstars sex workers and not artists?

they are both. but the former is less controversial.

There's a lot going on in the porn world, especially now that it's, er, democratized. Sex workers is very broad. Porn stars is a little fuzzy. Some porn stars are big names, and/or can actually act pretty well. Or excel at creating fantasies. A surprising number of cam girls just sit at their desk fully clothed, chin in hand, and the only action is their eyes darting around their monitor while bad background music gets mangled through their microphone.

"Sex workers" is synonymous with prostitution. Pornography is a form of art. "Sex artists" would make more sense. "Sex worker" sounds very pedestrian, we don't call actors or singers "theater workers". As for the girls just sitting in their desks that doesnt sound like sex-related work at all, they might as well be called cam-artists. This is a not a tiny niche anymore, there is space for more than one terms.

> Pornography is a form of art.

Pornography is as much art as streaming video games or uploading card opening videos to YouTube are a form of art.

Pornography is entertainment, and not all entertainments are art. In spite of all the more or less recent porn videos labeled "Art Porn," which, in fact, rather depicts passionate sexual intercourse, pornography cannot reasonably be considered art in the traditional sense. Pornography does not elevate your spirit, it does not make you feel a broad range of emotions, and there is no real creativity, or it is utterly limited to a mediocre plot and a few different environments.

What definition of art do you have in mind that makes you think that pornography is art?

that's a very narrow definition that excludes a lot of mediocre works which are typically classified as art. I m not interested in that discussion as much in why porn and prostitution are lumped together.

> "Sex workers" is synonymous with prostitution.

No, it's not, it's an umbrella term covering multiple kinds of sexually-explicit work people do, including prostitution, fetish modelling, camming, stripping, phone sex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_work

> there is space for more than one terms.

That's right, there's more than one term. When you want to say something about porn actors, you can use that term. When you want to say something about sex workers, you can use that term. When you want to say something about artists, you can use that term. They are different but overlapping terms and which one you use depends on what you're saying.

Interesting, i ve heard it more used to refer to prostitution -- do ,e.g. strippers count as sex workers? Also, even that article is confusing, for example it says that sex work is prohibited in most of the world, but camming is legal almost everywhere.

Well, I think the intention behind it is that it's an umbrella term; I'm sure there's lots of gray area around the edges--I doubt anyone thinks there's a bright line where it's "sex work" on this side and "not sex work" on the other. Maybe that's part of the point, it's somewhat loose. But the intention is to include workers other than prostitutes.

Actor and singer seem just as pedestrian.

> "Sex workers" is synonymous with prostitution.

Not generally; its typically used either more broadly (though not strictly more broadly, as nonconsensual acts wouldn't generally be included) than “prostitution”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_work#Types

Or strictly more narrowly than prostitution, as in:

https://theconversation.com/who-are-we-talking-about-when-we...

"Porn artist" might be taken to mean the people who make pornographic drawings/animations. Actors aren't colloquially referred to as "artists" most of the time; they're called actors.

This is a term from their own advocacy, as an alternative to much more derogatory ones. It focuses on work issues: pay and safety. The OF issue is about pay.

"Artist" might imply dilettante. "Worker" captures that they are doing it in order to get paid.

> My biggest shock was how much "PR" was generated on Reddit

And the winner ist: viggity

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237827

The RES addon has been a godsend for reddit for YEARS.

I love to browse by /r/all -- but I have spent a long while +Filtering out so many subreddit - and running it with Res and adblock etc... I have a super sleek and fun experience on Reddit with my 15-year-old account...

Some memes are cool - most are lame.

I have never been interested in 4chan nor twitter (I think twitter is the new "National Inquirer type" -- I think of tweets as those horrific multi colored snippet boxes on the front of tabloids.

It is in keeping with the general theme of things.

> My biggest shock was how much "PR" was generated on Reddit

Here is Twitter event by Tech Insider.[0,1]

[0] https://twitter.com/TechInsider/status/1430654887327682565

[1] https://twitter.com/TechInsider/events/1430648239171198984

I guess that's on you for attempting to conceptually limit the the wellspring of internet angst 4chan, incel, reddit, and twitter have become.

> People really do just want a one click solution for creating adult content, and consuming adult content.

I was the under the impression that Pornhub offers this? I have no idea how self-service it is though.

> He said BNY Mellon “flagged and rejected” every wire transfer linked to the firm, while Britain’s Metro Bank in 2019 closed OnlyFans’ corporate account with short notice

So it wasn’t just the credit card merchants but wire transfers and corporate bank accounts. So stupid… at least CC merchants can blame chargebacks or something.

I guess it’d help if laws were clarified, in the UK where they are based as well.

Maybe we’ll find out if something changed soon.

Maybe because British Board of Film Censors jurisdiction has been extended to online porn, and face-sitting and fisting is banned in the UK? (although that ban is older than OnlyFans itself)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-30454773

Where’s Ireland’s IDA now?

Is British board of film censors considered a government entity? Is so, then aren't those considered part of free expression?

And? The US constitution doesn't apply in Britain for obvious reasons.

I never talked about the US constitution.

> Under Article 10 of the Human Rights Act 1998, “everyone has the right to freedom of expression” in the UK. But the law states that this freedom “may be subject to formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society”.

My question is why this doesn't apply to those 2 sexual acts?

As stated in the BBC article it's not banning those sexual acts, it's banning depictions (e.g. porn of them). And it's banning these ones in particular because they are considered by the UK Gov to be life threatening.

So it's not about freedom of expression because it's about selling porn. And the gov has a justification as to why these 2 acts because it believes they're dangerous (note they also banned strangulation but that didn't get talked about because few people disagree that strangling someone for pleasure is dangerous).

I looked up everything they banned:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/long-list-sex-acts-jus...

"Spanking

Caning

Aggressive whipping

Penetration by any object "associated with violence"

Physical or verbal abuse (regardless of if consensual)

Urolagnia (known as "water sports")

Role-playing as non-adults

Physical restraint

Humiliation

Female ejaculation

Strangulation

Facesitting

Fisting"

There's no way I can see Spanking, verbal abuse, Female ejaculation, Facesitting or Fisting can be considered "dangerous". Even things like Physical restraint are safely done.

Does anyone think this was a failed pivot from the p0rn and the backlash was so great that they backpedaled?

It actually reminds me of Ebay. Ebay became big with online auctions but as soon as they did they seemed to want to no longer be in the auction business. Instead they wanted to be in the online retail business. Maybe because there was more money per customer. Maybe because online retail was larger. Personally I always found Ebay's retail move to be weird and off-brand with a subpar user experience.

Something about this Onlyfans move just doesn't sit right. Like who were the banks or payment processors that supposedly forced this? I haven't seen anyone claim responsibility (officially or not).

No. They call out the specific banks here: https://www.ft.com/content/7b8ce71c-a87a-440e-9f3d-58069ca04...

Unfortunately that's behind a paywall.

Install a browser extension that bypasses paywalls, like [0]

[0] https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea...

https://archive.is/Aqx8x

Interesting they say they were hiring hundreds of new mods to enforce the no porn policy, wonder how many employees theyre now un-hiring?

>OnlyFans declined to name its current banking partners, citing a desire to improve relations.

Sounds like they requested a new deal in exchange for not naming them.

I suspect OnlyFans cobbled together a "honeypot" deal.

This would explain why Pornhub, etc. lost their payment processing but OnlyFans feels confident they won't.

Not sure what that means? Like to 'catch' CP posters? From what I've read the payment processing is mostly charge back %s, mixed with religious driven activism against sex work.

>mixed with religious driven activism against sex work.

Is there any evidence that this played any significant part or is it just a conspiracy theory? The CEO said:

>“The change in policy, we had no choice — the short answer is banks,”

>Stokely claimed OnlyFans had been unfairly targeted by media reports into “incidents of illegal content” that failed to mention how porn-free social media platforms grapple with similar issues. “Banks read the same media as everyone else,” he said.

>Stokely said he would “absolutely” welcome porn back were the banking environment to change.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304164

That's just a link dump. Is there any evidence that their campaign is linked to the decisions made by OF?

It's not a link dump, it's sources that aren't condensed HN comments.

If you really don't want to read them, maybe read the short Wikipedia excerpt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Cry#Traffickinghub_camp...

That's about Visa, MasterCard, and PornHub. This thread is about OnlyFans and _banks_, not payment processors. Are banks swayed by religious groups to block payments related to adult materials?

Edit: Also even for PornHub, it is alleged that Nicholas Kristof's actions [1] had an important impact on the decisions surrounding PornHub, and Kristof is a self-described progressive who doesn't seem to act on religious grounds, so I don't really see sufficient evidence that religious groups play a significant role at all.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Kristof#Child_pornogr...

The more direct link is the reporting that hit PornHub and there is plenty of info on these religious / 'moral crusader' groups.

The NyTimes link below is opinion but it lays out facts and puts in the context of OF decision. It talks about the original nytimes PornHub op-ed by Kristof and his connections to anti-sex religious groups.

I think the rhetoric these groups use is very similar to the CP-as-an-excuse, but their goal ism't simply to remove illegal content (which everyone agrees is bad). It's to curb porn and sex work in general.

https://newrepublic.com/article/160488/nick-kristof-holy-war... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/opinion/onlyfans-porn-sex...

Opinion pieces can be framed to dictate whatever narrative the author wishes to promote, and a nice story isn't substitute for evidence.

The original PH article was opinion as well. There are a ton of sources if you care to google, i included the recent NyTimes piece because it does list specific sources.

They change in processor heart seemed to happen after people started making a lot of noise that Mastercard explicitly refused to block payments to terrorist and other awful groups, but keeps going after sex workers.

I don't think the cards companies particularly want regulators taking a much closer look at where they're making their money.

If anything I thought maybe it was a publicity stunt.

I could see why this might be your first thought, but I suspect this move might have hurt OF more than helping, simply because most of the people who formerly/currently call OF home have now lost any sense of stability.

Tho, as we’ve seen in the past, network effect will likely play a huge part in most of the content creators staying with OF. However I just can’t imagine the feeling of safety/permanence in platform choice will return for most of them.

I don't know if they have much to worry about. Where would those creators move? Is there any even remotely comparable platform in terms of user-base and pop-culture penetration? If you were worried about stability would you really feel better moving to some unknown upstart competitor?

Yeah, that’s why I brought up the network effect that OF brings.

I’m sure OF will be fine, I just hope they feel it a bit because this has to have shaken the foundations for a lot people who relied on them.

Creators have been doing this for years before OnlyFans and can continue to do it even if OnlyFans dies today. OnlyFans definitely made things a lot easier, especially for their audience, but I don't think we should paint creators like they're helpless without OF. It's not like Youtube where people have become dependent on it after almost 2 decades of use.

>> Where would those creators move?

Chaturbate has existed for time, existed through this; was the OnlyFans before OnlyFans, and continues to seem to thrive. Simple answer.

I know several creators (sex workers) who moved to other platforms (such as JustForFans) in anticipation of the ban and don’t plan on returning

Or maybe it helped OF, because they got to call out Mastercard / Visa and maybe negotiate a better deal out of it?

Since when does Mastercard / Visa care about minor backlash like this and why would they? Most of the hysteria died down pretty quickly, and it's not like people were going to boycott the biggest payment processors by far.

Antitrust is trending again, especially with tech, and the Visa/Mastercard duopoly has so far managed to escape the public's attention. Those two are no strangers to that world and that kind of publicity can actually hurt them long term.

I checked the FT link pasted in this thread, and the founder seems to claim that it was an issue strictly with the banks, not with the payment processors:

>“We’re already fully compliant with the new Mastercard rules, so that had no bearing on the decision,” he said.

https://www.ft.com/content/7b8ce71c-a87a-440e-9f3d-58069ca04...

At this point, I don't take any of the press releases at face value beyond the immediate effects they describe - all I know is they announced a future ban on adult content and then reversed course.

> “We’re already fully compliant with the new Mastercard rules, so that had no bearing on the decision,”

Reading between the lines, that could easily mean "We're already fully compliant with MC's rules but they still won't let the banks do business with us, so we needed to put publish pressure on MC"

Devin Nash explains the issue here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NURYbrDk7k

tldr: Financial transactions for porn suffer VERY high cashback rates so traditional payment operators do NOT like them because they become expensive to them VERY quickly.

They do viral marketing all the time. Go to any meme page and even some newspapers and you'll find "wow this mother who has an only fans is causing trouble at her school because other Dad's have been caught out!!! Dads! sign up here"

Watching people fall for their marketing is like being in a state of depression with the human race.

No it really does happen its just not so common among older people, I know people who got in trouble with their gf because they were caught subscribing to the OF of some other girl they both knew. Only half the appeal is random people selling nudes, the other half is the hot chick from your high school class selling them.

I'm not debating that it happens. But who's paying to have these articles published and promoted? PR dept of OnlyFans is your only answer.

I'm sure OF would be willing to pay for the right kind of coverage, but this sounds a bit nothingeverhappens. If something is interesting/amusing enough then it will get articles about it organically.

Telling your source of revenue that they're being removed from the platform, prompting many to seek other platforms, and absolutely destroying their confidence, is not a sane viral marketing move. I don't think they're that disconnected from reality.

This is like threatening to raise taxes to attract corporations.

Look at how many times youtube has pissed off creators. They have a monopoly and they know it.

OnlyFans will still be good money and still be able to attract new people willing to take their clothes off and cash in.

I think these are different.

Youtube content discovery is mostly through the algorithm. For OnlyFans, it seems to be mostly through outside promotion. If your ability find new members is all on you, I doubt it matters, as much, where you go.

It’s the next step after Ashly-Madison

No, I think they wanted to pressure payment providers to relent, by redirecting public fury that way. Seems like it worked.

Etsy would be another fine example: starting off as a platform for artisanal, craft and maker communities, then at scale opening the floodgates to become a market for mass produced factory knockoffs and junk, infuriating and adversely affecting their original user base.

Doubt it. This IMO is probably the best PR maneuver ever conceived. I doubt they ever planned to do it.

The BBC was just about to release a long-researched exposé about all the moderation issues they have and how child porn and abuse were going unchecked on their platform. This was a supposed to be a huge deal that could destroy them if the media at large rallied around that story like they did with Pornhub. By making this announcement before it came out they stole the narrative and switched the focus away from that problem and towards the issue of what are all the sex workers going to do when they suddenly lose their income and also just how crazy the announcement was in of itself.

They did it with perfect timing and drummed up such a fuss with such a wild and seemingly out of nowhere change that when that article actually dropped, it was merely background noise and not the primary focus of media coverage. The media likes to hyper-focus on issues for a short period of time (with a few exceptions, trump/covid/amazon being a few) and then quickly move on regardless of whether the issue/story has finished or resolved itself in anyway. Which is what will likely happen here, OnlyFans will likely make it through this mostly unscathed and with a ton of publicity.

> The BBC was just about to drop a long-researched exposé

Source?

It's been an ongoing story ramping up since May, but this I believe is the main story with all the research they did.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58255865

Ah, I now realize you meant 'drop' as in 'release', I misread the context and thought you meant 'drop' as in 'abandon'. My mistake!

Oh god, what typically terrible, tendentious journalism.

This is the kind of article that tries to dish up dozens of random allegations, intermixing them in strange ways, hoping that what sticks with the reader is a general sense of wrong-doing.

Among other things, it tries to imply that Only Fans somehow allows "big" accounts to post child porn multiple times with a warning, including by misusing the world "illegal". In reality, and pending evidence to the contrary, it is instead reasonable to assume that Only Fans will let people get away with a warning for a terms of service violation, which is entirely a different thing.

> This is the kind of article that tries to dish up dozens of random allegations, intermixing them in strange ways, hoping that what sticks with the reader is a general sense of wrong-doing.

Literally the first paragraph is the smoking gun:

> Internal documents, leaked to BBC News, reveal that OnlyFans allows moderators to give multiple warnings to accounts that post illegal content on its online platform before deciding to close them.

I.e., they literally allowed their users to post illegal stuff (apparently including CSAM, according to the guy from US Homeland Security they quote?) and keep making money, rather than reporting such cases. The rest is secondary. BBC editors are actually usually good at applying the inverted pyramid principle.

Maybe I am missing something but that is not how I understand the BBC article. The article doesn't specify exactly what the illegal content mentioned in the leaked documents is. It could simply be copyright violations or similar, which every major content site also turns a blind eye to unless they receive a formal DMCA notice.

So I am not seeing anything to support your claim that:

> they literally allowed their users to post illegal stuff (apparently including CSAM, according to the guy from US Homeland Security they quote)

The homeland security agent also does not appear to ever say that onlyfans intentionally allows such content. It seems his only contribution to the article is the observation that a large volume of CSAM he sees on other sites appear to originate on onlyfans. This is the entire section of the article which mentions him.

> Special agent Austin Berrier, from US Homeland Security, specialises in investigating child exploitation online. He estimates he finds between 20-30 child abuse images a week which he says have clearly originated on OnlyFans. He says every internet forum he has visited as part of his investigations in the past six months or so, has included child abuse images from OnlyFans. Most of them are videos that were live streamed on the site. In some of them, children are receiving direction - he says.

> "It's out there, it's all over the place and it's being widely traded."

> The homeland security agent also does not appear to ever say that onlyfans intentionally allows such content. It seems his only contribution to the article is the observation that a large volume of CSAM he sees on other sites appear to originate on onlyfans.

The three strikes policy creates a vehicle of exploitation. First two strikes an abuser posts something illegal OF doesn’t ban or report them, and in fact helpfully lets them know. Subsequently, in future uploads, they obscure any observable illegality to not trigger moderation, but their followers (which they didn’t lose, because they didn’t get banned) know what they’re really about and together with OF enable the abuser to keep making money.

They’ll just publish the article again. I don’t see why that type of controversy would just go away.

This is the most plausible explanation in my opinion.

OF we’re in the potential firing line so they rallied their user base and created a strong narrative.

They can now say that they tried to limit porn but too many vulnerable people would suffer as a result.

It’s a brilliant maneuver if this is what happened.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke

In reality they always knew it made no sense, but the amount of free PR they got from every major news outlet across the world posting essentially: “Popular pornographic app only available for a short while!” Is absolutely insane, and made the full circus with it all.

It’s like Red Bull leaning into the “dangerous drink” coverage.

How do you advertise a porn platform to the mainstream? By (briefly) pretending it's not a porn platform and getting coverage in virtually every major news provider!

Because now everyone is invested in the news event, they are likely to hear about the reversal of the decision.

Here my conspiracy theory, which closely related to what you are saying.

The BBC was investigating OnlyFans and found damaging stuff[1]. The leadership at OnlyFans was trying to think of a way to avoid the resulting bad press so they come up with the brilliant idea of announcing an upcoming Ban on all sexual material.

This will keep distracted while they work on improving their content moderation. When ready, they can announce their new policy: sexual content will be allowed, but with better moderation! (Exactly what they should have been doing all along).

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58273914

The cynic in me believe they may be involved in a honeypot operation, which will ensure they continue operating while not having to deal with backlash.

I don't think this was a PR stunt. OF relies on the talent to bring viewers, so publicly signaling to your talent "your job here is not safe, you should explore other options" seems far too risky a move to make intentionally.

My understanding was that they were being cut off by payment processors and banks and that drove the decision.

Was this resolved?

I would also like to know on whether it's possible for someone to start their own payment processors? There are tutorials on how to start an ISP, so should be possible for payment processors too no?

No because the banks from which the payments come from must support said processors.

Many countries have their own local payment processors, but it's still only a country-wide thing.

So I guess starting a bank is the next step?

Payment processing isn’t something a bank gets to decide on their own either. It’s decided by a group. In the US it’s NACHA:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NACHA

I don’t see any mention of payment processing in there. Have another link?

Sounds like a cartel gatekeeping the role of processor, and then the processors can put pressure on any business to do what they want or face “the consequences” which means no income (aside from crypto which most people don’t know how to use).

The bar is probably much higher. Among other things you're going to have a ton of regulatory controls to deal with.

Why not use crypto? Porncoin2.

Is there a way to do that where customers / content creators don't eventually hit traditional payment processor / bank?

not until you can reliably buy groceries, pay rent, pay utilities, etc with that crypto, it has to get exchanged for local currency somehow.

You still need to pass through a bank to convert it to anything usable.

How will the banks know the crypto came from porn, though? Receive payments either to your own wallet or straight to Coinbase, convert to USD, transfer to your bank, and we're done, right? What am I missing?

Maybe that to accept payments the porn company has to publish wallet IDs, so payments can in fact be traced back to them?

That doesn't seem like it would be a problem for individual creators though, unless all exchanges coordinate to ban sex workers or something (not to mention decentralized exchanges like bisq, or in-person exchanges like localbitcoins).

I think the traditional Visa/MasterCard/American Express/Discover payment processor has established a significant enough moat to make joining them unattractive.

There are several challengers like Paypal, Venmo, Zelle, Coinbase, etc that attack from a slightly different angle. I think the thing that is most common is that have super low cost bank transfer options, and they encourage users to maintain a balance. Processing payments locally is 100x-1000x preferable then processing payments externally for these players.

PayPal is even worse for sex workers, they're banning people left and right if they even suspect you might be involved into anything relating to it.

Their official stance always has been that this is due to the credit card companies, the reality rather is that Paypal doesn't want to deal with the rampant fraud (aka post-nut clarity) in porn.

Starting your own payment processor is done reasonably frequently, it has a certain barrier of entry (a few million and a year or two for all the approvals, so feasible with investor backing if you have a valid business reason to make a payment processor) but it's being done regularly and also you can buy and rebrand an existing one, which is a common way to get a quicker market entry at the cost of a bit more money.

However, that new processor will be a member of some existing payment systems e.g. Visa network and bound by all the same constraints as the other processors there. Creating your own alternative to a payment system (e.g. a major, widely and internationally supported card network like Visa or MC) is not really plausible. Perhaps you can look at the whole setup of cryptocurrencies+all the crypto exchange companies as something like such an alternative system, so there's one alternative made in this millenium.

It is. The problem is connecting to the rest of the financial system. Imagine starting an "ISP" that had not upstream connectivity. It wouldn't be an ISP then. Same problem here.

There's a few players here:

payment gateways, this is a service that provides the checkout service on a website and handles protected credit card information. Payment gateways also provide anti-fraud services.

payment processors, these execute the actual transaction. They are members of card associations like Visa and connect the card issuing bank and the merchant bank of the payee.

merchant banks, these are the banks that hold the company's bank account that the funds from the payment processor come into.

card associations, Visa/Mastercard these provide the connectivity and set the high level rules.

card issuers, these entities extend credit and may be retail banks or other parties.

there is a difference between Amex/Discover and Visa/Mastercard in that the former are also the issuer. That's why you also see Visa debit cards in Europe, they're using the payment processing network but not extending credit.

It should be clear that starting a new payment gateway is trivial. It takes money to properly comply but ultimately this is a software business. Starting a new payment processor is much harder but it doesn't matter because all payment processors must comply with the card association rules to get access to that network.

Starting your own card network would require attracting issuers who would then issue cards that people could use to pay for OnlyFans... probably not realistic!

It was the threat by Visa and MC to cut them off that was the killer here, plenty of payment processors would be happy to take their money but not if the card networks ban the company.

I suspect that OnlyFans realized they have the choice of either having a business that makes it incredibly hard to process payments, or to have no meaningful business at all. It's too late to pivot the brand to SFW with a couple of users going slightly over the line (similar to Patreon).

There are US laws that I can’t remember the names of which make financial institutions legally responsible (probably bad English) for crimes that happen on platforms they sell their services to.

So VISA could be fined for any trafficking that happen on OnlyFans. This is also why Pronhub had to remove almost all their videos if they wanted to keep credit card services.

As an European I’m a fan of laws that make platforms and big tech responsible for the content they house, but there is no denying that vetting that every OnlyFan sexworker is a task they can’t likely perform easily.

Of course moderation is only one of the solutions, paying money and accepting the financial damage that may come from lack of moderation is another. Of course the big banks know this, which is why they charge an insane margin for their credit card services to platforms like onlyfans, it’s likely they simply upped the price behind the closed doors.

Coinbase (and other financial services) do a pretty good job of requiring photo id on signup; I don't know what OF procedure is, but there's definitly precedent.

I'd be interested in the Coinbase verification requirements, do you have a link? Like a lot of Companies these day they don't give that information away before you sign up and agree to their ToS.

It's government provided ID + SSN + photo of yourself + address / personal details. If your gov ID doesn't have your current address you have to show a utility or other bill.

That all wouldn't be good enough for sex crimes though, because even if you have a passport + gov ID + a notary signed statement saying you are 18 and your own mother vouching for you, the counterparty can still be convicted of rape if it turns out you're lying about your age.

Of course this is really all just to keep the law abiding law abiding. Criminals on the dark web will just buy a forged electronic id package and KYC is bypassed.

Sex crimes are often strict liability. You violate the law whether you know or even meant to perform the act or not. For instance, Cody Wilson was sentenced for statutory rape after a sexual encounter with an individual who had a fake ID that stated they were 18, looked 18, and stated they were 18.

That sounds insane and like a failing of a justice system.

A drop in the ocean of failure.

I assume it's because no one wants to be figuring out where the line is for whether a person was "tricked enough" for sex with a minor to be allowed.

I'm just trying to think of an apt comparison - for instance, posession of heroin is a federal crime where the intent doesn't matter, at least the way the law is written. If you are found with a bag of heroin, that's a crime, regardless of what your intentions were.

However, I have a really hard time believing that if you went to a normal grocery store, bought a bag of flour that clearly says "flour" on it, had a receipt for flour, brought it home with the intention of making some bread, and then the police bust down your door and find that actually, it's pure heroin - I doubt you would be convicted. That's why the case above surprises me so much - the guy went above and beyond, by even checking the ID, if anything it's the other person who should be convicted of crime and put behind bars here.

Cody wilson met her through a sugardaddy site. The site requires ID verification but she used a fake ID. Every girl on the site was supposed to be 18. (Turns out she was 16 I believe).

Of course the girl voluntarily went to the site, signed up, and accepted a cash payment. She never even reported anything to the police. She was talking to a school councilor ("Mandatory Reporter") and mentioned she was earning money by sleeping with men. The school councilor was then required to refer it to police for prosecution, even though none of the parties wanted it.

The DA was happy to take it on because Cody Wilson of course is the guy responsible for making 3d printed guns popular, and he had a number of political enemies.

Does that solve the issue though? If you’re trafficking human beings you could probably use their old ID to sign them up and then still commit the crime afterwards.

It’s more than that. Anyone who works for the company can be held personally liable for trafficking and distribution.

> There are US laws that I can’t remember the names of which make financial institutions legally responsible (probably bad English) for crimes that happen on platforms they sell their services to.

How is it enforced? Any high-profile cases?

No idea, I just know about it because I work in the public sector of Denmark where we build our national digital identity system in corporation with banks, and we had a notice of changing terms some time back. I didn’t get too into it because it wouldn’t affect us, but I remember briefing over it because it had some sort of eye catching headline.

>corporation

I think you mean collaboration.

> There are US laws that I can’t remember the names of which make financial institutions legally responsible (probably bad English) for crimes that happen on platforms they sell their services to.

If it's what I'm thinking of, these laws are collectively known as "know your customer" or "KYC" [0]. It's primarily intended to prevent racketeering, money laundering, and other organized criminal activity, but the laws are written very broadly in part because they're looking for surreptitious activity.

In the case of sex work, it's difficult to verify that all performers are of legal age, that all activity is consensual, and so on. Since there are many, many ways that sex work can be illegal, it's very complicated.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer

Facebook reports over one million(!!!) images of child sexual abuse on their platform per year, and that's only the stuff that they identify and find. Clearly it's a platform where a huge amount of illegal materials are being exchanged, yet Visa and MasterCard happily keep Facebook as a client.

>>but there is no denying that vetting that every OnlyFan sexworker is a task they can’t likely perform easily.

Just make every performer submit a valid ID to have an account, if my mobile provider can ask for that, why not OF?

What prevents abuse after posting a valid ID?

Unless you’re paying for the images on Facebook the transfer isn’t being used to pay for illegal sex. This is the difference between the two in terms of liability.

>>What prevents abuse after posting a valid ID?

Nothing, but it should shield them from liability. They can always say a valid ID that shows the user is over 18 was submitted, if there is any legal issue then it can and should be handled by the law enforcement.

>>Unless you’re paying for the images on Facebook the transfer isn’t being used to pay for illegal sex.

Payment processors dropped pornhub because there was some illegal material on the website - it not being paid was irrelevant.

> They can always say a valid ID that shows the user is over 18 was submitted, if there is any legal issue then it can and should be handled by the law enforcement.

That wouldn’t make them less liable for any illegal content they fail to identify though.

It’s not like Facebook where they can hide behind being a platform because American politicians had no issue making platforms very responsible for the hosted content as soon as it was bundled into anti-trafficking legalisation.

I expecte that the EU will strike at “regular” SoMe in much the same manner when the legislation on anti-fake-news passes through the bureaucracy.

I don’t understand why they don’t just use Bitcoin or some other crypto, seems like this is the exact use case it was designed for

It's not practical to use bitcoin for individual transactions due to the high cost. If there was an easy way for non-tech people to cash in and out of crypto currency easily I bet that would be a good alternative.

Now ask yourself how much business they could do if they couldn't process credit cards or make cash payouts?

>I don’t understand why they don’t just use Bitcoin or some other crypto, seems like this is the exact use case it was designed for

The most popular options, BTC & ETH, are incredibly expensive for $20 subscription payments.

So pay with LTC or XMR instead? There are plenty of high liquidity coins with low transaction fees, these are just a couple examples. If the alternative is to not cam at all it seems pretty obvious, even if you are unbanked and get hit with 7% fees from an ATM or crypto-fiat in person moneychanger.

It's also trivial to exchange BTC to LTC (or other low fee coin), you don't even need KYC or in some cases to even use an exchange (atomic swap BTC-LTC). So the cam girls could take fees in LTC and then swap them to BTC once they have enough value to be worth the transactional costs.

No. Ones with transaction fees under $3.

Do you know anyone who's able to make use of crypto in the real world without using a bank of some sort?

Anyone who has feet that are able to walk to an ATM or person on someplace like localmonero? In places like Mexico and Switzerland there is no KYC, you just put the cash into the ATM or send to the address and take it out, there's no need to have an identity or bank account.

Yes:

> “The proposed Oct. 1, 2021 changes are no longer required due to banking partners’ assurances that OnlyFans can support all genres of creators,” [an OnlyFans spokesperson] said.

https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/onlyfans-drops-porn-ba...

The Variety article theorizes that the backlash may have actually been exactly the outcome OnlyFans wanted, because they were able to focus public outrage toward the banks and payment processors putting them in that position.

I'm honestly surprised the market forces are strong enough that the banks have to care about the bad PR at all

Nobody wants to change banks even when it affects them directly. How many people are going to change banks out of principle?

I guess some Gen Zers might be motivated not to pick Chase as their first bank?

I don't have great answers to that, although I think by "banking partners" they actually mean "credit card companies" and most specifically mean MasterCard, which (assuming reporting on this I've read is correct) was or may still be in the process of further tightening their policies around adult content.

Well, a not-great but plausible answer, maybe -- companies make changes, both good and ill, because they're panicked over PR fiascos all the time. From all appearances, MasterCard announced those policy changes because of PR pressure that was put on them by "Exodus Cry," a fundamentalist Christian anti-porn activist group. OnlyFans may have calculated that their best bet was to knock Exodus Cry off their hashtag-save-the-children pedestal.

Honestly that seems even more far-fetched. Visa and MasterCard are essentially a duopoly. Where on earth are customers going to flee to on bad pr?

This seems like a good use case for crypto currencies.

Realistically it would take decades, or great strides in usability, for cryptocurrency to really reach the main stream to the point it could be considered a serious alternative for credit cards.

Could you speak more to the areas in usability that you find currentl lacking?

Let’s say OF was forced to switch to crypto payments. They could make the switch tomorrow. Link to a few popular crypto exchanges so that customers know where to buy crypto and Bob’s your uncle.

How long until their customer service system gets flooded with questions about how to use cryptocurrency, and complaints from users who's funds got stolen from XYZ shady exchange.

99% of normal people find cryptocurrency strange and inscrutable, and if you think otherwise you're in a bubble.

Customers may not flee, but:

1. Customers in e.g. the EU may push their reps to "do something" about two US companies controlling all e-commerce.

2. Customers frustrated that Mastercard have gone on the record as refusing to block payments to terrorist-supporting orgs while refusing to process payments to look at titties may pressure regulators to start having a much closer look at Mastercard's money flows.

Both of those seem like meaningful concerns.

I think you're vastly overestimating how much influence "customer complaints" could ever have over the global monetary system.

Regulators are much more on the side of MasterCard than they are on the side of disgruntled pornography customers.

No, they called out specific banks, including Chase

I think a factor that they may be concerned about is that there is a large userbase that is spending a lot of money on OF and that they may very well all just move to BTC or some other cryptocurrency based solution to exchanging money. And once that happens, you have a younger generation that is more comfortable dabbling in making financial transactions without the banks being involved.

This just sounds like wishful thinking from cryptocurrency enthusiasts. There is no precedent of this happening, so I doubt they were so terrified about a completely hypothetical scenario.

There also hasn't been a precedent for a platform that has a large userbase spending hundreds of millions of dollars on sex workers being abruptly cut off by payment providers with no other recourse to processing payments from their userbase. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Pretty much the only threat to the Visa/Mastercard duopoly is public awareness that leads to antitrust enforcement. They're usually immune to any kind of backlash but this seemed to strike a cord with many people who are frustrated with America's puritanism (myself included).

I don't have a dog in this fight but it certainly reminded me how much power V+MC have to become an existential threat along the likes of Google and Spectrum. Next time I write to my Congressman about antitrust, I'll be sure to put them top of the list now (for all that's going to do...)

I've seen so many different grand theories proposed in this thread, but to me this seems like it was the most obvious one from the start. My guess: yes, it was intended to achieve an effect; no, it wasn't built on false pretenses / a viral marketing stunt / a way to avoid negative press from the BBC. It was probably a way for them to respond to escalating pressure from financial intermediaries with some pressure of their own.

Genius two-step marketing.

People who knew nothing about OnlyFans: “Hmm, this company I’ve never heard of is making the news for banning explicit sexual content.”

A few days later, on several mainstream reporting channels, “Just kidding, OnlyFans will continue to have steamy hot explicit sexual content available for a low, low monthly price.”

In fact I subbed one couple on OF just few days ago because I thought OF was going to kick them out and I wanted the content before that happened. Anecdotal, I know, but I wonder how many other people did the same.

Is there any evidence that this was the plan, or are you just trying to show solidarity for other business people?

I’m hypothesizing a tactic that would turn out to be brilliant (and funny as hell). I doubt it was the actual plan.

I mean, yes, public relations as a whole is getting better and better.

A question to you entrepreneurial types. 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 planned move that was now canceled). 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)?

Investments aren’t loans, so you don’t have to pay it back the way a loan might be.

Thanks, I guess I was wrong on that count. It makes sense.

The first part continues to baffle me. If I have a proven profit of $X/year and I have the market captured (speaking on the order of 10% or 50%, doesn't matter), how does it make sense to seek investment in the order of 100*X? What's the goal? Why not just keep milking the proven cash cow and stop growing and risking?

That's a different strategy - you can be shooting for a sustainable medium size company, or try to become a tech behemoth.

Both choices are valids, but investors tend to push you towards growing forever. So if your board is already controlled by investors (as opposed to founders or employees), they'll encourage you to raise more to grow more.

It doesn't really make sense in my opinion, so maybe I'm the wrong person to answer, but I think it's a game of statistics.

OF has captured a certain market, and is making a certain amount of money. Of companies like that, a small but not insignificant number grows to super major size, the size that can do an IPO and exit for billions.

The current owners are OF are trying to capitalize on the value investors put on that possibility, and on the reduced risk of having so much money invested. With each investment round the risk of failure goes down a little, and the risk of major success goes up a little.

A major example of this is Facebook. It was profitable and well established, why would they need extra investment or an IPO? Then out of nowhere Facebook bought Instagram, and Whatsapp, and it is clear now that without those two acquisitions Facebook could have been in serious trouble. The absolute crapton of cash they got effectively took away risk.

So it's a chance to de-risk and cash out of OF, and let the big boys play on taking OF to an IPO.

You need to look at it slightly differently. The founders aren't looking at the money they can make from the cash cow. Revenue is a long-term earner and requires them to keep being successful for that long term. An exit (via a sale of the business) is the real short-term earner & lets them walk away (m/b)illionaires.

Therefore the game is to optimise valuation - the higher the investment round, the higher the company valuation, and the higher the sale value.

Simple as that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo

“I don’t want to make a little bit of money every day. I want to make a fuckton of money all at once.”

One aspect is that it's a way for the founders get to take some money off the table. It's not prudent to have 99% of your wealth tied up in a single "cash cow" no matter how proven it is, you do want to diversify.

What risk is there?

* If you fail to grow, the investors lose their money. But the company still exists afterwards.

* If you succeed, you still get many benefits.

You're risking __someone else__'s money. And they're not even asking for the money back, just equity. In fact, a common scheme is to take the money, pay yourself, and do nothing. (Slightly fraudulent, but its really hard to tell the difference. Ex: all the yachts that Adam Neumann bought when he got investment money for WeWork).

As the CEO, you still get the salary, and that salary comes out of the investment money. So at a minimum, you often give yourself a raise for convincing other people to give lots of money to your company.

--------

There's also something to be said about cashing out. If you're tired of the grind of building a company, you can sell out and make $100s millions or $Billions with a company like this.

Ex: Notch burned out and dropped off the grid after a few years of Minecraft development. He took the $5 Billion offer from Microsoft and then largely disappeared. I don't think anyone can blame him, indie developers at heart don't want to deal with the politics of leading a 10+ million video game players.

Seeking investors is the path towards cashing out and retiring. You need to find a new owner of the company, and selling your stake / equity to them is a major step towards retirement.

I guess the risk is going from possible 50%+ ownership of a a company worth a few millions or tens of millions to much less ownership of a company worth roughly the same amount if it fails to grow. Or the risk of being forced out of control, I guess.

I think that's a good illustration of why people do it. 10% of a $20 million dollar company is still worth something and even if you lost ten or twenty million or so from theoretically doing nothing, having 10% of a multi-billion dollar company is worth a whole lot, so people like that gamble.

> I guess the risk is going from possible 50%+ ownership of a a company worth a few millions or tens of millions to much less ownership of a company worth roughly the same amount if it fails to grow. Or the risk of being forced out of control, I guess.

If the company is worth $50 million, and you sell 10% of it, the company gets $5 million bucks.

Since the company is now $5-million richer, you'd expect the company to really be worth $55 million at least (since its the same company, except now with $5 million more bucks).

It is now on the onus of the CEO to ensure that the extra cash does indeed grow the company's value. Sure, the money could be pissed away in a party yacht. But ideally, a good CEO will do something reasonable with the money. (Though the party yacht is often then used to raise more money from other rich folk, raising the value of the company again, lol)

As long as the CEO doesn't fall into the trap of just grabbing money without purpose... as long as the CEO has a plan for what to do with the investment money... its probably a good thing. IMO, where a lot of CEOs make a mistake is that they go into full-tilt money raising mode and never stop to think if they have "enough money for now". But I doubt that OnlyFans is at this stage of the game, OnlyFans probably can grow much faster with a bit more investment money.

Yeah, I just meant to show what is probably a worst case (not really, worst case would be company goes under or loses a lot of value/market share I guess), where they accept money and it's spent in an effort to help the business but just doesn't. I guess in the example you put forth that would be a $50 million company that takes $5 million, spends it on a major advertising campaign, and sees zero difference. Now they've given away equity and gotten nothing in return other than that what they tried before doesn't work. The flip side is that it helps immensely and your lower equity might be worth more overall. Any anything in between.

At least that's how I understand it. I'm not trying to pretend I know a huge amount about this. It's mostly general knowledge accumulated from normal sources and discussions here, so if you think I'm totally missing something, I'm happy to hear it.

> What's the goal? Why not just keep milking the proven cash cow and stop growing and risking?

I'm going to ignore the whole "cashing out" and "hyper growth" answers because they've been covered to death.

Rather, I'll just say that this OnlyFans situation is a great example of why you'd want to do that. OnlyFans is a great case of what you described — they have definitely captured a significant chunk of the premium adult content market, and have nice steady revenue streams from there. They could just keep milking that and improving it incrementally.

Yet, that whole revenue stream comes with a huge risk attached (a risk of 'extinction event' proportions) in the form of payment providers refusing to do business with you. Near as I can tell, this whole situation is at least somewhat due to Mastercard pressuring OnlyFans to stop offering adult content (or, at least, to offer it under much more restrictive terms), so this is not some hypothetical risk, it's an actual credible threat. Investment gives them the resources to go find ways to work around that risk somehow.

> Why does an globally established and growing company with a proven business model want to raise a billion dollar investment?

The suggestion I saw go past on Twitter was "because the current owner wants to cash out his $MM investment" but I cannot vouch for the accuracy, etc.

Investors are the final customer in a bubble. Uber and WeWork were never going to be profitable. The game was to convince investors they could be. In a bubble, it feels like anything is possible and silly things like math just weigh you down.

It's not necessarily money they'll have to pay back, it can be investors getting a share of the company (and existing investors getting their share diluted).

Sometimes they might want to raise to grow faster than your competitors. Not sure about their market, but sometimes there is a "winner takes all" market where the winner isn't established yet. So it's a race to grow fast enough to be the first to get to that network effect.

Look at online videos for example. Youtube has a near monopoly, while Dailymotion, Vimeo and others are just getting scraps. If your market hasn't settled yet, even if you're already established and growing, getting investors money could mean the difference between becoming Youtube and becoming Dailymotion.

The devs of FloatPlane considered entering that market as soon as the exit was announced, but given the development time and the fact that most of the content creators migrated to other platforms, and therefore they would be very late.

Huh, the thought came out unintelligible.

Let me try again.

It’s perceived trajectory. You think they can’t grow any more- they think they can grow 100x over with enough capital

Growing organically takes a long time and require a lot of luck. Capital can unlock massive growth if used in the right way.

Besides, why not? If the company gets bigger, all the execs win, if the company raises money and wastes it and collapses, the execs are rich already and just move on.

> Besides, why not? If the company gets bigger, all the execs win, if the company raises money and wastes it and collapses, the execs are rich already and just move on.

That mental equation depends on who owns the company. Who the big insider ownership stakes are held by. If you own 43% of OnlyFans as the primary founder, you're going to think twice about mass dilution unless it's absolutely necessary. If you can avoid hefty dilution and still build the company, your wealth outcome will be dramatically better in the end. That's why not.

OnlyFans isn't a zero insider ownership shell run by suits at this juncture. It's only 4-5 years old. It was founded by two brothers (that may still retain upwards of a quarter of the business), and then Leo Radvinsky from the MyFreeCams cam site purchased 3/4 of it. MyFreeCams is a money spigot, which funds Leo's venture activities, including the purchase of OnlyFans. Taking an enormous dilution hit would not be ideal for someone in that position, he would want to be very strategic about it (he already has financial resources).

This is Leo's venture capital enterprise:

https://leo.com

You don't pay investments back. They are a purchase of shares. The exchange is made and you're done.

> 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)?

Moving into new markets, expanding the scope of the existing market, etc. Is OnlyFans that different from Youtube, or Patreon? Is it that different from GoFundMe?

There are plenty of adjacent markets that OF could be trying to tackle.

> You don't pay investments back. They are a purchase of shares. The exchange is made and you're done.

This is a common misunderstanding that equity funding is free. For the owner of a business, taking outside investment and issuing share in return is diluting the original owners stake in the business. If effect, you are paying for these investments forever because you are giving up some portion of the businesses future profits.

There are certainly situations where this makes sense if you are able to grow much faster with the additional capital. However, the investment is not free.

That's correct, taking venture capital is almost always a massive obligation and a very real operational liability. It's just not a liability in the financial loan/debt sense, the liability isn't on the balance sheet as debt, it's in the obligation and complexities that come with managing the new capital partners and their self-interest; self-interest which may not always align with your own or the company's best interests. The operational liability is burrowed into the cap table.

I'm a CEO, I'm pretty familiar with the costs. I didn't say it was free, I very clearly said the opposite - that it is a purchase.

The parent was very clearly (and admittedly, elsewhere) thinking of investments as a literal loan.

Raising capital is not always for money. It can also be a means of paying for protection.

Letting powerful people wet their beak has always been a part of how the game is played.

Because that's just what tech startups do now: as long as you have a good "story", VCs throwing around their funny money left and right are easy to find. And once you're been tainted by it, you're forever fucked, locked into either going public or being bought out all the while needing to achieve hockey-stick growth. Organically grown tech companies are very few and far between.

The "old" boomer way of going to a bank with collateral to get a $750k loan is non-existent in tech. Not to mention, the bank is probably way more scrutinizing than VCs are (or just plain don't understand and will deny you).

This is actually an important question.

First, they probably don't have to pay back with interest. Large investments, provided by upper tier firms are "cheap" atm. For loans that means very low interest. More commonly in tech world, these are equity investments. Investors get shares. Dividends are paid in theory, but not or on a strict schedule and not if the company can't afford it. Increasingly, not at all. If you can be securitized and fed into the "high finance" system, you get to exist in a much more attractive monetary system.

A more pertinent question is "why do they need investment at all?" Assuming they can operate out of revenue, most answers to this question are controversial, one way or another.

One reason is cashing out founders and early investors. OF is popular now, but it could lose popularity. Founders are currently paper millionaires and selling equity gives them an opportunity to sell shares too. Even if the company itself sells all the shares, just having cash in OF's account is a buffer to risk.

A more amorphous set of reasons is "getting in with the in crowd." An equity investment is also a valuation event. It gives shares a market value. Besides allowing founders to sell shares, it also makes it easier to compensate employees with options. The company can use shares to buy other companies. Etc. All this relies on shares having a market value, and selling shares to an institutional investor is a way of doing this.

There's also good reason to establish a relationship with a financial backer. You'd rather talk to a merchant bank when times are good, revenue is flowing and investors want in, not when the company is struggling. In the future, you might need emergency cash on a short turnaround. You might want growth finance... likely for a network that needs to scale. otherwise, you leave opportunities for the competition. You kind of need an institutional backers to help you IPO, or otherwise interact with the financial sector.

A lot of this is pretty speculative, but an OnlyFans backed by Softbank might find it easier to negotiate terms with standard payments providers. It might have an easier path to IPO, etc.

In the old days, when firms built factories and made widgets, it was always big news when a big firm signed with a big bank. This was presumed to be a long term relationship, with the merchant bank funding the company and selling its bonds, leading major investment rounds when needed. These relationships were the bedrock of capitalism. Japan's economy for example, was entirely structured around merchant banks. "Keiretsu" brands like Mitsubishi & Mitsui were basically just a bunch of companies backed by a single merchant bank.

Marking the value of your company to market can make you richer over night. If you have a $10/year income stream, a bank might run a calculation valuing that income stream at $50-$100. If you can instead get investors to value it at $1000 (because it is a "tech company" and deserves an insane valuation), you are a lot richer than you used to be. Even if you lose 90% of your income stream, you are still probably richer.

This comes down to the question: why do you want to own a high-value asset? So you can borrow against it to buy more assets. This is how Jeff Bezos can fly around on a $500 million jet while selling $0 of his stock.

Because it's so hard to get traditional investment, entrepreneurs in the sex industry often see that they are a lot poorer (in quality of life terms) than people who own businesses that are much less successful.

For the sake of correctness, Bezos is definitely not in a $500M jet. The only jet at that price is owned by a Saudi Prince.

Also, the idea that Bezos and people like him never sell stock is just completely wrong. This stuff is public record, you can look it up. Here’s an article that did it already [0]. Which means, yes, Bezos and all the other über rich pay taxes and don’t borrow money to avoid taxes until they die.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2021/06/24/heres-...

Also, if you borrow against a stock as collateral, that loan will come due eventually. Don’t you have to sell something to pay that money back?

>Also, the idea that Bezos and people like him never sell stock is just completely wrong.

ProPublica did some pretty good investigating reporting showing that no, that idea is not "completely wrong".

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...

I said “never sell stock” is wrong. You read “never take loans against shares” which I didn’t say.

I think somebody in the last thread about this topic links to an article about the money being used to buy out the founder of only fans.

OnlyFans is a classic two-sided marketplace with strong network effects. The more paying customers are already on the site the more attractive it is for new performers to choose OnlyFans as their platform, and the more performers there are on OnlyFans, the stronger the value proposition is for customers. That tends to give you a winner-take-all (or at least winner-take-most) market, where if you can establish a dominant market position is becomes self-reinforcing, you become very hard to displace, and can command very large profit margins. It's exactly the dynamic that has kept eBay the primary way of doing auctions online for over two decades.

When you have a market like that, it often makes sense to pursue growth as an end in itself, well past the point of profitability, because the reward for coming in first place (a durable monopoly) is way higher than a linear projection would suggest. Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) gives an especially clear explanation of this logic in Blitzscaling: https://www.blitzscaling.com/

> it often makes sense to pursue growth as an end in itself, well past the point of profitability

To be clear, growth is not an end in itself, even in this case -- profitability is still the end.

The point is to temporarily forego profit until you have an unassailable market lead, so that you can then more more profit in the long-term.

I wonder if there's market to be gained from people who otherwise wouldn't venture near a site with such reputation who might be converted into the main model.

A bit of a tangent, but the dynamics in high-value investment is quite the opposite. You have people with lots of money (they do exist) who don't have anything to do with that money. They want to make it grow, and often are paid or otherwise incentivized to make it grow, but it's kinda hard to find a way of making 1 billion make you 100 million in a couple of years, without doing micromanagement for 1000 different 1-million businesses.

So the market is skewed the other way: if you are a company that seems to be able to productively use a lot of money, they'll be throwing investments at you. And onlyfans is currently in a very good position to do this.

Also, from what I read the consensus seems to be their decision had nothing to do with investors (if I were an investor I'd be absolutely livid to hear it), but with payment processors, especially master card.

can you explain this a bit more? Why wouldn't "invest in an index fund" be the obvious alternative to micromanaging thousands of investments?

I'm sure lots do use index funds. And I'm sure quite a few should use index funds, but waste money instead in pointless investments. But most who look for other opportunities do it for the same reason most of us don't invest in index funds even if it's the safe bet: they want more.

Because then OF becomes a company worth X+a billion dollars. Your stock options go up accordingly, and you can take profit and walk away before the cows come home. It's like getting ahold of a stolen credit card and maxing out the credit limits with fraudulent purchases while you can. Most business leaders who these days only have tenures of a few years do not care about outlooks past a few years. Throw the hot potato into the next persons lap and you are already working the same angle in your next gig when the old one explodes in your wake.

The damage is already done. I was doing a photoshoot at my house with 2 models that have OnlyFans accounts. When the news hit they literally signed up for other platforms within an hour.

The other platforms are capitalizing on the news and finding ways to make migration to their platform as easy as possible.

I doubt it. With all this PR and every boomer on the planet now knowing exactly what OnlyFans is... their user base will explode, and models will come right back. They couldn't have hoped for more free marketing if they tried... genius.

So now they'll come back because OF still has the larger community.

I think they may stick around because it has the user base and why not, they are already making money so no point giving that up.

But now models will diversify across multiple platforms because the writing is on the wall. They may lose their income at any point so they are going to have backups.

People will forget this ever happened in a couple weeks. By then, they'll be angry about something new.

The old models won't use new platforms because it's so much easier to just stay on OnlyFans. They already chose the easiest career path with the most short-term gain, I don't see how they're suddenly going to start thinking long-term. I don't think these people think long-term at all, if they did they probably wouldn't do this.

Soon enough, new models will be joining without any knowledge that this ever happened. It'll get memory-holed in weeks.

  People will forget this ever happened in a couple weeks. By then, they'll be angry about something new.

Big true. The adult content creator community is famous for this.

  The old models won't use new platforms because it's so much easier to just stay on OnlyFans.

After building content and following there for multiple years, it would be stupid to think that a majority of them would follow to new platforms. A lot of subscribers are not interested in giving their CC information to new platforms all willynilly.

  Soon enough, new models will be joining without any knowledge that this ever happened. It'll get memory-holed in weeks.

And Onlyfans will continue to be the biggest and most well known name in adult content platforms, making it the most profitable site for content creators to use.

Just got this text from a model:

"I don't trust them at all and nor do the other girls. So diversifying is our best bet"

Every OF model has her own link in social media profile. They do marking via Instagram, Twitter, Reddit etc. It seems like the OF “community” doesn’t matter.

It matters because that's where their customers have accounts and presumably they don't wish to make a new account for each new person they want to follow.

I hear their cut is lower too, like 20% vs larger for the 2nd largest platform.

They know their platform. I presume that prior to the announcement they had tried everything they could to continue BAU.

The fact that they're able to now reverse the announcement makes me wonder what changed. Did they find a new banking or payout partner? Existing ones had a change of heart? Feels like there would be more to it than these possibilities.

Banks: if we ban onlyfans and other widely popular services, a decent number of people might actually turn into crypto and make our business extinct.

But OF didn't announce a move to crypto payments. They announced that they were wiping out a massive amount of their current business in order to stick with traditional payments.

Or more likely, it might raise eyebrows at how payment processors control the world right now and lead to some kind of legal action.

My guess is they are just paying higher transaction fees now

That would make sense from a perspective of the transactions being higher risk, so higher transaction fees could cover the additional risk. Why would they not have explored that option in the first place, though?

Probably just a ploy to make the payment processors think they would actually go through with banning porn on their platform. No one actually cares about the porn except a very small percentage of mostly religious nut jobs. They just wanted more money.

Certain categories (porn, gambling, etc) of payments reportedly have a lot more fraud associated with them. If that's true, it makes sense for this to just be settled through a rate-card.

Wonder if this was all a publicity stunt to put pressure on their payment processors.

Possibly.

The amount of coverage this got in the financial press (particularly the FT) would seem to support this theory.

Additionally, it's interesting that the reversal happened after he named the banks in his FT interview yesterday.

Since FT article is paywalled, would you be kind to quote these names here?

If so, I think that's a good thing. This should bring attention to payment processors' ability to effectively kill any type of business they don't agree with.

I'm not sure what the solution is. Should banks be forced to behave as a common carrier? Or do we want private companies to be able to ban the public from purchasing things like pornography and firearms by stopping adults from completing legal transactions?

Let's turn the question around instead: why shouldn't banks be forced to behave as common carriers, at least when it comes to things like processing payments, providing checking accounts, and other such basic services? What good does it do to start a business, only to be told by the banking industry that you can't open a bank account for your perfectly legal business?

I'm not sure if I'd include lending in "basic services." That seems a bit more debatable to me.

I'd include lending in basic services. However it would tie it to pure risk, along with don't let a customer get into too much debt. Pure risk means you only get to look at risk from an actuarial/numbers perspective, nothing more. Too much debt I'm not quite sure how to word into proper legalise but that needs to be done before we can actually do this - maybe just better bankruptcy laws so that risk goes up too high before the customer has too much debt?

The sticking point in my mind for lending is that risk undoubtedly varies by industry. It's not really very sensible to force banks to lend money to businesses without considering what industry they're in. At that point, how do you differentiate a sensible underwriting decision from unfair discrimination?

Interest rate and documentation.

Pretend that a batch of YC startups are all getting loans rather than ownership purchases. What effective interest rate are they paying? What is the default rate where the startup dies before acquisition/profitability/IPO?

Write a heuristic to determine a fair interest rate given the current prevailing rates, financial history of the company in question, financial history of similar companies, and similar objective and quantifiable subjective factors. Document it. When someone complains, demonstrate to your regulator that your procedure was fair, reasonable, and applied evenhandedly, and to the extent possible is consistent with actual outcomes.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Any new batch of startups is so risky, I can't imagine a bank lending them a cent at any non-usurious interest rate until they've been in business for a few years.

Banks often do lend at better rates to companies run by executives with a good history.

Sure, but not without a personal guarantee from one or more of said executives, I would imagine. At that point, it's effectively the bank lending the money to the exec though, and not lending to the company.

That is the point. They should have numbers to show which industries get rates, and targets that a company meet (how is an open question - it might not be possible) to move to a different rate - either up or down.

There are no numbers for industries banks don't serve.

That leaves only illegal black markets where those involved avoid banks anyway because banks report activity to the local government. (illegal money laundering schemes do use banks, but there are numbers for banks to use even if they don't know about the illegal side of the business)

Once in a while there is a brand new industry, but they tend to start small enough that banks can figure out numbers before the risk is too big to worry about.

Lending and banking should be considered separate, if related business IMO. And bankers should absolutely be considered common carriers. Lenders should not.

Dutch banks terminated accounts of Corona-critics / anti-vax'ers / conspiracy nuts ( you choose how to call them ).

I wonder if climate change critics are next.

Wow, source? I'm not opposed to looking it up, but a claim like that will come across stronger if you link something

Dutch source : https://www.metronieuws.nl/in-het-nieuws/binnenland/2021/08/...

When I submitted it, I tried to find English sources, but couldn't.

Payment processors are heavily regulated by govts in the jurisdictions they operate in. They're not operating in isolation, rather they act as choke points for policy enforcement.

I doubt it. I'd imagine one of their top priorities is relationship with models on their site. It's not like they have some crazy proprietary platform that couldn't be copied. If it came out this was a head fake it would damage that trust with models.

The CEO actually blamed banks, not payment processors. He specifically said MasterCard was not to blame, but name-dropped banks that he did blame.

I don't think payment processors would care at all because they're an oligopoly. I doubt most banks would care much either, but maybe they are afraid of losing business from large-volume merchants.

Most likely some alternative banks stepped up and told OnlyFans they'd love to work with them.

I figured it was some kind of publicity stunt from the beginning.

There is no way they didn't know this would kill the company.

Absolutely. They may indeed have had pressure from the banks, but this is a solvable problem. They're servicing pornhub. If this is just about KYC, they can roll out or use one of the myriad identity verification services.

The tweet from their official account[1] reads:

Thank you to everyone for making your voices heard.

We have secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community and have suspended the planned October 1 policy change.

OnlyFans stands for inclusion and we will continue to provide a home for all creators.

This seems to match your theory.

[1]: https://twitter.com/OnlyFans/status/1430499277302816773

Given that people predictably started leaving the platform, I doubt it. There isn't a social network or content discoverability aspect to the service, so hopping to somewhere else is easy. And people will remain wary of OnlyFans since they could try to restrict content again since they've already shown from the original announcement that they don't really care about supporting NSFW content creators

One effect of the proposed ban would presumably to motivate content creators to look for alternative platforms. If it was a publicity stunt it seems like it would have had a pretty big downside.

Isn't "OnlyFans without sexual content" basically Patreon?

Hasn't this comment been made 100 times ready?

Possibly. Haven't read through all 5k comments on the previous posts.

Also, it was actually meant as a genuine question, not a snarky drive-by comment. I have only superficial knowledge of both platforms, so it would be nice to know whether there are some fundamental differences beyond "NSFW / Not NSFW".

I guess they offer similar subscription services but it seems to me (at least) that they serve completely different niches. For example, if a content creator says "check out my OnlyFans for subscriber-only content" versus "check out my Patreon for subscriber-only content", I would expect that they are selling completely different things.

Another parallel could be comparing HomeDepot and HobbyLobby. Both stores sell you things for DIY stuff, but they target different kinds of DIYers (even if they could sell some of the same items).

Ya, you’d suspect one is selling porn and one isn’t, at least that’s what I would have done.

> For example, if a content creator says "check out my OnlyFans for subscriber-only content" versus "check out my Patreon for subscriber-only content", I would expect that they are selling completely different things.

So, OF without p0rn is basically Patreon

I think there are more users of Patreon that uses it as a subscription donation service than there are on OnlyFans, with the primary content being available for free to anyone. Game reviews, mods and web comics comes to mind. I have no idea how large portion of the primary customer base those are for patreon.

Kind of? There are some tech differences on what the creators can do. Especially around video/live streaming that are all handled on site instead of externally like Patreon.

If I recall correctly OF basically started getting serious traction once Patreon banned photographic/video porn, so yes.

OnlyFans does have features that patreon doesn't that really improve the functionality for any type of creators; finer grained control over visibility of posts (you can sell things for additional money on top of the subscription cost), built in live streaming and video.

Patreon is really barebones, for example to host video just for Patrons you have to go through other sites which lets users leak out the info to access it since it's not usually directly tied to their Patreon account. There's no built in support for livestreaming on Patreon at all. All in all Patreon is a super basic private text blog.

Patreon has a hosted video thing in beta.

That's good they really need to provide more to their users than they do now. I get why because serving video is extremely expensive but not being able to do a properly private video on platform is a big gap.

The vast majority of patreon content is exposed like this where you can sign up, grab the content links, and then continue viewing the content after you unsubscribe before paying anything.

Their free Reddit ad campaign is over now.

I doubt this nets out as "free". The campaign was "this ship is sinking" (for people doing adult content), and subscribers and content creators have been acting accordingly.

I'm curious how much this may have impacted their users regardless. I imagine that a lot of people learned that relying on a single platform is dangerous and how important it is to diversify your online profile. I don't think people will trust Onlyfans anymore.

Network effects will always win, regardless of the trustworthiness of the platform.

As demonstrated time and again by Facebook.

And youtube. Creators constantly want to move away from youtube with it's content-id with incredibly slow appeals process that makes most types of fair use nearly impossible, it's demonetization that intransparently makes your videos unprofitable because you said the wrong word or made the wrong sound, the blatant favoritism when it comes to the "trending" page, etc.

But the viewers are on youtube, and network effects keep the viewers from switching. So there's just a graveyard of failed youtube alternatives.

That's true, until the viewer profile change or disappear, which happens very, very slowly, but it happens anyway. It happened several times in history. Nothing lasts forever.

I think streaming video is a different beast, because the market is littered with loss leaders. It's hard for content creators to switch to another platform when the only profitable ones are subscription based (and not competitive).

Even Youtube, for all its users and being part of an existing advertising company, struggles to break even (reportedly).

Video is so mind blowingly huge compared to everything else. A single youtube video can be multiple gb if you view the 4k60fps version. While making an alternative reddit or twitter is relatively trivial server cost wise.

The part that you are missing is that all of alternatives to YouTube pay creators little or no ad money and have far worse search engine/discoverability. If a creator is getting demonetized on youtube, moving to a platform with no monetization would not solve their problem.

And sooner or later, any platform that becomes popular would have to implement a content ID system and and have to deal with ban/demonetization waves every time Twitter/journalists discover a new type of offensive content on the platform.

There have been plenty of (mostly short-lived) competitors that paid out more per view than YouTube. But that's obviously meaningless if there are barely any viewers on the platform.

I agree that content ID is a necessary system in principle. Not legally necessary, but it's a system that solves real problems YouTube had before its existence. The problems with it are largely around YouTube heavily favoring recent content, while simultaneously having a support that takes weeks to even look at your case if you can't raise a twitter storm. They are trying to completely automate a problem that's full of subtlety and rife with abuse, and then don't give you any way to resolve it when it goes wrong. Other platforms don't have to choose the same path

As a viewer, I would prefer watching content on other platforms. Problem is: there's none. Someone will mention PeerTube, but no... It doesn't work as well, not easy to navigate. The whole federation thing makes it harder to find content on a platform that already doesn't have most of the well known creators.

This is why trust busting of monopoly social media platforms is so crucially important.

What non-trust related network effects work in OnlyFans' favour?

By network effects it's meant that all the buyers will go to OnlyFans because all the sellers are there, and all the sellers will stay there because that's where all the buyers are.

I don't see how trust is directly related to that, it's a competing concern.

Yeah but it's a case of how much effort it takes to post to multiple platforms?

I wonder if there could be a meta-platform which aggregates feedback, cross posts automatically, etc.

It differs from Facebook because the kind of interaction assymetry.

One of the advice that a popular youtube said is to start a newsletter, which is how you own your audience, as opposed to being at the mercy of the youtube algorithm.

I thought this was a good advice to take for a long while before a youtuber mentioned it, but I wasn't a content creator.

I think it's a good idea to have your own website as well.

This advice is older than YouTube. It was repeated endlessly back when bloggers were chasing views trading blows with response posts. The original QRT dunk.

Exactly. This is the method for being able to say you predicted 100% of the stock moves over the last year - while getting endorsements from people who followed your recommendations.

Send out A/B newsletters. Group A gets a version which says a stock will go down. The B group's newsletter says the same stock will go up. Rinse and repeat. You are guaranteed to have a path to victory...

In other words, don't believe everything you read or watch, even if it is from a newsletter or youtube account with 100% success.

That’s definitely good advice for an established content creator who has an audience but it doesn’t solve the problem of reach. If I start a newsletter today I have no subscribers. How do I find them? If it’s an innocuous topic I’d probably start by sending my newsletter to friends and family and by posting links on social media. For the typical OF creator that isn’t really an option. Most links to pornographic content hosted on an unknown site are assumed to be spam or a scam.

There's a thousand niches on AD (After Dark) Twitter. A lot of accounts have short videos, then link to an OnlyFans page for longer videos. I don't know how effective it is.

OnlyFans proved the market. Now it needs competition.

But all actors are at the mercy of a few payment providers and their regulators.

I believe a lot of the sex workers expected this to happen at some point. Tumblr burned them when they got bought. So they might have some diversification, but their main focus has been OnlyFans. That was the platform that gave the best ROI.

There's a lot of upstart clones that are using their own cryptocurrencies. Not sure how much they'll fare though now with OF retracting their decision.

That's decreasingly a risk you can avoid, whether you are an only fans user/model/entertainer (what's the OF equivalent of a youtuber?) or OnlyFans itself.

It's risky to be dependant on an App store, cloud computing platform, social media platform, payment processor, etc. They might change their rules, ban you over a rumour, or just quietly change their recommendation or advertising algorithms to exclude you. There aren't a lot of substitutes, and even if there were, switching can mean leaving behind users.

OTOH, you have no choice. All the opportunities are on these platforms, not just risks.

To be a youtuber, you need to be on youtube. Diversifying to other platforms is doing stuff other than being a youtuber is hard. You can't just take your users, revenue model and such with you. You could try also doing IG or OF, but in the same sense that you can also practice law on the side. Sure, it gives you security, but not in a portfolio kind of a sense.

I understand they may be bound by what's available to them.

But the plan to just throw out the essential core of their business model seemed obviously doomed. Banning the only part of your business that makes money. Heh.

Edit: Other comments that "the plan" might have been meant to be ridiculous...to drum up more press coverage, make sense to me.

"Suspended"

aka they're waiting for all of this to blow over.

I think it's more likely that the banks and Mastercard that were pulling service to them freaked out about being trending topics for three days and agreed to reinstate everything.

I have to think there must also be some requirement that OnlyFans work harder to prevent underage porn as well. Half the news I heard about this mentioned how much of it was on there.

While there may be some, it is worthwhile looking into where that news was coming from. Much of that push was coming from NCOSE, which is pretty much a literal puritanical force. They had success recently with Pornhub, and then moved to OnlyFans.

NCOSE taking credit themselves for pressuring the payment processors: https://endsexualexploitation.org/articles/exploitation-webs...

NCOSE is more or less using the "for the children" approach to try and stomp out all pronogrpahy generally. Their president "has helped draft ordinances to end or curb the impact of sexually oriented businesses such as pornography shops, strip clubs, and related establishments" according to their own website. Members of their board have founded and led pushes to ban and discourage all pornohprahy entirely.

https://endsexualexploitation.org/about/staff/

https://endsexualexploitation.org/about/board/

A critique on the Pornhub article / case, describing its reliance on evangelical groups: https://newrepublic.com/article/160488/nick-kristof-holy-war...

No doubt that some positive changes came in the Pornhub case, hence the significant lack of public pushback there. But I think their true goals are being exposed as they try to push further. Pushing on a platform that has become a key income source for many during a global pandemic was probably not the best idea for them in hindsight. It also got them a lot of public attention they probably didn't want, in good part due to a large voice and push over many recent months by sex workers, many of whom got a voice in articles in the media recently instead of only sources similar to NCOSE.

NCOSE is the renamed successor to the puritanical group "Morality in Media," which was literally founded by some Catholic priests to oppose everything from pornography to blasphemy in Monty Python films.

They don't give a shit about children or sex trafficking– it's all about eliminating availability of things that the Religious Right deemed verboten in the 1960s.

IMO think the only worse PR nightmare than banning adult content on your adult content platform is reversing your reversal on that ban.

I suppose? But then again it's hard to know what was going on behind the scenes. Did the CEO just save the company from their vendors bankrupting them in a daring display of finger pointing brinkmanship?

Sometimes you just have to threaten to blow the whole business up before anyone goes to bat for you behind the scenes.

If this was actually the strategy behind the move I really admire management’s tenacity. I’m having a hard time connecting the dots as to how or why a bank/payment processor would suddenly reverse course on their decision because of the bad PR suffered by another company.

Maybe? The timeline suggests that they got some sort of assurance from banks they work with, they will not not be bothered. Founder just blamed banks for the whole thing the other day.

https://people.com/human-interest/onlyfans-founder-says-bank...

I struggle to imagine any bank suddenly deciding they're OK with adult content after all. Apart from the moral outrage risks (like the ones OnlyFans itself has been facing wrt the literal kids on their platform), they don't want to accidentally run afoul of sex trafficking laws either. There's just too many risks in adult content. It's really surprising OnlyFans got as far as it did with adult content.

Plus, something like a small company blaming banks is everyday business for those banks. It won't hurt their PR much in the long term, especially since the older, more conservative sections of the public won't care or be more supportive of the banks here. It sucks but that's how the world is.

I mostly agree with analysis.

I am not sure I agree with 'suddently' characterization. They are not suddenly OK with it. Founder complained to their peer at the financial institution. Onlyfans was probably trying to take care of it internally for a good while ( CYA applies at most financial institutions so it was taking longer than most businesses are used to ). It was only after media outburst that an executive decision was made.

I am relatively certain that behind the scenes, the case of Onlyfans was argued by compliance, legal, PR, sales and their personal rep.

"It's really surprising OnlyFans got as far as it did with adult content."

I am not. You are not allowed to touch lgbtq+ community now. They are way too vocal and companies too scared to agitate them. And a fair amount of complaints came from them.

This is never going to blow over. It is as if YouTube had a plan to disable video uploads.

Funny.

Onlyfans banning adult content is like Nike banning tennis shoes.

We're a loafer company now!

They are probably looking for alternative payment methods. (coinbase payment processor and accept cryptocurrencies?)

Or they got some guarantees from banks that they won't get banned.

Their options are to die like tumbler or fight a bit. Moving away from traditional payment processors might cause problems for them as well.

>(coinbase payment processor and accept cryptocurrencies?)

https://www.coinbase.com/legal/prohibited

Oh damn... I wasn't expecting this from them...

> Adult Content and Services: Pornography and other obscene materials (including literature, imagery and other media); ...

Why would a service that desperately tries to get normalized shoot itself in the leg like that and allow something controversial?

A lot of th epromise of crypto to a lot of enthusiasts is freedom - freedom from traditional oversight. This can be both good, like being able to send money to people in countries with awful currencies, or bad, like when you don't have regulations to protect people. So it is kind of disappointing to see Coinbase basically reinvent traditional banking but on the blockchain, because then, what's the point?

You don't need Coinbase to move crypto. Sex workers were some of the first to use Bitcoin as an alternative payment. Meaning, a direct wallet to wallet payment.

However, some have indicated that it's not great. Many of their customers supposedly are drunk men. They greatly struggle to make the payment this way, and you can imagine that in this context it can't take too long, or the "mood" is gone.

They are trying to get normalized with mainstream America, not get normalized with the usual crypto fanatics. That means they need to have access to fiat financial systems which in turn means they need to not be associated with anything the old guard generally doesn't like. That includes adult content.

Sex work isn't controversial, it's just a magnet for fraud. The first thing someone does with a stolen payment method is usually go and spend it on porn - or if you're advanced, sets up a money laundering scheme to spend it on "porn" and circulate it back to themselves. It's just the nature of the business.

Really? The first thing someone does with a stolen credit card is to go pay for porn? I would guess so few people pay for porn willingly that that would be a great way to trip all sorts of fraud alarms.

Anecdotally, I had a credit card number get compromised a few years ago. They used it at a Babys-R-Us on the opposite coast. I'm pretty sure they weren't buying porn.

A stolen credit card number doesn't generally go and "spend big" - they go buy luxury items they want. There's no end of "my credit card got done and they went and spent $50 on gas and beer" stories.

At the other side of that there is equally no end of "went and signed up for premium porn content" or PPV cable or whatever - and that's what payment processors tend to get unhappy about.

EDIT: Or more accurately, the relative ratio.

Gas, especially. Because you can pay at the pump, you can see if the card is still live without ever seeing a human being. Thieves love that.

On the other hand, if the cops were actually interested in prosecuting such things, they left their license plates on the security camera...

That makes sense. I've tripped fraud detection alarms on one or another of my cards a few times, and, almost every time I can remember, it was at a gas pump.

I think this is thinking about it backwards. The payment industry are discriminating here on the proportion of payments to porn sites which are fraudulent or disputed, not the proportion of fraudulent or disputed charges which are to porn sites. It can be simultaneously true that the vast majority of fraudulent/disputed payments are not to porn sites and that a very large portion of payments to porn sites are fraudulent or disputed.

Its only a matter of time before better merchant ux is done all client side, and the crypto funds arent linkable by exchanges to curb cashing out

I don't understand the platform at all. I understand it's huge in the adult space, but it seems impossible to actually find anything on the platform. There's no discoverability (as far as I can tell). Is the discoverability problem solved by other platforms?

Well, it's like Patreon. Nobody goes to the index of patreon.com to browse.

> Is the discoverability problem solved by other platforms?

Reddit, snapchat, and instagram mainly

Yes, the discoverability is solved by other platforms, most people have a personal or desired personal connection to the creators, and find their only fans through the creator, or communities the creator set up. People don't pay for anonymous porn. People that only consume anonymous porn are not in this market at all.

Brand, vision for the product and such are one thing. Vague demands and pressures by the financial sector are another.

Partly due to actual risk, and partially because of stigma... payment processing costs are substantially higher in "sin sectors." Often they use specialised services targeting just these industries.

I assume financing has similar issues. Merchant banks don't want to add a porn bond to their portfolio, and those who do want a premium. Premiums count for a lot these days. A valuation anti-premium, at the extreme end, might turn a billion dollar company into a $100m. Private tech company valuations can be quite squishy.

We have so much structure in the economy now. High finance has always been structured, but the lower tiers were more significant when startup valuations were more modest. Once valuations hit billions, finance is high finance more or less by definition. That means the high finance cabal has a lot of say.

Meanwhile, users are structured by Google, FB and a handful of others. AWS is gradually becoming both monopolistic and opinionated. Payments systems are bottlenecked, with a structure related to the high finance structure.

What does and doesn't get built, or succeeds in a highly structured world is different to a more free market situation.

"Onlyfans decides not to go under"

That was a bloody genius marketing: do something absolutely unexpected first – gain a lot of articles on this, announce complete 180 just a week later – same thing, tons of articles about your company.

complete 360

:-)

I wonder if this was the plan from the beginning. Perhaps the bankers and business people with no connection to reality just wouldn't believe how disastrous that policy would be, so they make the announcement and use the backlash to get the point across.

They basically did the 'suprised-pikachu' face when creators that posted explicit content closed their accounts, after being told the content they created would be banned

While lying to those creators, claiming that pornography* would still be allowed.

*just not the kind of pornography that any of those performers create

Lets remind people why this happened in the first place: extremist christian org "Exodus Cry" petitioned high power people in board roles to defund sex work companies.

Exodus cry's mission is seeking the abolition of the legal commercial sex industry, including pornography, strip clubs and sex work, as well as illegal sex trafficking. So, their gameplan is to always claim the last one (illegal sex trafficking) and child porn, to greatly muddy the waters of legitimate sex work.

https://reason.com/2021/08/20/why-onlyfans-is-double-crossin...

Exodus Cry previously went after PornHub after they made claims of child porn and sex trafficking. PH ended up getting disconnected from payment processors, and they ended up deleting 14 million videos down to their verified members only.

Long story short: the drug war failed. And banning sex work for similar temperance reasons will only help people be LESS safe and run sex work underground (with no legal protections). Then again, that's this slimy christian org's goal.

So when are we going to address the gender pay gap on OF?

We aren't. That's limited to employers, of which OnlyFans is not for the creators. But of course, we can work on inclusion, but we have to recognize that the vast majority of the market for sex work is men, so the distribution of men interested in people born and/or currently identifying as men will have to be taken into account.

Why would that be a valid talking point?

I'm not sure, but it seems to be considered a valid talking point in other industries.

Indeed, it's a valid point when the people in question are directly employed, and do the same work.

That seems like a technical loophole, like zero hour contract workers not having any rights. It doesn't mean it's OK and shouldn't be discussed.

I doubt OnlyFans ever intended to actually do this.

Just a creative marketing blitz to drum up awareness.

Next up, McDonald's to stop selling Cheeseburgers and Tesla to stop making cars.

It was mainly due to pressure from their payment providers, who in turn were pressured by fundamentalist christian groups like exodus cry under the mantle of "protecting sex workers" and "anti trafficking", but their actual end-goal is banning porn completely.

They started out with pornhub, which as a direct result of that deleted a ton of their content. OF seeing how these groups could effectively pressure the biggest fish in the porn industry through the creditcard companies, they found themselves between a rock and a hard place.

Very unlikely, the last week porn stars have been posting to IG where they have moved to from OF, ex:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CS322xbNbfU/

IIRC the "new coke" was exactly that. They never intended to change coke, but loss aversion was an effective lever in wresting mindshare away from the pepsi challenge.

When are we going to see a Medium or Substack for pornographic content?

Even better an opensource LAMP or MEAN stack to host your own adult entertainment site?

The hard part is the banking and payments side of things. That's where a new entrant would be useful (but unfortunately also ~impossible in the US).

Just a better argument to force crypto, get a few exclusivity models and even if you have one or a few porn sex worker influences as a loss leader, you gain leverage - then it's worth it.

I wish this were true, but it's not that simple. For businesses, there is a lot of 'unknowns' with Crypto. It's regulated differently across jurisdictions, and Crypto in the USA is subject to things like anti-money-laundering and different taxable events when it's exchanged.

Many of the adult sites that have tried using crypto for payments have reported that less than two percent of their users are willing to pay with crypto. Until it becomes as easy as using a credit card or PayPal, crypto isn't going to be the savior of adult content.

I'm sure these puritanical payment gateways and processors have no problem taking fees for sales of guns, cigarettes, and all varieties of snake oil. But porn? No that's simply too much!

"Well they're private companies." The pro-censorship puritans and meddlers love farming their oppression out to monopoly corporations.

Many vendors do block sales of firearms (or anything resembling 2A) due to similar risk factors. It's extremely difficult to find a gateway and processor that's 2A friendly. The small number of vendors that are 2A friendly usually require an FFL to further mitigate risk.

If you can find a gateway and processor that has an underwriting team that will not require an FFL, that would be a sight to behold.

It's often the banks who block the processors. (If the processors block it of their own accord, it's due to fraud/chargebacks).

I am not sure why the banks are so puritanical.

I suspect the fraud rate for porn is much higher than for most other categories and the cost doesn’t make business sense.

Why not paypal? I remember in the early 2000s even the most dusty geocities sites having paypal buttons.

Their policy prohibits "certain sexually oriented materials or services".

https://www.paypal.com/en/webapps/mpp/ua/acceptableuse-full

I feel like you could just sell an access code that allows you to download content rather than the content itself and be perfectly within paypals acceptable use policies.

You _might_ get away with that for a short while, but a fairly trivial account review would result in a funds freeze at the minimum.

Paypals policy bans using it for payment of any digital adult content [0]. Many artists still use it for nsfw commissions, but every payment is a risk of getting your entire account banned simply due to a bad comment in the note field.

[0] https://www.paypal.com/us/smarthelp/article/what-is-paypal%E...

Surely both LAMP and MEAN stacks are already perfectly capable of hosting pornography? It's not as if the bits are different from other types of image.

Like written erotica? I think you can still get away with it on Patreon.

OnlyFans is Substack for porn.

Tumblr is getting a subscription feature, and as I heard their porn-content came back to old strength after they weed out some years ago. Maybe there is a platform for this over there.

Not been to a porn site recently, or any media hosting site really? They all look exactly the same and offer the same features, so presumably they're already using some commodity off-the-shelf hosting platform for video, images, and live streams with sign-up and payment.

The actual barrier is very few performers are popular enough on their own to be able to afford hiring people who can run servers with this software for them, but the few who are often do have "club{NAME}.com" sites for their own exclusive content.

Most of the popular tube sites are owned/operated by the same company, MindGeek.

> When are we going to see a Medium or Substack for pornographic content?

That's...what OnlyFans is?

This was actually the top story on the BBC Radio 1 news this afternoon. I'd never, not once, heard OnlyFans mentioned outside of niche internet communities before today. The "ban" was an excellent move by the marketing department.

I have a really bad feeling about further popularisation of porn, though. This is going to be so, so bad for society.

I've never understood the appeal of OnlyFans.

If your goal is to consume adult content, then you can get it in massive amounts for free, and without using an app.

If your goal is to make money from online sex work, the ~$180 average monthly earnings are simply appaling when you compare them to traditional porn sites, where some workers earn that money in a day.

I'm sure everybody has their reasons. But on your second point. My guess is that the $180 average on OF is WAY higher than the Average monthly income on any other site for this type of content. Some workers may earn massively more on other sites, but certainly not the majority.

Your average porn girl might make more to start, but unless they really take off, they aren't making very much. Also they get paid per shoot, not based on views. With OF they get monthly recurring revenue for their content. Performers can chat with their admirers to keep them interested and it's more of a patron/artist relationship I guess. With OF, they also have full control over the content they make, when it goes out, how long it stays out there and all that.

For viewers, it's definitely harder to browse than a regular porn site or pornhub or something, but if you end up finding a few pages you like, chatting, buying mementos. It becomes a lot more immersive than just scrolling around an ocean of videos.

This is a great video that explains the success of OnlyFans - https://youtu.be/nsK_6VSmlMI

Also this video does a reasonable job of analyzing the UX and understanding the user base https://youtu.be/auG2E53dFas

> If your goal is to make money from online sex work, the ~$180 average monthly earnings are simply appaling

That “average”, as is pointed out every time the statistic gets raised including when the story focusing on it was itself on HN, both includes conpletely inactive accounts and excludes tips—which are a significant (possibly the major) source of income for most performers—so it has nothing to do with the actual experience of active content producers on the site.

I don't use OnlyFans personally, but I can clearly see the appeal of it. Right up front is the personal connection, these creators are posting updates on their lives and their looks and more traditional content daily. It's like a watered down girlfriend experience. And that's also how it's marketed, you pay specifically for the person you're interested in, not to some shady porn production company that swaps out actors every other film. Of course this money goes through OnlyFans, but it's a lot more transparent.

I think that feeling of personal connection and more direct involvement is a complement to our modern lifestyle, and a very sharp contrast with the "oh my lord, I can see her bare ankles" sort of content that media like Playboy were based on.

And the average monthly earnings say absolutely nothing, setting up an OnlyFans takes very little effort, so the average is heavily skewed to non-committal or non-talented producers. What I've heard is that very average producers make serious money on the platform, I bet if you take the top 10.000 producers on OF, and you compare the top 10.000 porn actors, you'll find that the OF producers make a lot more money on average.

Platforms like onlyfans sell two products. They sell safe/clean sex work to a variety of people who would never get into regular sex work. And they sell the feeling of mattering and a sense of human connection to people who suffer from loneliness.

The only weird part is why the popular OnlyFans sex workers stay on the platform instead of moving to their own where they wouldn’t have to pay 20% to the platform. I’m sure there is a reasonable explanation for that though, maybe it’s hard to keep the same subscribers?

Are you suggesting content creators should run their own website? If they have the time & skills, sure. But running your own website is expensive in both time and money.

It's not expensive, difficult or very time consuming to have a static website connected to a email marketing or newsletter service in order to communicate directly to people and improve the services offered. Basic marketing strategy. There's no need to run the entire business on their own.

> It's not expensive

It absolutely is, because you still need to get paid, and unfortunately 18-20% fees are completely normal for adult-content payment processing. And OF clearly does a lot more than just payment processing.

Each one of those things can be done for free until a certain point (e-mail marketing) or completely free (static sites/hosting). Feel free to ping me if you need concrete examples of services that can do that – and there are many.

You seem to greatly underestimate what it takes to run such a business, both from the content creator and business owner pov. This reminds me of the “I can build facebook over the weekend” argument.

Yeah, and marc also skipped over the part where the creator actually gets paid.

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I'm a creator too. I was talking about the marketing side of the business only and not about substitution of the those platforms.

>The only weird part is why the popular OnlyFans sex workers stay on the platform instead of moving to their own where they wouldn’t have to pay 20% to the platform.

Discoverability. The same reason why Youtube content creators stick with the platform.

Do people join onlyfans and then find models? I always assumed most of the marketing took place on other platforms like Instagram.

My YouTube thing may be broken from the amount or miniature painting videos I watch, but I rarely get a suggestion for anything that I haven’t visited before. Well except for that world of Warcraft streamer asmodal even though I haven’t played world of Warcraft since the burning crusade something like 10 years ago. Most of those miniature channels have patrons which I guess is similar to onlyfans, but I would’ve frankly never known about neither their YouTube channels or patrons if I hadn’t seen their stuff on Reddit’s miniature painting or blood bowl subreddits first, and from there they might as well have lead me to their own sites. Which most of the more successful painters actually do.

I have no clue. My guess is that the platform is a known entity and users are comfortable engaging with other sellers on it, opposed to one-off markets. I also guess that there is cross collaboration and references and search ability

There is zero discoverability on onlyfans. The only people making money are those with a built in audience from other platforms.

Do you enter CC info on random porn sites?

It's literally no different from YouTube/Twitch/etc: people see the big earners and think "hey, I could do that" without realizing it's a pyramid scheme.

> ~$180 average monthly earnings … compare to traditional porn sites, where some workers earn that money in a day.

That is not a valid comparison. Some OF publishers probably make that much in a day. Comparing the average on one venue to the outliers of another doesn't really tell you anything useful.

Furthermore, I suspect most traditional porn work is paid per shoot with nothing per view or per repeat, and there are relatively limited opportunities for fresh shoots because of the reusability of the content from each shoot. OF is a completely different model, the recurring income is likely to be considerably more significant than one-off income in that model. You'd have to do some proper analysis on figures gathered over months (or longer) to get any useful picture comparing overall income from these platforms.

Additionally, OF less likely involves interacting with people you don't know, in environments you are not familiar with, and other potential safety or level-of-ickyness concerns, so money is not the only consideration.

> compare to traditional porn

And another thing: Cam girls have been around for decades. OF in the sense being discussed here is traditional porn of a sort.

No need for "probably". The top creators on OnlyFans make several hundreds of thousands dollars a day.

I went with "probably" or if laziness - a more definite statement would have required a bit if fact checking research as I don't want to be one of those people!

Not a user, but I think OnlyFans is less about consuming porn and more about forming parasocial relationships through subscriptions.

Your mistake is thinking that porn is a generic concept that people consume. Almost no one would not be satisfied with a generic porn channel that showed random content of random ages, random body types, random genders, etc. Everyone has some criteria when it comes to porn they consume. Some people just have more specific criteria than others.

The appeal is it’s easy for women to become online prostitutes and make ridiculous money from incels and sexual predators. I thought women could aspire to something more than this but I guess this is progress although regressive.

> “We pay over 1 million creators over $300 million every month, and making sure that these funds get to creators involves using the banking sector,” according to Stokely. Because several banks have cut off OnlyFans from making wire transfers

Why is that allowed?

JuSt MaKe YoUr OwN pAyMeNt PrOcEsSoR aNd StArT yOuR oWn BaNk!

So sick of that argument...

A 'free' society means people being 'free' to make decisions that are within their rights and don't break the law.

> JuSt MaKe YoUr OwN pAyMeNt PrOcEsSoR aNd StArT yOuR oWn BaNk!

I know you're right and I agree, but we should also do that, for other reasons. A large, diverse and competitive market of mutual credit unions could really democratize capital.

I think there is a general issue with platforms “conveniently benefiting” from massive growth from all their users, until one day they suddenly decide who/what they want to “allow”. This exclusion can take different forms, e.g. exclusion by suddenly imposing high subscription fees (not just “moral” exclusion).

It’d be really interesting to see if these platforms would ever have gotten so big/popular without their now-excluded audiences.

But you see the whole point that Onlyfans Management says about dropping the plan is to "protect the creators". But this seems far from reality. This article from wired sums it up: https://www.wired.com/story/onlyfans-reverse-porn-ban-creato...

The fact that this even went anywhere is indicative of some serious, serious disconnect between the decision-makers and the reality of the situation.

They did mention that it's going to be adjusted set of rules when it comes to content. I see this moving to crypto for payment.

I suspect the payment processing argument is a convenient red herring. Adult sites and their transaction service providers process payments all the time, some at incredible scale.

Really good summary of the situation pre-dropped ban on this short podcast.

https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/why-onlyfans-banned...

So Visa and Mastercard have been pressuring only fans to do this. Threatening to withdraw their services. It is extremely worrying that these credit card companies can decide what media society at large can consume.

What I am most curious about though, is why? Why do Visa and Mastercard give a shit what business their clients are in?

The big one is the BBC report that found they weren't doing a good job keeping under age people from signing up as creators and posting.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58255865

Do Visa and Mastercard ever face penalties for any crimes committed by users of their services? Probably a large percentage of their users are criminal in some way.

So much underage alcohol is purchased with visas and mastercards its absurd. I've never seen anyone pay cash all through college and at any given campus bar or liquor store half the kids are underage.

The relationship between payment processors and Onlyfans is a lot closer than the one between them and stores/bars etc. that are selling to underaged kids. (Also underaged drinking is a lot less intensely prosecuted than underaged porn) Usually they don't have any direct relationship with the stores at all and their card processing goes through another company that provides the machines and access to the MC/Visa/et al payment processing, that's how it was with my family's stores at least when we started taking cards, the machines all came through another company and our contract was with them.

I suspected something like this would happen.

As an adult company they thrive on controversy. If they found a group willing to invest at the scale that they need, sparking controversy like this is low hanging fruit for exposure and (hopefully) a quick boost to growth that an investor would want.

“Fans cans planned ban stans panned”

Cooler heads prevailed it sounds like. Not a fan of the site, but I'm in favor of sex workers actually getting paid, rather than just exploited and left homeless and penniless after a few years. Net-net, it's an improvement over the status quo.

> The company has struggled to attract outside investors and the move was done at the request of at the request of its banking and payout partners, it said.

Reads a little weird. It was a request of a request, from a friend of a friend?

It's just bad proofreading. The writer probably duplicated "at the request of" and the editor didn't catch it.

Direct link: https://twitter.com/onlyfans/status/1430499277302816773?s=21

Very few commebtors here seem aware that onlyfans were being forced to do this by their payment providers.

So its not a publicity stunt, so much as "publicity forces others to reconsider their crazy decisions".

The whole situation is such a, for lack of a better word, cultural shock to me. Pronographic website ceasing to allow sexual content causes major news and longest discussions...

Basically, what you are familiar with is how everyone pretends the consumer side only exists of people you don't know. And those people, we like to imagine, are people we don't want to know. People that lack any ability to integrate into society. Especially the ones that pay for any of it.

So that's always been a lie. The people that pay for porn or sex are all socioeconomic classes, all levels of attractiveness, all levels of social integration. It has never been possible to simultaneously assume someone that is entertained by sex workers "can't get sex" any other way while also assuming that anyone that gets a windfall of cash does "hookers and blow" pretty much immediately.

In the mean time, there has been a push to normalize and validate sex work. Because the similarities and issues to all other labor are too numerous to treat sex work differently in its own category.

But, in this process, people still pretend that the consumer side doesn't exist and that the consumer side isn't all socioeconomic classes. People want to invalidate and vilify anybody that admits to being a consumer of sex work, because this makes them comfortable to imagine the world doesnt have these readily available options. This is something akin to the silly "swedish/nordic model", where sex work is legalized and the consumer side is criminalized.

What you are seeing is people being allies to sex workers as a proxy for continued and expanded consumption.

Where sex workers, which happens to also consist of a lot of marginalized groups, are able to amplify their voices against prohibitions now, and the allies are people interested in all social justice topics as well as the consumer side that finds it convenient to normalize sex work, but can't really yet talk about being a consumer even of legal things like websites.

Its pretty cool, I mean, I'm willing to normalize the consumptive side so that people don't have to start all their posts with weird disclaimers like "I'm not on OnlyFans and would never pay for porn but". Alright.

content creators will now have persistent anxiety about OF pulling the plug in the future. They'll hedge with other platforms.

I think OF killed itself and this backtracking will not save it.

They were making money hand over fist so I really dont understand why they initially took this step. I really think only fans will die eventually because of the trust they lost.

These companies, most seem to admire here, just because they make a lot of money, are going from bad to worst.

First....

- They made money on stealing your privacy.

- Then they made money on taking your rest and piece of mind inviting your neighbors to make money from renting their mattresses.

- Then they made money from making you do "gig's" with zero hours contract style type of work...But making you believe you are a contractor.

- Then they made money from reading your email and showing you announcements.

- Then they made money by tracking your location and selling your buying habits.

- Now they are making money by inviting you to sell your soul and exhibit yourself naked for money.

Is anybody working on something that matters or is it only money that matters?

> - Now they are making money by inviting you to sell your soul and exhibit yourself naked for money.

Actually, they were trying to stop the naked part, and that's what people were up in arms about.

And given it was the people that were upset, not the company because it couldn't take advantage of the people in this way, I'm not sure how that works with your premise.

They said they were only stopping because of the banks. There is also something very strange going on there, because other porn sites were able to clean their act by implementing regulations demanded by the payment providers, but not OnlyFans. I feel we still have to hear the full story on this.

But we’re making the world a better place by open sourcing our Nth JavaScript framework and a new database. But on a serious note, that part community just looks away, because the answer is not easy. Popular sentiment on HN is privacy, freedom and de-centralisation . Yet major portion of community works with companies that break at-least one of those.

The headline should have "For Now" appended to the end

Ah, so it was a marketing scheme the entire time. How modern.

I would love to see the transcript of the conversations to implement this ban in the 1st place. What did they think would happen?

It's possible that all this is what they knew would happen, but they needed to go through it to get some leverage on someone upstream.

Perfectly executed marketing campaign

My first thought after reading the title was: OnlyFans refrains from commiting suicide.

People here don't seem to realise all this was from pressure from fundamentalist christian groups like Exodus Cry, which managed to collect 2 million signatures pretending to want to protect sex workers and be anti-trafficking.

Their end-goal however is a lot simpler: get rid of all porn.

Because the early 1900’s prohibition and the war on drugs has totally shown us ridding us of something there is massive demand for totally works!

We seem to be managing to get rid of smoking.

It was not made illegal. Cigarettes are available everywhere.

It was made uncool. The product placement in movies and such disappeared, so you don't see super cool hero looking awesome as he smokes while going to do something important.

Ads targeted at kids are illegal. Everyone knows it is unhealthy. There isnless social pressure to smoke.

Now you get netflix movies where the protagonist is ripping on a vape that looks like a light saber.

There was also a massive PR campaign against it. I grew up in the 90's and there was an insane amount of anti-smoking messaging to kids my age.

...smoking was never - and still isn’t - illegal.

It’s just not relevant to my point. That’s harm reduction - which should be applied to drugs as well. Nothing to do with prohibition.

Porn isn't illegal either.

Where is the source for this?

What actual leverage do these groups have over the banking and processing systems that were actually forcing the changes to OnlyFans? Shouldn't there be some statements that it was 2 million signatures that had an effect somewhere? And if so, why retract? Did someone get 3 million reddit karma to keep it, and now someone else needs 4 million survey responses to ban porn again?

I looked an was not able to find evidence. Only these groups happy with the plan and congratulating themselves based on seemingly nothing.

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/onlyfans-banning-explicit-cont...

https://www.newsweek.com/content-creators-react-new-onlyfans...

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/onlyfans-ban-porn-exodus-cry

And other stuff, more related to pornhub: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxqy4z/petition-shut-down-po...

if they are smart they'll move to crypto and hopefully start a movement away from these centralized payment processors. Stuff like this might finally be what causes mainstream adoption

I can't be the only one who's not hot on crypto. Do we really want a world where even the simplest transaction is permanently recorded publicly and cryptographically sealed? The governments will just mandate custodial wallets and we'll be back in the same place with respect to things like forfeitability.

I still don't understand this argument, maybe because I just don't understand enough about crypto currency itself.

What coin is stable enough to use as currency? Unless OnlyFans could pay its employees and services with that said coin (who could then use it elsewhere directly), the company would still have to convert to fiat currency right? And wouldn't that itself affect the coin price?

I am very much a cryptocurrency skeptic, but you could imagine a token which is only used as a medium of exchange. I.e. you convert your USD into the token immediately before making the payment, and the recipient converts it back to USD milliseconds later.

Of course they did!. It was that or give up the company basically.

I thought they were forced. It seems it was just a PR stunt.

> “OnlyFans stands for inclusion and we will continue to provide a home for all creators,” the company said.

Interesting statement considering they already categorically ban some sex toys and acts. Not exactly inclusive.

Why does this porn site get so much free advertising?

I seriously thought that onlyfans was catered to porn.

OnlyFans had creators that weren't pornographic?

what if this was a big scam to get web archivists to freak out and subscribe to as many people before their content is gone forever? /s

People predicted this very transparent publicity ploy when the news first broke. There are no surprises here, other than perhaps how quickly they played their hand.

all press is good press. But doesn't this damage your brand? In this short week I am sure both sides of the marketplace have tried to figure out - what other options are out there? I'm sure the real winners are those smaller platforms.

I think the brand-strengthening generated by the outrage from people with accounts coming to Onlyfans' defense and rallying support, far outweighs any potential negative outcome of customers looking for alternate solutions, especially when the decision to reverse course came so quickly.

There were I think literally hundreds of thousands of people on social media expressing support for Onlyfans.

I don’t think this is true. Adult content is heavily policed by many important parties, including PayPal and mainstream payment processors. It’s certainly possible, but it’s wishful thinking IMO.

Some were pointing to specific new restrictions coming from MasterCard as an example.

Regardless, people predicted that Onlyfans would do a full 180 on their decision shortly after, and here we are, a few days after and they have done a full 180.

Yes, people predicted the 180, I just disagree that they planned this all along necessarily.

People predict every outcome. Then the ones that got it correct can boast that they knew all along. Basically the survivorship bias.

Nobody knows shit in advance, even if it seems repeatable.

Thousands of jobs saved.

Anybody else think this feels suspiciously like a planned set of moves to generate hype?

Why do I feel like this was a publicity stunt?

I still refused to go past the landing page.

I doubt it. It sounds like OnlyFans had established themselves pretty well. I think this would only spook people as it creates uncertainty about the future.

Meanwhile my platform for Henry Winkler impersonators goes unloved.

OnlyFonz?

You win the fridge!

How did they not see this backlash coming?

Good

White this is temporarily great news for sex workers, its worth keeping a couple things in mind:

This would seem to be in large part an extension of the wider religious right and groups similar to the Moral Majority's push from previous decades to remove sexuality or "objectional content" from the public sphere.

This recent OnlyFans (and PornHub) pressure were driven in large part by pressure from Exodus Cry and NCOSE both of whoms ultimate goal is to remove sexually explicit content from the internet.

NCOSE has been around since 1962 but was previously called "Morality in Media" [0] They are attempting to obscure it now, but Morality in Media was open that they were a "Faith Based Organization" at the time. It seems like with the name change they are trying to obscure their foundations. You might remember them as the group who tried to make it illegal to sell Playboy magazines on military bases and who wanted to do away with "obscene language." Their group were the inspiration for George Carlin's bit "7 words".

Exodus Cry is an evangelical christian group who are open about their intentions to abolish sexually explicit content from the internet. [1]

I think its probably worth paying a little bit of attention to the undercurrents here because my guess is we're only seeing the beginnings of the religious right's ramp up. I think they'll probably try to grab momentum from some of the other more ... conpsiratorial(?) groups that have some popularity currently.

I think we'd be making a fairly serious mistake to underestimate these two groups.

Ill also be interested to see how they make use out of some more dark money style groups as they move forward in attempts to obscure who is behind the pressure campaigns.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20180401043101/https://endsexual...

[1] https://exoduscry.com/abolitionist/

Interesting, I did not know about the NCOSE or Exodus Cry.

This seems somewhat plausible, but how do you know these organizations have anything to do with OnlyFans?

Whether they did or not, it is encouraged to be aware of them and to seek ways to weaken their efforts to impose their beliefs upon non-believers.

They're open about it, but its been written about pretty extensively. One of my other comments [0] has a number of links. Including a couple which discuss their involvement in PornHub takedown as well.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304164

I was under the impression that this was a matter of pragmatism by the payment processors to avoid the chargebacks that adult-oriented industries are known for. I haven’t heard any source say that this was for Puritanical reasons at all.

If it was just about chargebacks, they’d just raise fees to cover them, which they’ve already done (with approximately 10x higher fees in sex industry card processing).

The momentum from these groups against OnlyFans (and others) started last year when covid hit and porn consumption in general "went up".

https://reason.com/2020/04/24/people-stuck-at-home-are-makin...

> similar to the Moral Majority's push from previous decades to remove sexuality or "objectional content" from the public sphere.

"History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” – Mark Twain

On the one hand I love the spirit of this quote, but on the other, it's pretty solidly not a Twain quote: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/

I was going to mention that but I went for a more laconic approach. I didn't want it to appear like I had written it, but a long explanation about how it's commonly attributed to Mark Twain but may not be him seemed to make the comment worse.

Sigh

Why can't these cults just follow their own rules, why the hell are you trying to take ME to your miserable heaven.

Fighting an outside "other" simplifies maintaining social cohesion within the cult, therefore sustaining exploitation of cultists.

This needs to be more widely understood.

Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons don't just go door-to-door to spread their word. They know that the extreme majority of people they ring are going to just shut the door in their face. Leadership knows this, and it's a tool. After they get repeatedly rejected, church leadership can say "They don't love you, but WE do!" and it further solidifies their belief in their religion.

It's all about creating another "us vs them" scenario.

Because like all churches, they make money from it.

Anecdote: I went to a charismatic non-denominational new wave evangelical thing in Maui, for reasons I will not explain, call it amusement. I paid particular attention to the pastor before and after the collection plate, and it amused me so much that I went back to confirm what I had first seen: that every ounce of his charisma (and boy was he loaded in that dept.) drained from his Animus as soon as the collection plate was full. He would disappear into the background to suffer the remaining service until which time he could count his winnings.

>I think they'll probably try to grab momentum from some of the other more ... conpsiratorial(?) groups that have some popularity currently.

if they do as you say, which i think is quite plausible, it'll be interesting to see how they fit in the more anti-semetic and end-of-days thoughts that are foundational to those groups.

Im sure we'll see the end-of-days stuff a bit--a lot of the "this degeneracy, this porn, it is proof that civilization is falling apart and the end is near." only packaged in a way that will resonate with the puritanical types.

How much of a role did these groups play in anyone’s decision making here? I’ve never gotten the impression that either of these groups to be especially influential outside of getting congressional reps to occasionally sponsor symbolic legislative fights. Like you can run all the media that you want but ultimately banning porn from the internet is a pretty quixotic endeavor and the stakeholders in OF know this. Where’s the leverage?

Wrt influence, much of it comes from the association that these groups have worked hard to build between porn and sex trafficking. Simply disliking porn because of religious and/or conservative values is easy to dismiss for a large majority of people.

However, if "sinful" adult content and sex work becomes synonymous with non-consent, hurting children, etc, their arguments become far more difficult to dismiss without looking badly in the public eye. Especially for our politicians where discourse is limited to extended soundbytes and debates that leave no room for nuance or deeper discussion.

I think what the sibling to this comment has brought up is important to understand.

These groups are entirely trying to alter the definition of “sex trafficking.” Or rather, attempting to make the phrase so broad as to be meaningless.

Sex trafficking brings in images of humans being thrown into a container against their will, shipped overseas in darkness, and then maybe drugged up and pimped out in hidden shady backstreet houses.

These groups like Exodus Cry and NCOSE are attempting to conflate that above image with grown and often well educated people who are choosing to be their own bosses.

You can see this conflation all over their websites and in many of their press releases.

How much of an influence did they have in this and the pornhub debacle? I mean, i don’t know how we could accurately measure this. But it would appear their pressure campaigns are heavily funded, very active, and then during those campaigns many of their goals were met. So I guess it’s up to you to decide how much influence they really played.

My point is simply for us to notice this now.

I thought Pornhub banned unverified content because MasterCard added them to a blacklist over them repeatedly not deleting illegal content?

My understanding is that these action committees are the ones that pressured the banks and payment processors (whose partial functions are shielding their partner banks from bad PR) to do so.

I didn't read anything about those organizations being involved in any of the stories about the Pornhub thing. Do you have any evidence of them being involved or are you just speculating?

According to wikipedia, the Traffickinghub campaign, created by Exodus Cry's Director of Abolition, resulted on the credit cards ban.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Cry#Traffickinghub_camp...

I don't like copy and pasting my other comments directly, so ill just link to it [0] but the short answer is, they're pretty open about their pressure campaigns towards payment processors. There was also quite a lot of exposing during the PornHub debacle.

the linked comment has quite a few links attached.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304164

I thought the main cause of this was a recent law change regarding liability around sex trafficking: https://www.wired.com/story/how-a-controversial-new-sex-traf...

Rather than risk this liability it's easier for payment processors to just not work with high risk sites.

NCOSE pressure campaign was heavily directed against payment companies. They're quite open about it. [0]

The first link is directly to NCOSE (Morality in Media) but heres a few other articles with quite a bit more information. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]

[0] https://ncose.salsalabs.org/thankyou_mastercard_visa/index.h...

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/why-visa-mastercard-being-blamed-on...

[2] https://knock-la.com/onlyfans-bans-sex-work/

[3] https://reason.com/2021/08/20/why-onlyfans-is-double-crossin...

[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52543508

[5] https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-real-reasons-why-onlyfans-...

[6] https://avn.com/business/articles/legal/mastercard-visa-ban-...

[7] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pornhub-policy/pornhub-pu...

Nah its just the payment processors

Its only a matter of time before a service relying on a Metamask extension on a cheap Layer2 is extremely popular

This will be much much harder to police so its kinda of counterproductive to go after permissioned centralized services as it accelerates the inevitable

This is looking like a failed mission from my perspective. If anything I think today people in general are more understanding and accepting of sex work and sex workers.

If anything Christianity is on the decline due to mass hypocrisy.

i was not aware of these pressures, but on the other not surprised.

i do fully agree with you, and even perhaps think in a broader sense, that we must watch these extreme religious/ extreme nationalist movements, from a sharper eye.

also, as climate change will proceed by cutting ressources, food and water from the poorest, as well as causing wars and possibly massive migration, these groups will only become stronger.

As a Gen-Z also recently graduated (less than 5 years), I can assure you, the fact these platforms are so big is because being graduated isn't worth anything these days. You are lucky or you are not.

Getting a degree in a field that has jobs helps too.

It helps, but for many it was/is not enough. Trust me, the job search was brutal even as a computer science graduate from MIT. I had an offer and it was revoked (and companies that I had offers from pre-pandemic would not engage anymore). I'm almost certain that I have classmates who had OF at one point during the last year and I know for certain from Twitter there's Ivy League, Cal, and Stanford students on there.

Especially at the beginning of the pandemic when nobody knew how long it might last and the stock market was free diving to what was seemingly oblivion.

I guess my point is that in mid 2020, it felt like there were no degrees that had plentiful jobs short of being:

1. A close-to-graduating worker in health or medicine.

2. A finance-compatible major from a Top 15 school with exceptional math, statistics, and inference ability. Likely, previous internships. And there really weren't that many of these.

Jobs at software companies that were typically not competitive were getting flooded by top grads and early career applicants w/ 1-3 years of experience who had offers revoked or got laid off. I fought tooth and nail for the offers I got, and the company I joined ended up being terrible -- so go figure.

Now consider that there are like, 500k students *not from top schools* graduating in STEM that same year. Suddenly the 'study something useful' mantra fell apart in the matter of months (weeks?).

What is unemployment among software devs? It's real real low.

As someone who hires devs, I could easily hire 2-3 devs right now. However I live in a tier3 city, and don't want to do the remote dev thing right now. If I post a remote job I get 5,000 candidates, if I post a local job I get 0-3.

As a new grad, I bet winning a remote job would be hard. But pick a city, any city. Always looking for devs. If still not landing jobs, its a matter of interview skills and non-school resume experience.

Yeah MIT CS grad on OF means

1) Bottom 5% tier grad who has less than zero social skills, thus would also be a low earner on OF

2) Extremely picky about jobs. Instead chose OF for lifestyle/earning reasons.

3) Serious health, legal, psychological, or family problems that would prevent them from any job and probably also would have made attaining their degree very difficult. This is MIT OnlyFans person I feel the saddest for.

4) Some other 1/1000 possibility

The idea MIT grads are on OF in mass just to make enough to eat and put a roof over their heads is some serious sympathy farming.

Hey "quantumBerry" -- What a username to behold!

While I find this post witty and well-written ("some serious sympathy farming"!), I don't follow where the parent post was suggesting anything about MIT CS grads on OnlyFans. Do I misunderstand? (Zero trolling.)

The parent comment two levels above mentioned fellow MIT CS classmates having OF.

Yeah, all I was saying is that statistically, it's likely that I overlapped with an undergrad(s) at MIT who has/have an OF. And that I know for certain from Twitter that there are undergrads from similar schools who have OF.

I never prequalified it specifically with 'CS' -- by the way, a lot of the discussion in the thread has tunnel-visioned on CS, but I'm pretty sure that's not the only STEM degree HN would consider 'useful' (if we loop back to the comment I replied to).

There's physics, math, engineering, and much, much more -- and all of those had an even worse job market than CS with the exclusion of those jumping into quantitative finance. The point of the original comment is to highlight how you can do everything 'right' according to the poster and, by necessity or tragedy resulting from a global pandemic, may still end up relying on sex work to make ends meet for a period of time.

The circumstances of the pandemic are only further exacerbated for the hundreds of thousands of STEM graduates not coming from top schools or internships. Finally, I'd like to note that my original comment (way up in the chain) was neither about STEM nor top schools, so I hold that my observation there still holds weight.

TL;DR: the concept that Gen-Z job hunters can simply go to 'the good school' and get 'the good degree' for 'the good job' is entirely subverted in a pandemic, leading to an especially dire job situation for those who are less privileged in education or training. This, coupled with social distancing, was the perfect social context for OnlyFan's recent hypergrowth.

Thank you for this excellent, thoughtful reply.

This point: "may still end up relying on sex work to make ends meet for a period of time". I grew up in a family and culture that shamed sex workers, but when I became an adult, I learned that that the truth is much more nuanced! I hope OnlyFans can continue to provide a safe space for sex workers when and how they wish to work.

Your tl;dr: I agree and experienced it myself, first hand. The year that you graduate is a roll of the dice in real life. If the economy is strong, you'll mostly do fine; if the economy is in a nosedive, most people are screwed, even hotties on OnlyFans with an MIT CS degree!

>I learned that that the truth is much more nuanced!

Yes! Absolutely, I tried a couple times to re-write that bit without getting too verbose and kinda gave up. I agree with you -- there are people who absolutely just vibe with sex work and they should be empowered to do it.

Maybe in the US? The UK market for tech is insanely hot. But perhaps it was previously underpriced.

No. Tech employment in the US remains hot as well. Unemployment for people in the tech industry with a degree is about 1-2%. For a software developer with a degree, it's sub 1%.

Well when you apply at GAFAM you're competing against a very specific talent pool, and it's a buyers market. Maybe try applying at a smaller company?

When I graduated with my CS degree in 2002 the job search was brutal. I hang out in cscareerquestions on Reddit and a common theme seems to be getting that first junior dev job is really hard. Is this just an unfair reality all junior devs face?

Getting that first job is almost always the hardest. I went through nearly 100 interviews (I have no degree) before I got hired. I wouldn't call it unfair though. I've been on the other side of the interview table since then and I can tell you that the vast majority of applicants to a junior role are so far from employable that its barely worth it to hire a junior. No one wants to wait years for an employee to become productive. The fact is that most schools are not preparing graduates to work in the industry. I know several CS graduates who were almost totally unfamiliar with SQL databases. Considering that the vast majority of SE work these days is on the web, it is shocking that there isn't more focus on fundamental web technology.

It definitely seems so. Whenever I post an internship or junior position on Indeed or LinkedIn I get hundreds of resumes.

Whenever I need someone more experienced, it’s either hired by recommendation, or we need a headhunter. Salary is never the issue, it’s just that senior devs complain about getting swamped with offers, so they don’t even have to look anymore.

It’s almost like a game theory problem: people have to apply to hundreds of companies to have a shot because everyone is also doing the same.

That, and some companies seem to be shifting towards preferring having a low number of experienced developers rather than a larger number of entry-level: I know of a few companies that paused junior and mid-level hirings after getting big investments.

Joel Spolsky has written about this problem extensively. The best devs are not available and are not looking. I have seen many, many LinkedIn profiles for people who are insanely technical (much more than me) who literally write: "Headhunters: Go away!" LOL.

I think there's just a lot of competition. I never was able to land a junior dev position and gave up (was self taught, though.) I just decided to go freelance and work on personal projects until I had a portfolio and was able to get hired as a mid-level engineer.

> I have classmates who had OF

What is OF?

Sorry, OF is the abbreviation for OnlyFans.

OnlyFans. OF is what it’s called often in common conversations.

“What’s your OF?” “I setup an OF at blahblahblah”

I think this is a sign of companies not knowing how to get useful work out of junior developers with only a few years of experience, much less fresh college graduates. This is an extremely challenging problem at small scales, and one that most companies simply aren't up to. In my experience, listening to engineering management discuss these matters, the few people who entertain the idea of hiring junior developers do so for fairly abstract reasons: a sense of moral obligation, a sense of contributing to the health of the industry, a desire to challenge the software engineering team to mature in its practices, etc. I'm sure there are companies out there that know how to employ a junior developer at the going rate and actually get their money's worth, but it isn't common knowledge, and I haven't seen anybody succeed at it firsthand. If my experience is typical, we're just overall shitty as an industry at using young talent.

That creates a problem of incentives, where purely self-serving organizations will let other companies bear the expense of employing junior developers and helping them learn the ropes, and then hire them when they're worth it.

As an aside, professional soccer solves this by granting a team certain rights to the players it develops, so if a player is trained in Team A's youth academy, and Team B wants to sign them at age 18, Team B pays a fee to Team A. Team A may agree to reduce the fee in exchange for a share of any subsequent sale, so if the player develops into a top professional and is sold to Team C at age 22, both Team A and Team B benefit financially.

> That creates a problem of incentives, where purely self-serving organizations will let other companies bear the expense of employing junior developers and helping them learn the ropes, and then hire them when they're worth it.

With juniors being able to be easily enticed away with a bump in salary at a well known company it becomes the situation that the only companies that can afford to hire juniors are those that pay enough to make it so that they aren't enticed away as easily.

This then leads to other companies not interested in hiring juniors - not because they don't want them or that they aren't willing to train them, but rather that they can't compete with the big tech company compensation.

The result of that is then that you see only job postings for mid and seniors... not so much because they will hit the ground with less training, but that they're likely more mature and less likely to be poached (they're stereotypically interested in settling down and raising a family).

Ultimately, if everyone and every organization is similarly self interested, there is no reason to hire a junior dev unless you can pay them top dollar to avoid the possibility of them getting poached by another org before they've been able to produce a positive return on investment... or that the overall income of the org is large enough that the loss in the ROI isn't substantial.

It sounds like you’re talking about the very beginning of the pandemic when everyone was just trying to figure out what the hell was happening. That seems entirely separate from the topic of the value of a degree these days. I had a similar situation finishing school as the last recession hit, but that wasn’t so sudden. Someone else is talking about it being brutal graduating in 2002. The common theme here seems to be graduating right after crashes or right after pandemics hit sucks.

I wanted to add to your list of degrees of plentiful jobs.. but electrical engineering grads have no shortage of people competing to hire them.

If you include associate degrees, you can add all the skilled trades to that list. To be clear, I'm talking about all the associate applied science w/[electricial|plumbing|pipefitting|welding] programs out there.

As an MIT alum - if you had an offer rescinded please let the careers office know. Companies are not allowed to do that if engaging with MIT students in a meaningful way (career fairs, etc.) and MIT can and does penalize them for this (banning from fairs, etc.)

I am not MIT, but rather shabby mid-tier state uni, and my experience was nearly identical when job hunting in 2002/3 after graduation. With some distance, the hardest part emotionally, is that one or two years when you are only 22 years old is a LONG time to find a job!

There are about three fields like that now.

The median bachelor's degree in math or physics obtained in 2021 is basically worthless.

A bachelors in math or physics from a decent school should indicate that you have the capacity to learn difficult concepts, work with data, and you should have some experience with programming.

Sorry, but that doesn't translate into employability in 2021.

I have mentored math and physics students for six years now and even the good ones are having an increasingly hard time finding employment, and not for lack of trying. It's not uncommon to hear of seniors sending, say, 100 applications only to get ghosted on 99 of them.

Try convincing the median HR drone of that.

I would agree with this. A large portion of tech people I work with are not CS grads. I myself have a math degree. You do need to show that you can program and know your stuff, but you can still do that with personal/side projects/etc. Once you get your first job, then you're good to go and most won't care about your degree. I think now it's more a challenge of getting junior level jobs across the board.

Same here, math undergrad; not terribly difficult to start my career with and is now an advantage I think, albeit a small one.

Just curious what you would say those fields are.

Off the top of my head CS is steadily looking like one of the only degrees worth anything and I’d still argue the value of that given the prevalence of self taught developers. Decent starting salaries for the most part, and very good starting salaries if you’re particularly good at certain things and an otherwise unheard of ceiling. Though I’m generalizing at the moment, I feel the industry is more complex than that.

Nursing seems ok. Salaries appear good at first, but the nurses I know also work ungodly hours.

Some traditional engineering fields seem ok in terms of employability, but wages don’t seem that great and many of the roles I’ve seen in those fields want a MS/MEng.

Nursing, yes. Pre-COVID it looked like it might have gotten saturated but since then demand has spiked.

Physical therapy seems to be doing well too.

The other one in my head was pharmacy, but I guess one needs a Pharm. D to continue on. Being a pharmacy tech also sucks, objectively.

CS, maybe. Engineering degrees from anything less than a large state school or tier one are probably better off trying to get into one for their masters. That's why I said "median" BS degree above.

Law is entirely saturated and dead.

Ironically, I see a lot of humanities students doing well post-graduation because they went in with low expectations. But society continues to dunk on them for basically no reason.

> The other one in my head was pharmacy, but I guess one needs a Pharm. D to continue on. Being a pharmacy tech also sucks, objectively.

A Pharm D is currently one of the worst investments. Their wages have been declining since at least 2015, and stagnant since 2010.

They have no ability to generate revenue other than hawking bullshit vitamins and supplements, because they have no negotiating power against the people that pay them (managed care organizations and governments). And a few big employers compose of most of the market that buys Pharm D labor (CVS, Walgreens, Kroger, Walmart).

Not to mention that you have to work evenings, weekends, nights, and deal with the general public. Checkout the pharmacy forums on sdnforum or Reddit, they are super depressing.

Doesn’t help when you don’t have the foot in the door because your family is not traditionally professional.

I had to ask one of my old graduate project partners for a referral to my current (and first, at 27) tech job and I still feel dirty and guilty that I got it so easily and managed to escape the trap of being extremely qualified while making min wage in a dusty shithole of a warehouse.

“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” was a phrase of derision growing up, but it’s how the world works now.

It's how the world has always worked, which is why it's a phrase in the first place.

It’s fucked up is what it is.

Right now my coworkers like me, my manager gave me a glowing review, the company is willing to buy me certs and I have been assigned to the subteam responsible for our core functionality.

8 months ago I was self-harming and ready to off myself because of endlessly firing applications into the void and reaching the end of my finances.

I can clearly perform under the stress of work, school, achievement, things breaking but the way the labour market is structured almost broke me which has to tell you something.

As parent was telling you, that's always been America.

Except historically, most jobs have been less safe.

You get crap jobs in your teens to have work history. You go to college to get a degree. You make friends at college, network, and maybe get an internship. You leverage all of the previous to get your first job. You leverage your first job and network to get your second job.

It's not easy. But it is how the world works. Why do you think so many people in white collar jobs have imposter syndrome?

> 8 months ago I was self-harming and ready to off myself because of endlessly firing applications into the void and reaching the end of my finances

I am sorry you experienced this. Many of us have experienced similar things in our careers. When I did, I had my brother's couch I could crash on while I figured things out, and to be honest, parents who could help me with rent when my post dotcom-bust job paid peanuts.

To the extent that your difficulties were exacerbated by an insufficient social safety net is perhaps the greatest indictment of our society. Incentive structures matter, and structures that put people at the brink between achievement and self harm do a lot of damage to our human capital.

Not everyone will be pushed to the point of self-harm, but the proximity between destitution and achievement is too close, especially for those without family and community safety nets.

Every single job I've had in my adult life (I'm 42 years old now) was because I knew someone. It pays to know people and make friends/connections.

I got started with an unpaid internship in high school (every school should require that) and life grew out of that.

[edit] And my family was anything but "traditionally professional." I had no connections whatsoever through my family.

Pretty much the same here. Many of those connections were from school, going all the way back to elementary. So as a parent now, I feel like part of my job, for better or worse, is to nurture their friendships and maintain them with playdates once they aren’t in the same school.

I can’t say I blame you, but it really leads to a society stratified on uncontrollable factors and puts a bullet in the idea of meritocracy. You can’t control who your parents are or the culture you grew up in, but these have no impact on your job performance unless you live in a highly nepotistic society.

Maybe an “affirmative action” type program for the socially disadvantaged is necessary, but I can’t see that gaining much support when addressing the more glaring disparities (racial, gender) is controversial enough.

I have the same issues as you as well and no, you can't control who your parents are and the culture you grow up in.

But you can control who your friends are. And you can choose to surround yourself with motivated people.

>puts a bullet in the idea of meritocracy. I don't feel the same way, as this sits at the boundary of the workplace. My understanding of meritocracy is that, reward is based on performance inside the company. But until you have hired and had someone working for some time, you have no way of evaluating them.

We try to mitigate hiring bad employees with things like resumes, interviews and skill tests but those are not perfect. I, for example, suck at writing a resume. How many people have you seen on this site rage about "leet code tests"?

So, another "tool" companies use are personal connections. John, a great worker whom I trust, refers Frank. I still have to interview him but it give me another data point.

As a society, we have drifted away from the local community organizations (i.e. churches) that allowed people to build up good connections. We have tried to replace them, things like Linkedin but I am not sure how good of a job they do. Anything done on the internet gives me more of an ethereal feeling as opposed to the more permanent feeling of face to face personal connections.

I'm not entirely sure that is necessary. While I think connections will take you further, nurturing relationships in the community, as an adult, is also very useful. This is something anyone can do provided they can get wherever things are happening. Which in a lot of cases is online.

Do you also make an effort to include children from lower socio-economic backgrounds? That is a good way to contribute to a flatter society, that depends less upon "the privileged people I know to help me get a job".

You’re right — I’ll do my best to give them opportunities to find friends all over. Then my kids may become those privileged people, and it will be their responsibility in turn to continue that flattening until it’s not needed.

My anecdata are somewhat counter to this.

I got my first part-time tech support job during college via a connection. My aunt was a white collar professional, she ran the fundraising for a non-profit with an annual budget in the millions of dollars. Some software they used for managing donations was developed by a small local company, and she recommended I apply for work there because she was always in touch with their support and thought I could do the job. So I wrote a cover letter and name dropped my aunt's name, who they knew as a client. They interviewed me and hired me. I don't know how much my aunt helped but I can grant that this connection was a privilege many don't have.

After that, the rest of my jobs were without any connection. In the winter of my senior year at college I started applying to big companies through their websites. A big insurance company responded and flew me in for an interview. I was thrilled by this chance, I had never been treated so well. The recruiter told me to save receipts for food and taxis etc, I was so unused to this that I don't think u ever submitted them, I couldn't believe they'd pay for all that. Anyway they hired me.

After that my LinkedIn profile did most of the work. I responded to recruiter spam and got interviews.

One job-hop was driven by a semi-connection: I was moving cities and wanted to find a new job, so I went to a bunch of tech meetups. One was a python meetup, which has nothing to do with my tech stack and I know very little python. At the end, I approached one of the lecturers and told him that while I didn't understand anything he talked about, I got his joke and I thought they were funny. He said that he and some friends were going for drinks, would I like to join? "Sure." So we sat and talked, at the end he asked if I'm looking for a job, I said yes, he told me to send him my CV which I did. Then nothing... then a week later he responds telling me he posted on a forum for veterans of a particular military unit he was in, where he wrote that he thought I was a good candidate. Then suddenly my phone started ringing...I had interviewsin the new city and ultimately offers.

Bottom line: there are multiple ways to success. Good fortune is a common thread though, you do need luck and serendipity, and professional family connections certainly don't hurt.

> “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” was a phrase of derision growing up, but it’s how the world works now.

It was always a phrase of derision for the naivete of those who think it has ever been different, because it has always been how the world works.

You just didn't understand it until it bit you, and then you mistook it for some recent change, even though you apparently grew up with people telling you how it is.

True, I always interpreted it as “incompetent people will sometimes be picked over you by virtue of their connections” but the reality is much, much worse IMO: “from a young age, optimize your social network for the career you want, else play the application lottery”

Honestly being on the other end hiring people without referals is very draining, but my best hires have been without referals.

See the thing is, there is no such thing as meritocracy. What I don't understand is why people choose the fantasy of "working their way up" instead of putting some of those efforts into political activism and engagement. That's what's needed to actually tackle the systematic problems at hand.

We need more political education, especially among younger people just entering the job market. Period.

YMMV. I've gotten all my jobs by mass applying, going to career fairs (to be fair this was through my university), having an updated LinkedIn, etc. None were by referral.

> “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”

Close. It's not who you know, it's who knows you.

Absolutely, and that has always been the case, even in vocations. There was a time where being a tv or vacuum repairman was a pretty good, middle class-ish job. Then the times came where that's not really the case. Picking a career path does have a little bit of luck in it, but that's like thinking it's lucky to not hit a door when going through a doorway. If you stop, think and open the door, you're less likely to get hit by a door, even though that doesn't guarantee it.

And yes, this is coming from a guy who has been smacked in the face by someone else opening the door on me. Same with picking a poor career choice pre housing crash in 2008. Adapt and overcome.

That's basically shooting at a moving target, though.

The problem with college is the cost, not the degrees people choose to pursue. And blaming students for studying things that aren’t in demand is a straw man.

A lot can change in the four years between enrollment and graduation. For example, I went to college in 2006 when the finance sector was booming. I graduated in 2010 when it very much wasn’t. By the time the jobs had evaporated it was much too late to change my course of study. And I certainly couldn’t go back and renegotiate the tuition or interest rate on my loans.

I’m sure the same could be said about people who went to school for anything relating to tourism or hospitality who have graduated into the pandemic. If you’re a new chef, pilot, hair dresser, massage therapist, looking to work in hotel management, etc. the job market that existed when you began your studies is entirely different from the job market you’ve just graduated into.

I finished a network admin degree just as all the entry-level jobs were being sucked up by SaaS and a few IT firms that weren't hiring. At least the state scholarship paid for most of it, so I had no debt.

And the same can happen in tech! When I started college in the late 90s in software engineering, the market was booming. A year before I graduated the dot-com crash took place and the jobs evaporated. That was the catalyst for pursuing an entrepreneurial path (I had no choice) but in spite of things working out, I always try to be thankful for my good fortune and remember that it can change in an instant.

Can you expand on the entrepreneurial path you took?

If you are going to uni to do vocational training such as hairdressing, massage and being a chef then something is really screwed.

hairdressers and chefs can't have well rounded educations? going to vocational school is a completely different experience. you're not being asked to read literature at a trade school. you're not asked to take history classes, or even basic sciences. sure, these are positives to people that don't care, but i'm not sure that's a full education? you're definitely trained in your field, but is that a full education? i would recommend at least 2 years at community college on top of (before?) vocational school. i'm not knocking vocational schools, but i'm suggesting not knocking someone attending a college taking one of these types of careers

I'm not knocking them, but if what you say is the case it would appear orthogonal to their career choice and so complaining that your college was expensive and you can't get a job is incoherent.

Last I had been hearing, the people complaining about costs were referring to universities (4 years +) and not the community college (2 years) type of school that I suggested.

You've just made as much of a straw man (by listing jobs that evaporated over 4 years) as the comment you were replying to.

The fact is that some jobs will always be in demand. Some jobs will almost always be in higher demand.

And the rest of jobs... won't.

Get a degree linked with the former, you'll have more opportunities. Get a degree linked with the latter, and you won't.

Which field "has jobs" anymore? Putting aside the humanities, STEM degrees these days aren't even a guarantee of a job. Biology/chemistry jobs generally require graduate school or medical school, engineering jobs aren't as lucrative or stable as they once were, and math either implies becoming an actuary (i.e. more certification), a quant (insanely competitive) or a programmer. I'm not saying these routes are impossible, but it's harder than you'd think to pick a field that "has jobs". More than a few of my friends who did STEM degrees have ended up in tech for that reason.

That's not exactly true. It's not that an undergraduate degree is worthless, but it's become pretty standard. You may not stand above the rest with just a degree, but you certainly fall below the rest without one.

I don't mean this from an intelligence or skill perspective, some of the smartest people I know don't have college degrees. But when the big companies are recruiting from college career fairs or listing it as a job requirement, you can and will be passed over for jobs because you don't have one.

I have a friend who worked for 5 years at a big consultancy company and he got stonewalled for getting promoted to a team lead role because he didn't have a masters degree. Like, he was getting top marks every year at performance review, clearly knew how to do the job, but some internal policy somewhere said that you can't be a lead without a masters degree, sorry.

He did manage to arrange with them that they would pay for him to take a 1-year old masters in CS in his own spare time, and if he passes he would be promoted - and he was. Still, I'd say it was an absolute waste of time and he ended up switching companies a year later anyway.

That might me the case at larger consultancies. Also, some jobs even require a PhD, because it is super specialized. But overall, the ROI of degrees have plummeted. A friend of mine finished a Mechanical Engineering degree and couldn't find decent paying work for 2 years. He then moved onto website design.

Your friend may have struggled but overall Mechanical Engineering is one of the top 10 highest salary college majors. Most graduates are doing pretty well.

https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/valueofcollegemajors/

The ones that get jobs, you mean.

Almost didn't catch the fact that the data he pointed out only really counts people who actually got jobs. What kids need nowadays is to know which majors generate the largest percentage of graduates who get work in their respective fields. That would be a better indicator of your chances of being hired after college.

It does most of these kids no good to know that a given type of engineer can make 150k right out of college, if less than 2% of them are actually able to secure work in the field right out of college. In fact, I'd wager that prior to going into a field, most kids would rather know about the "less than 2% are able to secure work" part rather than the "150K starting salary" part.

Your friend was working for a bureaucratic company.

Source: I know plenty of engineers without any formal degrees working for big money at real companies.

If they dont have formal degrees, then "engineer" is a loose term. They would not be professional engineers (PE/PEng).

Saying that here will be unpopular.

But it’s important to keep in mind that in many countries “engineer” is a protected term with qualification requirements and not simply a job title.

There is no software engineer professional accreditation, the way there is for, say, civil engineer

Unpopular idea, but that is why I use the word "engineer" sparingly. Engineers doing real engineering is becoming a smaller part of making tech products, especially software.

Software developers can be at least as highly skilled and intelligent as can be engineers, but, most of the time, they are engaged in a highly skilled craft rather than engineering. Making software is sometimes more creative and more integrative than engineering.

Also software can change radically in ways physical engineering doesn't - we may continue to make refinements to steel alloys, but you won't come in to work tomorrow and discover that everyone is now building bridges out of glass.

But a software engineer isn't a member of a state-sanctioned professional association. They cannot be struck off for bad behaviors, nor are they licensed to do anything beyond the norms of any other citizen. They are not members of a true profession like doctors/lawyers/engineers.

I'm not sure what "state-sanction professional association" means but there are many professional associations like IEEE (covering tech as a whole) or ACM (that covers computing specifically).

There's also ABET - Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology - which establishes formal requirements and standards for the teaching of Software Engineering as a discipline: https://www.abet.org/accreditation/

So I think those pieces are there, they're just not the norm yet.

State sanctioned means there is law mandating that only one group is in charge of the profession and they, outside government, regulate that profession. Lawyers only have one bar association in each state. Doctors have only one medical board.

The State of Oregon already tried to sue someone who was a software engineer for not being a "certified 'Engineer'" and the state's own supreme court ruled in favor of the defendant.

I'm personally in favor of such an organization but it really goes against the meritocratic spirit of tech. Lots of us have used tech to bootstrap a better life through sheer mastery and not a "professional" track

This is the reason why our country will die a soon approaching death: the people who built all of our engines for WW2 were not certified engineers.

A Master's degree is what you make of it. A student who only wants the credential for short-term career purposes can skate through without much work or learning. But if you have it the opportunity to attend then why not put in some effort and learn interesting, challenging topics? I find that usually opens up unexpected opportunities later.

It's a bit silly for employers to focus on arbitrary educational credentials instead of actual ability. But on the other hand for large organizations managing thousands of employees it's challenging to treat everyone as a unique individual. Some level of forced standardization is the only way to make it work efficiently at scale.

At a consultancy, credentials you can market when "selling" your consultants is part of the job. Depending on the field, a certain level of accredited knowledge (i.e., from a degree, or certification perhaps) is part of how the bill-rate is justified for employees at given levels.

We don't have an education lock on certain roles/levels at the company I work for, but we do have roles at certain levels that require a given certification no matter how proficient one is in the specified tech. This isn't a small-brain move that misses the forest of knowledge for the trees of credentials, but a recognition that it will be more challenging to staff that employee at a given level without it.

> This isn't a small-brain move that misses the forest of knowledge for the trees of credentials

It is a second-order small-brain move: the clients are the ones missing the forest for the trees, while your company is just going with the flow. I get it, my company did the same thing, but in the end it's one of those "how business is done" things that add together to create a culture we all freely admit makes no sense.

I think viewed uncharitably, it makes no sense. But I think it is plenty logical on its own. The reality is my org. - and many like it - have choices. We're not choosing between an incompetent person with a relevant credential and a competent person without one, we're choosing among many competent individuals (as far as we've assessed), and verifiable (marketable) indicators of competence beyond us "vouching" for them is an extremely valuable resource. It may not be ideal for a given person's career, but I don't think it has that much effect on our clients' outcomes.

I'm sure there have been exceptions to this, and firms that aren't as confident in the capabilities of their people may suffer more.

> part of how the bill-rate is justified for employees at given levels

“This guy is absolute garbage, but he has a masters degree, so we charge more for him.”

The industry term is leverage but, fundamentally, yes.

> I have a friend who worked for 5 years at a big consultancy company and he got stonewalled for getting promoted to a team lead role because he didn't have a masters degree. Like, he was getting top marks every year at performance review, clearly knew how to do the job, but some internal policy somewhere said that you can't be a lead without a masters degree, sorry.

Well, that's part of the job - are you able to figure out what needs to be done to reach the objective, and then do that? No? Well, no promotion for you.

> He did manage to arrange with them that they would pay for him to take a 1-year old masters in CS in his own spare time, and if he passes he would be promoted - and he was.

Seems like your friend did figure out what hurdles to jump.

Part of the reason that employers require advanced degrees is so that they are assured that the individual in question can figure out what steps need to be taken to fulfill an objective, and then take those steps.

This is the common refrain, but I think it's equally likely that it boils down to "I did this, so you should have to do this, too."

> This is the common refrain, but I think it's equally likely that it boils down to "I did this, so you should have to do this, too."

The reason is probably irrelevant: the organisation tells you what steps to take to get a promotion. If you fail to take those steps they consider you unsuitable for the promotion, not because they consider those steps to prove your capability, but because you have demonstrated an unwillingness to meet the minimum requirements.

Why the minimum requirements are what they are is irrelevant.

>Part of the reason that employers require advanced degrees is so that they are assured that the individual in question can figure out what steps need to be taken to fulfill an objective, and then take those steps.

it seems like if some individual has been working with you for years, you should probably have access to better metrics for this than degree/no degree, such as personal acquaintance and familiarity

> it seems like if some individual has been working with you for years, you should probably have access to better metrics for this than degree/no degree, such as personal acquaintance and familiarity

But it isn't about the employee's competence, so how would metrics help? It's about the employee's compliance.

Look at it from the point of view of the organisation, not the point of view of an individual within the organisation: an individual literally gets told what steps are needed to reach some objective, and then they fail to take those steps!

That does not bode well for that individual in terms of making business decisions, hence they shouldn't be in a position of more power and/or influence anyway, because they are unable to achieve an objective even when it is spelled out to them.

Or, they achieved the objective, but they found their own solution instead of being forced to have it spelled out for them. I commonly encounter people who have these degrees but are unable to figure out how to accomplish an objective unless every step is presented as a bullet-point list in the task description.

Having a degree is not the objective, being able to do the work is. Confusing the two is an example of a cargo cult. I don't want people working under me who are incapable of understanding which objectives are important.

> Or, they achieved the objective, but they found their own solution instead of being forced to have it spelled out for them.

The objective here is getting the promotion.

> I commonly encounter people who have these degrees but are unable to figure out how to accomplish an objective unless every step is presented as a bullet-point list in the task description.

Irrelevant - the company isn't using the degree as an indicator of competence, they are using it as an indicator of compliance.

> Having a degree is not the objective,

You're correct. Getting the promotion is the objective.

> being able to do the work is.

Being able to do the work is irrelevant if the candidate does not meet the minimum requirements set by the organisation.

Is there a more worthless degree than a CS MS? No offense to anyone who has one, only my condolences.

I disagree. By that logic any CS degree is worthless. I have two years of college under my belt but work as a lead engineer at a well funded startup. I didn't need college to get good but that doesn't mean it doesn't help 90% of people to do so. I imagine that same is true of a masters degree, certain people will definitely benefit from it.

In France you can get a degree (or at least an equivalent) from professional experience. You have to go through skill validation for that!

This is certainly a common thing at large companies, but it also is one that goes back ten to twenty years, possibly more. Millenials hit this frequently, it's not just a Gen Z change.

> He did manage to arrange with them that they would pay for him to take a 1-year old masters in CS in his own spare time, and if he passes he would be promoted - and he was.

Well, at least he scored a degree out of it.

I'm torn on this. I'm not sure I see it all that different than if they wanted to make sure someone they were moving into a managerial role had knowledge to back it up, and wanted them to take managerial courses. It's good that the company paid for the courses, a bit less good that it was in personal time (but it's also theoretically beneficial for the person and isn't tied to the company, so I don't fault that much).

If they outright offer this path in in this situation and it doesn't have to be brought up by the employee, I think that's a pretty acceptable solution to requiring that degree for the position, if the company thinks it's really important to have for some reason.

Worthless? Probably depends on the degree. Miseducation is worse than the absence of education. STEM at least has some market value, but man does not live by bread alone and market value alone does not elevate the university above the level of trade school. Trade schools are a good thing. Turning universities into glorified trade schools (which they are) is not.

People need more of the intangible but true. A consumerist society is condemned to wallow in mediocrity and misery. It does not rise to the level of human dignity and maintains a level of existence better suited to worms than men.

American universities do not really seem to be playing the role of exploring deep questions or search for meaning or knowledge for knowledge sake, either.

It's mostly about expanding the gravy train of administrative staff and shiny new dormitories and eating facilities and gyms, alongside a narrow ideological political indoctrination with little enthusiasm for debate or considering unpopular opinions.

Without the trade school aspect it's difficult to see what value they still provide.

You've never been to an american university, have you?

Graduated from one.

You may get as philosophical as you want on the topic of whether degrees are necessary. As someone who did college recruiting for my company I can say first hand that degrees don't mean anything about someone's skillset. I've talked to hundreds of students with a 4.0 and a degree that couldn't tell me the Big-O of a hash vs searching a list. But if you are working in a field where the job requirements list a bachelor's degree and you don't have one, you are automatically at the bottom of the list. If I have 3 positions open and 25 similar candidates, things like fulfilling the job requirements (like having a degree) start coming into play.

Very obviously if you are working in a field that does not list that as a requirement, then of course you don't need one. But it's still not worthless. As someone pointed out in another thread, if you're trying to move up in a company, a degree can be the differentiator.

A degree at least means a candidate can probably read and write. I meet too many 20-somethings who think they are hot stuff because they can make a website dance, but are totally incapable of creating a document explaining how they did it.

My favorite legal recruiter question: give them a topic to research online, one where you know the wikipedia entry is wrong. Not many without post-secondary research experiance would pass that one.

If you know where Wikipedia is incorrect you fix it. They let almost anyone edit.

Edit yes, but whether your edit survives whatever person is king of that particular corner of wikipedia is another matter. Try making an edit from a brand new account. Correcting errors on a website isnt worth such fights.

This is also my experience with Wiki. After having a few edits reversed that were obviously wrong (with sources!), I gave up. Ignoring the problem of edits, I still love reading Wiki.

> If I have 3 positions open and 25 similar candidates, things like fulfilling the job requirements (like having a degree) start coming into play.

The problem is when jobs don't truly need the knowledge granted from a degree, and is just used to thin the heard, because hiding managers don't know what else to look for.

The value is thus generated by convenience to the hiring manager rather than possession of relevant job knowledge.

Add to that the fact that not all degrees are equal... there are plenty of "degree factories" that pump out useless people who don't know anything marketable.

Having a degree is, as you've said, a requirement (I have a 2 year... I'm out on some jobs because of it)...

Not having a degree is bad. Having a useless degree is worse as you now (generally) have the debt of a paper that means nothing.

> Having a useless degree

Do you mean a degree in weird subjects, or from non-famous colleges?

Weird subjects.

Personally, I'd say "weird subjects" - or, if not weird, not marketable. The proverbial "basket weaving" degree or stuff like that. I think the more common "liberal arts" line as well.

https://blog.prepscholar.com/worst-college-majors

https://www.salary.com/passages/8-college-degrees-with-the-w...

https://www.ownyourownfuture.com/most-useless-degrees/

What I find interesting in these articles (and others) is CompSci is listed as a bad investment... oversaturation and what not.

> But when the big companies are recruiting from college career fairs or listing it as a job requirement, you can and will be passed over for jobs because you don't have one.

I’ve started to get the impression that even in software development there are certain domains or industries you would be hard pressed to get into without a degree, simply because majority of entry levels are done through campus recruitment.

To confirm your point, Google Jobs has introduced a beta field called "educationRequirements" which can be any of the following values:

- high school. - associate degree. - bachelor degree. - professional certificate. - postgraduate degree.

Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure...

You don't need a degree for software, but you do for certain subfields.

You won't be able to do biotech or practice law or medicine without credentials.

There are (a few, but they exist) states that will allow you to practice law without a JD - you have to pass the bar, though.

Generally my takeaway from stories about working for big consultancies is exclusively “don’t work for big consultancies”.

That’s troubling. I don’t know where you live but at least in my locale many employers seem hesitant to hire newly-grads, even if they need to increase staff. Many companies seem to expect some other company to take care of the training.

A degree is nice but until someone has gained experience that person first needs a company to take a chance on them.

When I graduated (5-10 years ago) internships were the best way to grain experience and stand out a bit above the rest in the full time hiring portion.

1. The company that hired the interns received a fantastic deal on labor. I think the company that hired me did it because they had an extra fully equipped desk that was going to waste without someone coding on it.

2. Not every student earned an internship, so gaining one was real feather in the hat.

3. Not every intern would have accomplished the same amount. Just like school and life, the more you put into an internship the more you get out.

4. It jump started my professional network of people actually in industry.

The hard part is finding one that's paid, or pays enough. Most people can't afford to do un(der)paid labor for the prospect of maybe, possibly, but maybe not getting a job. Being able to do unpaid labor selects for people with other things working in their favor.

Almost all tech internships are paid (for people with CS or engineering majors). Only really shady companies would try to get away with not paying a technical intern. In most cases these folks are doing real work, not just fetching coffee.

Most tech internships are paid. Someone in a CS program at a recognizable school with a strong program should definitely not be signing up for unpaid internships (at least not at for-profit corps).

I just finished supervising the summer interns embedded with my team at work, and we definitely paid everyone, allowed remote work, and brought everyone into the HQ for a week towards the end (flights, hotel, transpo, meals all comped) to give presentations, network in person with the team, do field trips / team building stuff, etc. I like to think we do a better-than-average job, but it's pretty close to what you need to be doing if you want to attract good talent to your internship program.

Internships is a good thing, if the terms are reasonable. But IMHO there should also be other ways to get a foot in the door.

> being graduated isn't worth anything these days

I'm gen-X and it's been like this for as long as i've been around too.

Degree says "this one is reliable / knows how to finish stuff". That's it.

I'm Gen X too and I don't think that's really accurate.

I feel like the job market has changed pretty markedly since I was a grad in the late 90's, and that it's just way more all or nothing.

You either can get a job with benefits and a career track and 4 years later you're better off, or you're literally going nowhere, every year of your job is the same as the year prior and you have nothing to show.

There's no more thing where you get a real, genuine, full time, but low-skill entry level job and try to prove yourself. You can't prove yourself in low-skill jobs any more, nobody is watching and nobody cares. In short "you can't get there from here."

I'm speaking entirely anecdotally for sure, but with that said it really does seem fundamentally not the same at all as what I faced as a new grad.

Yea, and once you get on a track, you're pretty much there for good. There's a narrow range of "promotions" within that track, but no jumping tracks anymore. If you're flipping burgers at McDonalds, you can't just "hard-work" your way to owning that store. If you're 3rd junior engineer from the left at your tech company, you can hard-work your way up to senior, maybe even principal engineer, but you will statistically never be able to hard-work your way to CEO. If you're a nurse, you're never going to hard-work your way to being a doctor. And so on. The higher-status jobs are all gate-kept by social class pedigree and credentialism.

I partially agree with your sentiment. But isn't this one of the most commercially relevant skills to demonstrate to a potential employer?

In finance, it is "tradition" for people _without_ certifications to dump on those with certifications, such as CFA & CPA, but most of these haters miss the point. It is really hard to motivate yourself to finish. Once you have the cert, it is a good indicator that the person can get things done! Interestingly, when I interview fresh grads, if they have anything that demonstrates tenacity, like sports or playing musical instruments ... or something that takes time and skill to accomplish, I am always curious to hear about their experiences of personal growth.

Not to be that guy, but a very small percentage of people might get lucky to get an opportunity at something, not to keep it. Time and time again I've found that what people refer to as luck (aside from inheritance or lottery) is sheer hard work and discipline.

Some important steps in my career were basically down to sheer dumb luck. I will happily claim responsibility for putting myself in a position where lightning could strike, and was prepared to take advantage of the lightning strike, but it actually striking was, again, sheer dumb luck.

Again, dumb luck might have given you the opportunity, but dumb luck didn’t keep that thing going, you either consciously cheat or you’re working hard to keep the thing that dumb luck gave you the opportunity for.

The point is we all get dumb luck opportunities, not all keep them though

As someone who has life experience, I can assure you that your lamentations are not special. "It's not what you know, but who you know" isn't a saying that originated in the 2010s.

Can you please share what have you studied in your undergraduate? Or roughly what area? My experience is very different, to me it looks like the market is very hot now even after covid (talking about: Busness analysis and Engineering)

I mean luck is always a factor, but let's be real, the major/career path someone chooses to study in college is a much bigger determinant of your prospects after graduation.

I still can't understand how people can willingly choose any number of majors/careers that are very well known to have a weak job market and salary range, and then act surprised when it's tough after graduating.

The last half you wrote is so real and devastating to many. And few get the advice they need at 17 or 18 years old to make a more commercially relevant decision! If you are from an upper-middle class (and above) family, no worries -- anything will do. For all others, choose wisely.

Come on, there was never an era when "graduation" was worth anything. I graduated a small university in Normandy, France and work in an investment bank in Hong Kong.

You think they care I graduated at all? :D Be intelligent, know things, be creative and always end a job interview with the guys telling you you interviewed them.

Graduating is worth nothing. Whatever you learned while at university is worth a lot to get a free internship. Whatever you learned during the internship is worth a bit. Always been so, always will be.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28301239.

aka "Our valuation is dropping like a rock"

"But look, now it's soaring like never before"

More likely "we managed to get a deal in place with our payment processor". The only reason why they were going to do this was their payment processor saying they would stop processing their payments.

AFAIK a relevant credit card company said "we haven't done anything"

Well Mastercard did update their rules. They did not specifically go and say anything to onlyfans but onlyfans investors/banks looked at the new rules and interpreted them as "well this is now super risky of being shut down at any time" and stopped pumping in more money / loans. Only way to continue from there is to get an actual promise/contract from the processor that no we will not shutdown your stuff on a whim. (or the nuclear option of getting rid of this risky content)

Here are the updated rules https://www.mastercard.com/news/perspectives/2021/protecting...

Basically starting October 15th every new piece of content uploaded to OnlyFans needs to be reviewed and have age verification done for all the people involved.

But if I'm an investor, I would be worried that Visa/Mastercard could get pressed by one of the anti-porn groups at any moment, and then poof, there goes my investment. It's better from a risk perspective to go ahead and get OF into compliance by banning adult material before buying into the platform.

> It's better from a risk perspective to go ahead and get OF into compliance by banning adult material before buying into the platform.

Except, there would be nothing left to buy.

Lol, you're right, but some folks don't think that far ahead. And if the owners of OF want to eat at the financial trough, their only option might be to try to see what they can get away with.

mastercard denied saying this. what a clusterfu*k.

It wasn't MasterCard that was the problem rather their banking partners according to the FT.

oh, ok. i was actually looking now for the source, I remember I read that mastercard delined forcing them,but there was nothing mentioned on that article about who actually requested this.

thanks for the information

edit: converting the url posted below this into archive link, to skip paywall: https://archive.is/Aqx8x

https://www.ft.com/content/7b8ce71c-a87a-440e-9f3d-58069ca04...

Thanks for the heads-up, the article from yesterday:

https://www.ft.com/content/7b8ce71c-a87a-440e-9f3d-58069ca04...

I hope the assurances secured means that OF will verify consent per MC reqs. [edit - seems they have: “We’re already fully compliant with the new Mastercard rules, so that had no bearing on the decision” ^^]

Also I suspect their biggest money makers were leaving, here's the first screen from a competitor's ^ 'join as a creator' page tailor-made from this:

>Earn 100% payouts from every new user from now until Oct 1, 2021!

>Sign up

>Leaving another platform? Not to worry! Our team is on hand to help you transfer your content to FanCentro!

^ https://fancentro.com/sell

^^ https://www.ft.com/content/7b8ce71c-a87a-440e-9f3d-58069ca04...

With all the PR a major bank that deals with high risk would have stepped in. There is too much volume and processing to turn a blind eye from this deal.

It should be noted that the cams see a lot lower chargebacks than subscriptions because of the shady tactics a lot of subscription adult sites use. Example would be not noticing a "$1 trial" addon being offered that recurs at like $44.95/month.

The rest of the chargebacks can be offset with 3DS/3DS 2 to shift the liability off the merchant (In this case OnlyFans) and onto the issuing bank.

I can answer any questions within reason if someone wanted to know anything more.

Source: Worked/wrote code for a high risk payment processor with volume +$1B/Yr.

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are solely my own and only my own.

Indeed, but it's odd that creditcard companies are so hard on merchants. Surely they could just offer some program where they hold payments in escrow until the transaction is final and just subtract chargebacks from the escrow account as necessary.

They already do this. Credit card transactions don't "finalize" for 180 days. Until they do, Visa can reach into the merchant's bank account and claw back the funds plus a fee.

Some people who buy porn will lie to other people in their life and open chargebacks if they’re found out, and dealing with those people is a nightmare because they’re lying and they get loud and angry and litigious to try to sell the lie so they don’t lose social standing and/or in-person sex.

Something like Apple Pay, that is rooted in a biometric/pin-verified payment (low fraud) rather than “enter your card number manually” (high fraud) would be a godsend for the industry, since it would detect the lie in the fraudulent chargebacks as described above.

Human beings in many world cultures are such a huge pain when it comes admitting and openly talking about paying for sex and sex-tangential things, that I can understand and grudgingly concede that higher processing fees are necessary. I do not know if they need to be 25%, but they do definitely need to be higher than for other industries.

What do you think what they will do to handle the high risk?

The risk in this kind of model was much lower when I worked at the payment processor. Direct content like this was always lower chargebacks than subscriptions/trials.

OnlyFans should be aggressively poaching people from the other companies in this space but pay them SF salaries. The expertise they'll get hiring existing employees in the space will help them.

If you've already worked in this industry you'll know to do 3ds/3dsv2 to shift some liability to issuing banks. The card networks have different rules based off their region like MC NA and MC Europe. There are some loopholes to shifting your acquiring process into other regions to get more liability shift as a merchant. Bin routing to maximize your approval ratio, the higher your non-chargeback volume the easier it is to deal with the chargeback volume.

Introduce micro transactions to pad volume. Users less likely to chargeback you want to have each micro transaction as a standalone charge because it increases your volume at the cost of additional card fees. Users unknown or likely to chargeback you want to "batch" or roll these charges into a single charge because then it is only a single chargeback that can happen instead of multiple smaller ones.

Plenty of other stuff...

Is it feasible for someone to start their own payment processor?

Yes and no. It's not feasible for me, and I don't know you but I'm gonna go ahead and day it's not feasible for you either. The barriers to entry are extremely high, regulators need to be convinced you know what you're doing, as do banks, and you need to be accepted by enough places for it to be worthwhile people paying for things through you and merchants paying your fee to accept you. You can choose to do only parts of the payments processing picture and that's easier, but it's not easy. Bottom end startup costs would likely be in the hundreds of thousands, ignoring actually developing your payments platform (so just to get everyone onside and regulatory approvals etc), more realistically a budget of say low tens of millions might get one off the ground.

Besides adult content, what else is considered "high risk"? What are the commissions in this space?

Also, major media outlets* are now doing bait and switch subscriptions. Does that make them high risk too?

*Bloomberg $2/mo->$35/mo after 3m

NYT $4/mo->$17/mo after 1yr

WAPO $4/mo->$10/mo after 1yr

Economist $25/qtr->$55/qtr after 1 qtr

> Besides adult content, what else is considered "high risk"?

Off the top of my head: gambling, medication, gift cards...stuff that's legal but more-likely-than-average to chargeback or default.

What the hell did they think would happen?

Does anyone remember Tumblr? No? We’ve already experienced what it’s like for a brand to lose any relevance by abandoning the very community that made it successful.

> Does anyone remember Tumblr? No?

Yes? I check my Tumblr timeline pretty much every day - there's a lot of content there (and I only follow a handful of people.) Anyone suggesting Tumblr is dead is mistaken.

(And yeah, the daily posts are way down but that's after 8 years of neglect and mishandling. Any social network would suffer the same!)

everything2.com has new content everyday. Long tail != top brand.

Alexa currently has tumblr.com at 114 and Tumblr report about 12M posts a day this year - I'd say that probably still counts as a "top(ish) brand".

For contrast, everything2.com is at 526113.

Tumblr went from >1B valuation to ~3M right after it was announced. It wasn't the 8y of neglect that did it.

> Tumblr went from >1B valuation

Yahoo are not known for their savvy approach to acquisitions - they frequently paid well over the odds for the cachet of ownership until Verizon snapped them up.

> to ~3M right

But we don't know how much they were valued at when Verizon bought the Yahoo group in 2017. If they considered Tumblr only worth $3M then before they banned porn, then the porn ban has done nothing to the valuation. Anything else is just conjecture.

Not only is Tumblr still alive and well, I see screenshots of recent posts being passed around Twitter and Imgur regularly.

The idea that a) Tumblr was 90% porn before the ban, or b) Tumblr is now dead are both quite false.

More active discussion at top of front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28300966

Thanks! We'll merge those threads.

Although not an onlyfans fan, these new Puritan times are dangerous for everything the West supposedly stands for. The bankers who allegedly have laundered drug money and goodness knows who elses dirty money, now seem to have an issue with those who use the platform safely and responsibly (and all the rest of the OF users) on that platform.

lol these weak people. Just stick to your business driven decisions.

So are they going to use stablecoins/doge?

What's next? YouTube banning videos? SoundCloud banning music?

Nothing like (good/bad) publicity!

How about there are people who make $200M a year on the platform. Outrageous.

Well, maybe they realized that sexually explicit stuff is their only reason to exist.

Otherwise I can't see why people wouldn't flock to, say, Patreon.

I guess it wasn't really a requirement imposed on them by Mastercard as they claimed.

That's not very charitable. The pressure could be very real. We still don't know whether they will survive the decision they've made.

Or they came up with ways of placating MC/Visa around better moderation.

Tbh evangelists or whatever the fuck they're named have broken my balls, if you're so attached why don't you go to meet him in person and leave the rest of us in peace

These women were grooming children on apps like Tiktok. Good riddance!

Well, at least this means every man still has an automatic litmus test to reject women who will never make good girlfriends, wives or mothers: "Do you have an OnlyFans account? Yes? Ok, bye!"

Of Course not ... We live in decadence, seeing China take over while the west is eaten away by a bunch of narcisists. I think it's just obvious to assume we will all be living in some form of Democrat North Korea soon enough.

They just released an app on the app stores days prior to the "ban" announcement. Nice PR stunt for some downloads. But obvious manipulation if the walled-gardens cared about that sort of thing.

It's extraordinary that payment processors don't have any regulations that force them to serve businesses in a neutral fashion. It's weird that they're allowed to play morality police with the Internet even though they have no formal governmental role as such.

You'd think that once the government decides what is and isn't acceptable, the processors would follow that lead. But instead they go a different, more restrictive way.

I guess they want to be everyone's prudish uncle, instead of payment processors.

There is lobbying/regulatory/activist pressure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Cry

Exactly, I don't believe that payment processors want to play the role of gatekeepers (after all, they lose revenue for every customer they turn down). They probably just want to show that they can self-regulate to give Congress less of a reason to pass something like this[1].

I think people underestimate how much moral regulation in the US actually comes top-down under the guise of anti-trafficking law (remember SESTA/FOSTA and how it killed Craigslist personals?)

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/808/...

The bigger you are the stronger is the pull of the average.

I don't see how common carrier type regulation in the financial services industry could work. You're essentially forcing people to lend out or risk their money with anyone who asks regardless of their financial status or the risk profile of their business. Surely choosing what business risks you are willing to take must be some sort of right?

The only way out of that would be blanket government insurance for payment processors, but that would essentially be a massive subsidy and open to rampant abuses.

This is a good point. So there's more fraud associated with OnlyFans and the like?

You do see that this is specifically an issue with the credit services threatening to refuse the processing of payments and not simply withholding credit. These are two different banking services, and you can support neutral payment processing without supporting neutral (forced in your vocabulary) lending. The reasons that the banks are as regulated as they are everywhere is because of the huge amounts of power that they have by controlling the flow of money. If you deregulated banks you would end up with one bank that controlled the world.

You have to realize this was marketing. Coca Cola did this, and brought their earlier recipe back within three months. Plus this generated greater product interest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke

I guess you can expect companies to start using the defence of many politicians, just create as much noise and kick up as much dirt as possible distracting from whatever the main issue is (in this case child porn on your platform [1]).

They were never going to ban adult content were they. Cynical in the extreme.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58255865

EDIT: I’ve updated this comment with a BBC investigation that suggests they had quite lax child porn policies. Do any of the down-voters really believe OnlyFans were genuine about removing all adult content?

I guess you’re just using the offence of many current politicians, attack everything you disagree with under the pretense that it aids paedophiles.

Not at all, I was just wondering if OnlyFans banning adult content was a distraction tactic (from the BBC investigation or something else), it seems extremely likely as it doesn’t make any sense for a porn site to ban pornography!

What makes you think that OF is any different than any other platform? Do you think they all struggle with this problem or do you think it's unique to OF?

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58255865

What evidence do you have that there was that sort of content on the platform?

I’ve updated the comment with an investigation by the BBC.

I find that news report to be pretty uncompelling. They are using lots of weasel wording to make it sound like they have evidence of widespread jailbait, bestiality, and incest (a non-issue between two consenting adults), when really they have nothing. They have "leaked documents" suggesting that accounts posting illegal material are warned instead of shut down immediately, and then they give third hand testimony of examples of illegal content moderators have seen. Notice that there is no attempt to quantify the amount of illegal content. But here we are, trembling in our boots about it.

> Christof - not his real name - says on some days, he has viewed up to 2,000 photos and videos looking for content prohibited by the site. He uses lists of keywords to search within bios, posts and private messages between creators and their subscribers.

> He says he has found illegal and extreme content in videos - including bestiality involving dogs and the use of spy cams, guns, knives and drugs. Some material is not actively searched for by moderators as frequently as he believes it should be, says Christof, despite being banned under the platform's terms of service.

Oh! Well if Cristof thinks they aren't doing enough I guess they must be shut down!

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