Hacker News Reader

Comment by d3nj4l | Hacker News Reader

"Suspended"

aka they're waiting for all of this to blow over.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com