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Comment by toofy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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.

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