The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks | Hacker News Reader

The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks

theguardian.com

675 pointsshivbhatt346 comments

The reason the banks, and through the banks OnlyFans, attack sex is because they are accountable, and don't wish to take risks unless they are very profitable risks.

The real danger of platforms and banks is how happy they are to censor for the government, or simply the loudest, richest mouth, in order to keep the profit flowing. If you want to fix it, you put in legal protections for people to do business, rather than this informal and/or ad hoc regulation through the shifting influence and agendas of arbitrary special interest groups.

> The financial and tech industries’ prudishness is unfortunately increasingly reflected in government policy, typically under the guise of protecting children and other vulnerable communities.

This is the Guardian getting causation extremely wrong.

I have to ask. Who is going to hold banks responsible for their role as just a payment gateway and not the actual people involved or the service? This is like saying banks are responsible for a drug mafia using a laundromat for "money washing" by using sales proceeds of a laundromat depositing into the said bank and sending it away.

The government will. This is the basis of Know Your Customer laws.

Oh. Like the time deutchbank was fined a billion dollars and nothing happened? So they are really imposing their idea of "should" be allowed or not. Democracy is passe.

If that were true they wouldnt be investing in Facebook.

> If that were true they wouldnt be investing in Facebook.

It's easier to stir up outrage against porn—sexual prudishness has a long history—than against Facebook—the ability so globally to overshare, and the (inevitably delayed) realization of its consequences, is only in the very beginning of forming.

Yes, I know that. But the point I was responding to was that the banks and cc companies are worried about liability, but Fb is a larger hub for child exploitation and general social instability than all of the tube sites combined.

The issue is that the banks all move in lock step, undermining the basic principle of the free market.

If one bank decides it doesn’t want to deal with porn, fine. But when all the banks decide that, that’s very very bad. The cumulative effect is a chilling of protected speech in a way that congress could never legally get away with.

This doesn't undermine the basic principle of the free market, people are just now learning about unintended consequences of the free market.

There are lots of payment processors who will deal with explicit content. They tend to be fairly expensive though - partially justified since apparently chargebacks are outlandishly common. For example, CCBill will process essentially anything that isn’t illegal, albeit with 6% fees for “risky” industries and 10-15% fees for “adult” industries.

https://ccbill.com/pricing

(As an aside, one sort of neat thing about CCBill is apparently they’ll never kill your account without warning, unlike PayPal & co)

This is the dirty little secret that everyone clutching their pearls over the OnlyFans 'scandal' won't talk about. There are plenty of providers who will deal with porn, but porn customers are shit customers who no one wants -- the fraud and chargeback rate is incredibly high so the cost of processing payments is equally high. The advantage that crypto brings to porn payments is not the pretend anonymity, it is that there are no chargebacks so you do not need to deal with fraud prevention.

OnlyFans claimed it was the banks, not the payment processors, who were the problem.

Specifically, BNY Mellon, acting in an intermediary role between OnlyFans' banks and creators' banks, allegedly blocked all payouts to creators.

I believe it. For a smaller company, it will take one analyst stumbling over something problematic that may trigger an investigation ( think SAR ). If the issue is bad enough and customer does not have clout to back it, bank might derisk.

The problem is.. it is not exactly standardized as each bank does their own thing thanks to BSA rules.

And it’s not exactly out of the realm of possibility that some analyst somewhere just really dislikes pornography. It’s not like there isn’t a robust anti-porn movement purposefully using “think of the children” as cover.

That just means that chargebacks cannot be offered as part of payment processing.

And what happens when real fraud does occur?

Mandate 2FA which any normal Bank already has

A lot of banks don't have 2fa

Chase for instance

This is why we can't have nice things.

How is there any fraud these days with 3d secure, etc?

Sometimes merchants will turn off 3d secure because of the approval drop with 3ds. This is one of the main reasons why 3dsv2 was introduced to elimate the friction.

Even with 3dsv1 the liability doesn't always shift to the issuing bank. For example, I believe it is Mastercard NA(Might be Visa NA) that doesn't allow any 3ds liability shift for high risk merchants.

Source: Worked at payment processor in high risk processing +$1B in volume

What’s the difference between the two systems?

The big deals are:

1. It tries to gather more data points about the customer environment (i. e. browser and screen details). I think the goal is to provide more signals that the bank can use to decide low/high risk transactions. This likely feeds into...

2. Some transactions can be passed through in a "frictionless" manner. Instead of getting the "please log into your bank this is not phishing trust us" interstitial, it requires no interaction.

If most of the time, customers are sitting int eh 'frictionless" universe, then they won't hit too many situations that encourage cart abandonment.

Even with 3DS challenges, people are persuaded out of their one-time passcodes by phishing, using an increasingly elaborate series of text-message and voice-call based deceptions. I hate the term, but search for “smishing” and there’s a bunch of material explaining the exploits.

Depending on the region, only a small fraction of payments are enrolled in the framework to do that validation / challenge anyway, it’s been expensive to adopt and a lot of card acceptors are still nervous about abandoned carts and lost revenue.

Aaaand that’s not to mention good old fashioned stolen cards, counterfeiting and at the other end, full-scale identity takeovers. Many security features are still bypassable by using the legacy system that should have been supplanted by now. It is a constantly-evolving (and frustrating) field.

Yeah but why would anyone bother with with all the hassle and some porn. Other than few people for the lulz, I can’t imagine this being serious problem (when 3ds works)

This isn't the case across the entire industry. There is a large portion of customers who keep their CB ratios below the requirements of Visa & MCs. Hell, plenty of the customers in the industry could get it even lower but that runs the risk of leaving money on the table by turning away a potential customer that doesn't do a chargeback.

There are some customers in the industry who run silly numbers like +10% and do "Mid burning" with different banks.

The highest CBs tended to be the "online dating space" or "find X nearby hookup" kind of sites.

If you've got any other questions feel free to ask.

Source: Worked at payment processor in high risk processing +$1B in volume

what is "mid burning" in this context? what do you expect % of charge backs to be for something like onlyfans? if you were to start a company in this field what would you use as a payment processor?

Mid burning is when a company will have many shell companies and just open up at many acquirers and knowingly will breach their chargeback ratio with the expectation that eventually their acquirer will shut them down but they don't care because they'll move onto another acquirer. This goes on until Visa/Mastercard blacklists them at the card level but these merchants don't care because everything is shells corps and structured that it looks like it has no ties to the parent corp.

I expect the CB ratio to be 0.7% if they're aggressive with not leaving money on the table and refund anything that looks like it'll give them bad press. If they're they're trying to keep it as low as possible I've seen the ability to operate at 0.3%.

CCBill & Epoch when I want to shift high risk liability. Rocketgate for everything else. Getting the processor is the easy part, finding an acquirer and getting a mid is much harder.

I have no advice on how to find an acquirer/getting a mid for high risk it is very much networking and knowing people club.

Not that simple. The payment processors have to follow edicts by the payment networks. I've been in meetings where we had warnings passed on from payment networks about consequences if we failed to address a chargeback problem where our processor kept apologising because there was nothing they could do.

You also need to deal with various combinations of acquiring (bank the merchant account linked to the specific payment network is with) and issuing banks (bank of the individual card owners)

What else do they move in lock step on? Isn't that collusion?

Just another reason to smash these banks into a million pieces.

> If one bank decides it doesn’t want to deal with porn, fine. But when all the banks decide that, that’s very very bad.

I think that's not quite what happened here. It's not that, literally, all the banks decided this; it's that the banks are so huge that, when one or a few of the mega-banks make the decision, it's effectively the same as if they all did. Ultra-consolidation is the real problem.

I mean, if it's really a great market that's underserved, then you should launch a payment processor that serves the market.

People think this is about morality, but it's a lot more about the cost of operating in that market. I bet that there are way more claims of fraud, money laundering investigations, subpoenas and other overhead that the banks don't want to deal with.

Like teenagers stealing credit cards to pay camgirls is probably pretty common. And there are likely a lot of prostitution investigations.

The real problem is that sex work isn't treated like normal work, which just creates freedom for criminals to take advantage of vulnerable people.

If it was licensed and regulated, then it would be easier to tell the crooks, and victims of human trafficking from the people who are legitimate, voluntary workers.

Then the economics might make sense for banks to keep serving these customers.

> if it's really a great market that's underserved, then you should launch a payment processor that serves the market.

A credit card for porn… good luck.

I’m pretty sure the majority of consumers don’t want to be associated with such a thing - almost certainly tied to SSN and part of any credit report.

Payment processor for porn, not a credit card. That is, the part you put your credit card into. Some already exist, but they charge a high premium due to increased risk, but they still only exist because the banks continue to allow them to.

A payment processor is useless without the possibility to pay with a credit card. And that means you depend on Visa, Mastercard and Amex.

I think we should have some sort of internet money that can be used to transact without any central authority.

Definitely being worked on: https://interledger.org/

Found this recently I think it fulfills your idea https://dogecoin.com/

But without a central authority how would everyone agree on what's the truth? How would you avoid double-spends, protect against Sybil attacks and basically prevent people from creating money out of nothing? If someone could solve that it would be truly revolutionary. /s

So far every option has a usability problem that's been solved by companies with the same KYC requirements as credit card processors. This will remain the case as long as people also want to transact in fiat currency, and that will be true as long as it's how people pay the bills and buy food.

Any crypto-only platform that solves the problem of everyone needing a copy of the ledger and gains meaningful adoption will face the same legal, PR, and regulatory pressures as anything else in the same place.

FedNow would also make this theoretically possible, no? No middle man, just transfer money between accounts.

A government program has to abide by First Amendment protections. Most restrictions payment processors and banks put in probably wouldn't survive a civil rights lawsuit.

Not necessarily, there are plenty of bills that cant be paid with credit cards - the credit cards themselves for example.

Bank transfers are still a thing, aren't they? And payment processors built around those? I can't recall when was the last time I paid on-line using my card.

On that note, the whole reliance on cards for on-line feels like a stupid hack that got way out of control. A card is just a physical access token for the account - it shouldn't be reused on-line like this. You should be able to generate per-payment tokens on demand instead. The whole mental model around online payments is bonkers - it's just taking the meatspace model and adding "but with computers!" to it, where it's the meatspace practices that are a kludge that digital doesn't need.

This partly exists. But could of course be much simpler to use:

1) some banks/fintech offer virtual cards. For example, whenever I need to pay with credit card at a site that seems to be using some homegrown system I create a new virtual card in transferwise and destroy it right after.

2) I've seen banks offer virtual cards with CVC codes that change every 24h hours.

Re 1), virtual cards are useful if you can get them (banks that I use stubbornly refuse to provide them; same story with subaccounts). But it feels like doubling-down on the bad mental model.

Cards make sense in meatspace, not on-line. Virtual cards are stretching the analogy already. Short-lived virtual cards are pushing it to the limits. What users need is the ability to generate single-use payment authorization tokens. Talking about "cards" carries too much irrelevant meatspace baggage; we've already worked out different, better-fitting abstractions for digital use.

You talk about "users" as if the majority of people are tech-literate. They are not. Imagine explaining to your parents what a "single use digital token" is. Now imagine explaining "it's a card that you only use for this".

Outdated/meat-space abstractions are useful for both driving adoption and getting laypeople to understand intuitively what you mean. And beyond that, most of us encounter dozens of them a day without blinking. Think about that the next time you check your electronic mail on your general-purpose computing device you call a "phone".

FYI Google Pay actually creates a new "credit card", i.e. a single-use token for every payment, something along those lines would probably be great if more widely adopted.

https://support.google.com/pay/merchants/answer/6345242?hl=e...

I agree with the other post that keeping meatspace terminology isn't bad. Offering a "Single use credit card" would be an easily understandable feature.

That being said, there are several initiatives that can hopefully challenge the visa/mc hegemony:

https://payid.com.au/ is gaining wide adoption in Australia. It seems like Australia has abandoned their homegrown payment rails (EFTPOS) in recent years and all bank cards are actually visa/mc. But maybe with PayId on phones this will change again.

https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-insta... is coming to Europe and hopefully will see similar adoption to PayID.

As mentioned often, America is behind the rest of the world by at least a decade but maybe they can leapfrog similar to developing markets.

eftpos has been quiet while doing quite a lot of innovation (eg - [0]). ATMs and any CHQ/SAV transaction still run on their rails, and there’s a lot of iceberg below what you see in terms of branding at point of sale and plastic cards.

[0] https://www.eftposaustralia.com.au/news/eftpos-has-started-c...

I suspect the big limits on payments migration is that many people live on credit.

Someone else mentioned the future promise of FedNow. I'd expect that would be "any legal use is permissible" for legal reasons, but it can only replace debit payments at best. If you had a lender who worked atop FedNow, you'd reintroduce the problem of having a private party who is not legally obliged to serve all possible customers.

>> then you should launch a payment processor that serves the market

Checkout.com was most recently valued at $15 billion.

You can simply offer a product that operates under the necessary constraints. There is no need to offer conventional payment processing if the conveniences it offers are so unsustainable as you say.

My guess is it’s the chargebacks that banks really care about, which licensing and regulation won’t solve.

> If one bank decides it doesn’t want to deal with porn, fine.

Not necessarily. Banks have a government license to create money (ok, depends on what kind of bank, but let's put that aside), and provide services many individuals and organizations rely on. That already means that even if you're a staunch capitalist, you should still support some sort of set of constraints and norms, regulation, of their activities. So it's not clear that a bank should be able to refuse service to legally-operating organizations.

Plus, if one bank can do this, then why not any other bank?

This is not unique to banking in the least. It’s pretty typical for most industries to follow a company that does something the others want but don’t want to be the first one to do.

Price increases are a great example. One company will take an increase and most follow.

And how is this chilling of protected speech? The constitution guarantees free speech, not payment for speech. There is nothing stop these workers from sharing their content/speech.

> There is nothing stop these workers from sharing their content/speech.

So how do you share things legally on the internet without involving a private business who can stop you?

The banks don’t stop you.

The banks are all regulated "in lockstep" by the same same regulator (FDIC), which can and does tell banks which industries to not serve.

Anyone discussing this needs to be aware of "Operation Chokepoint".

This. In the conferences I attend, I can see a regular push towards very invasive review of every transaction. Last time I heard it I think I can paraphrase it as 'we can see SKUs, why are we not stopping transaction there and then?'.

> The issue is that the banks all move in lock step, undermining the basic principle of the free market.

The banks all doing the same thing is exactly what you would expect in a free market.

They are all in the same market (credit card processing) and all have the same information on the risks and costs and revenue in that market for handling various types of transactions. All of them that make rational decisions supported by the data they have should come to the same conclusions and take the same actions.

What you'd expect in a free market is for specialized banks to appear that would deal with porn and other high risk customers that the more general purpose banks all conclude that they don't want to deal with.

That's what has happened, as has been mentioned in other comments.

Operation chokepoint

Agreed, but why do they move in lockstep? Is it a conspiracy among elite banks (or whatever other businesses)? Or is it a rational response to their political vulnerability? Or something else?

It's a rational response to the extreme social, political, financial and potentially criminal risks associated with profiting off content that may be identified as child pornography or sexual assault.

The Traci Lords case is a good illustration of this. One day everything is order, the next somebody realizes she used a fake ID and bam, everybody involved is suddenly manufacturing/profiting off/in possession of child pornography. Add in the massively lowered bar for OnlyFans/PornHub, where anybody with a phone can now DIY, and it's a legal minefield.

Nobody makes these kinds of arguments about why payment processors are afraid of Ebay selling potentially stolen goods or Amazon selling (lots of) potentially counterfeit merchandise. Or rather, they don't have to, because payment processors are perfectly willing to turn a blind eye to those kinds of crime. And before you say it's about risk to children, the global market is perfectly willing to do business with companies that continually have child slavery scandals.

Yes, there are legal risks involved, but at the end of the day, the main reason why sex work gets hit so much harder than any other type of legal enterprise is because the people in charge see nothing to be gained by standing up for sex workers.

I have yet to see any principles at play in this free market.

The banks are not a free market. The banks are expressly controlled by multiple federal regulatory agencies and the Federal Reserve itself. They're supposed to move in lock step by design. If they didn't, it'd be a 'Free Banking' system, which it isn't.

that's because banking isn't a free market at all, it's tightly regulated.

> The reason the banks, and through the banks OnlyFans, attack sex is because they are accountable, and don't wish to take risks unless they are very profitable risks.

This is exactly the case.

Does anyone know the specific reason banks find the adult industry risky?

> Does anyone know the specific reason banks find the adult industry risky?

Likely higher instances of "friendly fraud", and chargebacks.

Two reasons.

One is the higher incidence of chargebacks. You don't have to ask if something is naughty -- just look for the chargebacks and it'll tell you. What happens is someone charges a thing, their partner sees it on the CC statement and asks about it, the first person is ashamed to admit it so they act shocked and insist it MUST be fraud because THEY would never charge something like that, and to keep up appearances, they call the bank and have the charge reversed. And platforms have to build in large margins to cover for it, or screw creators out of their payouts, or sometimes both and keep the difference.

(Which is why something irreversible, like cryptocurrency, keeps getting talked about. It wouldn't solve the shame problem, but it would eliminate chargebacks, and creators would just get paid. It just brings a bunch of other problems.)

The second is extremely vocal pressure from some fringe religious groups, who will pump the bellows of the CSAM-PR-disaster furnace for anyone who allows a nipple on their platform. You don't know the groups' names, but you've seen the hit pieces they put in the press. Look up "Exodus Cry" for one.

There is one more: legal compliance.

While there is no law on the books that says banks can't do business with OnlyFans, there are laws ( BSA comes to mind ) that in effect create incentives for banks to 'derisk' problematic customers. Some get branded high risk based on internal and industry standards.

This is the reason. Sex work is a crime so banks can’t offer banking services and sex work-adjacent businesses (like strip clubs) tend to be high-cash businesses so they’re considered high risk for money laundering. This means the entirety of adult entertainment gets bucketed as “high risk” even though technology has, in theory, significantly changed the actual money laundering risk presented by these businesses.

Also, the type of people who are typically sitting in the meetings who would have to sign off on changes to these long-held banking “truisisms” haven’t given it a second’s thought and they really don’t care to re-examine their beliefs anyway.

My impression was that payment processors, not banks, were on the hook for chargebacks, but I may misremember?

If there's a chargeback, someone has to cough up the X dollars that the cardholder spent and return it them. That typically isn't the bank. But it also requires Y dollars of overhead to work on the issue until it's resolved.

The cardholder calls their bank (the issuing bank) on the phone, and right away the bank has spent money answering the call.

After the bank tells the merchant that a chargeback is happening, the merchant can dispute the chargeback (make their case that it was a legit purchase), which the bank has to adjudicate.

Credit card processing is a high-volume, low-margin business. The bank's cut is roughly 2-3% of the purchase. For a $10 purchase on OnlyFans, the bank is only making like 20 to 30 cents off that transaction. If a chargeback happens, the required manual work will cost them many times that. So, in order for it to be profitable, banks need chargebacks to be rare. If they're frequent, it's less profitable or even unprofitable.

Exactly. Banks have no morals, as long as the price is right

You're describing the average business. Businesses are primarily there to make money.

It's amazing how pwople dont see the fundamental tension between "western values" like individual freedoms and unbridled capitalism "values" (i.e. profit). Those motivations are sometimes pulling in opposite directions. Which will win? Which should win?

How does this narrative fit in with banks who've laundered obscene amount of money for murderous cartels?

besides fall short to cut ties with betting cartells more than likely to be associated with so-called organized crime syndicates

Cartels pay their bills, and have very effective ways to collect from people who want to skip paying theirs.

If you had billions to invest and transact with, you'd have banks bending over backwards for your business too.

I’d guess billions of dollars flow through pornhub, they’re the 10th most visited website in the world. They apparently have still had incredible difficulty getting anyone to process payments for them.

I expect that you are off by several orders of magnitude.

Digging a bit more, I don’t think so. The company that owns PornHub does about half a billion dollars per year in revenue: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindGeek

That includes revenue from other brands too, but I believe PornHub is their top brand, and likely accounts for a good portion of that. Also, how much money flows through PornHub that doesn’t count as revenue? I don’t know much about their business model, but say if a content creator generates $100 in total revenue on PH, and $40 goes to PH while $60 goes to the content creator, I’d guess that’s $100 in payments processed, but only $40 in MindGeek revenue?

Based on that, I’d estimate the volume of $$ flowing through PH at somewhere around $100,000,000-$1,000,000,000 annually. Even on the low end of that, around a billion should have flowed through them so far, over the lifetime of the site. And I think multiple billions is quite possible.

My knowledge is a little old (I was the CTO of a major porn site in the mid-2000s) but I would be willing to bet that most of Pornhub's income comes from affiliate fees, advertising, and other B2B transactions. These are not card transactions and do not go through payment processors.

Pornhub launched in 2007 according to Wikipedia. Mindgeek (Pornhub's owner) had a reported $460 mm in revenue in 2015. (https://www.luxtimes.lu/en/luxembourg/mindgeek-porn-empire-r...) Pornhub is privately owned, so how much of that $460 mm is Pornhub vs other properties is unknown, but Pornhub having made a billion dollars over its 14 years doesn't really seem that far fetched.

This sounds like anti-bank/centralization propaganda.

"The reason the banks, and through the banks OnlyFans, attack sex is because they are accountable"

I think it is about charge backs. Visa and mastercard hate charge backs. Porn has a very high charge back rate and these cost card companies so much they will often just cancel the merchant agreement. With a charge back there is human customer service involved, customer denials, fraud and complicated dispute resolution. This is why the processors that specialize in porn (ccbill) charge up to %15 per transaction. I don't think the processors wanted to go after onlyfans - they just would rather not deal with the drama. However, like onlyfans discovered, if you offer to pay a %15 per transaction fee - processors will work with you. Processors do not have morals - they are just trying to make money. They don't mind handling transactions for gun sales, tobacco, strip clubs or pyramid schemes.

"The reason the banks, and through the banks OnlyFans, attack sex is because they are accountable, and don't wish to take risks"

Where exactly are the banks at risk or accountable?

Are we talking about fraud, or potential criminal investigation because of underaged girls forced to do onlyfans by mafia (I can imagine that) and money transfer via their bank?

If you want to fix it, you put in legal protections for people to do business, rather than this informal and/or ad hoc regulation through the shifting influence and agendas of arbitrary special interest groups.

The answer to regulation gone wild is not more regulation, it is to remove regulatory power. You can’t dig your way out of a hole.

The Guardian probably means "accountable to the general public", or whichever faction they favour right now.

deutsche bank literally launders money for drug dealers, terrorists, and generally a lot of other criminals. what are you talking about?

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/01/germany-orders-deutsche-bank... is just the first result from a google search

This is the Guardian getting causation extremely wrong.

I don't think causation runs one way. The financial industry & "Government" aren't clearly delineated. You can see this all the time in "compliance." Banks will commonly cite "compliance," essentially blaming the regulator for various policies. If you ask the regulator itself, they'll generally consider a lot of that stuff bank policy.

The way in which banking regulation works in practice creates a ton of ambiguities like this. "Compliance" is basically the area between regulation and internal policy. One firm will adopt a policy, which has all sorts of compliance implications. Another will copy them. The regulator grows to expect it, and it develops from there.

Market centralisation encourages this a lot.

> The real danger of platforms and banks is how happy they are to censor for the government

One of the great usecases for crypto

If people really want to fix this, they'll go back to creating independent web sites... Social media lures people in, takes a significant part of real money generated from creators, and then slowly tightens rules to protect it's own interests and profit while forsaking creators and that includes gradual suppression of promotional equality for creators.

The whole scheme to make creators pay to run ads is a failed ideology if creator content is the very thing that platforms depend on to succeed.

This is why I always edit/record to files I can re-use/re-distribute rather than using native record options on platform-specific apps.

I make music, not adult content though just FTR.

I don't think it's getting causation wrong, it's just confusing 'accountable to [in its opinion] the wrong entities' with 'unaccountable'.

The banks are accountable to their boards which are accountable to their shareholders, which (the ones that matter) are increasingly .. I hate to use the word but 'woke' activists - nudging companies in the 'right' direction either from a moral standpoint or from a perceived moral standpoint of customers/public at large.

Progressively (as in a simple progression over time, not the political sense) investing in/lending to/providing the current account for, defence/tobacco/oil/sex are becoming bad looks, to the big voteholders even if not in general.

The bank prudery is a response to the government's willingness to hold banks accountable for turning a blind eye to money going to illicit purposes.

Yes, both PornHub and OnlyFans haven't been careful enough with screening their material but we normally don't hold hosts responsible for perfect policing of user content--except when sex is involved.

Governments have been willing to reign in banks in some capacity? That hasn't been a thing since the 90s it feels like.

Since the Obama administration's Operation Chokepoint, banks are loath to process transactions from certain industries, including porn, cannabis, and guns -- lest they incur greater regulatory scrutiny. This scrutiny comes whether the transactions are legal or not.

Through this whole OF debacle, seems like the free market sorted itself out and consumers got what they wanted.

You can't sell dildos with most credit card providers and PayPal. That has nothing to do with risk, I am allowed to resell cheap China stuff with a much higher return rate than the average dildo shop

This article completely misses the causes of the rule changes. Banks and payment processes pushed new rules because they were being held accountable. The changes were all implemented in response to hugely influential NYT opinion piece on PornHub in December [1] that specifically called out payment processors, and preempted a BBC investigation into OnlyFans that was hinted to do the same [2].

The conversation here should about how rulemaking via media outrage is a problem given the public has conflicting morals.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58255865

Yeah this piece seems to forget that the Guardian[1] was also very critical of Pornhub when the NYT story came out. It seems like their position is that neither a completely hands off approach or a complete ban is acceptable, and that the only moral path is to allow the good and police the bad with perfect precision and recall.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/16/pornhu...

Accountability by definition requires proper accounting practices. There should be level-headed discussions, legal actions, and punishment proportional to the wrongdoing.

Taking damage from public outrage is being lynched, coerced, blackmailed, retaliated, scapegoated, it is being anything but held accountable.

The author is talking about having power to discriminate anyone's business via private corporate decision. It seems OK in the context of sex trafficking/CP because we know those are bad things, but the power is not limited to any of that, and that is unaccountability.

The Guardian has no problem with the unaccountable power of platforms and banks.

The Guardian merely has a problem with this particular application of it.

Bingo.

Absolutely true. Whoever is downvoting leave a comment to explain. Are we okay with banks discriminating against free speech but not against porn?

What is to explain?

The article is an Opinion and not representative of The Guardian. It is written by Jillian C York, the author of Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism.

Trying to conflate this opinion piece with The Guardian itself is dumb and shows a failure to understand what an Opinion is.

What's your point? That someone at the Guardian does not share your personal opinion?

As for me, I'm not okay with either banks discriminating against free speech and banks discriminating against porn. For example, I was vigorously against banks blocking Wikileaks payments. Therefore, I'm fine with the Guardian article.

What about banning Proud Boy accounts or Gab/Andrew Torba?

crickets

That's an absurd false dichotomy. We don't need to choose between being okay with banks discriminating in all circumstances and discriminating in no circumstances. If you support banks serving the Proud Biys are you okay with them serving Jihadi terrorist groups and autocratic dictators? Porn isn't trying to establish a white ethnostate.

I'm fine with them serving jihadis so long as they serve the counter-jihadis!

I think you are drawing a false equivalence between the Proud Boys and jihadi terrorist groups. A better comparison would be between Proud Boys and members of Antifa.

As far as I was aware, the main reason banks don't want to deal with porn is the huge rate of chargebacks that occur.

Post nut clarity is apparently a financial problem.

They could make the credit card more save, so it wouldn't be so much a problem.

I thought it was a side effect of "know your customer". Sex work is high risk because it's adjacent to trafficking (organized crime) and underage workers result in CP. It's very difficult to determine if every amateur sex worker is a consenting adult.

I suspect post wife-noticed-the-charge clarity is a bigger issue.

It's not only chargebacks, it's also stolen credit cards being used on porn sites to "launder" the money.

Sure - I guess I should have said disputes.

Businesses with high chargeback rates might get rejected by some payment processors, but there's usually another one willing to take them on in exchange for higher fees.

Imagine a world where banks actually tried to solve problems

I wonder if that is related to dodgy subscription schemes on porn websites as well. I looked into it a few times and every portal had ridiculous hidden subscriptions. Every access pass automatically converted into a hugely expensive monthly subscription. And I presume it is similarly hidden or difficult to get out of it again.

I'm really happy to pay for content, but shit like that makes me nope right out of there and look for alternatives or not bother.

What about sex toy shops? As small provider selling selected sex toys you constantly face a PayPal and stripe (or whatever) ban. IMO it makes no sense.

Or a portal for prostitutes to advertise their services. I tried forever to find a way to charge CC or PayPal but it's impossible without a huge existing volume. These providers basically enforce a monopoly on this market. Even thought it is completely legal here.

For me the US is enforcing their moral believes on us. In my culture this differentiation does not make sense

Given how cryptocurrencies are rapidly growing (again), we should expect their deeper integration into payment systems. Eventually, all sites related to sex toys, sex services, or any kind of sex pleasures will shift to independent payment systems based on cryptocurrency. As for me, I'm not pleased too with this monopoly while hiring babes on https://aurumgirls.co.uk. You said that "the US is enforcing their moral believes on us". I think it's their state policy. You need to follow their rules and believes, otherwise you are "wrong".

I suspect that "accountability" is a problematic frame. Platforms are the accountability mechanism, increasingly so.

As for banks... Everything new is old again. Financial institutions have long been the unofficial regulators, acting more or less in unison with arbitrary decision making power. Tech platforms have just joined the game.

But do you think some hidden power would organize banks together behind the curtains and ban… porn? of all the possible battles to lead, children and the sanity of adults would be their battlehorse? If so, I admire it.

>> But do you think some hidden power would organize banks together behind the curtains and ban… porn?

I think a secret meeting to form a secret cabal is unlikely. More like an approximate consensus, that has always existed in an industry that has always been highly centralized, in a world where sex work has always been marginalised.

My point was that there's nothing new about relatively arbitrary power at banks to decide who can do business.

It's pretty uncontroversial, if you think about past decades. Was there no profit to be made providing financial services to women, before it became normative in the 50s-70s? Theoretically, there probably was. In practice, banking norms were not to.

Looks like the same thing as wikileaks to me. A combination of bad optics and lawyers getting involved causing a monopolistic supplier to pull their services.

Doubt this has much to do with MasterCard attacking the adult industry, it looks more like they want to strongly protect their existing stranglehold on the payment systems. Anything which impacts the way they're seen costs them real actually money I'd bet at their scale.

This is still attacking the adult industry. You are just suggesting alternative motivations.

Yes.

Welcome to cancel culture.I can recommend some reading to get caught up.

Oh please come on, stop with the monopoly rhetoric Only Fans is no where near a monopoly. It just comes across as truly naive to throw that term around in every conversation.

I'm pretty sure they mean the payment provider are the monopolistic service.

I read monopoly above as credit card processing, not OnlyFans.

AFAIK only fans doesn't provide services to MasterCard as an entity... I think that would be a scandal I'd enjoy reading if that's the case.

This issue happens evey decade or so. Last time it was wikileaks and VPNs being delisted by american credit card companies. That popularized cryptocurency and saw bitcoin rise as a censorship-beating payment system. And last week i signed up for a VPNs using my visa without issue. After that they went after filesharing platforms like rapidshare. Now "file lockers" are called "cloud storage" and are a normal online service. This time they are going after porn, an old favorite for US companies to hate. It will again come to nothing.

My comment from another thread : Dutch banks terminated accounts of Corona-critics / anti-vax'ers / conspiracy nuts ( you choose how to call them ).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28301199

Seems like you conveniently forgot the word "organisations".

Why does that matter?

Why did you remove it if it doesn't matter?

I didn't remove anything. What I wrote is just my attempt at translation, while I am not fixated at orgs like you seem to be.

Why don't you answer the question instead of insinuating I have ulterior motives?

There is a big difference between cutting off financial services for organizations and people; in general, in business-to-business relations organizations are free to serve only whom they wish, but individuals (unlike organizations) deserve protection from discrimination, and having access to core banking services is considered an important right for individuals in EU.

Dutch banks denying accounts to someone because they are a conspiracy nut would be big news; even someone who's declared bankruptcy and is currently sitting in jail after being convicted for fraud would have the right to a basic bank account.

I never claimed big news, I just posted an analogue case where a bank holds power over an org, in a thread about banks holding power over orgs.

What is your point?

Because your quote in the post above is literally a lie due to omission of that key word - no, dutch banks did not terminate the accounts of any Corona-critics / anti-vax'ers / conspiracy nuts (the obvious/natural reading of that sentence implies they blocked accounts of people like that), they just terminated accounts of some organizations. As currently written, that quote asserts that banks not only hold power over orgs but also hold equivalent power over "undesirable" people, which is not true and would be very worrying (and relevant to this discussion) if true, so I feel that I must contest that misleading quote.

Because organizations can be refounded, desolved while humans can't be. An organization is a vehicle for purpose. Humans aren't a vehicles for a purpose.

Why is that relevant in the context of OnlyFans, which is an org too. I just posted an analogue case.

You are correct, the difference i would point to is that sex work is real work and should not be marginalized while spreading mental malware for self enrichment that causes harm to society should be marginalized. This is simply an result of utilitarian calculus to me. If you don't subscribe to that ethical system that is your choice and i am not going to convince you otherwise.

Decriminalization of sex leads to less suffering for prostitues and better health for the customers (they way Germany accomplishes the second thing is not ideal, like requiring even blowjobs to be performed with condoms but that's a tangent).

Criminalization of anti vaccine speech (similar how holocaust denial is illegal in Germany, only high profile cases are really prosecuted) would lead to better discussion about vaccine risks, better vaccination rates, less death and fewer fights within families due to intellectual malware.

I am also for a criminalization of climate change denial as it also a form of genocide denial which violates the human dignity of future generations. Note that in German law statements of facts are exempt from that. Only statements which are univocally false, so they can't contribute positively to societal dialog and deny human dignity to a protected group or statements which are to made to inspire violance against a protected group are subject to these kind of laws. If you say "No jews were persecuted under the third reich" you are commiting holocaust denial. I would propose that "emissions of man made CO2 don't impact the climate", "CO2 emissions will be completly absorbed by more green growth so there will be no impact on the climate" or "climate change or unlimited CO2 emissions will not lead the displacement of people in costal regions due to raising sea levels" can be prosecuted.

Is that a limit on free speech? Yes and i am fine with that as there are positive and negative freedoms. The moment where speech violates the human dignity of other groups of people it should be limited.

The centralized financial system is a weak point, and those in power are more than happy to utilize it ala Operation Choke Point.[0]

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

It's odd to me that people, such as the author of the Guardian article, so casually find the origin of the censorship in 'surveillance capitalism' or corporations, even as they also hold that corporations are singularly motivated by money.

The existence of Operation Choke Point makes pretty clear that in fact a self-appointed group of questing govt officials are the ones motivated to impose censorship. The existence of monopoly financial platforms give them the means.

It's incredible to me that a private business can discriminate so wantonly while also being fully supported by the FDIC.

Is it either a form of discrimination that doesn’t line up with any protected class, or a bona fide discrimination against areas that have a high chargeback rate?

I’m interested in how much the morals we don’t like line up with the cold stats we would follow.

Sex workers are effectively a subset of women. I'm not sure if this qualifies as a protected class. My personal sense of justice leads me to think that there should be some amount of protection for any worker, even if the powers that be disagree.

Not sure why you're downvoted. I've never heard any definition of 'class' that would make sex workers one. It's a profession, not a class.

Yes, though sex workers aren't workers of an employer, who give worker's rights. I'd like greater amounts of protection, but is requiring Visa and Mastercard to do business the right move?

Yes, they should be common carriers.

They've been doing it with firearms manufacturers and retailers for a while.

It wasn’t that long ago that discrimination on the part of banks was required by the government.

Right? It’s the old, they’re a private enterprise, they can kick you off their platform if they want to (AWS, GoDaddy, for example, or even YouTube).

I was thinking of this just the other day. Just the past few weeks, Apple with CSAM, OnlyFans getting between people and their fans/clients. All of these big corporate moves are making me think more and more of decentralization of platforms. Is that coming?

> Is that coming?

the fact that it's decentralized means you will not be told - and it's on yourself to buy in and be part of.

The revolution will not be televised?

This is an important observation. People (myself included) are tired of the power exerted by large corporations with centralized platforms, while at the same time, we're just waiting around for another large centralized platform to come and save us.

I have no idea how to get started, but I agree with you, the onus is on people to do something different, not just to complain about it.

> All of these big corporate moves are making me think more and more of decentralization of platforms. Is that coming?

Absolutely not. Decentralized and self-hosted alternatives to doing anything on the internet have been available since the beginning, but

1) people choose convenience, every single time

2) popular things get popular

3) corpos have what it takes to make a thing popular

4) popular things get popular among the audience because all the content is there

5) popular things get popular among the "content creators" because all the audience is there

6) it's hard to make an artificially popular decentralized service without centralized investment into it; platforms that rely on individual users meshing their internet connections and $5 VPSes start small and stay niche

7) central investing into a platform without moderation and censorship is very risky, so it's unlikely to happen and if it does happen, it's likely to draw the same fire from banks, hosting providers, regulators, etc.

8) any platform that offers moderation and censorship and gets big enough will eventually get between what people want and those who provide that

9) lots of people actually want moderation and censorship, not freedom

10) the "scene" behind decentralized stuff is also divided on the issue of moderation

11) if a decentralized platform with no moderation were indeed to get big, it would again draw fire from various parties (see how various file sharing protocols and sites died)

There's more to it but point is, a "big" decentralized platform cannot happen (or at least cannot last) unless it also has a central entity that wields the power to do the same things that happen on centralized platforms. And people really just want to use one big platform.

And it's not a technical issue, it's a social & political issue.

To make a system that won't bend under the powers that be, people would also have to accept that they're hosting child porn, terrorist materials, drug trafficking, and other fun stuff. That's never going to happen.

The alternative is decentralized platforms that are and stay niche. They exist already, they've existed since the beginning. Are you using them, or are you just using the big few popular centralized platforms? I'm guessing you're not using them because "Is that coming?" kind of implies you think it's something that doesn't exist yet.

Brilliantly put.

>Is that coming?

I doubt it very much. To me it feels like the screws are being tightened and the oppression more blatant because they realize that for a variety of reasons (technical and legal) we're past the point where decentralization is a viable strategy.

Meaning they know we have no choice so they're dispensing with the velvet glove.

Decentralized Finance has exploded in growth over the last 6 months (see https://defillama.com/ for stats). Metamask is quite easy to use and I can see it becoming a payment option on many sites soon.

Decentralized Social Media is less promising unfortunately, it's a harder problem to scale because nobody wants to pay for it and without payment its hard to ensure it's not overrun with trolls / spam. Twitter's Bluesky project is probably the best effort to fix this atm.

The platform and banks also do not allow the following list items which are varying degrees of legal. There are categories that they crack down upon which are entirely legal and that doesn't sit well with me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point ammunition sales cable box de-scramblers coin dealers credit card schemes credit repair services dating services debt consolidation scams drug paraphernalia escort services firearms sales fireworks sales get rich products government grants home-based charities lifetime guarantees lifetime memberships lottery sales mailing lists/personal info money transfer networks online gambling pawn shops payday loans pharmaceutical sales Ponzi schemes Pornography[5] pyramid-type sales racist materials surveillance equipment telemarketing tobacco sales travel clubs

I believe central-bank digital currencies will solve this problem if they offer transactions that are guaranteed anonymous, unless there is some kind of law enforcement warrant to inspect them. This will be a much more sane and accountable system than the robber baron system of unaccountable gatekeepers.

Hard no on CBDCs- they're subject to the same fiat abuses we already have

This story cannot be discussed in any meaningful way without reference to Wikileaks being fully denied access to payment tech while having been charged with no crime.

The article did explicitly reference Wikileaks being blockaded by financial services.

>One salient example occurred in 2014 when WePay – a payment service provider that had gained traction with sex workers and activists after its CEO described the company as the “anti-PayPal” after the latter’s denial of service to WikiLeaks...

And visa and all others without any due process at all because a politician requested it be done to their political enemy(!)

I'm not seeing that being meaningfully discussed nor am I seeing how WePay stepped in and solved that problem for Wikileaks because, iirc, they did no such thing.

Why do you think they left a proper discussion of that out given it's clearly the most relevant example of what they're claiming to discuss?

So do I have to be THAT guy?

Fine.

Crypto solves this issue...

Crypto moves the problem to the exchanges. It doesn't solve it.

These people, especially in porn, live by impulsive spending (buying the subscription, sending tips). The high delay and extremely large sign-up burden [0], combined with the fees, would probably ruin a lot of their income. Remember, they compete with a free offering.

[0] Most people don't own crypto yet, so they'd need to learn about it, create an exchange account, verify it, fill it up and then they can pay. Compare that to two minutes of entering cc information.

CC also went through a similar transformation that crypto would have to.

The problem is that noone wants to take the risk to transform crypto into as convenient a service as credit cards, when credit cards have such a first-mover advantage.

Many companies do want to solve that problem, but they’re hampered by the conventional financial system which really doesn’t like interfacing with anything crypto related.

A key reason for the cost of the CC payment infrastructure is that these costs were instrumental in solving the chicken/egg problem of adoption by ensuring that there's enough money/kickback/etc for all the infrastructure partners to market cards and offer various benefits to get both the cards in the consumers pockets and also terminals rolled out at merchants. Noone wants to take the risk to transform crypto into as convenient a service as credit cards because crypto is decentralized enough so that no organization can feel sure that they (as opposed to everyone else) will see enough payout (e.g. lucrative lock-in, skimming part of every transaction) to justify the quite immense and risky long-term investment required to push consumer adoption.

It really doesn't. Crypto solves anonymity, making it possible for operations to take payments in ways that can't be regulated based on content.

It doesn't solve trust. In fact existing solutions fall way, way, short of what consumers already have. A provider that accepts crypto is 100% unaccountable. You can't do a chargeback on Bitcoin. You get what you get once you make that payment.

Now, it's true that there is an ever growing stable of technologies trying repeatedly to solve the trust problem on top of a crypto base. And none have been remotely successful in any market. Almost all have significant drawbacks. Some have included absolute whoppers of security bugs.

You have to crack that second part before declaring that "crypto solves this". Until then, you aren't going to see any successful small payment markets on this stuff.

What does this have to do with trust? Clearly the current users trust OnlyFans, and I doubt very many people are worried they’re going to disappear in the middle of the night and turn off the porn.

“Yeah I’ll throw $50 into this OnlyFans subscription, but only if I can get a chargeback if I’m not happy with the performer” said nobody ever.

It's a stack, though. Sure, no sex work consumer ever said that[1], but their bank sure as hell did. Which is why they had a handy credit card in their pocket with which they were able to easily pay OnlyFans, who were able to easily receive the transaction. It's about TRUST. Banks and consumers and providers work together to come up with a framework where fraud is so difficult as to be largely a vanishing concern for routine transactions.

And that's what you need in the crypto world. It's not enough to have anonymity. It's just not. And that's why this hasn't been solved yet. Keep at it.

[1] Actually some did, who was the starlet that produced a giant chargeback flood a while back by promising nudity she didn't deliver? I'm not the expert but I remember the story.

The lack of charge back is really a small issue. I don't think it applies here. Crypto does solve this problem. Even if there's the lack of charge back, it still overcomes the censorship problem, which traditional systems do not. So do you want censorship + charge back? Or no censorship and no charge back? In this case, I think it's clearly the latter.

You're missing the point. "Chargeback" happens to be a mechanism that exists to promote trust in the market. Trust is the requirement, not mechanism. Right now no one uses crypto to send folks $20 a month for n00dz. Period. No one does this. Why?

Trust. Crypto providers don't trust they won't be hacked. Crypto consumers don't trust they aren't being scammed. There's no trust.

But their Visa card or OnlyFans account? Those they trust. Credit card billing has been around for decades and we all know it works.

Crypto needs to be like that. Address the Trust Problem. Stop fixating on anonymity.

The traditional banking mechanisms are designed to pull money from accounts. That requires a way to correct errors and fraud. If the only way to transact is for a verified account owner to push the money out, a chargeback isn't needed as much.

It's probably more like "I'll throw $50 into this OnlyFans subscription, but only if I can get a chargeback if it's actually just a bunch of cat pictures." There's a lot of scams on the internet, adult industry or no.

> It really doesn't. Crypto solves anonymity.

Depends on the cryptocurrency. If you're talking about Monero then yes.

As for the others, they are far less private than you think and the majority of cryptocurrencies out there can still be traced.

Heh, and intra-crypto wars like this are one of the reasons the Trust Problem hasn't been cracked yet. People are too busy trying to fix the part that's already solved!

I mean, look. Yes, there are ways to trace bitcoin et. al. given some level of sophistication. But the threat model isn't an intelligence agency trying to unmask a single porn consumer or cam worker. These technologies are "anonymous enough" so that an outfit like OnlyFans can reliably take payment from arbitrary consumers without fear of regulatory interference. This part really is solved. It's just not enough.

At least with Bitcoin, it's costly to pay privately. I need to set up another wallet and then get funding into it in a way that isn't linked to my main wallet. That involves either giving cash to an exchange or sending the money through a tumbler. There's fees to pay the exchange or tumbler, fees paid to the miners for the transfer into the wallet, and then fees paid to the miners for the transfers out of the wallet (and another fee paid the miners for the tumbler since there's 2 legs to that transfer).

Don't checks and other payment mechanisms also solve this problem? Obviously not as conveniently as Mastercard or Visa, but it is disingenuous to assert that credit cards have a monopoly on payments.

Checks are slow and can be faked or scammed.

Sending cash also wouldn’t work.

MasterCard and Visa had a strong monopoly on instant transactions at a distance. They fought PayPal quite a bit in the beginning as it encroached on their monopoly.

Thankfully crypto has solved this monopoly

Yes. There's a cost to checks just like there's a cost to using credit cards. The slowness of checks can be mitigated by offering some sort of access until the check clears. I'm sure there are plenty of creative types who can figure out how to route around the credit card problem. Also checks, credit cards and crypto aren't the only payment options.

Instant verified electronic money transmission is difficult. There are not many options here. MC, Visa, PayPal, Crypto… gift cards?

wait until Joe Coomer finds out there's a $17 network fee to send $10 worth of btc to a performer.

If your hypothesis was true everyone in the industry would already be billing for it

Crypto will have to overcome these hurdles first:

- Slower and more difficult to use (especially compared to saved CC auto-complete)

- No rebills (the biggest problem)

- No credit

- No payment protection

came here to say this

Indeed - Payment companies like Visa and Mastercard enforcing American cultural and religious conservatism on other countries and nations is an illegal situation - per other countries' laws.

These are effectively monopolies. It doesnt matter whether there's two of them. If they collectively enforce something onto the people of other countries - like Europe - then they are violating those countries' laws

They must be investigated and regulated accordingly in Europe. American culture and American laws do not apply to Europe.

One of the reasons why this happens is money and specifically money from pension funds. The largest pension funds nearly all have "morality clauses" with them and won't invest with an entity that goes against that.

The other portion of this is the hassle of dealing with the adult industry in terms of politics. You can Google to see how the news articles came out claiming PornHub was being used for pornographic material related to children. Visa & Mastercard from public pressure revoked their ability to process any payments on that site. Canadian House of Commons Ethics Committee did hearings against the company. Nobody wants that kind of attention.

Still doesnt change the fact that these corporations force American norms on European consumers. They have no right to do so.

It isn't just payment processing. Recently looking at various ethical ETFs, I'm finding that they all filter out companies for social harm. Which includes porn. Even the green ETFs. So on the first few paragraphs of the disclosure doc you are investing in companies with carbon targets meeting whatever criteria, no fossil fuels, etc. And next find out they are also skipping gambling, guns, tobacco and adult entertainment.

> for these corporations this is not a matter of free expression, as it ought to be, but one of morality

Is it really true that banks block transactions related to sex work because they are morally against it? Last time I checked banks just want to make money. This is a genuine question by the way.

> But just a few weeks in, Twitch shut it down after a change of policy that included, among other things, a ban on visible nipples for those who “present as women”. At a time when societal views around gender and sexuality are in many ways opening up, restrictions on sexual expression [...] feel positively archaic and seem to demonstrate that [...] there remain highly unaccountable powers making decisions about how we express something so utterly natural and human.

Although I fully support the free the nipple movement, I can absolutely understand that a streaming platform wants to ban nudity / sexual content. Sure, sex is natural and normal, but compared to other human behaviour it is still in a league of its own.

They're reacting to regulations designed specifically to make it too much of a headache for them to service these customers.

This is also my understanding - though I think it’s mostly a side effect of the regulation (which is intended to increase the liability around enabling sex trafficking).

The article mentions this, but I agree with pessimizer that the article seems to get the causality backwards.

I also agree with float4 re: why platforms may not want sexual content. I’m sensing some agenda driven motivated reasoning behind this article that’s being used to shoehorn the events into its frame.

There is something to centralized software companies and payment processors being in a position to do this at all though (whether required by regulation or not). Both blockchain based protocols that create decentralized incentive structures like Audius, and (non-blockchain) approaches like Urbit (along with just regular crypto) help to solve this problem. I’d bet this is what will enable them to be more resilient in the long run.

https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit

>This is also my understanding - though I think it’s mostly a side effect of the regulation (which is intended to increase the liability around enabling sex trafficking).

Sex trafficking is the flagship target of these regulations but it's fairly obvious from their messaging that the original lobbyists are trying to shut down sex work of all kinds and using sex trafficking as an excuse.

Webcam porn sites seem to be doing quite well. If Twitch would suddenly allow nudity, the chance that they get sidetracked is high - just compare OF and Patreon. They offer basically the same thing, but Patreon is rather strict on porn and OF is known for only porn.

My understanding is that banks don't really care about sex. At least the one I worked for didn't seem to care. They will take all the money they can get. The more they have, the more they can lend out based on the fractional reserve system. They do care if people are not investing money in their banks and there are investors that don't wish to be associated with adult related organizations.

Perhaps there is a way to shield investors from this association without cutting off adult content businesses?

Are chargeback rates higher for porn businesses?

If so, that alone could be a reason to stop servicing them.

Chargebacks are more common in adult businesses and banks often eat some of this cost. This puts more onus on the banking customers to implement some protections and ID verification that may be seen as cumbersome to small businesses, startups, etc... There are banking and credit sites that provide tips and techniques to minimize charge-backs. Banks can also help businesses learn how to implement these measures, but admittedly there is still an operating cost to this. Here is a past thread talking about some aspects of these issues. [1]

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21538460

Price it into their fees.

>The more they have, the more they can lend out based on the fractional reserve system.

Although the name fractional reserve might be correct it is highly misleading as to how modern banking actually functions. Practically speaking banks are limited by the availability of solvent debtors.

Colloquial language is describing an ancient process that is no longer in use. Debtors are people who promise to work, they sign a contract that they will pay in the future. That debt contract called a bond is an asset of the bank, it is a future income stream just like the share of a company. In exchange the debtor obtains a liquid form of his debt contract. The bank grants credit equal to the principal owed in the contract.

Essentially, bank money is just a share in the bonds that the bank owns. It's almost equivalent to buying a bond ETF whose share price is fixed to $1. The profits of the bonds are then distributed through interest rates. Now, the big question is, what happens when the bank is losing money because the bonds are worthless (think 2008)? It does not pass on the losses because of the free deposit insurance program that the government pays for. In fact, the incentive is to write as many (possibly bad) loans as the bank can get away with. Add onto the fact that US dollars are a shared currency among private banks, you get a pee in the pool scenario...

The central bank then engages in QE which is basically the act of transferring the bonds to the central bank and now private banks have a metaphorical share in the bonds the central bank owns. If there are 10 banks and 1 with 50% bad loans then after QE there are 10 banks with 5% bad loans. The central bank has the pee now and diluted it to the point the pee is no longer noticeable.

Of course, the "correct" solution is to just lower the value credit. That's usually done via inflation but the problem is that this "after the fact" inflation must be done through government spending. Wouldn't it make more sense to keep the value of credit the same just pass on losses directly? That would imply negative interest rates. In practice it doesn't work because cash gives a risk free 0% return which forces returns on every investment to be above 0% to justify the investment and that includes 0% interest rates on bank accounts. Essentially, inflation targeting only exists to allow representation of negative real interest rates on cash. It's a huge hack.

I wanted to limit it to the first paragraph but I felt it would be too difficult to understand without further explanation.

We know exactly what lengths the bankers are willing to go to when securing a profit. The leadership environment literally selects for the sort of people who are willing to throw a family out of their home because the financial implications don't make sense. They aren't fuzzy, friendly "forgive the debt because of religious teachings" people.

There is no way there is a moral stand here, the idea is absurd. They're locking out sex work because some regulation is making it risky for them. Or maybe the charge-back issue. But probably regulation.

Or, perhaps, fear of the political bloc that is Evangelical Protestantism in the US?

I am not aware of any existing regulations that would make this particularly risky for the banks. I am aware of a very vocal minority that wants to limit sex to heterosexual and procreative (and ideally not fun at all), and then only when the man wants it.

This is probably the regulation you’re unaware of: https://www.wired.com/story/how-a-controversial-new-sex-traf...

I suspect the increased liability risk is the main cause of what we’re seeing.

>Or, perhaps, fear of the political bloc that is Evangelical Protestantism in the US?

Not just politics -but finances as well. The Evangelicals represent a huge amount of money -particularly when you're talking about the mega-churches.

Also, it's quite, quite possible that a large number of decision makers in the banking industry are themselves conservative hard-line Christians.

I actually agree with the term "Unaccountable". Sure, the banks have their boards and share holders, so do the tech companies.

The question is not whether they have internal accountability, but rather if they have public accountability to their declared statements, their stated mission and non-written guarantees given by officials to the public.

Many companies like these paint themselves as for-public, while I know and so do you, that is not true, but companies should be held accountable for the image they try to portray, they should be held accountable for public announcements no matter the personnel change.

So yes, the platforms and banks have unaccountable power, given by us the public, based on false promises and sales pitches. And we the public have the power to stops that, by making them accountable, but we are the ones who have to do that, by pointing the finger at the root decision makers in those monstrous structures of organizations.

On the contrary, they are doing it as society will blame them if they do not and they will suffer if it turns out they were involved in child pornography.

Banks are not moralists on a crusade. They love making money, but they fear risk. Dealing in the adult industry is a huge public relations and legal risk.

The strange thing is these problems are already solved through cryptocurrency and decentralized social media. We just need more adoption of decentralized platforms. To me, as I hear about these centralization problems more and more, it seems like decentralized platforms are the future.

The decision was reversed due to public pressure, so how unaccountable are they, really?

And even before that, the decision was made because they were afraid of public opinion. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense to refuse to do business that generates revenue. The credit card companies’ puritanical values are a reflection of what they think public opinion, among the public that matters to them, is.

They were wrong, or at least outdated, or maybe online sex workers just somehow happen to be better at PR than evangelical christians. But (trying to) follow public opinion isn’t unaccountability, it’s the opposite.

The fact that they have the option to make this decision is the problem - a payment system _should not_ have the option to cut someone off, without a warrant from a court.

This isn't allowed for utilities, why not the same for payment systems?

>a payment system _should not_ have the option to cut someone off, without a warrant from a court.

That seems like a high standard considering that AML laws require them to proactively block transactions.

>This isn't allowed for utilities, why not the same for payment systems?

because utilities usually have some sort of monopoly granted/enforced by the state.

'The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks'

So the fact that there's underage children selling porn on OnlyFans isn't a scandal? What about the bestiality on sale?

There's this common meme of blaming anti-sex-work sentiment on some bloc of US Evangelicals who secretly rule the Western economy and politics. Because surely, it couldn't be the market speaking out against adult material?

Here's an alternative hypothesis: between those anti-sex fundamentalist religious groups (Christian or otherwise) and people who absolutely love everything sex-related, there's the vast majority of people who find the whole topic uncomfortable to a large degree. Whether they themselves like porn or not (or like, but feel guilty about it[0]), whether they make use of various meatspace sex services or not, they don't like being reminded of it. They don't like sex being mixed with other areas of life. They might especially not want their kids to be exposed to porn, or to become sex workers.

The market caters to majority case. Advertisers, especially, cater to majority. In such hypothetical world (which I posit might just be the real one), the market itself will exert pressure against overt pornography and sex work, and anything that associates itself with it.

So, perhaps, there's no conspiracy in play - maybe it's just the majority getting the things to how they want them to be.

(It's supposed to be good, right? When some people here complain that technology is increasingly user-hostile and exploitative, there's no shortage of arguments saying it's not conspiracy, it's just the market catering for majority use case. So which way is it?)

EDIT: Three more thoughts.

1) Of course, the degree of discomfort with sex topics is a spectrum. But on this spectrum, sex work and hardcore pornography are one of the extremes, not the middle point. Thus, the majority being uncomfortable shouldn't be a surprising concept.

2) I suspect the same thing happens with drugs. There's people who are strongly anti-drug, often on religious basis. Then there's people who are for everyone (responsibly) ingesting whatever they want. But in between, there is - in my experience - the majority who's afraid. Afraid of health effects, afraid of associations with organized crime, afraid of being shunned by others. And so, even legally selling mind-altering substances (other than alcohol and cigarettes, which have been normalized over centuries) faces the same challenges as sex businesses.

3) One can say it's religion all way down. Perhaps. Atheism as a cultural phenomenon is a very new thing in the history of humanity. The way people think about sexuality carries thousands of years of baggage. It's not going to change overnight, or over investment round, or over election cycle. So I don't think you can fix the problems faced by sex workers by telling Visa or Mastercard to chill out.

[0] - There's no shortage of pundits - secular, religious, and religious pretending to be scientific - that make careers out of convincing people that porn is bad for you.

> people who find the whole topic uncomfortable to a large degree ... they don't like being reminded of it. They don't like sex being mixed with other areas of life.

So... ban it for everyone else because they don't like it? Sounds fair and reasonable /s

It's more subtle than that. There's a reason I mentioned advertisers :).

The group I posit is the majority are the people who:

- Will want to hide their sexual services related habits from others, including their spouses (who may also do the same!). Those are the people who cause chargeback risks for sex businesses, making the latter undesirable for payment processors that are optimizing for majority use case. This is reflected in payment processing fees.

- Will dislike products and companies who use overtly sexual messaging or associate themselves with sex work, but themselves are in business other than sex works. Advertising industry is exerting pressure against sexual topics in order to not lose access to these people('s wallets). This means that any non-sex, ad-funded business faces tremendous market pressure to stay away from topics pertaining to sex.

- Will be highly responsible to messaging that porn/sex work is dangerous to people's minds/souls, or their children, or society. They may not agitate and organize against sex business, but when presented with pro- and anti- options (and enough propaganda), they'll vote against.

There's no need for any conspiracy, or any large-scale organizing here. It's just how the political and economical incentive gradient looks.

> economical incentive gradient looks

... you're forgetting the biggest economical incentive gradient - people who are actually throwing money at Only Fans, and will immediately throw their money at a competitor if one should open.

It's almost like you've forgotten that people already pay money for porn online everyday.

No, I didn't. The thing about startup economy: fast-growing companies don't give a damn about losing some of their existing paying customers by doing something that they see can lead to more growth. As apparently was the case with OF, if one is to take their initial porn-ban announcement at face value.

Also interesting that it seems perfectly acceptable to repeat the conspiracy theory you mention (I've seen it several times here, no opinion on it's validity) but if you stay even remotely from other official narratives, you're immediately branded a "conspiracy theorist" spreading misinformation and shut down.

It's relevant here because of how obviously subjective censorship is, which is the strongest argument against it

Instead of asking the payment processor monopoly to censor things you don't like you can.... you know.... not indulge in things you don't like instead of ruining it for everyone who does like it?

The market speaks out with wallets not with hypocritical outrage nor moral high grounding nor virtue signaling and especially not straight up random censorship of legal buisnesses. And last time i checked onlyfans was wildly profitable and legal.

Outrage and virtue signalling is mostly noise. It only works on businesses when it becomes a credible risk of monetary losses.

> Instead of asking the payment processor monopoly to censor things you don't like

There's no monopoly here. There are many payment processing options, but their differ in their level of service and transaction fees. Both of which get better with scale. So while everyone wants to use the major processors, those processors have to cater to majority use case, because that's how they maintain their position and profits.

> last time i checked onlyfans was wildly profitable and legal

And niche. The OF story is weird in many ways. At this point I half suspect it was a PR stunt. But still, it's a fast-growing company, and like all such companies, they evolve towards being appealing to the masses, because it's the only way to continue rapid growth.

So if Visa and Mastercard refuse service to your legal business because they don't like you, what options do you have?

Agreed, the conspiracy idea here doesnt make sense. Through the last few decades puritans have attempted to exert control over video games, music, and film and failed at every step. I don't know why they would suddenly have this power over banks.

The market also leads to food full of fat and sugar. Without strong campaigns against cigarettes, the market would make sure it's everywhere. The market also has no problem showing deeply violent content to children.

At some point, the status quo was slavery, death penalty, child work, women domination and against gays.

Just because if you do nothing the current equilibrium tends in some direction doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

Of course. I'm not saying the market is right in everything "it decides". On the contrary, I think it's usually wrong in the long run - it shoots past the social optimum as businesses continue to figure out new ways to extract money from established things.

Anyway, my point is just that this may just be market at work, and not some conspiracy or minority exerting undue influence over society.

(And my second point is that, for the same reason, I don't buy the argument that shitty technology is good because that what sells with most people.)

> There's this common meme of blaming anti-sex-work sentiment on some bloc of US Evangelicals who secretly rule the Western economy and politics. Because surely, it couldn't be the market speaking out against adult material?

Strangely, the same evangelicals that are being allegedly discriminated against, and de-platformed [1], and their right-wing jewish allies [2] are also the same evangelicals that are controlling the big platforms, and through NCOSE, creating a pressure campaign [3] to form porn removal? That the Right Wing is executing this, and controlling this, for anti-porn? [4]

I don't think this is particularly credible, but I did include [3] & [4] for the contrary perspective.

A more realistic answer is that Nicholas Kristof, a well-known NYTimes reporter and author, wrote an interesting piece on Pornhub that also indicting several others for rebroadcasting non-consensual sex videos [5]. This led to pressure on the market in general around payment processors handling things of less repute because of #MeToo

> The market caters to majority case. Advertisers, especially, cater to majority. In such hypothetical world (which I posit might just be the real one), the market itself will exert pressure against overt pornography and sex work, and anything that associates itself with it.

Well said.

If the era of #MeToo has taught us anything, it should be that one person's sexual freedom to make a buck is another's sexual coercion and exploitation. In the grey between those two truths there will be casualties.

[1] https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/02/27/financial-blacklis...

[2] https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/03/visa-finally-gets...

[3] https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/08/conservative-christ...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/opinion/onlyfans-porn-sex...

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...

It makes sense for platforms like Youtube ("advertisers don't want to have their brand associated with $topic because it's controversial"), but it makes less sense in terms of payment providers. Is the majority who supposedly prefers to keep anything surrounding sex in private pressuring Visa to not work with OF?

The theory that payments with OF have more charge-backs and that's why they are going after them is plausible to me. From what I understand, there's a lot of blatantly false advertising/severe buyer's remorse on OF.

I've got numerous years of software development working in the high risk space (adult & gambling). With a lot of experience specifically around payment processing for high risk merchants.

If anyone has questions feel free to ask and I'll answer within reason/if I have the answer.

Disclaimer: Just solely my own opinions being expressed.

Haven't we been seeing this same scandal over the past couple of years? Personally I hate some of the political content that has been deplatformed, but every time one gets shut down, something about that process just doesn't sit right with me.

The problem OnlyFans had was they tried to be a legitimately low risk business, but they turned into porn

If they started now knowing what they know, how would they get passed the banks and payment processors?

How does pornhub or others do it?

"but there are no practical applications of cryptocurrency"

The banks do this as counter measure to human behavior, eg. Spouse , wife, family finds out about porn payment and then the people deny they have made the payment. Or sometimes an unauthorized family member or friend uses it to pay porn. Another scenario is porn pages doing dodgy monthly subscription charges.

All these lead to chargebacks.

It's simply not worth it for the banks, it's bad for everyone involved.

It happens more frequently in porn, it has its own risk category, so to say. And most bank regulations are globally similar, so no surprises there. Most transactions have a trajectory between many correspondence banks and none of them wants to deal with chargebacks.

Source, worked in chb department.

'Friendly' fraud is a problem that was supposed to be solved with 3D Secure (Verified by Visa etc) but it still doesn't protect merchants for billing code 5967 which is what anything involving adult sites is typically billed on.

If Visa/MC wanted to fix this problem they could overnight, but they refuse to.

It's interesting to see the comments from people who supported Youtube/Twitter/FB/Patreon/Visa political censorship, but are suddenly against the porn censorship by the payment same systems.

"Rules for thee, but not for me."

There are compelling alternatives for many of the platforms you mention; what was happening to OF amounted to a complete disqualification from infrastructure.

There are no popular alternatives to Youtube and Twitter.

The number of users is important, and they have monopolies on the user base.

Learn about network effects.

I'm sorry but your analogy just doesn't work.

If you're de-platformed from YouTube, Facebook, etc, you can still publish your content and share it. You have a distribution issue, you don't have an "ability to perform" issue.

If you're locked out of the banking system, your business is done. You lack transactional alternatives.

A girl pleasuring herself isn’t the same thing as encouraging people to storm the White House and overthrow democracy, I’m confused why you would interpolate the two. It is just more fuel for the argument that America has always been so uncomfortable and Puritan with sex and way too comfortable with violence.

> A girl pleasuring herself isn’t the same thing as encouraging people to storm the White House and overthrow democracy

That comparison doesn't work because calling to storm the Whitehouse is calling on people to perform an illegal act which is illegal by itself. I think everyone is in agreement that platforms should remove content that is illegal.

The content that encouraged people to storm Congress didn’t contain overtly illegal overtures. And yet that’s what happened, relatively predictably from the scenario.

I mean it does work, because that's exactly the difference they were pointing out.

> I think everyone is in agreement that platforms should remove content that is illegal.

Yes. Including child pornography that Twitter seems to find it difficult to remove off of their platform. [0] [1] [2]

[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/30/india-twitter-kashm...

[1] https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-rules-twitter-can-be-su...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-20/twitter-f...

Calling on people to storm the capitol and over throw democracy isn't the same as protesting politicians who refuse to take allegations of election tampering seriously, and yet people with censorship powers keep insisting that the former is what January 6th was about.

There is no credible evidence. Its an insane conspiracy theory.

There were many, many lawsuits all of which were heard in court and ruled on.

>There were many, many lawsuits all of which were heard in court and ruled on.

No. Most of those lawsuits were thrown out without rulings. Generally, not enough process was given to investigate these allegations, which is why half the country supported Trump on Jan 6 until things got violent and moderates got cold feet.

Have you read any of the legal briefs? I read several of the prominent ones, and they all followed the same pattern of leading in with a bunch of easy facts but then jumping to completely unsupported conclusions (that were then used as political sound bites). The cases were summarily dismissed because they had no logical merit.

What anyone with this argument doesn't understand is how censorship can't be comfortably shoehorned in these "morally understandable, accepted by everyone" categories. This false belief was a relic of the 80s-2000s. Shoehorning is very subjective of the current societal compass, and now that this breaks up to thousand pieces in online platforms, it fails us all.

While I am concerned about the coercive power of these platforms against speech they find unpopular, whether porn, or something else....

> A girl pleasuring herself isn’t the same thing as encouraging people to storm the White House and overthrow democracy

Enough with the hyperbole, the FBI has already stated they found little evidence of a grand conspiracy to overthrow the govt [1], despite the fact we know that the Oathkeepers' leader is actually an FBI operative or informant [2]

[1] https://www.salon.com/2021/08/20/fbi-finds-little-evidence-j...

[2] https://www.revolver.news/2021/06/stewart-rhodes-oath-keeper...

From the article you linked, there was clearly coordinated groups trying to overtake:

>The officials did note that far-right groups – like the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and Three Percenters – may have collaborated in breaching the Capitol on the day of the riot.

These aren't scrubs either. Some of them are ex-military, armed civilians coordinating with other groups to breach the capitol and take hostages. This is not hyperbole, it's fact. Just because they didn't succeed doesn't mean it wasn't real.

Then you might as well say that any riot or even a protest any of the people from these groups participate is an attempt to overthrow the government.

They pushed through security, and accessed private offices, and destroy property, with the stated intent to stop the vote count. On Camera.

This was not a protest or a riot, they intended to disrupt the normal order of governance.

Just like AOC and 150 of her companions did to Pelosi?

If they didn't bring guns and open carry it wasn't a real revolution or they were really stupid either way they weren't storming the white house it was congress and the FBI was involved heavily with the events so you could say it was government sponsored.

> they weren't storming the white house

Why would they storm the white house? Trump was there...they wanted to keep him there by intimidating politicians at the Capital to not certify the election. Stop watching Fox News / OAN / NewsMax (and CNN/etc while you're at it.) I am not delusional enough to think that Biden (or any politician) are in it for anything other than power. The difference between Trump and all the "professional" politicians is that when they lose, they don't decide to throw a temper tantrum and incite an insurrection. Storming the Capital was 100% an insurrection.

Definition of insurrection : an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government

It's time to stop identifying as republican/democrat and start being an American. The institution of gov't and it's continuity matters more than the party in power. Trump tarnished the election process and the institution of American gov't. There are plenty of problems with our gov't caused by both sides (largely caused by bribery (I mean 'lobbying')) but maybe it's time to stop with the partisan bullshit and find common ground.

Care to peddle your bullshit somewhere else? There may have been no 'organized' conspiracy to overthrow the gov't, but they sure as hell were trying to illegally pressure politicians into not certifying the election.

Americans disagreeing over fair elections is nothing new. In 2016, Democrats made more objections than Republicans in 2020: https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-did-democrats-object-mor...

Let's also not forget about Stacy Abrams and Bush. There's even the whole Kennedy election controversy.

Maybe you should reread the rules before you comment more?

I dont think they were talking about January 6 posts. I have seen all manner of Facebook friends censored for speaking their thoughts on varying subject matters that have been politicized over time. Also seen friends banned off Twitter for literal shitposting. I miss the internet when it was mostly full of nerds. After smartphones it all went downhill.

Summer never ended after 2008, sadly.

It's been eternally September since 1993.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted, but after smartphones it became clear the landscape of the internet changed drastically. Fore example today you can get a smartphone for under a hundred dollars. It might not perform the best, but it will get you on the internet. Hell, nowadays you can get hundred dollar laptops. Up till the late 2000's most people had to own a laptop or a desktop computer to get online, most phones charged up the nose for internet access if I remember correctly.

Weirdly enough, had smartphones not became a thing, I think Facebook Games would of possibly become the next Steam. It's a shame Facebook couldnt get their Games to take off as big as it once did, they would of produced an entirely different company.

A bot downvotes the first post I make in every thread and has ever since I criticized the moderator Dang.

Are you talking about the time that BLM tried to storm the White House?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/secret-service-moved...

Did you read your own article? A few people broke away from a peaceful protest and trespassed. In what reality is that even close to a huge mob breaking into the Capitol building with such force that they killed a cop and injured several others?

Its also a bit of a non-sequitur to the thread’s discussion.

I'd say your comment is a non-sequitur. Did you read the post that I responded to? He explicitly said the White House, not the Capitol. Nobody mentioned the Capitol except you.

Speaking of, no cops were killed by the Capitol protestors. See https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brian-sicknick-capitol-riot-die..., the medical examiner determined that he died of natural causes unrelated to his duties. Please don't spread fake news.

You absolutely do not genuinely believe the white house rioters thought they were overthrowing democracy and this a plainly obvious straw man.

"A girl pleasure herself" is a gross simplification of a highly complex topic.

Payments are like water and electricity, utilities, and should be regulated as such. If you’re not breaking the law, interfering with legal payments should be a sanctionable offense by regulators. Social platforms are not utilities, nor is my blog and its comment section.

This speaks to the need for censor proof payments systems that can still accommodate KYC and AML requirements (so you’re not violating financial regs and end up closing up shop). Stablecoins perhaps? I leave that to the domain experts.

TLDR Disintermediate legacy payment systems without breaking the law.

There's always interbank transfers / ACH as long as they have bank accounts. It's a pain to use though.

So the Fed is rolling out Instant Payments (“Instant ACH”) in 2023, but I did not mention that as it’s to be seen how or if payments are censored passing through that platform.

Money is definitively a public good. If money were a private good provided by banks then banks wouldn't trust each other's money. Each bank would have their own currency.

There is a difference between a platform that can be easily replaced choosing not to serve certain content, and infrastructure providers choosing to deny service.

I'm all for Twitter choosing what they will allow - if anything the more aggressive they are, the more space it creates for competition.

I'm on the other hand not for payment providers even being allowed to choose, because their position then makes them effective arbiter of what kinds of businesses are allowed to exist without democratic oversight.

For all the power the social networks have, it's nothing like that.

Maybe crypto will change that, but today threatening to withdraw payment processing is an existential threat for a lot of online businesses which gives payment networks undue power.

In this case, OnlyFans made the choice (and reversed it), not the payment provider. Granted, they did it because of the payment provider, but Twitter etc don't make their decisions in a vacuum either, they react to different kinds of pressure.

That said, the same people made the same arguments ("private businesses, no rules should apply") with payment providers boycotting Gab, but turn around now. Will they learn that political pressure via businesses is a bad idea because it might affect them next? Doubtful, they haven't learned it the first few times.

Onlyfans made the "choice" the way someone with a gun to their head makes a "choice".

It's meaningless to suggest they had one.

And I'm a concrete example of someone who considers Gab a haven of extremism, but who still believes payment processors should not be allowed to boycott legal businesses.

Sure, just as Twitter, Facebook and the cloud providers make a "choice" when they ban someone who has become a persona non grata in the establishment media. Nobody does anything out of ideology at that level, it's all damage control.

The WSJ imagines pewdiepie to be Hitler incarnate? Advertisers pull their ads and Disney has to cut ties. Not because they think pewdiepie is a Nazi, but because there's only one "choice".

This is nothing new, it's been done before, but it hurts a different group this time, so the people who celebrated these same actions are now angry that this kind of thing is allowed to happen.

> the more aggressive they are, the more space it creates for competition

The competition is not apples to apples. Instead, you have ideological bubbles like Gab, and you have the incumbent network (Twitter) which "normies" use by default.

The problem with the default network applying ideological censorship is that it limits the average person's exposure to the marketplace of ideas. In the context of a controversial topic, this benefits the default narrative tremendously.

If we want to reduce ideological conflict, it's imperative to respect alternative viewpoints and engage them as equals. Otherwise, we risk alienating people into becoming extremists, or worse, we allow the authorities (who work closely with censors and fact checkers) to control the Overton window and propagandize us away from the truth.

Competition is not apples to apples, but it is possible. You have no realistic options to take payments from a mass audience if payment networks cuts you off - that is a huge difference.

> Competition is not apples to apples, but it is possible.

Ok, demonstrate that by creating a YT competitor with 2 billion users.

Then tell us how possible it is.

You're moving goal posts. The vast majority of users on YouTube has no realistic access to an audience that size.

What a nonsensical argument. There's no replacement for Youtube or Twitter in the same exact sense that there's no replacement for when a banking/CC industry bans you.

Yeah, there are vastly inferior alternatives which almost nobody uses (Bitchute, Minds, cryptocurrencies), but that cuts you off from the vast audience that they've monopolized. An audience that want to read you and wants to pay you, evident by the vast number of subscribers and payments.

Network effects matter.

What cuts you off from the vast audience is that most of them will never see your content. The network effect can make a difference, but it's exaggerated in the sense that the vast majority of people will never get much exposure.

Twitter stats are a good example of this. Look at the stats for your individual tweets. I have an account with 45k. I can beat the organic exposure for a tweet with 1-2 USD of ads.

That's not to say the big networks have no value, and you could end up one of the lucky ones with huge exposure.

But they remain giants because people keep thinking they're much more important than they are.

They are important if you get big on them. The vast majority will never get big or even mid sized on them.

People are capable of infinite mental gymnastics when it comes to justifying why rules or oppression/suppression they like are different from ones they don't like.

There is the often repeated "imagine your worst enemy had this power" but it doesn't seem to get through to people.

Also the same ones who repeated the 'private platform argument' now don't like it when several 'other private platforms' ban or don't want to do business with OnlyFans because it hurts those who use it for a living, especially those who have 'pornographic content'.

Exactly the same thing how YouTube demonetises specific individuals who use the platform for a living for content that is skewed to a certain political audience.

Do they now realise that this can happen to anyone? As for payment solutions, this is the whole point of cryptocurrencies that will solve this eventually.

Many sex workers have been warning against political censorship for exactly this reason: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/532137-sex-workers-war...

> people who supported… political censorship

That’s a pretty loaded statement. It’s strange to me that someone can take a provable fact (e.g. COVID-19 is real), politicize it, and now spreading that misinformation is painted as political speech that should be protected.

Right, the "other people should stop politicizing it and just do what I say" argument

> It's interesting to see the comments from people who supported [..] but are suddenly against it ...

I hate this argument, it is so easy to say: people were against before and they are in favor now. Without proving that the people who were against are the SAME people that are in favor of it.

For example, people wanted mask at the beginning and now they don't wear them. People support Facebook censorship but are against when it is for porn. People wanted a vaccine but now they dont want to take it. People protested against motorbike sounds yesterday and they protest in favor of motorbikes today

Sorry but what tell you that they are the same people ? Without that this is just wrong

Isn't this what we made btc for

It is but people on Hacker News refuse to acknowledge this because they are angry that they missed out. Techies "who should have known" are embarrassed and jealous so they do everything in their power to dismiss BTC.

>It is but people on Hacker News refuse to acknowledge this because they are angry that they missed out.

Maybe you shouldn't create a money system where it is possible to miss out? The fact that regular working people do not want to subsidize "investors" is a pretty strong incentive to avoid Bitcoin altogether.

Isn't it a mostly unavoidable characteristic of p2p distributed systems (when they're not introduced top down by governments) that they grow from "practically zero users" to (maybe) mass adoption?

I'd think that it's almost inherent for any currency like technology that - over the course of its adoption process - the value goes through various phases of increase. At least for currencies with deflationary supply.

There might be blockchain based cryptocurrencies out there that try to prevent early adopters from becoming excessively rich mostly out of luck, but apparently these alternatives lack the incentive to even get to wide adoption.

Yes, early adopters would become unfairly rich, were bitcoin to make it to wide adoption ... but something makes me hope that a btc wealth distribution with Gini coefficient close to 1 would be a temporary thing. A phase that the whole thing would pass through towards a less unequal distribution, where the increase in value and thus the aspect of speculation would become less relevant and the aspect of btc as a payment system or value store would become more relevant.

What a thread. Right now literally half the posts are greyed out for saying things I don't understand in the slightest.

Feels like some kind of cultural war is spilling into the site but due to nature of HN, no one is really sharing their actual thoughts on the matter so there's a lot of voting based on subtleties.

That's because what you type can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion.

What about up/down votes? Are people liable for those?

I understand the audience on this site. At first I thought it's just /. But it really isn't.

There are so many companies out there profiting from selling weapons, destroying the environment and misusing cheap labour in awful dictatorships. But these are issues the banks and payment platforms don‘t seem to care about at all. Where is the NYT article pointing out these issues?

but this happened because payment processors feared being held to account

The real OnlyFans scandal is the friends we made along the way

When this happened to Gab somehow no one cared.

Don’t like crypto currency? Stop making it necessary.

It affects more than just sex workers. Amren cannot accept Paypal or credit cards due to deplatforming (or even draw attention to this through Youtube or Facebook, as those also banned them), Wikileaks was also financially isolated, and donation websites and payment providers deplatformed Rittenhouse's legal defense fundraising.

Funny the Guardian didn't mention this. Reading their coverage gives the impression deplatforming is limited to moralizing against sex workers.

Silly me, thinking the real scandal is that our daughters are forced to sell nudes to survive.

Many businesses cannot hire enough employees. Everywhere I walk I see help wanted signs. Hourly rates are going up.

Are they being forced to sell something, or a conscious choice?

How does the wages increase with help wanted signs compare to the rent increase in the last decade or two in your annecdotes? Food? Health insurance? Student debt repayments?

I don't know i just want to see real data before condemning anyone at all.

Here is some real data. Right now, the inflation adjusted median weekly earnings for people 16+ is essentially at it's highest point ever. Much higher than it was 30 or 40 years ago.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

So that excludes student debt levels (ie the inflation of the price of entry into the workforce) over that period. It includes people aged 40-100 who probably also outnumber and out earn the 16-40 demographic - who I assume dominate the only fans vendors being discussed.

The median as a measure will basically exclude the entire demographic. Eg Say for argument everyone in the workforce for 10 years or less had a 50% pay cut it won't show up in the median.

Real data is hard!

That's a new problem. The problem he is talking about existed for thousands of years.

Those nudes fuel property values so it is all good.

Every business that includes network effects must be regulated as if it is a public agency or utility once it is above a certain size. I don’t think it is useful to debate the threshold to try and find some kind of optimum. Let’s just pick a number, like number of users exceeding 25% of national population, and start there.

The author has a book "Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism"

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1.0 out of 5 stars Another pompous elitist advocating free speech for those they agree with

Reviewed in the United States on July 19, 2021

Looking for yet another elitist advocating for freedoms, but only those they agree with, then this is the book for you. The author complains vociferously about silicon valley enterprises restricting the speech of people and groups she politically agrees with while at the exact same time advocating for the removal of content she finds "offensive". The author also makes great noise (rightfully) attacking racial and religious bigotry while simultaneously coming across as extremely bigoted towards Jews and anyone with low melanin counts and politically right of Mao. If the author is the voice of freedom of expression and speech in the modern age then we are all doomed.

see: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2MXNOSHCZ1CW1/re...

It's tremendously easy to be concerned about unaccountable power opposing your own narrative.

It's just the usual progression of authoritarianism.

First they come for your enemies, then your neighbors, then your friends and family and then they come for you.

Meh. Everybody was like "private companies can do whatever they like" when parler was censored off the internet. Now why is it a big deal when the same happens to a porn site? Only fans can create their own Visa and Mastercard if they want.

Underrated.

Exactly. There you go and that's the idea. This can happen to anyone.

I don't understand why they cheer on with the same "X is a private company and can ban, censor or remove whatever they like" argument when it happens to someone they don't like with but only care when it happens to them or to someone they agree with.

Just look at how Google Play removed other apps on the Play Store after Parler was banned [0]. This can happen to anyone.

These companies that hold this power are not anyone's friends and once again are on the side of profit. When will supporters of such acts learn that it can soon happen to them and realise that these large companies are the problem?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28173060

And Parler can obviously make their own mobile phones with comparable market access to Apple and Android combined with most apple and Android users more than happy to abandon their investment in their asset on principle.

If you didn't immediately ditch your iphone obviously that means Apple are beyond criticism of any kind because the market.

Why is still the real narrative for this ban is still not around the children on that platform. I can't for the life of mine understand why everybody is pulling their own agenda while the real reason for that ban is dragged under the rag. Crazy...

This is rich coming from The Guardian, which for years has been in favor of private actors censoring their ideological opponents. Today, when their face is getting eaten by leopards, they're worried about "unaccountable power", but tomorrow, they'll be demanding others be kicked off the internet.

Exactly. They now start crying when it happens to others that they support, when the whole entire point is that this can happen to anyone; as these private companies are on the side of profit.

Sometimes, they only learn who really is in charge as soon as it happens to them which is always when it is too late.

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