The ‘E-Pimps’ of OnlyFans
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The personalities described here - like Jason Rosario - don't seem like particularly pleasant people to spend a lot of time with. Their life goals and priorities are not mine. But like most porn, while it might be kinda gross, but it shouldn't be illegal or inherently subject to societal shaming (if Rosario was selling energy drinks, who would judge him the same way?).
The place for real unethical behavior, therefore, is on the margins: Taking unreasonable cuts of models' income (70%!). Negotiating different rates with different subscribers for the same video. What if a subscriber is having a genuine mental health crisis? What if they threaten to kill one of the models? Or themselves? Is Jason Rosario prepared to handle that?
None of those possibilities seem like reasons to just shut all of this down or do anything - not that I'm sure the article is advocating for that. I'm just not sure what else to do or consider in response to this phenomenon. I guess I just acknowledge it exists? I doubt the people in this story could be counted on to behave responsibly, but until they don't, I'm not sure what it matters.
This seems no less real than a medieval nobleman's arranged marriage; infidelity or cheating was a big deal then.
> and expecting a random woman to shower you with attention for $50 a pop videos seems unrealistic.
Given global wage inequality, is it really? I'd expect many of them to be the equivalent of the famed "chinese gold farmers".
The business transaction there was "I'll support you if you give me an heir." Infidelity is a clear breach of that fucked up transaction, which is why it was a big deal. Not really similar to buying a video online.
price discrimination is good!
For the rest of it, banning porn is probably a losing battle, but surely we can make fraud illegal, like passing yourself off as someone else.
For the rest of the what-ifs, do nothing, or call the police. I don't think pornographers should have a special duty to act over a shopkeeper or bus driver.
Ah, so it's the rich people driving all those sensible cars with the exact practical functionality as the higher end models
It's starting to look like removing some of the sexual morals that societies had used for hundreds of years is a classic Chesterton's fence style problem. Progressives didn't understand the good effects of some puritan policies and decided to throw it all out because it got in the way of them feeling good right now.
Limiting personal freedoms to satisfy old religious beliefs (some of which used to serve useful purposes) makes very little sense nowadays, especially that we have much much much better ways to get much better outcomes with regards to those purposes. (Eg. avoiding genetic defects due to incest, keeping communities growing to have enough people to replace those who are lost due to famines, disease, war, accidents.)
Cultures that have these rules and restrictions seem to be growing via positive birth rates while cultures that dont are stagnating and not growing and seem to be actively committing cultural suicide. So its not obvious to me which path evolutionary processes will choose to win out in the long run.
These two things are hugely different. Kids can and do regularly begin viewing porn right at puberty. There was never such easy access to sexual simulation even with prostitutes. You also cannot photoshop a real life prostitute, or browse around for the most attractive one in the world. Every additional prostitute you are with is an extra price, whereas each additional porn star is free; it naturally leads to needing huge amounts of stimulation that's incredibly hard to get in real life unless you own a harem. And even then if you're into the really hard-core stuff you'd have a hard time finding willing participants.
Porn and prostitution are totally different
not sure, but in the greater picture of overpopulation, porn seems to be a cheap and effective measure compared to medical/physical alternatives.
Source that we are overpopulated? We can shrink the population and still pollute irresponsibly. In the past when the population was smaller we certainly managed to ruin plenty. And we aren't running out of land or food either.
So then what it's ok to take advantage and scam them ??? WTF ...
Is the idea that since the subscribers should know that it isn't the model that it doesn't matter that it isn't the model?
On one hand, sure, the customer paid to talk to a specific model, and sure, scamming is wrong. On the other hand, those conversations are already so artificial and staged (and customers know it!) that it doesn't matter who has them. A service is definitely being provided, no harm done, just like "sending a post asking for an autograph" as someone below described.
Do you know that for a fact? It's hard for me to understand the minds of these subscribers, but surely, if they're so invested in one particular model, of course it would matter to them.
It is also hard for me to understand their mind, but I know several cases of people who claimed to have fallen in love with the streamers. Even on small channels that can be a weekly occurrence.
So yeah, it does matter for these types of buyers, and it would crush their world if they knew it was a bot, but the end result is kinda the same, because streamers/models aren't interested in them.
But you're right: the parasocial relationship makes it different, and it is indeed fraud.
If a friend did that to me I would also get angry too. But on the other hand, I would probably figure out if a friend of mine ever does it.
Instead of : "The only time he ever has to ask the couple for anything is when a subscriber refuses to pay for content without receiving video confirmation that he’s really talking to Dani" ...
But in practice it doesn't matter: even with a real chat, it's still one people getting their hopes up and another not caring and only doing it for the money.
Apparently we define "authentic relationship" differently. I think it's quite explicit in the article that the targets do not want just "content" ...
I would expect the business to be less profitable if the representant were to identify themself even with just an alias, no ?
Oh, but there is plenty of platonic relationships with camgirls, streamers and such. It can reach levels of delusion that you wouldn't believe.
You mean Pygmalion?
Another interesting but sad fact is that a lot of those streamers have significant others, but they hide it from the audience because they believe they'll get more engagement.
Sure the same thing might happen in regular businesses, but the interactions are either shorter (eg cashier) or at least it's acknowledged as being entirely professional.
The streamer won’t reciprocate because it is a random unknown person coming on a text chat claiming they’re in love with them. I don’t think this ever worked ever, but if you need further proof, she told me for a fact she won’t reciprocate.
The value-add in this industry is not the model - there are plenty of beautiful women willing to take nudes in the world. The hard part is actually finding and extracting money from paying customers - cross-promoting with other models, spamming a million posts on every nsfw subreddit, having a human carefully determine how best talk to a customer and entice them into paying, etc.
Traditional porn studios of course take this farther - models just show up and act, and the studio pays for cameramen, editors, websites, marketing, promotion, distribution, etc. This is basically a smaller scale version of a porn studio, where now the actor is also the director and camera operator (although I would guess the largest accounts will have professional editors and the like) but all the other work is offloaded onto an agency.
I can easily imagine a Russian/Ukrainian model that doesn’t even speak a word of English (the traditional low-cost labour for the industry) using one of these agencies and making an order of magnitude more money after a 70% cut than they otherwise would.
The balance here is on who’s driving the value. Is the model special in some way such that they can draw large amounts of paying customers with little effort? Then they will accrue to themselves most of the profit in the industry. Otherwise it’s the people doing the marketing work that make the most money.
Do you give up X % of your business for a cash injection or go it alone? With the cash it could be a billion $ company, without it just a side gig worth -$'s.
It's an open market without anything even remotely resembling a monopoly, where all parties involved are professional and can relatively easy exit a contract they find unfair.
I believe the idea to set-up an OnlyFans agency like this is relatively popular among 'hustle porn' style "entrepreneurs" whose goal is to extract as much money from anyone as fast as possible. Which probably gives an idea about the general personality these people have.
And whilst I don't think that an agency like this is always morally wrong, there are a lot of grey areas and moral issues - potentially legal issues - that can arise depending on circumstances.
There's an obvious ethical issue with subscribers believing that they're talking to the model themselves, and yet they're actually talking to someone completely different. And to add to that the implications of the subscriber sending nude photos to be viewed by any random person is bad too. If the subscribers knew that they weren't actually interacting with the model, I seriously doubt they'd continue that transaction.
And I'm sure that fishing for models on Instagram to start pages can have issues too if the agency has some bad actors. What happens if a model no longer wants to work with the agency?
Why? He provides a service to people who may not speak English or know how to optimize their presence.
This isn't a new practice, but the stakes are higher.
It used to be that you could write to "celebrities" for an autograph. You hoped it was the celebrity who signed your thing and mailed it back, but in reality you knew it was probably their spouse or secretary. It wasn't honest, but it's not like they charged you money, and the emotional stakes were lower. They weren't pretending they were your buddy or your lover. They were just signing a thing for you.
With online adult media, there's that whole parasocial dynamic. The whole thing is made to make you feel like you have something like a personal connection with the model.
I wonder if there's a way to do it ethically, while also keeping it fun for the subscriber.
Like honestly the answer might just be transparency. ex: "Sometimes my assistant XYZ helps me answer the huge volume of messages I get. We'll always sign our replies with the name of the person who actually wrote the reply." etc.
I wonder how convincing something like GPT-3 would be at this. I give it 5 years tops for 100% AI OnlyFans accounts to be commonplace, complete with artificial personalized livestreams.
That's some blade runner/cyberpunk/black mirror stuff if I have ever seen some.
If you start with a setup like “a conservation with a disagreeable chatbot” and give an example of some unfriendly back and forth it can pick it up and be unfriendly.
The recent case of the “sentient bot” at Google was apparently primed to be agreeable.
I am glad there is a honeypot for people like this so they won't move here (SV or even SF)
Southern California (as influenced by Hollywood) has a bit of this problem too, but it’s far less acute by my observation.
What you described is a sub culture of Miami. It doesn't describe anyone in Florida north of West Palm Beach, and completely disregards the Cuban-American population in Miami itself.
Or are Cuban Americans not representative of "real" Miami? Because if you forget about the Cubans, my wife is going to have to say something to you in rapid Spanish that you won't enjoy, even if you only understand her tone
I agree it’s overly simplistic but that sub culture of Miami certainly exists and is very visible, just like SF isn’t entirely tech.
“Lets exclude people to make it more inclusive!” really hits a peak there and a lot of people don’t buy it
I’m glad to see this smoothing out geographically, especially since a lot of the same people move to Miami and partake in its allure and inclusion of body-focused participants in tech as well as sex workers
Uh, what? True, Silicon Valley has been more sedate in that regard, but SF has been / remains the home of everything from Kink.com to the SF Sex information library, to mainstreaming sex toys (e.g. good vibrations) and feminist sexuality (Susie Bright, Annie Sprinkle, among others) to the sex side of the Castro. The dildotronics “movement” to the degree it really existed was an SF/Well/Mondo2000 effort.
If anything it was the weirdos who flooded SF starting in the 2000 boom who tried to squash it.
Many of the performers were very thrilled to be at a specific company's events and were excited to make it an addition to their CV, their contribution mattered. They were not treated as individuals, they were treated only as a symptom of male preference and that their view didn't matter because they didnt have a cognitive heavy trade.
Miami is not going that direction. Its great. Call out these libidoless segregationists.
Whatever people could be coming in from Miami can’t be any worse than the people presently robbing and defecating SV into an early grave.
In fact many subscriptions are free.
When I listen to people make OnlyFans the butt of a joke or otherwise deride its existence or of people “paying for porn, whyyyy”, it really neglects how that platform works and the marketing funnel. and that many people subscribing are not paying to consume content.
It neglects that a large percentage of the revenue is from other content creators supporting each other, or using a subscription to advertise on a more popular person’s page in their comments.
I’m fine normalizing discussions about both the supply side, where meeting someone attractive in person can easily result in a casual and unoffensive discussion about or introduction to their onlyfans, because its quite common.
and I’m fine normalizing discussion about the demand side, where we don't have to pretend its just “maladjusted men that we don't know”, compared to a distribution of everyone.
“It may take me a couple of days to really grasp using this platform and answering all my messages but I will get back to each of you! I will also be taking photos to share on the wall for free with some PPVs over the next couple of days. It is ONLY ME on here, so , I'd love some suggestions! PS; I'd like to also know what time is best to come on and not miss you... also, going to try and do some live streams when I get it all figured out!" Richards wrote.
Source: https://people.com/style/denise-richards-flag-bikini-fourth-...
From the e-pimp article:
“You see how there’s a space before the exclamation mark?” he said. “Yeah, that’s how 18-year-olds type.” When it comes to sales, Rosero said, those details make all the difference.
…
“An older lady won’t use emojis; she’ll use, like, a semicolon and parentheses for a winky face, when a younger girl will actually use a winky emoji.”
Or for that matter, someone who spies through a peep hole at hotel guests.
Sure, this is less serious, but I don't agree with the "what you don't know doesn't harm you" excuse. It's deceptive and wrong.
You can't lie to people to get money out of them.
Ok grandma, lets get you to bed.
Obviously NSFW, but for instance niteflirt.com uses internet technology so you can call people, but neither of you learns the others' phone number, privacy is preserved, etc.
I have never seen any 18-year-old type like this. Is this actually common in the US or just a thing of older folk imaging how an 18 -year-old might type?
typing quirks
!!
(or at least used to, a couple years ago)
Disintermediation [1]
I use it all the time when I'm trying to sound smart to business folks.
Just because a woman and her body is involved for attention and payment, anybody getting any payment and involvement is called a pimp?
Where's the coercion, destruction, trafficking? Where are the people that really do lack agency and autonomy?
There should be two different words, one for the destructive thing that's regulated or sanctioned in physical sex for money activities, one for benign management.
What makes sex work special compared to say, pilots, police, electricians, miners, fishermen, divers, construction workers and many many others who also need to balance their choice against a very real risk of long-term negative consequences?
I know of some naive people, I know of some cunning people, I know of some extremely high functioning people that have a business plan, I know of some extremely goofy people that don't know what to do with all the money they make, I know of many people with paltry earnings. Many people have multiple of these attributes at once.
I don't think brothel terms are really accurate or necessary. You are mapping due to some overlap of erotica and women. There are so many other intermediaries that can be applied to these terms better, such as the businesses that let people rent rooms to record in, with better lighting and setup than they have at home. But even then, we should use a more applicable word, as they are not brothels with madams or pimps, no matter whether they have great collaborate management, or management issues.
Anyways, you light have to change your locale and/or time zone. I've used iPlayer successfully with Nordvpn myself for a while now.
I always felt it likely at least some of these are managed by FSB as a way to gain blackmail material on western citizens. I have no evidence that's the case, except that it would be extremely doable and probably very effective.
Initially, she didn't offer "dick ratings" but there was so many requests for her to do it, that she started doing it.
Now most of her profits is simply from people who want her to rate their dick.
She's not Russian or have any affiliation to Russia. I think people are just generally strange.
I mean, that's how I'm imagining it.
Until someone creates thisdickdoesnotexist.com to game the system.
PS: apparently the domain is up. IDK... I ran out of original ideas.
The replies she commonly give people are more like "That's a pathetic cock, I'd never want anything to do with it and I'm sure others hate it too 2/10" or "Wow, what a grandiose dick, a master among plebs, 9/10", and anything in-between, depending on what it seems like the person wants to hear.
The times we've talked about it, it seems most people want to be degraded, which seems a bit self-destructive, but I don't know them and won't judge whatever they are into. People be strange!
a picture of some random dick does not qualify as blackmail material.
I doesn't seem far fetched that there could be a significant overlap between men who have enough insecurity about themselves to pay for the service, and men who would be amenable to blackmail using said photos.
Besides, it's not just the photo. Likely other things were shared as well, and the embarassment of having paid for online sexting might be more than enough for some people. Especially if they're married...
imo a "dick pic" is just that, a picture of male genitalia whereas a "nude" is usually a picture of a naked person (i.e. identifiable)
It's also a common scam nowadays, only remote and with nudes instead of actual sex.
It would make sense the FSB and colleagues have modernised and also use modern techniques. In fact a few years back a candidate for mayor of Paris (unlikely to win, but would have had ~15-20% of the votes) had a video of him masturbating, IIRC with another guy on video chat, released on Twitter. The guy was a "traditional family" type and resigned from his campaign.
He simply chats all day to lonely men, pretending to be women, so the women don't have to.
Apparently the girls had to be somewhat plain in order for fans to feel some attainability during fan meet and greets.