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> The most fascinating thing to me about OF is how it's practically normalized having one.

Onlyfans rose to fame during covid - a lot of people stuck at home with ample time to make or view porn. They were for a time pretty much the only opportunity that allowed the creators to make money (Reddit and Twitter didn't) other than Pornhub, which on top of that was dealing with the GirlsDoPorn fallout and ManyVids which while solid hasn't ever been good at marketing... and content creators loved that OF was the first site that more or less lured the viewers into subscription, resulting in a fixed revenue stream - loads of people forgot that they've subscribed to a couple OF people and no one really bothers with ten bucks on the monthly CC bill.

On top of that came a few celebrities/starlets and media pieces, the rest was watching a meme unfold in real life.

> The most fascinating thing to me about OF is how it's practically normalized having one.

I don’t know any personal acquaintance or any celebrity that has one. Perhaps I do but I’m not aware; my point is, it’s not that normalized, at least in my circle.

It's the butt of many jokes and a sign of desperation amongst my various circles. I don't think the service is empowering or pushing the industry forward, just another SaaS "pimp" creating more avenues of exploitation.

Legalize the wide umbrella of sex-related work and stop the exploitation.

I am confused by your argument.

Is OF exploitation in your view? If so, how?

If sex-related work was legalized (as OF is), would you think OF would no longer be the butt of jokes or do you think performers on OF would then turn to newly legalized sex acts?

The platforms get to charge insane amounts of money and control the audience. Creators have no chance of building a legitimate brand, their only hope is to play the algorithm game and pump out content that the platform controls.

IMO, legalizing it would let creators own their brand, get rid of exploitative race-to-the-bottom content, and give buyers/sellers confidence/acceptance to pursue their needs in a regulated and safe way.

I'm not so sure. Youtube is more mainstream but creators are still subject to arbitrary rules, summary judgements, and are forced to play the algorithm game if they want to derive income from the platform.

I agree that the stigmatization of sex work is a major driver of exploitation, but big tech is getting pretty good at the exploitation game itself.

>IMO, legalizing it would let creators own their brand, get rid of exploitative race-to-the-bottom content, and give buyers/sellers confidence/acceptance to pursue their needs in a regulated and safe way.

I'm all for legalization, but I think this idea of "giving power to self hosted content" will go as well as pretty much any other blog site that's been replaced by tumblr, medium, wordpress, or ugh... Twitter. Yes, people would rather type out rants 300 characters at a time over 20 posts than use a proper word processing unit.

Anyways, legalization won't solve the algorithm race. We're still dealing with those issues even on sites that ban 18+ content.

When you guys are talking about legalization in the context of OF, what are you talking about? What’s illegal about the site now, and where is it illegal?

This thread is a great example of why not to talk about sex on HN. It can only go down from there.

> Creators have no chance of building a legitimate brand

This sentence is only correct if you affix [on the platform] to the end. There is nothing stopping these creators from creating their own websites and using TikTok and Instagram to market themselves in much the same way they do now, directing viewers to their own website rather than OF.

I don’t think the algorithm game is the driving force of viewership. I think it is the content creators “advertising” via TikTok and Instagram followings.

Honestly it seems OF has the least platform control of most “social” sites.

>I don’t know any personal acquaintance or any celebrity that has one. Perhaps I do but I’m not aware

I guess that's another allure for it: OF isn't really indexed, so it creates some privacy and security despite being a public website to link to. Very easy to have a 2nd twitter which links to OF and have your peers be none the wiser.

>You still go to a models page and get blank images with no potential preview to know what you're getting unless they allow free subscriptions. It's always a gamble. Just feels performatively sketch.

Yeah, that's why I prefer Fansly if I can help it, unless the model has other social media with proper "previews" of their work. Fansly can still do that, but AFAIK it's not the default behavior. Or at least, the canonical method is so ubiquitous that it feels like the default.

But I guess I'm not too surprised. The genius thing models do that no other website gets away with is having 2-3 tiers of funding. So it's normal to not only pay for a subscription to see anything, you constantly pay to see even more individual content. It's not uncommon for a model to charge $13/month for a sub and then charge $10 for what could be a single picture (one that may not necessarily be different from what you could find on Instagram, mind you).

And that's not even talking about how you can post "fundraisers" or other misc. kinds of money raising on those sites.

And I guess the demand there was enough to succeed. Takes the best of both worlds of premium sites and webcam tipping and requires less effort than either of them for a single model to be successful.

I wonder if that's a reflection of how frustrated the current youth are in their (lack of?) sexual escapades? pumping out a sub and per post money's to see what could be as tame as an instagram feed, but at least they message you "directly".

It is not normalized to the extent you think it is, because like most trends it is overblown by social media, gaining more of a focus there and less in real life. However, this has still distorted reality enough that now young men ask young women if they have onlyfans, as if that is a casual or normal thing to ask someone.

> It is not normalized to the extent you think it is

I live in the middle of the biggest bar/club neighborhood in a major (usa) city. I meet men and women with OFs at least weekly. It's nothing at all like it was back in the 2005-2010s when I worked in the porn industry. People don't hide it at all. I have Tinder dates that admit to being on OF openly. Even men and women who work at (strip) clubs are way, way more common nowadays. I have a lot of service industry friends and about 1/4 of them have worked at local clubs if not danced at them.

Like, who even are you to say this to me? Lol I worked IN the industry. Are you also in the industry? Are you a dad with 3 kids or something? I have NO idea what your frame of reference is here but it is the absolute opposite of mine. Nothing wrong with that but unless you're more familiar with the industry than I am I'm failing to see why you even commented. But hell, maybe you're Ron Jeremy.

Anecdote is not statistics. If you work in the porn industry, it’s more likely that you’re meeting people who share similar tastes…not a representative view of the general public.

I said 2005-2010. No shit. I literally said "worked IN," I don't work in the industry anymore but I still associate with service industry (bars/clubs) people. Far beyond what the usual hackernews person would.

Hackernews peeps coming in with their hot-takes completely irrelevant to the conversation because they can't follow threads. So embarassing.

No shit some javascript dad with 3 kids probably won't be meeting people with OFs. That's the entire point of my question. But they also shouldn't be commenting on a porn industry thread like they know anything. And sure as HELL shouldn't be telling someone FROM the industry about the industry. Show your creds, homie, explain why I should just listen to you. Herpaderp "anecdata isnt statistics" thanks Gallileo. You know you're on HN and not instagram right? Like, I know math, and programming?

Calm down champ, no one cares about your porn industry experience. "Not normalized" means not normalized in society at large.

you're just aruging past each other without defining "normalization". Some people would say Video games are normalized, while some still think people make fun of adults who play them. We'd need a proper lens before we start arguing if something meets the criteria.

It doesn't need to be defined at the outset, you can infer from the context. Claiming that something has not been "normalized" to the extent depicted, and responding "yes it has! In my small niche community!" is irrelevant. Small niche community is not society at large.

Again, we have to define "niche". Are video games only popular in a "small niche community"? Is being more popular on a website more normalized than being more popular in a traditional club?

The original rebuttal was that it was normalized in the porn and stripper community, yes that is a niche.

The original rebuttal asked for a source and the source was a personal experience. Thar doesn't mean it's the only area, nor does it prove/disprove it as a niche.

I saw an Onlyfans QR code at a gas station, I think it may be less niche than people give it credit for. It's just that westrn society, as usual, does a good job suppressing knowledge in the topic. so many circles are underground.

It just feels werid calling a multi billion dollar empire "a niche".

However I think we all agree that playing video games are significantly more normalized than having an OF account.

Not necessarily. Less stigmatized, sure. It's like how watching porn is normalized but no one talks about it in public. Especially in countries where it may not be fully legal to ("lewd conduct").

>I live in the middle of the biggest bar/club neighborhood in a major (usa) city

This is the modern-day equivalent of Sodom or Weimar. Most of the world, or even the West, is not nearly this far gone.

I don't know about Sodom... but the level of decadence in the Weimar republic was possibly over exaggerated a bit by the you know who.

Besides the widespread poverty and sexual exploitation (which was a pretty common thing in most places back in the day) I doubt even Berlin was that much more 'decadent' than many places in the west are now.

Even homosexuality remained illegal in Germany during the 20s (unlike in France or Belgium for instance) and since about 500-1000 men were still convicted per year being too public about it probably wasn't the best idea.

It might appear normalized in the bar and club area of a huge city. This gives a culturally specific context to where and when people would advertise or talk about onlyfans.

In my frame of reference you are too familiar with the industry to see how normalized it actually is for most people.

I reckon the network effects are just too strong

Yep, and coincidentally related to your username, economy struggles. The main one I worked at was a mansion by University of Tampa that someone bought and we put cameras around it and women/men "worked" in it. They got free room and board and college tuition at UT paid for. This was 20 years ago.

But none of these acts ever thought/expected to become millionaires like what happens on OF. It's wild. It was mostly apposite to dancing and a lot of them were dancers when not in school.

Not many on OF actually become millionaires either. The chance of that is just as rare as in regular life.

No kidding.

OF network effects don’t seem that strong to me. I am not a user but I see a lot of TikTokers directing people to OF and assuming this is how they derive their viewership, those performers could just direct the potential client to a different platform. Unless I am mistaken, OF doesn’t have discovery features or other features that would be the source of stickiness to the platform. Isn’t it essentially just a webhost with payment system?

I don't really know much about it but OF has this right side "menu" of suggested people to watch. But I've never figured out how they related to anyone else I've watched. Most of the organic network-growing that I see on OF is one model/act will tag their friend/business partner in a post. It's kind of amazing to me how little effort they've put in to building that part of the site up because that would drum up so much more sticky (viewing not fluids) activity and keep people on the site longer.

Wasn't the big problem for many porn sites to get paid? The main payment service providers didn't want to deal with them (for many reasons including chargebacks) so they had to use shady providers that charged 15-20% of revenue.

Everyone wound up having to use CCbill so CCbill ran an iron fist and you couldn't argue with them at all. The guy who paid me was an absolute POS with drug/alch, anger and other issues. He's been arrested many times. So yeah, you were lucky to be paid reliably. He'd come in and fire half/all of the staff (acts and tech people) and offer us thousands of dollars to show up the next day. I was young and abuse-vulnerable at that time. It was the most money I'd made ever at that point. Same with a lot of the acts. A lot of us just dealt with it.

Wouldn’t you assume a high level of psychopathy is required to be a successful pornography producer?

If you’re going to throw out an open leading question like that, maybe you could give a good reason why you are asking it?

Lots of ethical sex positive people would be happy to be owners of a fabulously profitable site for ethical sex positive creation and views.

And most people are practical enough to know that the ethical side will take a lot of work to maintain those boundaries. Ethics require work anywhere people socialize.

I don’t see how psychopathy is somehow a necessity for a porn related business.

It's possible to be sex positive without being positive on prostitution or porn.

prostitution, maybe. But porn? This just sounds like "Sex is good, but don't show it to anyone but people you care about". "Porn" as itself is such a general term that it can really mean anything involving exposed genitals.

Either way, I feel "sex positive" means being able to respect differences. So it feels weird to call oneself that but also feel that consenting adults cannot exchange money to have sex, even if you never personally want to deal with that.

> This just sounds like "Sex is good, but don't show it to anyone but people you care about".

Yeah, that's "just" the way it's been for most societies in history.

> Either way, I feel "sex positive" means being able to respect differences.

"sex positive" actually means "pro-prostitution, pro-porn, anti-tradition and anti traditional morality", couched in terms that try to cast a better light on it and to cast people who object to it as joyless prudes. It's a political term.

>for most societies in history.

western ones, yes. And all the territories the west took over.

>It's a political term

In the same way anything slightly controversial is political, sure. No more political than "anti traditional morality", as if that's such a term to inspire awe.

> western ones, yes. And all the territories the west took over.

Which moral system is better than the Christian one?

> In the same way anything slightly controversial is political, sure.

Is that what making up euphemisms to redirect and confuse the public is?

>Which moral system is better than the Christian one

I can't really say. All I can say is that the Christian moral system didn't simply win over other societies through its moral value alone

>Is that what making up euphemisms to redirect and confuse the public is?

I guess you can spin any kind of PR that way, sure. The Civil Rights movement, the multiple sexual awakenings, the KKK, Christianity, and Super Mario Bros. All make up some kind of PR for some purpose.

(and no I hope you don't read too much into that. I hope using Mario and the KKK in the same sentence clues you into this being how general of terms we're speaking).

> "sex positive" actually means "pro-prostitution, pro-porn, anti-tradition and anti traditional morality", couched in terms that try to cast a better light on it and to cast people who object to it as joyless prudes. It's a political term.

No it isn't inherently either politically loaded or a euphemism or proxy for any particular platform, no more than 'liberal', 'conservative', 'libertarian', 'family', 'hard-working'. It merely means regarding sex and sexual expression as good and healthy. But there is no shortage of groups who want to coopt it to their political views, just like the other labels mentioned. Defining a term by not affirmatively defining what it means, but in terms of which policy platforms or bag a group opposes, is a pretty clear sign when it's being hijacked or coopted by an interest group.

> > This just sounds like "Sex is good, but don't show it to anyone but people you care about". > Yeah, that's "just" the way it's been for most societies in history.

Yes, and that only means that technology did not exist until now to simultaneously handle micropayments, security, anonymity, customer acquisition, billing, subscriptions. We could say the exact same thing about most SaaS business models.

The thrust of your comment is "What longer-term implications do current evolusions in modes of male-female interaction, online app-based dating, online porn, the monetization of male attention, etc. have for society, sexuality, psychology, morality, relationships, marriage etc.", which is very much an active discussion. Chris Williamson ('Modern Wisdom' [0]) and Dr Alok Kanojia ('HealthyGamerGG' [1]) are two excellent podcasters who interview a range of experts covering this and other areas regularly. Sample them and tell us what you think.

Akin to what you mention, another historical relationship trend that was just the way it's been for most societies in history for thousands of years, but is currently changing, is the increase in voluntary childlessness. Clearly there are a lot of enormous trends changing, with major societal implications. As you allude to, there isn't much neutral, fact-based research or discourse on these trends.

And the next one will be when AI displaces humans in online sex work; humans using AIs (Replika, et al) as boyfriends/girlfriends.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisWillx

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClHVl2N3jPEbkNJVx-ItQIQ