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Comment by fpgaminer | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for sharing your experience. It absolutely disgusts me the power that payment processors have over businesses. The sooner that industry is dismantled and made agnostic the better. I remember watching some BDSM website's documentary where they talked about how their payment processor dictated the kind of content they were allowed to make. It boggles my mind that people are okay with that.

I also find it surprising the amount of back bending people will do to say that payment processors are only doing it because the transactions are high risk. Your story, the thousands of other public stories, and the payment processors themselves have made it absolutely clear that it isn't about the transaction risk. It's them imposing their religious beliefs upon others.

With sex being such a huge part of our lives, why aren't we bending out backs to _help_ the sex industry thrive, instead of defending corrupt oligopolies?

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>> _help_ the sex industry thrive

There are dark sides. It is not the friendly industry oft portrayed. It is an industry that thrives on the young and naive. It is regulated because it needs to be. Most common complaint heard by lawyers in the field: "I did the shoot, the movie is on the website, but I haven't been paid." Followed worryingly by: "They said I had to because I had signed a contract."

The advice I give to anyone going to work on their first porn shoot: Bring a friend. Someone older, with a car, who will be on the set with you at all times.

I would contest that if the industry wasn't demonized it wouldn't have a dark side.

Hollywood isn't daemonized, but I used to give basically the same advice. Industries that run on attractive young people, people looking at very short careers, tend towards evil. Ask any successful recording artist about their first record contracts. Taylor Swift is writing songs about that dark place.

Fair enough, I can see that. I think a good portion of the evil in those industries comes from sexism, but that's really tangential to the topic and I appreciate your point.

EDIT: I would like to expand my previous comment though. Whenever prostitution is legalized we see massive improvements in the lives of sex workers. It seems clear to me that further reducing the demonization of sex, sex workers, etc would lead to a better work place in those industries for similar reasons. There may be a baseline of evil, for the reasons you point out. I don't think that should stop us from working to at least reach that baseline, rather than just leaving the people and businesses that inhabit that crucial landscape to rot.

porn already works within a well-defined legal framework. There are model releases, people getting paid etc. So if a reputable porn company interacts with their models and their consumers, everything is well. However, there are still non-legal reasons that make it a special case - see the ancestor post about a bank wanting to dictate what a merchant can offer to their credit card customers, or the post about models being treated badly (not getting paid or having to do things that they didn't sign up for). In that case, there still seems to be a difference to non-porn modeling and acting in terms of standards and of recourse available. part of this is that there are more people paying for badly made porn than for badly made action movies

> I think a good portion of the evil in those industries comes from sexism

What do we mean by "sexism" here? You don't think it's enough that men would like to have sex with attractive women? Or is that fact itself sexism?

> It is an industry that thrives on the young and naive.

Some of it maybe. But not the toy selling business being discussed.

Yes, conventional porn is a dark place. In my study of the problem, this fact underscores the importance of the Snapchat/Onlyfans revolution rather than taking away from it.

Prohibition creates problems. It doesn't solve them. Prohibiting anyone from using conventional payment infrastructure simply pushes them into the arms of the (sometimes abusive) people who have the resources to work around the system. In this scenario, an individual can't work around the system. The nameless/faceless owners of the large porn groups can.

This situation creates an inherent power imbalance that incentivizes coercion.

In the Snapchat/Onlyfans model, coercion is eliminated by virtue of allowing people to express themselves, when they want and as they want in the privacy of their homes. They are the directors, gaffers, editors etc. and no one else can tell them what they can or can't do.

A decentralized system is better at taking power away from those objectively awful people than any regulation or personal tips or oversight could.

I’m fine with regulating the adult industry for safety and what not, I just think that credit card agencies are possibly one of the last parties I would pick to be the regulator, second only to religious institutions.

> With sex being such a huge part of our lives, why aren't we bending out backs to _help_ the sex industry thrive, instead of defending corrupt oligopolies?

Because the "sex industry" is a bunch of corrupt oligopolies?!

I mean, we're talking about a business that thrives on human trafficking and exploitation and preying on the weak and vulnerable and defenseless. We're talking about an industry whose business model depends on an endless supply of defenseless gullible victims that see their lives thrown into the furnace to keep it running for just another instance.

Was it so long ago that one of the biggest porn sites in the history of the internet was caught knowingly hosting and refusing to take down videos of abducted underage girls getting raped?

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/pornhub-petition-ra...

The banking industry is not innocent, but let's not pretend the sex industry is a paragon of virtue in comparison.

What? The above anecdote is literally about how the payment processor's bank is twisting their arm to deplatform OP's site.

I meant "payment processors" more generally, referring to the greater oligopoly of Visa, MasterCard, the major banks, etc.

It's little consolation for the vast sex industry that it isn't Stripe et al's fault that they are deplatformed.

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