Comment by danbolt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danbolt | Hacker News Reader

Earlier in the month, the website OnlyFans set a price cap on what creators could charge for content in response to a celebrity selling photos that weren't as advertised. This affected the incomes of a lot of sex workers whose content contributed to their livelihoods. [1]

I'm not knowledgeable about sex work at all, but a lot of the discussion I read noted that it seemed troubling how OnlyFans had so much authority over how the content creators did business. It's not uncommon to hear how sex workers or people in the adult industry are at the whims of opaque moderation on social media too. [2]

Sex work can be an exploitative industry, but I think federation could bring a lot of power and control back to the content creators involved online.

Disclaimer: Again, I'm not an expert on the topic of sex work or knowledgeable about it at all. It'd be a lot better to get feedback of the people involved or know the industry better.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53979625

[2] https://jezebel.com/instagram-s-solicitation-policies-are-ex...

In the end, the problem sex workers have on the internet is that they are a huge fraud risk, with that risk coming from both the provider and the client. The mainstream payment providers won't touch it as a result. The less mainstream ones are expensive and still not easy to do business with.

Without easy setup of payment providers, federation is difficult. Any new instance in the federation needs to go through the same pain.

Meanwhile, what does federation actually solve? The only fans model (and most sex work) seems to be a social graph that is a single producer talking to a bunch of clients. The producer needs a server, clients need to connect to that server, where does federation come in?

Disclaimer: I'm not at all knowledgeable either - literally just know what I've read on hn on this subject.

The bottleneck is the Mastercard/Visa duopoly combined with the modern banking system. At the end of the day no amount of Patreon vs Shopify style business models for adult entertainment work fixes the fundamental payment risk problem. Onlyfans helped amortize the risk somewhat by spreading across multiple payment providers and controlling the UX tightly but even so they still had to change the pricing policy. Mindgeek/CCBill are the Paypal/Stripe of adult entertainment payment processing and it is not an easy field to "disrupt". You can put the best actuaries and machine learning engineers in a room and it would be doubtful if they could come up with a better risk model without fundamentally altering the method of transaction. (Crypto is often touted as a supposed fix for this sort of things but I am not knowledgeable enough about it to comment, somebody else please feel free to chime in.)

You're actually spending time and energy feeling bad for women who probably make more money selling nude (or often, just partially clothed) photos of themselves than you make selling your games.

So?

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