OnlyFans to block sexually explicit videos starting in October
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237274&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237274&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237274&p=4
(Comments like this will go away when we turn off pagination. Sorry for the annoyance.)
I say greater because OnlyFans is/was still on a massive upswing whereas Tumblr was 10 years past its peak already when the nails went in the coffin.
Edit: I understand this is supposedly not their choice.
Crypto/Bitcoin, in keeping with the relationship the Internet and adult content have. Congrats Coinbase, Venmo, and others enabling censorship resistant crypto payments on your revenue bump.
Best practice would be for patrons and content producers to have dedicated wallets for OnlyFans transactions, to prevent data leakage from ledger analysis.
Onlyfans depends on joe average being able to do this (and not being scared off at the mention of the word "crypto")
I think crypto is about 5 - 10 years away from this point
With current tech this would just be a mobile wallet that holds stablecoins with some sort of built in funding mechanism.
The issue is getting money from Coinbase into Wells Fargo or wherever, not getting it into Coinbase.
As usual crypto is a solution that didnt solve the problem: how do you detect underage porn so that you can mark your profits in general.
Yes, crypto incurs drag from fees and inconvenience for a platform to transact in it, but it can’t turn your payments off overnight.
(and I make these comments as a crypto skeptic)
Think Privacy.com/Lithic.com but using crypto and instant fiat->crypto conversions when the payments are made. No chargebacks, no refunds. The crypto or stablecoin are decentralized rails.
You'd have to build your own infrastructure, but you could make an actual credit card. It would have to be super jank at first (you might even have to cut actual physical checks at first). Fundamentally, a credit card is just you paying for somebody's transactions, and billing them at the end of the month (and suing them if they don't pay up).
It would be slow, and the service would be horrible, but the people accepting your money don't have a ton of other options.
And fundamentally the reason that credit cards have that customer trust is that they make it easy for customers to get refunds when the product isn't delivered, which is very hard to do for an Onlyfans-like business where there's no way to "return faulty goods" - standing in the middle between clients who think they didn't get what they paid for and sellers who think someone just wants to copy their pics without paying is not going to be a fun place to be.
The service promises huge amounts of money to, lets be honest, young women, to post nude photos of themselves. How much are you willing to be that every single photo, every video, of what has to be in the terabytes, is of someone over the age of 18. That no one 17 or younger, lured in by promises of big money, lied about their age to get it? That the platform's age verification system is 100% bulletproof and can't be fooled by photoshop.
Rather, the obvious reading of that is that onlyfans isn't primarily or deliberately hosting illegal content.
The meme is dumb and should die imho.
And yet, that isn't happening to the same degree as visa or mastercard.
So, for whatever reason, visa and mastercard are currently, successfully, forcing OnlyFans to do this kind of policy change, whereas coinbase is not.
When the actual rubber meets the road, crypto is defacto, not as censored as visa or mastercard.
The "private by default" criticism is misleading:
- While this is important in a design which mixes your transaction with a limited set of other recent transactions, in Zcash the privacy set is all of the shielded transactions ever.
- It's not a "default" technically, it's a choice of transparent and shielded, both of which are useful. "Default" is a wallet UX question. I think the latest reference wallet auto-shields things so you don't have to remember to shield what comes in from a transparent transaction.
At the moment I'm pretty sure they don't. At least, not via card-based payment systems.
https://bravenewcoin.com/insights/pornhub-crypto-news
from february
Sadly it doesn't seem to be working out as the crypto-enthusiast author might have wanted.
I get they are less popular in the US but are probably, hmm, 70% of cards in Europe? So that’s a viable option.
Source: almost accidentally undid an in-shop payment because their processor was based in a different town where i had never been. Realised at the last moment where the charge came from; bank was willing to undo.
Surely if the risk of fraud is an issue, the processing companies could simply price it into their models and charge the vendor a premium for it.
The main difference is that a gambler will keep throwing money (and encouraged to do so via dark patterns to keep the margins), whereas post-nut clarity is the main barrier to maintain the margins in porn.
What I don’t understand is the selective enforcement – why doesn’t this happen more often? Who is pressuring the payment networks?
In general merchants don't deal with client cards directly but through payment processors. The chargeback process is usually manual (meaning it requires non-negligible resources) plus it impacts the fees the card cartel collects (if the chargeback is accepted).
High risk payment processors generally agree to pay card cartels for the fee lost if chargebacks are accepted, and sometimes even perform refunds to stay within a threshold of chargebacks. This, plus extra fraud monitoring/protection makes their service more expensive.
You don't need a processor in Monaco, CCBill or PaymentCloud are US based and offer that. Now, they shave a significant chunk of the transaction in flat+percentage fees, it can be anywhere from 4 to 15% depending on your profile.
This is like saying "drugs are bad because of all the violence" when the violence is mostly a symptom of how we treat drugs.
Patreon?
"Network effects" doesn't mean jack, this isn't surfacing a plumber to a user on facebook because friends of friends have reviewed them in their local area..
They have a solid brand, it isn't what they want, but change that and what else is there?
I laughed reading the title, because it sounds just like 'TikTok bans dances', 'Instagram bans food and candid shots that aren't' to me. I don't use any of these sites, but that's the reputation they have/association I have for them; rebranding away from it when the core is so simple just seems nuts.
I really have no idea. I also don't know whether rebranding is the right choice.
But they have the code, the infrastructure, the marketing department, and all the revenue from their adult services days. So that seems like a pretty big head start over just a clone of their web UI.
(Also, we're talking like it has a massive employee count, is that the case? Could be just a handful for all I know.)
Also, weird that they would give up an entire market because of prude payment providers. Are these providers from Afghanistan? They should not have that much power over their customers.
Maybe a crypto spin off could work.
No one corporate wants to be actively involved in paying sex workers.
I think that slowly corporations are going to dismiss the loud puritanical few that complain about it and that those who do will find advertising their brands along side porn is extremely profitable. Corporations have been using sex to sell their products for ages specifically because it's so effective. It's just a matter of time until they start being honest about it.
0. https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/onlyfans-ban-pornograp...
https://www.salon.com/2020/12/30/the-anti-porn-religious-lob...
The government really did screw over websites like Craigslist and Backpage, but that was due to changes which would have made the site operators responsible for the content their users post which I don't think would have an impact on someone like mastercard.
I suspect the payment processors must support the anti-porn agenda since I doubt they really fear that any appreciable number of people will resort to using cash only for the rest of their lives in protest. It's entirely within Visa's power to say "If you don't like porn don't pay for it, but it isn't our place to police what free people can do with their money. Our role is simply to facilitate any legal transaction. If you feel something shouldn't be legal speak to your representatives and change the laws"
Onlyfans and sites similar often attract the small fetish sex workers because the demand isn't big enough for a major company to pick up on them on a regular basis but the demand is enough they can make serious money freelancing.
The problem from the credit card companies' point of view is that "I got caught by my wife" isn't a valid chargeback reason, so the vendor can dispute the chargeback, have every incentive to do so, and that's not a fight Visa want to get into.
Payment processors are required to maintain a certain chargeback rate with the card companies and so that risk gets passed on to the merchants.
This is all exceedingly well documented and a Google search away if you'd like to learn the inner workings of it.
You're looking for cumrocket . io (no, not joking) and their own Token Cumrocket / $Cummies which is on BSC (Binance Smart Chain).
“The live CUMROCKET price today is $0.053191 USD with a 24-hour trading volume of $4,789,810 USD. CUMROCKET is up 61.03% in the last 24 hours.”
> OnlyFans is getting out of the pornography business.
HN:
s/of the pornography //>> OnlyFans is getting out of the pornography business.
>HN:
> s/of the pornography //.
…is getting out business?
Without porn, onlyfans will do maybe $100M in 2022. It’s the difference between a $1.5B valuation and a $20B valuation.
s/getting \(.* \)the pornography /going \1/
-- Jamie Zawinski
"The children selling explicit videos on OnlyFans"
======================
Schools have shared anonymous reports of pupils using the site, including a 16-year-old who boasted to her careers adviser about the amount of money she made on the site, and showed off her "exuberant" spending on Instagram.
Underage creators and users of the site include victims of prior sexual abuse and those with mental health issues and suicidal thoughts, according to Childline counsellor notes. UK police forces say children have complained about their images being uploaded to the site without consent, and one 17-year-old reported being blackmailed.
Missing children are appearing in OnlyFans videos, according to a US watchdog, which also says it has received reports of child sexual exploitation.
"It is increasingly clear that OnlyFans is being used by children," says chief constable Simon Bailey, the UK's child protection lead.
"The company is not doing enough to put in place the safeguards that prevent children exploiting the opportunity to generate money, but also for children to be exploited."
In a statement, OnlyFans says it could not respond specifically to the anonymous reports we were told about without the account details.
======================
The anti-vice authoritarians will always come after any lucrative porn enterprise with these sensationalized stories. I'm surprised there are still people out there that eat it up.
https://definitions.uslegal.com/t/the-child-protection-and-o...
Try to use the excuse under a judge that the children are the ones fooling your obvious flawed registration system to see how that will go.
WHOA! That's not true.
At least one of her fellow "actors" went to jail for it and I think some of the staff only avoided jail by cutting plea bargains but still wound up with felonies.
There is a reason why so many people were angry when Traci Lords started getting "legitimate" roles after having destroyed a lot of people's lives.
Child porn is a strict liability crime in most cases of the US. Yeah, the justice system generally applies some common sense (ie. not convicting two 16 year olds sending each other selfies), but that is completely at the whim of the system and doesn't always hold true.
>Our reading of the relevant Supreme Court opinions, particularly Smith v. California, suggests that the first amendment does not permit the imposition of criminal sanctions on the basis of strict liability where doing so would seriously chill protected speech. While Congress may take steps to punish severely those who knowingly subject minors to sexual exploitation, and even those who commit such abuse recklessly or negligently, it may not impose very serious criminal sanctions on those who have diligently investigated the matter and formed a reasonable good-faith belief that they are engaged in activities protected by the first amendment.
[1]https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/858...
> Gottesman was found guilty of violating the 1977 Child Sexual Exploitation Act, but appealed the lower court verdict all the way to U. S. Supreme Court, claiming that he should not be held liable for using underage girls if they lied about their age.
Yet this is also commented from 2011:
https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/a-short-history-of-undera...
> No one, including Lords or her scene partners, ever went to jail over the scandal, but it led to several court cases and tougher laws regulating the adult industry.
"Never went to jail" does not exclude "Cut a deal but still wound up with a felony conviction". However, apparently my memory was faulty about someone going to jail.
Unfortunately, everything about the case is old enough that it doesn't appear well in search engines. And that's without the fact that everything is going to be drowned out in search engines by being proximate to "traci lords".
Why would the BBC or the police be worthy of trust? It’s ironic to trust their word when the article goes over the ways the site tries to verify identity and hence age, and they seem reasonable, far more reasonable than trusting the police because they’re the police.
I’m not going to post up my passport but I didn’t come down in the last shower.
Claims about this "damaging" them seem about as speculative as 1960s claims that homosexual behaviour is damaging.
While the idea of a six year old uploading naked pics makes me extremely uncomfortable I think that's a parenting issue (something has probably gone very wrong and that's what needs fixing, not the symptom of posting online), not something to be governed at the payment processor level.
What happens when X or Y minority group claims the test is biased against them?
Also your claim is that an intelligent person who could perform well on an examination wouldn't also make risky sexual decisions when they are young?
Good question. Perhaps a more in-depth analysis of the person would be required to understand why they are not passing the test.
What happens when X or Y minority group claims the test is biased against them?
This is an existing pattern and I would defer to the legal system to mirror the existing processes. This pattern is replete throughout all intersections of society and government.
Also your claim is that an intelligent person who could perform well on an examination wouldn't also make risky sexual decisions when they are young?
I never said intelligent. I said "if a person is mentally competent to make legal, financial, contractual and overall life decisions". These things are not directly tied to intelligence alone and intelligence can be interpreted to mean many different things. The test would be written and reviewed yearly by clinical psychologists, biologists and lawyers. The current process for this that already exists depends entirely on a judge which is just a more experienced lawyer and a single persons judgement call that may be biased by their personal beliefs. I believe my suggestion would be a vast improvement over the existing system and would make it easier for kids put into precarious situations to move forward in life rather than sitting in emergency foster care at the mercy of strangers if they don't actually require it.
I personally know of a few people including a close friend that went through this process. She was declared an adult at age 14 and was appointed guardianship over her brother as the legal guardian with full custody. She handled this perfectly but all of this was the decision of a single judge. This is of course not the same as legally being at the age of majority/consent. In my method, there would be certifications for different aspects of responsibility much like endorsements for a car or aircraft license. These would be endorsements on their state ID.
The reality of course though is that not every child has a responsible parent, and many children have parents who would happily exploit their children to make a couple thousand extra dollars (which really sucks, but it's also just how the world is). So as a general legal policy, putting the burden on parents may lead to substantially more harm of children.
However those sites now all have strong 230 compliance regimes, and I gather OnlyFans doesn't. OnlyFans could have implemented something similar. PornHub went down that route when confronted with similar pressure - they got of rid of all video's that went compliant. But OnlyFans.com have chosen not to. I wonder why?
Voat only became "Reddit for white supremacists" because Reddit was pushing many of those users off their platform. Only Fans only became "Patreon for sex work" because Patreon didn't want those users on their platform. Anyone who wasn't one of those groups was better off just sticking with Reddit and Patreon and that only became truer as the reputation became more and more ingrained with the platform's brand.
This seems like an opportunity, not a problem. Since most platforms simply don't get traction at all, you have something. It's opportunity that involves problems (or "challenges") but you've gotten somewhere on the market chessboard. And most "growth hacks" present challenges.
That said, it's hard to believe that onlyfans wasn't aware they were effective a porn site. Maybe Voat was more naive since white supremacy doesn't monetize the way porn does but I'd be skeptical there too. The Internet has a zillion places for any population to go so there isn't a single "off-brand" that a undesirable population X is fated to go to.
Have a look at the front page of Voat. I’m not even gonna check it myself because I’ve seen enough. I guarantee you that 50% or more of everything on the front page of Voat at any moment will be very obviously white supremacist type content. They know. And by letting those people dominate their platform for so long, they are effectively saying that white supremacists are welcome on their site, and that they are ok with giving a platform to people who are looking to spread hate against others based on ethnicity and nationality.
Voat shut down last year (I actually wasn't aware until reading this thread and trying to check the frontpage)
It doesn't appear to be ran on the same codebase or the same database as the "old" Voat, but it can essentially be considered "back".
This time the site above did actually have some content that match the description. Looking at the top 10 on the front page, 8 is anti-vaccination discussions and 2 is anti-jew. That is significant more than any of the other sites I have looked at, and for once I can verify what the person claim to be true.
(As usual people demonstrate how appreciated independent verification is).
It is both. If money is the primary driver you should simply accept the opportunity and pivot. However I would guess that the people who founded, worked at, and invested in these companies before the brand change were probably a little uneasy about that "growth hack". I know I would leave any company that to pivoted to white supremacy or porn. The former for personal moral reasons and the latter because our societal morality creates a stigma that isn't worth dealing with.
Plus this content is generally kicked off the original platform for some reason other than morals. It is usually because users are abandoning the platform or other companies are refusing to work with them. Embracing this content can therefore result in headaches like payment processors or cloud providers refusing to work with you.
The amount of money in porn overall is vast, generally estimated in the billions.[1] Some pariahs get a lot of money.
I'd agree on white supremacy, still.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/porn-could-bigger-economic-in...
And it's only fans
Unfortunately when I first set it up, I wasn't concerned about visibility haha. But while it's all fans, most of the content is heavily electric fan related
It reminds me of a "Ken M" post, but like a joke that just keeps working, even if you tell variants of it over and over.
I really miss the "old days" when the internet was full of single purpose, dumb-if-you-think-too-much-about-it, hilarious sites (crappy taxidermy, ThatWillBuffOut.com, graphjam, etc.) and this is as close as we can get these days. Only. Fans.
Yes,there was a time when Patreon meant porn. But now a lot of mainstream artists, YouTubers, etc. using Patreon.
Anything newsworthy will likely get reposted online somewhere within the hour anyway.
Otherwise it's just a PG13 version of itself with similar sexual undertones.
It's corporate suicide and it makes zero sense that they aren't fighting it. It's a valuable market, it's ethically sound and they are making the world a better place by having a safe place for adult performers to sell their services.
https://onlyfans.com/nathanflorence https://dailycaller.com/2021/06/17/onlyfans-pivot-porn-backi...
I would imagine it's very trivial to have a "Show me explicit content" setting.
Edit: Side note, I don’t know why porn is so shameful, especially concerning adults posting high quality content, it’s their art.
But more likely, it's OnlyFans' lax moderation[1] along with their recent attempt to raise capital have caused greater scrutiny by governments of illegal activity taking place on their platform.
[1] Quick summary by The Verge of a longer BBC article: https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/19/22632797/onlyfans-prohibi...
That's quite the assumption.
> so chargebacks in this sector are extremely high.
Or,
1. Many of these transactions will be impulse decisions that are made during periods of reduced cognitive function so will have higher rates of regret than other content.
2. People might not want to admit that they made the purchase when their partner/guardians find out about the charge.
Do you really think the critique of Only Fans is aimed at the consumers' experience, rather than contributing to the norm that it's OK for men to pay women to do what the men want?
If you can flip it and it sounds right then you can’t have it both ways, that’s hypocritical.
Is it really such a mystery?
Mostly every religion prohibits sexual freedom and most every government has deeply religious members in the legislature. There is no separation of the church's morals and political ones.
Which means yes, I'm suggesting a ban on religion in the political space. I don't mean you can't be a politician if you're religious, I mean you should be fired if you ever fall back on religious grounds while executing your responsibility.
Strange how the more religious the political leadership, the less freedoms you find in that society, regardless of religion (and like all generalisations, there are plenty of exceptions to that sweeping statement).
This is really not meant as an assault on religion, but let's not pretend that Church is not a political institution. You can have a legislative and judicial political leadership, or a religious one.
But I don't believe it's possible to have both (and call yourself a free country)
In the UK, the head of state is also the head of the state church, and things aren't too bad.
In Germany, the government is currently run by the Christian Democratic Union (and a few allies), and things seem reasonably secular.
I'm not sure how requiring age check relates to being non-secular either. I'm not religious, but I don't think children should watch porn.
So in many areas UK has less freedoms than poor authoritarian countries. I cant say anything about Germany since I havent lived there.
cryptocurrency? Revenue taxes crypto gains so I doubt that.
> almost all fintech companies will ban your account
I believe revolut operates in the UK and allows you to trade in btc.
And what do you suggest to use? Trade crypto to cash? And then how will I put said cash on bank account without getting on check list?
In UK even if you have 1000 GBP in cash they look at you like you're drug dealer.
> I believe revolut operates in the UK and allows you to trade in btc.
Revolut itself is shady and at least until recently didnt have or used any banking license in UK. And it's can ban you at any moment for no reason.
And Germany is far from secular too - for example church taxes (even if you can opt out) are still collected via the government. There is also much more censorship in video games than in most other countries.
Or use a better ISP.
In other news US post office caught delivering mail to churches, synagogues and mosques. Religious conspiracy or completely normal?
> even if you can opt out
You had to be opted in in the first place, you don't get randomly assigned to one of the religious groups that signed up for that service.
> There is also much more censorship in video games than in most other countries.
Gotta love how quickly school shooters got blamed on video games. Can't blame the government, can't blame the poor parents who were barely even aware of their kids existence in the months leading up to the shooting, lets blame and censor games the kid never played.
You have GOT to be joking!
Do you not see the difference between the government delivering postal mail to everyone, and the government collecting money for churches only - money that you have to explicitly opt-out of giving?
Will the government collect debts that other people owe me? Hell, no! So why should the government collecting church taxes for them?
I would be quite a bit richer if the government collected only church taxes. Would have been nice if I could have opted out of paying for that mess in Afghanistan.
> Will the government collect debts that other people owe me?
No, but maybe you could start a movement to have it recognize other, non religious, groups for this service.
Is it true that torrent sites are blocked for adults and consensual BDSM like spanking is considered illegal pornography?
I can't really believe it till I hear it from a person.
I had no idea. This completely changes my view of the UK and the world suddenly seems much darker.
Yes, there's an overlap there, but your use of the expression "a ban on religion in the political space" highlights the problem. To frame it first as a political problem in the sense of political parties and professional politicians misses where the harm is being done; and to expand the definition of "political space" in your ban to include private financial operators would ban religion entirely.
And that's also not possible to do while calling yourself a free country.
I'm certainly not anti-religious (I'm no atheist myself), but I'm very anti-moral crusading against the business of consenting adults whatever form it takes.
Powerful "Blame your political opponents" move and damn those Chesterton fences.
On a more serious note, it is not just porn and it's all about gene survival.
Men who do not care about the sexual freedom of their partners tend to got the way of Dodo. (for obvious reasons).
But I grant you that they may a live a more pleasant and relaxed life.
I can't speak for others, but my partner and I have a monogamous relationship because we like each other. We don't need government coercion.
(edited to make it sound less ominous)
Religions are just old ideologies centered on an anthropomorphic metaphor. It's not possible to exist without ideology -- even if it's something neoliberal and pared-down.
And, people will create institutions to provide them with additional structure, if the State isn't giving it to them. They'll organize around a priest, or a VP of DEI; they'll choose a holy book (Atlas Shrugged, the Koran, Das Kapital), and so on. And, lo and behold, those alternative structures will start coercing people too.
> prohibits sexual freedom
The older I get, the more I think "freedom" is a trap. What is the alcoholic's freedom to drink? The procrastinator's freedom to watch YouTube videos?
Odysseus, before sailing past the Sirens, was wise enough to ask his sailors to tie him to the mast.
I know you say you're self-motivated, but how many of you would really accomplish much without at least a little pressure from a boss, from perf review, or from your peers at least? "But I'm the CEO!", you say. Well, do you ever work harder as you prep for a board meeting?
I will do a dangerous thing now and, although essentially secular, make an Old Testament reference: What of Onan's freedom from responsibility for Tamar (i.e., his choice to leave her abandoned after Er's death), freedom from responsibility for the children he would have had with her? (People have myopically and stupidly focused on the "mechanics" of that story while missing the point.)
What if the consequences of your "freedom" don't hit you for many years? What if, as an individual, you simply don't have enough time in your life to make the mistake and learn from it?
I know a few people who were "free" to completely fuck up their lives, and they're belatedly figuring it out now, usually when it's too late.
Freedom is a very multifaceted word. On one hand, it means being free from coercion from others to do or not do what you want. On the other, it also means being free to do what you want without being forced into it by your own mind.
Most people have no freedom over their own minds, they would be slaves even if no laws applied to them and they had infinite money. Restricting physical freedom to guide those people even makes sense, as I would say those people are the majority.
But why the fuck would I accept that? I choose what I do and what I feel, why should I submit to others rules "for my own good" when my own mind has shown itself capable of choosing the correct option even when it hurts? Why should I limit my potential so every idiot who can't go 5 seconds without his little dopamine hits won't find a way to kill himself by the time he's 40? Why are the lives of the unaccomplished masses more important than my own?
Admittedly, this isn't a huge problem in my life, since to quote the New Testament, "if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move". Yet I feel like this kind of paternalism stunts the growth of those who would one day learn true freedom from themselves too. If you are shepherded into behaving, you do not learn why one must behave that way.
The context of your quote is especially apt for a discussion of (structure as a defense against) addiction, since it's about a man who was, in the understanding of the day, "possessed by a demon", and who was cured.
Now -- this is sort of an aside -- I'll admit that my first reaction to
> this isn't a huge problem in my life, since [Bible quote about how, with faith, anything is possible]
was negative, because it felt like how my mental caricature of an Evangelical (note acceptable prejudice) would brag ("look how much faith I have"). As was my reaction to
> Why should I limit my potential [...]? Why are the lives of the unaccomplished masses more important than my own?
which had more ego than... my culture teaches to put out there.
But, to look for the important point, it was that if someone were to really go all in on Christianity (in the "radical" sense), instead of just keeping it at arm's length and looking for some wisdom here and there (my approach -- and borrowing not just from Christianity), then they'd start with faith, not the thing I'm calling structure, because -- the idea goes -- all the good deeds, all the behaviors, and so on, stem from faith; if you really believe, the rest will follow.
Or, using "Law" as a synonym for "structure", there is Galatians 3:23-26, which seems very on-the-nose:
23 But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed.
24 Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.
25 But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.
26 For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.
Anyway, long story short, I think I see your point, which -- unless I have just projected a whole ton of additional meanings -- would be to emphasize Faith.
(That, I'm afraid, may be beyond me.)
Yes. Structure can turn an animal into a man, but only faith can elevate him above that.
I do not much like the word faith, as it evokes in me the image of the "Christian faithful" all praying on their knees, hoping for a better future if they follow everything the two-faced priest says. Ultimately it achieves nothing, as blind structure following without feeling for anything deeper than that within yourself is a soulless activity. If you couldn't tell from those last two sentences, I'm not actually Christian. I have rather strong feelings towards them, since I have seen them pull the greatest trick of all: convincing the masses that religion is extrinsically rather than intrinsically motivated. "Faith" nowadays is orthopraxy.
The world is much more complicated than that, of course, and it is not the Christians who did it, or anyone in particular in my opinion. Religion is as much spiritualism as culture, and Western faith before them was explicitly orthopractic. But I feel much more at home criticizing a religion I have experienced, rather than far off ones.
As to my Matthew quote: it has a lot of meaning to me. It is the expression of a universal truth, that true faith (or true will, or spirit, the alchemist's gold and so on and so forth) is the power to change oneself, and thus change the world. Admittedly, the full story (Jesus heals the boy, who does nothing) does not reflect that, which ties back into my hatred of Christianity as a religion that teaches the masses to be powerless and seek their spiritual salvation in others, when it is readily available to them.
(I quote Bible passages with a perverse enjoyment, though)
> Creators will continue to be allowed to post content containing nudity as long as it is consistent with our Acceptable Use Policy.
>These changes are to comply with the requests of our banking partners and payout providers.[1]
I do think OnlyFans has a lot of potential with the features it offers: It combines the core functionality important for content creators of youtube, instagram and patreon. That is, except for discovery, which is notoriously bad.
[1]https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/19/onlyfans-bans-explicit-con...
The norm is still heavily enforced.
OnlyFans is doing this allegedly because of a push by their payment processors and their investors.
I used to work for a company that did payment processing for high-risk sites (pornography and gambling), and before that I worked for a company that ran high-risk sites (pornography and gambling).
Those types of sites are high-risk because of a relatively large risk of fraud and chargebacks. Fraud and chargebacks are both bad things that cost both merchants and payment processors a lot of time and money, and they want to eliminate as much as possible.
This is why it's not as simple as a "Show me explicit content" setting - it's not about people seeing porn if they don't want to, it's about the banks not wanting to deal with the trouble that adult-focused sites tend to bring.
Basically only just a image problem is keeping this industry from a huge amount of important infrastructure development.
Imagine that YouTube was to shut down next week.
how many startups do you think would be created to address that market?
How many uniquely innovative new ideas for attracting the former YT user base would be executed with lasting qualities that are beneficial to society and video producers and professional consumers?
Homogeneity is the developer crown / throne.
But homogeneous behemoth oligarchies prevent any serious development in any way capable of being subsumed by the oligarchs at marginal and not meaningful cost?
Can't any number, if a multitude is necessary then how about a multitude of global entrepreneurs less worried about their CVs appearance and capable of the work that we do for very much less for the same lifestyle, can't we find enough cut away / vanity intermediaries to take any public rap to enable the creation of a host of new companies in this sector all wanting to hire American talent and use American IP to develop the most advanced features for video sites serving this user base right now and just step in?
Even if they lose the bulk of their customers, they will still have a bigger network than if they had started with the same platform, but without the porn.
The company is probably assuming they can pivot, and maybe they can, but I doubt it
It was always weird but also kind of fascinating to dive in to.
Just a note that Tumblr's anti-porn policy has been fairly leaky and users basically adapted to it. After a decline, the site now hosts nearly as much porn as previously.
The problem is that onlyfans has a much bigger spotlight on it. So yeah, one wonders how people justify just killing their product.
But agreed that I didn’t know OnlyFans had any meaningful non-porn content. And the business sense in this seems 100% geared towards a short term payout with no regard for what happens afterward.
Strong disagree. They lined their coffers and now it's time to pivot. In fact, it's probably the perfect time to pivot. They are still relatively unknown, and their reputation hasn't been tarnished. Patreon is ripe for disruption.
Pornography is not how you become a billion-dollar unicorn, which is I'm sure what they're eyeing (especially after their most recent raise).
Onlyfans is synonymous with camgirls and porn
Are you sure about that? This company seems pretty well known in the creator space, but not for hosting anything other than porn. At least in all communities I follow, having an OnlyFans account is synonymous with selling porn.
> Pornography is not how you become a billion-dollar unicorn
Pornhub would like to have a word with you. I'd say that, in fact, porn is one of the easiest ways to get there (as shown, for example, by OFs enormous growth).
OnlyFans is instagram but for porn. If they want to escape that, they're gonna have to rebrand.
1. Onlyfans is extremely well know to the point of being a meme, you couldn't be more wrong. Like what rock would you have to be hiding under to not have heard of OF?
2. Exactly what about Patreon seems ripe for disruption? Looking for something specific here, hopefully something that wouldn't apply to most every other company.
3. ??? But only-fans literally became a billion-dollar unicorn on the back of porn. Like, I'm speechless, really, I am.
Whereas for example GPB and other Mario players have TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and so on, full of Mario, because duh, that's what they do. Why would you expect say, Pangea Panga's Twitter to be about dinosaur fossils, Defender to do TikTok dances or CarlSagan42 to... OK, Carl is different.
I've not seen anybody ask Geek (another popular Mario player) whether she's on OnlyFans but I would expect that if they did ask that they'd get banned from her chat, because again, nobody thinks "Oh yeah, I bet she'd charge money for Mario videos" the implication would be that it's porn.
I disagree. OnlyFans is well-known in streamer/gamer/internet/Tumblr/Twitter culture. Ask anyone on the street and most people won't know about the porn connection. They probably won't even know what OF is.
> 3. ??? But only-fans literally became a billion-dollar unicorn on the back of porn. Like, I'm speechless, really, I am.
They haven't, though. They "only" made ~400 million last year and can't find investors (did you even read through the Axios report?). Porn is bad for business. I'm surprised people are surprised. Patreon literally did this exact same thing[1] (ditched explicit content after initially allowing it).
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbqwwj/patreon-suspension-of...
It's been mentioned in jokes, multiple times, in prime time current affairs shows in my country.
I expect almost everyone I know under the age of 60 knows what it is. From my under 18 relatives, through the accountants and builders and electricians, to the coffee shop owners, bar staff... and of course all the systems & software people I work with.
Yeah I'm not sure how to respond, since you don't seem to understand anything the same way I do. Like zero points agreement here, which is why I opened with we must be living in a different reality.
When you somebody says a "billion dollar unicorn" they are talking about valuation not revenue. Also the vast majority, effectively all of OF's revenue is related to the adult content they are going to be removing.
EDIT to add :
If you argue ad absurdam that everyone is going to be exposed to everyone for moral judgement of their rights to online existence, then maybe we need a more sophisticated and practically judicious and efficient system of adjudication of the legal entitlements and freedoms endowed to everyone, than "I know it when I see it ".
This needs a logical codex. Literally a logical reduction of the comprehensive semantics used to describe unacceptable content. From which we can apply triage to emergency cases of accused indecency. Too many cases are heard so immediately in the courts of public opprobrium exclusively in hostile environments where the most sympathetic media is bound and restricted from venturing any actual support virtually ensuring that the rights of the publisher are lost. This is ignoring the issues of commercial withdrawal of essential services.
My liberal translation:
It's crazy that companies try to scale workforce like you scale compute units in the cloud. This wouldn't be the same if the workforce organized itself in unions, both against the platform and the moral police.
If arguing that everyone on these platforms would be judged in front of everyone else, maybe a legal framework dictating what people can and cannot do is the way to go (I think it sarcastically implies that the "everything which is not forbidden is allowed" principle would be violated).
Edit: it's very complex to describe what unacceptable content is. This will cause many cases of indecency accusations, which will turn the public against them, leaving no freedom of media per se.
I always felt porn was an exploitative business so was never into it, But I gained respect for OnlyFans as a platform because it enabled people to move from dangerous, risky work to relatively safe work. As with any content platform, I understand that only perhaps top 5% might make sustainable business out of it but still it's a choice available.
Now they've blown it, In order to chase after scale OnlyFans has decided to sacrifice their original customers. Fans of those music artists who are supposedly joining now should inform them that OnlyFans is robbing the livelihood and would be pushing many back to dangerous physical-sex work.
[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/211-aella-savannah-solo
What about not getting into this and, thus, not being exposed to any risks? Sex-work nowadays is the matter of choice, it's not how it used to be in pre-internet era.
Unfortunately it's often the only choice, If not we wouldn't be still finding women from poor countries dead in locked shipping containers in the harbors of developed countries.
Tinder was initially sometimes described as an app to find people nearby who want to hook up. Like a one-night-stand-radar. It quickly positioned itself as more traditional dating app (although very focused on visuals).
And although not sexual, I think what happend to YikYak is similar. They started as this anarchic platform where you anonymously could talk shit about local topics and people. And then they realized that is probably not what they want because it causes outrage, so they tried to nerf that aspect (which is the whole allure of the platform).
Sometimes the sanitizing works (Snapchat), sometimes it kills the app (Tumblr, YikYak). But in any case I'd wish there would still be a place for the anarchic, 'unmoral', wild ideas in our society.
1) There is a high chargeback and dispute rate on porn. I don't know why.
2) OnlyFans has underage performers who get on there using fake IDs and there is not a very good way to stop that.
Clone the full experience on a dedicated site, OnlyFantasy.com, duplicate the whole userbase, and give a simple warning that I can find my favorite stars on another site. In time, the user bases will diverge naturally depending on interests.
Yes, the payment processors will bark at the porn site. Move to a more expensive processor for that site only, pay 5%, 10% fee, it doesn't really matter, it's free money.
If PH is having trouble processing any form of credit card, a smaller company will have no chance at all. We're seeing a sterilization of legitimate porn on the internet, done by legitimate tax paying western companies. It'll be left to whoever can operate beyond those constraints, which is kind of a sad state of affairs for free speech, separation of church and state, and policing in general.
Let's not kid ourselves about PornHub...
https://www.engadget.com/pornhub-first-transparency-report-1...
None of which had the consent of all parties involved.
Sending a pic or video is not substantially more difficult than sending a link. The revenge porn stuff is a red herring.
That's an incredibly repulsive take. It's also increasingly illegal, so your opinion of it is thankfully irrelevant.
Also consider that we will eventually have face search for the internet, so someone could take a photo of you from LinkedIn and find all the places that face appears.
Either you're commenting without being informed, or you're intentionally lying. Either way, you are harming people.
Some of those were literal rape videos.
"IRL", abusive relationships can be hidden in plain site from people who think they know the couple well. How do you stand any chance of knowing there isn't an abusive pimp behind the camera of an onlyfans account? Ultimately you only have intuition and guesswork to go off of, but both are fallible. Even if the platform itself is trusted and does a good job of verifying identities, that doesn't preclude abuse.
That's my point, you don't and can't. You should be cognizant of the possibility of abuse, not write off the possibility. Don't pretend to know when you couldn't possibly know. People who claim that abuse doesn't exist on Onlyfans are almost certainly wrong. How much abuse content exists on OF is unknown; unknown to everybody in this conversation, and unknown even to OF. Whether OF is ethical depends on how much abusive content is on OF, which none of us know, and how much abuse somebody thinks should be tolerated, which is subjective.
Anybody who claims that Onlyfans is ethical is making a claim about the rate of abuse which they can't back up.
Note that I am not claiming Onlyfans is unethical. I don't know if Onlyfans is ethical or not. I don't know what the rate of abuse content on Onlyfans is. That's information I simply don't have. Furthermore, I'm not even sure what rate of abuse content society should tolerate from a company. Probably if these are only isolated incidents that are swiftly recognized and rectified, it shouldn't damn the whole platform. Also, I think it probably matters whether that rate is trending up or down, but I don't have any information about either possible trend. I lack the information I need to support the claim that Onlyfans is ethical, and I think the rest of you do as well.
Are you arguing that all sex work should be illegal because it is possible that there is an unhealthy relationship involved?
Would you also extend that to the modeling industry as well?
What about professional cheerleading?
Hooters waitresses?
If there is a couple who decides for the guy to be a stay at home dad, and the wife pays the bills via sex work, is he a pimp?
What if you reverse the genders in the above?
I know couples in both situations. I wouldn't characterize their relationships as abusive, but you might?
Unfortunately, the company seems to be pretty morally bankrupt: https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/19/22633411/onlyfans-banned-...
While crypto could fix those issues as well, it's just layers and layers of segments that need wide adoption (B2B transactions, payroll, benefits, etc.)
Why wouldn't it just revert back to how it was before all the amateur stuff got monetized over the past 5yr or so.
Kind of like when they closed backpage. It went back - to situation I which sex seller risk more.
User submitted content is so much harder to verify facts about (consent in particular) and as long as the user submitted content is sexual in nature, it is legal plutonium.
That doesn't seem to be stopping e-Bay and such. I don't believe that payment processors have any idea what are people buying and selling.
User-traded goods on e-Bay are also much harder to verify facts about than goods from a brick-and-mortar shop. Doesn't seem to prevent e-Bay from operating.
Like how would you distinguish between a stolen item and a used item without requiring people to keep every receipt for anything they ever buy? This is not an endorsement of their anti-porn policy, just observing that that it's easy for them to implement that in contrast to your theft example.
https://newrepublic.com/article/160488/nick-kristof-holy-war...
Just because people you don't like are for something does not mean that you must automatically be against it.
It is a logical fallacy. The risk of de-anonymization doesn't go away because their consent wasn't verified- tattoos, birthmarks, backgrounds of images and video, etc are still there.
Not only that, but that same risk still applies to people whose videos were posted without consent. What's worse than being raped and having your video put online? Knowing that everyone you ever work with may have seen it, for the rest of your life.
Also, if you read the article the post attached, it literally opens with a woman who had to impersonate a lawyer to get porn of her taken off of pornhub.
"How I view those people" seems to be your imagination, not mine.
How many problems occur, what kind, what protocols would address the problems without needlessly harming performers and consumers?
There's no mechanism I can imagine that would make this situation true. HOW would everyone have seen it? Are you aware of just how many porn videos/pictures there are in the world?
You'd be well served to post a stat for how many people have had their coworkers see their rape videos, I'd bet $$$ that it's a negligible number compared to the livelihood issues suffered by onlyfans removing all those creators.
Payment processors are choosing to not associate with businesses that cannot demonstrate that legal consent was gained from everyone involved in the production of the videos.
There's neither church nor state involved here.
You say there's neither church nor state, but then you cite payment processors and legal consent, which are both constructs that are determined by the state. And the content that's in question is sexual consent. The idea that there should be an additional mind (e.g. a legal mind) regulating the behaviors of sexual participants is an old religious conservative idea.
If you still insist that the church in this sense has no meaning, and that this isn't a question of church and state, then you don't believe that there is fundamentally a problem of church and state at all, which in itself is an old religious conservative idea.
If you want to count "choosing to not support a business that enables rapists and child porn" as exclusively an old conservative idea, I guess you are missing the mark by quite a lot.
The institution of a church in the theological sense has nothing to do with a legally registered organization. The domain of the church, in the sense of "separation of church and state", is in the psychology and interal belief structures of the mass of people. The Enlightenment thinkers who asserted a separation of church and state were not making an assertion about mere legal technicality.
Just pointing out that this seems to be your own interpretation and isn't held in any legal doctrine I've been able to find.
In-fact it doesn't have a lot of historical or academic backing either: Historically, the separation of church and state was about removing the special benefits of state-sanctioned religions so that other churches could exist.
That was explicitly about the legally registered organisation, and you can see this now in how legally registered churches are constantly trying to find ways to legally divorce themselves from linked entities so those entities can receive state funding. That is 100% about the legally registered organisations.
Where do you see "legally registered organization" in this defintion?
Of course, within existing legal doctrine, "separation of church and state" could only refer to legal technicalities. And that's the whole point I was making, that separation goes both ways. For you to redefine the idea behind separation of church and state in merely legal terms is itself a breach of that separation.
See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_kingdoms_doctrine#Response...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genevan_Consistory
In any case, this has nothing to do with consent laws, which are entirely a matter for the state.
> this has nothing to do with consent laws, which are entirely a matter for the state.
That's what I've been saying. And it has nothing to do with my point.
I don't think many people who believe in the separation of church and state would think that implies that the state doesn't have the ability to make and enforce laws around consent.
For example, when states strengthen regulations on abortion clinics with the stated goal of improving patient safety, but the driving forces behind the legislation are anti-abortion groups who know that rural abortion providers will have to close, creating large unserved areas... will those laws help or hurt the safety of women who want abortions?
Likewise, we should be wary of consent verification laws that are pushed by groups whose supporters are opposed to legal pornography.
In both cases the goal is not to protect women. The goal is to take something morally wrong and make it seedy, underground, and dangerous, like morally wrong things are supposed to be.
This is the definition of an ad hominem, which is what the whole separation of church and state discussion is, since neither church nor state are involved here.
We arent discussing regulations, we are discussing payment processors choosing to not do business with video hosts who cannot prove legal consent was obtained from all involved.
If you ran a business, would you want to make money off of rape and child pornography? The payment processors chose "no", and that is their right.
In porn as in abortion, prohibitionists are numerous and committed enough to be a force to reckoned with, but they strategically justify their work using reasons that the rest of society finds persuasive. Anti-abortionists believe that abortion is inherently wrong, but they talk about women's safety while they shut down clinics.
The difference is, the groups who care about the safety of women will look at the details and say, the effect of this supposed "reproductive safety" bill is that thousands of women will lose access to legal abortion. Even if it targets shortcomings at poorly staffed, decrepit facilities, they won't support it if it actually makes women less safe. Overall, will shutting down OnlyFans payments make things better or worse for the women on it? People who aren't asking that question don't actually care.
Replacing skepticism and critical analysis isn't doing anyone any favors, and it doesn't make the matter at hand an issue of church or state.
The Craigslist shutdown seemed mostly driven by anti-sex work motivations
The Pornhub identity verification changes were driven by women who had been tricked into having their videos appeared and sued Pornhub over their inability to get them taken down: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pornhub-lawsuit-nonconsensual-v...
So yes - motivation is important. The identity verification requirements for performers on porn sites are at least partially driven by actual victim complaints.
So it is at least partially to protect women.
Nonsense. The odds of you stumbling upon a particular porn photo or video are miniscule unless you are specifically searching for it or it's very popular (which is very hard and not going to happen for unwilling pictures).
Particularly as most sites would take down images of you on request.
Producers should have been doing this anyway.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2257
> "... create and maintain individually identifiable records pertaining to every performer portrayed in such a visual depiction."
For example, research on the take-down of reputable sex work sites harms workers by removing their opportunities for safe work.
> the financial situation of the vast majority of research participants has deteriorated, as has their ability to access community and screen clients.
https://antitraffickingreview.org/index.php/atrjournal/artic...
If that inconveniences performers, then that’s their problem to deal with. We shouldn’t be focused on making things easy for performers if that happens at the expense of allowing revenge porn.
Going after porn sites does nothing really to stop the harassment (they can just send the pic or video directly rather than a link).
https://mobile.twitter.com/GustavoTurnerX/status/14284408173...
Thank you!
If anyone else is wondering Exodus Cry is an organization which originated out of a weekly prayer group founded 2007 [0], they apparently lobbied Mastercard to only accept providers which verify the identity of all performers & review content before any upload [1]. Which is almost impossible for the tubes / onlyfans => no more payment
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Cry
[1] https://www.mastercard.com/news/perspectives/2021/protecting...
They are literally facilitating the transaction.... Handling payments which determine access to the content is very much "being associated".
> Deciding whether that sort of thing is happening really shouldn't be their purview.
That is their purview. Who they choose to process payments for, and the various rates based on content and risk, is the entire purpose of their business.
Content, no. My email provider doesn't get involved in what I am emailing (even though they might be "facilitating" a crime or other unsavory), the car dealership doesn't get involved in what I am going to use the car for. I mean by your logic a grocery store could ask what business you are in, and not sell you food because that is facilitating what you are doing.
Sure, if law enforcement and courts get involved, then they can stop being a provider.
But to suggest that it somehow reflects badly on the credit card company that they are used on a porn site is ridiculous.
I guarantee you they do. This is right from SendGrid:
__Twilio SendGrid Email prohibits sending of any content that is illegal or content that is harmful, unwanted, inappropriate, objectionable, confirmed to be criminal misinformation, or otherwise poses a threat to the public, even if the content is permissible by law. This content is not allowed, regardless of user consent.__
They then have a huge list of prohibited topics. Pornography, misinformation, hate speech, etc.
I recommend you check your provider TOS.
> the car dealership doesn't get involved in what I am going to use the car for
Car dealerships are free to refuse you service for any reason, other than being a protected class. I guarantee there is a long list of activities you could tell a dealership you'd do, and they'd refuse you service.
> I mean by your logic a grocery store could ask what business you are in, and not sell you food because that is facilitating what you are doing.
Yes, this is literally the case, lol. Not just by logic, but by actual reality. A grocery store can refuse you service for any reason other than discrimination of a protected class.
You need to update yourself with the laws in this country.
> But to suggest that it somehow reflects badly on the credit card company that they are used on a porn site is ridiculous.
They are free to do business with anyone they see fit. Pornography comes with the significant risk of actual harm to people. Therefore, they don't want to be involved.
If you don't like it, maybe capitalism isn't for you.
I'm kinda on the fence, but you're making a good case against it.
That means there is already an userbase for crypto porn.
Banks are notoriously risk-averse. This is a disruption waiting to happen for the first person who can crack handling sex-worker credit card payments despite the banks.
* Laundering money (buy accounts with stolen cards, sell them using crypto to people who don't want to be associated with the accounts).
* People falsely claiming fraud to cover up the payments (ex. a spouse finding out about them).
* More specific to OF, people paying for private/custom content and then filing a chargeback.
I think people being prudish is kind of what allows this market to be ripe with fraud. I'm not sure there's a way to "disrupt" this industry using credit cards just due to the inherent tendency for fraud in the market.
I don't think there's anything intrinsic about the sex industry that makes it more fraudulent. I think it's much more about the prudishness and societal attitudes that makes it so. Also the long association with organised crime, obviously.
I wonder how this works in countries (like the Scandinavians) where the sex industry is more accepted and there's less prudishness? Are the banks still excluding them there?
Except in 2008 when they were idiotic. I felt the need to point out that one specific data point among the trend that otherwise agrees with you.
If it was just covering the chargebacks it'd be easy.
Then, it's simply a question of the fee structure.
What they don't like is hard-core amateur stuff. Its hard to verify the models there. You see titles like "I brought my tinder date home and rode him/her hard" in a video title and you start to wonder if this person consented to being in a paid film, or if they are of legal age. My guess is onlyfans will ban anything involving two or more people. It will become instagram with tits and parasocial relationships.
Instagram is already Instagram with tits and parasocial relationships.
it's all who/whom now
i don't like it, but that's the reality
Welcome to the "free(ish) market." As I've said before, people love to say they're in favor of the "free market," until they get one. There is no law preventing any payment processor from accepting clients in the adult content space. They do it simply because of risk and to protect their corporate image.
That being said, most US debit networks (Star, Pulse, Coop, etc) don't have these restrictions. It does damage the user experience to limit your card acceptance to most debit cards.
1 - https://thehill.com/policy/technology/548279-mastercard-upda...
This whole “pay with card to get a lot of points!” thing while also allowing processors to have anti-competitive terms forbidding surcharges for credit card payments is a huuuuuuuge boon for their industry.
I’m surprised that I hadn’t heard of Star, Pulse, and Coop before. Probably has something to do with the Durbin Amendment.
Yes, there are companies out there that will do this.
They're only allowed to operate because they're licensed by the government, and the government can yank their license at any time.
Note that the "Operation Chokepoint" wasn't just about porn - it was also shutting down payday lenders and firearm dealers. The operation was stopped by the government in 2016 and bipartisan legislation passed in 2017 to stop it happening again: https://www.forbes.com/sites/norbertmichel/2018/11/05/newly-...
That's a lot harder because they have more of a network effect. People have a Visa or MasterCard because it's widely accepted and it's widely accepted because a lot of people have one.
The solution to this is to make it easier for people to get or accept the alternative payment network. Only now you're into regulatory barriers.
The critical feature of PornCard is that you don't have to give your name, right? Except that they're specifically prohibited from offering that.
The regulatory cost of establishing a new card is effectively the same whether you have a hundred users or a billion, so high regulatory costs put a disproportionate disadvantage on small and upstart networks, which would then have to charge higher fees, which would then cause no one to accept them.
The regulations destroy competition and without competition you don't have a free market.
Isn’t that exactly what crypto is?
I agree with you that some regulations are harmful and are just plain old regulatory capture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture) that protects the big incumbents. But we need well-targeted regulation for this situation where the size of existing networks prevents new payment processors from participating and having a shot in the economy. one option is that once you’re above a certain size, providers benefiting from network effects must be treated like a government entity, just like we regulate utilities. After all, services like payment processing are incredibly fundamental to our society’s operation. Another option is to force interoperability so that a new small business doesn’t face an insurmountable barrier to competition.
BTW, the theory of the "free market" also predicts that there should be no long term economic profit, ever, provided that perfect competition exists.
If we were talking about bars, then yes, you have thousands of bars, and if legal, it wouldnt be hard to find a naked bar. But with two companies, you're far away from free-anything.
This is usually startups biggest problem - there exists demand, but not enough demand in the right mix to be able to make a living/business/millions/etc... filling it.
There are hindreds of millions of consumers not enough demand?
The unfortunate truth is that anarchy is better than a weak democracy, because weak democracies just become oligarchies with more steps.
Ofc, a strong democracy is better than either, and regulations are extremely important. But in this case, those regulations are more for the oligarchs than the people.
If you really want a great example of anarchy vs oligarchy, take note that the anarchy of the private world ran Trump into the ground repeatedly and called him a loser while our public world gave him all the power it could and started a cult. Anarchy isn't great, but it's better than that.
Aside from the fact that where a metric ton of regulations targeting processing adult content payments under the guide of "protecting the children"
There is another metric ton of regulations around creating and operating a payment processing system. There is a reason no competitors to paypal have really emerged. That reason is GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS..
Please stop saying people do not like a free market when they get one as there is NOTHING FREE MARKET about the banking industry in either the world or the US
The Stronger and more centralized the government, the more abuse and harm will come
Weak, distributed government power is the only resolution to corruption, people never want to admit that however.
Government should be limited to the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense of Individual rights, and nothing more
This is demonstrably false. There are countless regulations that are vital to your every day life which serve absolutely no nefarious purpose.
Your flaw is assuming that corruption can only come from government. You risk allowing yourself to be ruled and abused by corrupt corporations (many of which are larger and have more money than some governments).
Make no mistake, there will always be people who will try to take advantage of you. They will flock to places where they have power over others. Some of them will end up in government and some of them will end up in corporations. As a citizen, you may have the power to vote out the ones that exist in governments. You have zero power over who is employed at a corporation.
You want to weaken the thing you have at least some measure of control over to allow yourself to be ruled over by something you have no ability to control or influence.
I don't understand the willingness to subjugate yourself before powerful corporations while also tying your own hands behind your back as you bend over for them. Is it because you believe that they will be benevolent rulers? History shows us they will not. Does it make it easier to pretend that you aren't being ruled? History shows us you most assuredly will be.
Maybe it's because we don't talk much about the long history of abuses people suffer when they allow themselves to be ruled by corporations. Maybe you think that those horrific abuses which happen even today overseas could never happen to you even if you weaken the government which currently protects you from those very same conditions. It's a bit like watching someone beg to be enslaved while insisting they'll somehow have freed themselves once they are...
Absent Government there can be no corporations, Business sure, but business absent government looks very different
Corporations are fictional entities created by government regulations namely liability shields, to facilitate investment.
>As a citizen, you may have the power to vote out the ones that exist in governments
Reality says other wise, as a citizen my vote only carries the measure if there is a tie, there as never been a tie...
This mystical rose colored view of democracy does not match reality.
>You have zero power over who is employed at a corporation.
I would say my power to say who is employed at a corporation is about the same as my power to say who is in power in government, that is not even talking about who I have the option to vote for.
In my entire life I do not believe a Single person I have ever voted for as ever won the election... I do not vote for either Republicans or Democrats
>>I don't understand the willingness to subjugate yourself before powerful corporations
that is because you have confused my position. Allow me to restate it. I am not opposed to Government.. I am opposed to the type of government we have, I believe the constitution did not do enough to limit government.
Government should only be empowered to protect the individual rights. Specifically negative individual rights. Not "Human rights" which are often defined to include positive rights, things like Housing, Health Care, and all manner of other things the government must provide..
Government should not be the parent, the nanny, or the sovereign over the people. The type of government found in most of the "First World" is a complete inversion of what government should be, subservient to the people, not sovereign over them
Read The Law by Frederic Bastiat to glean an understanding of where I believe government regulations, and law should be at and how it should be limited
These conversations should be about the end results and not just blindly accepting a culture of overreacting to every sort of risk.
Forcing companies to middleman sales at gun point isn't any better of a solution either, nor is it even probable, which is really the only other economic model (besides some true-scotsman bitcoin solution).
Trying to work with the system is better than abandoning it for some pipedream or throwing up our hands like there's no solution.
The problem is these companies have accumulated so much power, they can push anything they want on you. They can reach into your device, scan you files, canxell your transaction, etc. and there is fuck all you cam do about it.
Anyhow free-market is a meaningless label akin to socialism.
People misuse it so much that it lost any meaning.
Free-market means legislative anarchy of anything to do with markets. The moment the is a mandate ie corn subsidies, banned substances its no longer free by the definition.
But are you willing to argue the same for every minor group of content/business that gets selected out but the same economic model ?
We'll be pushing en masse against banning porn. Will we also be doing the same for every single category of legit business that credit card companies won't touch for any reason they feel like ?
That seems highly unrealistic to me, and we're basically saying to minority groups that the day Mastercard doesn't want them as customers they're done and done.
This is about liability and regulation. The processors are scared to process these transactions. It's not that they don't want to.
How does one go about proving the intent of a company? That concept is irrelevant
On the one hand I don't think the government should be able to tell you what you can and can't do with your body. If you want to sell your body, you should be able to.
But on the other hand, if you legalise it then you open the door to people being exploited, and I'm aware that people are exploited now in prostitution, obviously, but I feel if it's legal it might be harder to punish those that do.
So maybe on balance it's better for it to be illegal if it protects at least some people.
Or it could be easier because it becomes regulated and controlled?
People are going to do what they want to do. When you ban something that's the end of your regulation on it. So it goes underground and becomes less safe for everybody that's involved with it.
When you legalize it you can be more nuanced with the regulation, ultimately making it safer and having better outcomes for a huge majority of the people involved. You won't get 100% but it's certainly better than the 0% you're getting with a ban.
Of course the more you over-regulate and create effective bans the lower that % of people following your regulations is going to be and you're back to square one. Take a look at the history of abortions through being banned, coming into legality, and then back into over-regulation/effective ban in some places. Rate of abortions doesn't go down meaningfully when they're explicitly or implicitly illegal but rate of complications from abortions goes way up.
An anecdote for you: someone I know was instrumental in getting the "condoms in porn" law architected in LA county. The goal was to normalize condom use in the face of multiple STD epidemics including HIV. On the surface this is great. But porn with condoms is insanely less popular than porn without condoms - effectively making this new law a ban on producing porn in LA county. So what happened? Productions either went half an hour down the road to the next county or they just stopped actually filing permits and went unregulated meaning no more enforcement of the regimen of testing etc that porn actors were previously required to adhere to, leading to less safe outcomes for the folks involved and no meaningful increase in the amount of porn featuring condom use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_law#/media/File:P...
As I understand it, independent providers doing 100% legal work in their countries live in terror of their payments being cut off due to the factors mentioned above.
Where is the CoinBase of legal erotica?
I still agree that no chargebacks is an issue though.
Lets be real, if PH had a way to take monies without having to clean up to save face for the card issuers, it would still be business as usual.
It might be a better idea to require all participants in videos to have their OF account linked and tagged in the video.
This is not as simple as “follow the law”. OnlyFans already appears to require sufficient identification that at least for account owners they pass the USC2257 bar, so content featuring just the account holder should completely pass legal scrutiny in the USA.
Yet they still have this pressure from MasterCard and the discussion isn’t about type of adult content (performers other than the account holder) it’s about all adult content. This is someone who saw the successful pressure tactics work on PornHub and wants to go further.
It’s also important to remember that MasterCard and Visa don’t directly offer services to anyone but banks/payment processors, so while there are “high risk” payment processors such as CCBill, etc, MasterCard as network operators are saying “for these specific people… no”.
Maybe it's because they're not trying to make money off of it? I don't think they run ads on NSFW subreddits.
I wonder if there's a market for something like how strip clubs operate -- where the artist pays OnlyFans to stream there, and then the artist collects their income some other way (e.g. Patreon, or just direct cash equivalents). That could in theory keep OnlyFans good with their payment processors, while still keeping this revenue stream at least somewhat open.
I suspect they're working in the same direction, no? For example a few months back they removed NSFW from /r/all. They didn't just make it user-config'd SFW by default, to my knowledge you cannot browse NSFW content on /r/all. So they sort of ghosted that entire genre on their site.
Maybe they'll stop there?
They removed political spam and porn, but also lots of subreddits opt out to be shown there (e.g. sports subreddits).
As much as I hated the political spam from various TD clones, it is sad that there is no way to see "real" r/all and perhaps one that allows to remove porn and politics.
The web is far more interesting to me when not curated for what something thinks i want.
All reddit NSFW content has been removed from /r/popular and /r/all about two months ago.
I think they're getting ready for an IPO.
All that porn probably won't be there anymore in a few years.
Bingo. Back in the days one of the most popular subreddit was /r/jailbait (I won't explain what that is here, you can search for it in DuckDuckGo in private mode). Back in the days free speech was huge on Reddit and the admins did quite the mental gymnastics to appease the concerns of the community over free speech. Of course this was done just around the time they got investor money.
Not that I mourn the loss of this kind of content but it really makes you think how low free speech have fallen in terms of priorities going from "we won't even ban jailbait" to "let's ban distasteful subs" and being more prude than my religious grandma in certain aspects. Now it's nearly impossible to post a link in the default subs and nearly all the top comments are obviously bought accounts.
Maybe by accelerating adoption and normalization of cryptocurrency.
OF would likely not run into this because all of its content creators are verified and can only post videos of themselves or videos they have the rights to; it's not a free-for-all upload fest like PH used to be.
According to the article, they value themselves over 1 billion. That's not a small company in my books.
The fact is, MindGeek, who operates PH and the others, is the reason all the corporate porn studios stopped making profits. When was the last time you saw a full length > 90 minutes porn movie produced after ~2010? This used to be a huge industry just as big than Hollywood.
A few days later low and behold the first thing MindGeek does is to stop people from downloading videos and only accept payments for studio made videos.
"Think of the children" is a meme at this point and should raise eyebrows whenever it is raised up as an argument.
* Money laundering by people making anonymous accounts with stolen credit cards and then selling them to people using crypto (so that they're not associated with the account).
* Customer's spouses/SO finding out about it and the customer claiming fraud to chargeback and cover it up.
* (More OF specific) Customers making a large payment for custom content and then filing a chargeback after they get it. This is more or less a problem with all digital goods, but probably more of a problem with custom content.
Most banks/payment processors don't want to touch this industry since it poisons their image to others in the network. For example, if Stripe started serving the industry and fraud went up, that ruins Stripe's image to all the banks they interconnect with. It's just segment that isn't worth serving at the expense of all your other markets.
Even if someone made a bespoke payment processor for the industry, banks would just stop working with them.
In reality, the fraud problem really needs to be dealt with first. If your "customers" are going to be bad actors then there's really nothing you can do on the payment side to solve that.
Chaturbate had this issue some years ago where entrepreneurial individuals would just go direct to the model for a cut.
You are, absolutely, a genius.
OTOH OnlyFans could have complied, and the requirements are not impossible, though harsh.
Also, there seriously needs to be a reckoning with the payment processor issue, somehow.
Visa & Mastercard are happy to ban an entire company from their platform (see PornHub).
This is exactly what Gfycat did. They took the same backend infrastructure, made it into a porn site (Redgifs), and moved all the porn gifs on Gfycat over to the new site.
I have a fair number† of friends and acquaintances who have OnlyFans. Some for side income, some for a substantial portion of their livelihood. And to see that get taken away because the payment processors want them to fall in line…I guess I’m on the crypto train now.
†Yes, I have a slightly strange life, I know.
- Sexcoin, launched in 2013 [https://sexcoin.info] [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/sexcoin/]
- Titcoin, TIT [https://titcoin.github.io] [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/titcoin/]
- Tittiecoin, launched in 2014: "TittieCoin Accelerates Your Digital Transformation", now Limitless VIP? [https://tittiecoin.com] [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/limitless-vip/]
- Spankchain, by Spanktoshi Nakabooty [https://spankchain.com/]
- Fapcoin [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/fapcoin/] defunct
- Pornrocket [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/pornrocket/]
- PornStar [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/pornstar/]
- Intimate [https://intimate.io/]
- Okoin [https://okoin.io/] defunct?
- Analcoin [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/analcoin/]
- VGINA [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/vgina/]
Has it been useful? I doubt it.
They could try to block that (they probably need to already), especially as the alternative seems to be to shut down now.
I hope that was a legal name change.
I wonder how we can be more open minded as a society while still keeping enough skepticism to not accept literal garbage.
Pick any "we should oppress this thing that other people want/like/are" and there are people who miraculously realize that actually, there's a reason people want/like/are that thing once it happens to them.
I think it starts from some combination of factors like fear of the unknown, superiority complexes, downright stupidity, etc., which are only un-blinded when it smacks you in the face.
What does this mean? Its an example of a business in addition to politicians, how is that the reverse?
I've experienced this first hand. I was a compulsive liar in primary school and one time I told my friends that I saw a webcomic that had this gimmick that every panel ended with the phrase <insert topic> is EVIL(BAD) ("Złe/zły/zła" in Polish).
Oddly specific, isn't it?
Well here it is in the flesh:
https://www.deviantart.com/oliko/art/Pablo-Webcomic-ep-221-1...
I'm not against the promises of crypto - but the tech so far has failed to deliver anything but a platform to streamline illegal activity, asset speculation bubbles and a whole bunch of wasted energy/hardware along with reliving the problems people had historically with bank fraud in free banking and the likes (banks printing their own notes without cover till you get a bank run - this is why central banks were invented ...)
Friction is a problem, but I don't see why sending Monero has to be any harder than with conventional payment methods. The hard part is overcoming the network effect of payment cards.
You don't have to sign up for an account or provide any personal info, just use your wallet to send certain tokens to an address, then you can use that wallet as a sign-in.
OnlyFans can then use Coinbase or an off-ramp to go from crypto to fiat.
It's a more seamless user experience and solves the payment processing issue.
In my opinion it's a matter of educating the masses to a very different method of paying for services and using services (both on the business and consumer side).
What are the guardrails to prevent bankrun like the wild west days of banking?
Do some googling before commenting please.
Much like tether, there is no proof that they have anywhere near the currency they claim and folks that operate in that market are the ones shouting the loudest about the apparent fraud occurring. I've yet to see tether or usdc provide proof otherwise, it always seems to be a "we wouldn't be this big if we didn't have what we say we have" - bernie madoff style. And to get in front of it, an attestation != audit.
There's been a lot of talks of regulating stablecoins to ensure backing, which I don't think is a terrible idea.
I'm a pretty techy guy but in this one sentence alone you said 5 things that I have no idea about nor even heard of ("USDC", "DAI", "sidechain", "Polygon", "Fantom").
The chance of the general population catching onto this stuff anytime soon is slim.
USDC and Dai are both US-dollar stable coins. They’re always worth 1 dollar each, they’re among the most trustworthy USD stablecoins, and they are perfect for storefronts. The problem is that Ethereum transaction (tx) fees are now around $15-$25 because the network is so popular. Everyone wants to use the highway but the highway is only so big. Ethereum 2.0 is supposed to increase the size of that highway by some order of magnitude to make each transaction cost cents to send but we won’t know until it happens in few years. But we need a solution now! — and not in a few years!
That’s where other less popular but still good enough networks [side chains] like Polygon, Stellar, Binance Smart Chain, Tron, and a few others come into play.
Side chain is a term for a non-Ethereum or non-Bitcoin blockchain. Think of it like getting off a tollroad and getting onto a less trafficked, cheaper, and possibly faster side road, with the risk of coming across some new undocumented potholes.
USDC (and probably Dai too) for example, can already run on the Binance(bsc20), Ethereum(ERC20), Polygon, Tron, Stellar, and a few other networks. This can be super confusing and shocking for users because if you send your BSC20 USDC to an ERC20 USDC address you usually lose it. It’s a good thing that many of these networks have different address formats and that helps considerably to have software preventing that goof but some networks like BSC20 and ERC20 share the same address format because ERC20 is a copy of BSC20. Very user unfriendly. Alright I know I might be loosing you here but the solution is next.
Now, here’s what I think a solution to this all is: Rename one existing Stablecoin on one of those networks and let’s call it something idealistic like Freecoin. For example, DAI on the Polygon network or something else. To make it simple, it’s only one coin on one cheap network that is anything but the Ethereum network and then boom, you’ve dropped your terminology down to just “Freecoin” and “where is an easy on-ramp to buy it?” It’s important that there is only 1 kind of Freecoin. Buy them on this Shopify website, these exchanges, or this DeFi exchange. Obviously you can allow people to pay with other cryptocurrencies but you can either give a 1%-2% discount for using a certain cryptocurrency or make the UI button for your cryptocurrency larger than the buttons for the other cryptocurrencies. Both are effective nudges.
If you have a product worth buying, people will beat a path to your doorstep.
And then you quickly realize how useless USDC/DAI is when you want to pay your rent, for milk, etc.
> OnlyFans can then use Coinbase or an off-ramp to go from crypto to fiat.
They can't because then KYC kicks in. This is exactly the problem with crypto at scale...you can't convert large scale amounts of crypto to fiat without someone noticing. Silkroad "worked" because there was no central authority taking money, just lots of a smaller drug dealers. Pablo Escobar wouldn't have been able to run his whole operation on crypto without getting seen.
> They can't because then KYC kicks in. This is exactly the problem with crypto at scale.
Isn't KYC only a problem for people trying to hide their income? Onlyfans (and other legit businesses) would not have this problem as they would not be trying to hide their earnings.
This is essentially how Coinbase is allowed to operate - it doesn't have whales on its platform, just millions of KYC'd minnows who are individually low risk.
Illegal activities are only a problem if law enforcement makes it their problem, I don't think there is a case where law enforcement went after the payment provider for facilitating transactions for illegal activities, it is website/marketplace responsibility usually
> Illegal activities are only a problem if law enforcement makes it their problem
And now this is where AML kicks in. Now you're dealing with banks and not credit card processors as the source of the issue. No US bank is going to work with a company who is converting money from crypto to fiat at the level of billions of dollars.
Exchanges are doing pretty well to convert USD to say BitCount, despite Bitcoin's unsavory reputation for illicit/ illegal transaction like ransomware payments that actually happen on the coin. Even single transactions in the millions barely register these days.
I am not sure porn as an industry earns in billions and even if it did the market is today large enough that it won't be sticking out all that much.
Monero is really the only thing that makes sense here.
Adoption is a thing and takes time. Crypto itself is also a technology still in its infancy with at least a decade+ of engineering remaining to begin to resemble something that everyday people can use, but it's already quite promising.
But yes, these are consenting adults (a fair number of them quite highly educated and absolutely aware of what they are doing) selling solo videos or videos with other consenting adults. It’s legal, it’s a huge business, and it’s dumb to push it further to the fringes.
And forgive me if this seems ranty, but it isn’t just payment processors, it seems to permeate so much that comes out of the USA. See the various App Store rules too.
And this isn’t about fraud rates. Because why are the fraud rates high? It’s because the sex whole industry is pushed to the fringes, and loaded with shame. “Oh that payment wasn’t me, my card must have been stolen”.
I feel pretty angry how much this puritanical nature in a foreign country affects the people I care about around me.
If you can let China censor your platforms, you can let Europeans have porn.
Ok, rant over. Please don’t downvote too heavily.
They're private companies, they have the freedom to do what they like, and "you" are free to start your own payment processor.
There was a story about an online dildo seller who couldn't sell specific colour of dildos because American Express didn't like them. I think it was lovehoney
What are those last 10% worth to you? Unless it's still the difference between personal financial independence and wage slavery for the majority owner, I can't see how that's the rational choice. That's why I'm concluding lack of imagination and borderline incompetency.
Of all companies that could adopt mass crypto this one would be somewhere at the bottom of the list imho.
The percentage of consumers with crypto is maybe 1%. The percentage with credit cards is maybe 90%. If OnlyFans moves to crypto, they cut their addressable market by 98%.
No you don't. There are many people who are become porn actors as a result of only fans. That is likely why this is happening.
I think a lot of people think the processors are doing this out of some moral high ground to try and kill off the pornography business, but that's not what's happening. It's all about risk and opportunity cost. I forget the exact numbers, but pornography and gambling are near the top of the list when you look at industries with the highest number of fraudulent transactions. When someone reports a transaction as fraudulent, the money to refund the customer comes out someone behind the scenes pocket and often that money gets tied up in limbo while everyone points fingers at everyone else. Dealing with fraudulent transactions is a massive headache that wastes a ton of time.
Most major processors just don't want to deal with the hassle and the ones who do charge extremely high fees to offset the extra risk. OF has probably been using a processor that doesn't allow for pornography this whole time, but the processor has been letting it slide. My guess would be the risk has finally grown too large and the processor is cracking down. Like I said, there are other processors out there who are happy to work with the porn industry for a much higher fee, but it seems like OF has decided for one reason or another that that isn't as lucrative as just banning explicit content all together.
What I am basing my statement off of is second hand knowledge from multiple people at one of the companies mentioned saying that the reason payment processors don't work with porn companies is because of fraud rates.
That's not definitive, but considering the person I was responding to gave us 0 reason to believe his statement is anything other than his opinion and his comment history shows a pattern asserting his opinion as fact. I'm going to assume he's talking out his ass and that I'm slightly more informed on this issue.
This is a widely given explanation so I would entirely expect you to have heard it repeatedly in that context.
It is far less clear to what degree this explanation is accurate. Yes fraud rates are higher but they could easily be covered by charging higher processing fees (something that is often done for other risks.) There is pretty good evidence that other factors than fraud risk are at least partially responsible.
If you have an issue with people aaserting opinions as fact, maybe you should be more careful as you what you state as fact from a position of claimed authority.
This is exactly what happens, there are several payment processors (probiller, ccbill, epoch …) focusing on high risk transactions like porn.
This is all well documented in mainstream media, I certainly shouldn’t need to provide any evidence to a purported industry insider.
From NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/10/business/visa-mastercard-...
> Mastercard and Visa said they had prohibited the use of their cards on the adult website Pornhub, after the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reported that the platform included videos of child abuse and rape
BTW it’s silly of you to try to pretend to be some sort of industry expert and then immediately admit that you have never worked with porn payment processing. Everyone knows that the fraud rates for porn are very high, that’s not new.
1. Addict puts $1000 into gambling site via their credit card
2. Addict loses $1000 in the next few minutes at gambling site
3. Addict realizing they can't afford it files a charge-back
4. Addict repeats cycle anyway
OF has been increasingly making use of step-up authentication to avoid disputes, which is the way the non-US payments industry is heading. My guess would be that if disputes are in fact the reason, it’ll be because the step-up authentication isn’t available or working for some significant slice of the market.
That said, I don’t think that’s the reason. Switching off porn altogether means the vast majority(citation needed) of OF’s content will be gone, which means this has to be a life-or-death move. MC has been placing legality/consent/age restrictions on adult content, including real-time monitoring of content / chat [0]. My guess is that this is onerous enough that it breaks OF’s business model.
[0] https://www.webshield.com/post/mastercard-introduces-revised...
Also stripe identity really works for US users the most , with a global audience like OnlyFans that could be limiting as well
Yea I'm not sure how you validate everyone in the video has a verified identity and age... Perhaps machine learning could automate some of this. Stripe has selfie validation... so if you could do something like that on the video where faces in the video are compared to the identities provided... If there isn't a match then the video is flagged for review.
I think at the company I worked at most of what is in there around record keeping wouldn't have been a problem because there were laws that required the company to do that already.
The "pre-screening requirement" could be problematic though.
> All uploaded content must be reviewed prior to publication to ensure that it is not illegal and does not otherwise violate Mastercard’s standards
That one seems crazy. I have no idea how much content they get uploaded daily, but I would guess it's a massive amount. If they needed a human to view 100% of the uploaded content before it's allowed to be published... I just don't see how they could do that profitably.
I think the hard part is the hand-wavy stuff you’re supposed to be looking for. How are you supposed to know whether some unusual sexual act violates their standards? Or whether gay porn is legal in all applicable jurisdictions for instance?
The circumvention you mention is incidental, not primary. "Something better" was the, admittedly lofty, goal. And if not purely "something better" then at least "an alternative".
For big companies that have to respect laws anyway, yes, but it still brings lots of opportunities for regular people and small organizations that can fly under the government's radar.
They are in business and need to adapt. If they can’t hack it take my route: employment in a demand industry.
It bothers me that they have the power to shut businesses based on what appears to be their own subjective moral code. If a website is shutdown for any reason it should be due them breaking some law, not the payment processors feelings.
Regulation should passed to stop this from happening. While a lot of people may agree with their actions so far, it shouldn't be their decision to do this.
So, they are trying to get inclusive by excluding most of their community...
I understand it is bullshit and the only reason they do it is because porn is a difficult investment, with a lot of credit card fraud and limited opportunities for partnership. But still, OnlyFans made a name for itself with porn, and even managed the impressive feat of staying mostly clean regarding abuse and copyright infringement.
It is a difficult niche to fit in, but by abandoning it, they will compete with everyone else, including Google, Facebook, etc... and I don't think they will stand a chance. It is like, say, a shop that sells craft beer next to Walmart. Craft beer suppliers may be unreliable, have limited stock, with wild variation in quality, etc... it is much easier to deal with large industrial breweries, but if you stop selling craft beer because it is too hard, people will not buy your new, "guaranteed profit" industrial beer, they will go to Walmart, because Walmart if bigger and can negotiate lower prices, and people can get their beers with their groceries. The only reason the craft beer shop can make money is because they do the kind of thing Walmart refuses to do.
Now their in this weird uncanny valley of "adult content" combined with "no adult content". Seems hard to shake that image.
Lol. Watching a musician on OF and your friend looks over your shoulder.
It's going to be similar if people link to OnlyFans instead of Patreon (or Locals).
If someone linked me their OnlyFans, I would assume it’s porn.
How do they seriously expect people to use it when the brand is porn?
https://onlyfans.com/reallinustechtips
Ended up being one of the top accounts on the platform for a while.
While we allow nudity and for creators to push the boundaries of art, we also have guidelines against funding pornography on patreon. In our community guidelines: We define pornographic material as real people engaging in sexual acts such as masturbation or sexual intercourse on camera.
Edit: an 18+ interstitial would just be one that asks if the person is 18+
Same as Twitter. It's awash in porn but you wouldn't really know it if you stuck to the default trends and searches.
> Creators will still be allowed to post nude photos and videos, provided they’re consistent with OnlyFans’ policy, the company said Thursday.
So I am guessing the distinction is nudes vs sex acts?
Their credibility is gone.
He puts the sketch in sketchy (porn click farms in the 90's, sued by Amazon and Microsoft working together for spamming emails by the millions in the early 2000's).
Even dead ones get it better. I took one look at it recently and saw lil peep on there. My first thought was wow they're really putting a dead rapper's meat out there like that? But nah, it's like unreleased music videos and shit. Gotta wonder who is milking that.
> That popularity also brought with it additional scrutiny, and OnlyFans is positioning itself more as a forum for musicians, fitness instructors and chefs than sex workers. While many of its most-popular creators post videos of themselves engaging in sexual behavior, several mainstream celebrities like Bella Thorne, Cardi B and Tyga have also set up accounts.
Not sure about the other celebs.
>Not quite accurate. Bella Thorne joined Onlyfans and promised "no clothes naked" content in exchange for her $200 subscription fee. She made millions of dollars but then only sent clothed and obscured pictures to her subscribers. After thousands of people demanded refunds, Onlyfans changed their policies to heavily limit how much subscribers could be charged for content, how much they could pay, and increased the creator payout wait time from one week to three weeks. This heavily damaged the incomes of thousands of people overnight.
I get that it's a de facto situation for some, but let's not drop the onus on "morality police", payment processors, and OnlyFans for a massive societal failure to help vulnerable people. You could take that argument as far as you want (prostitution, drug sales, etc). There is some level of dignity that everyone's entitled to. If someone does OF by choice because they love it, good for them. If someone is compelled to in order to feed their kids or leave an abusive partner, then we should all be ashamed of that.
People are making huge bank with content you could post on Instagram without fear of being banned.
You're right, we should tell them to wait until society is fixed.
I totally get their mindset. If it wasn’t for my own residual sexual conservatism, I’d much rather be an OnlyFans sex worker than some underpaid wage slave.
And let's be frank here. OF is probably a viable financial opportunity - on average - for a small number of more attractive that normal people, and it's probably weighted towards younger women. I'd love to have hard data to present to you, but I can't find it.
I have literally zero problem with people who want to use OF to support themselves. However, let's agree 1) that some people for whom it would be a viable financial option find it objectionable and 2) it's a less viable financial option for some, even if they don't find it objectionable.
I think that groups 1 & 2 in there should still be able to work a 40 hour job and pay for food and rent, and still be able to save something to retire if they want to. And they probably should fear starving or dying of exposure even if they don't have a job.
Call it unrealistic, but I prefer to fix that problem, too.
But why? Because their parents told them so?
Is there some fundamental reason to see this differently? Some cultures accept murder too, should we accept that some people think of it differently? I say fuck those people.
Mostly for people’s in-groups. The care goes down as in-group association goes down.
—-
America, Europe/NATO, and other allied countries have unnecessary “wars” and conflicts and use things like drones to murder people. Drones killing people randomly isn’t war a lot of the time.
Murder definition is silly. Says “unlawful” killing of someone. Who determines what’s lawful when the countries included at the beginning do stuff overseas? Obviously some will consider all the killing done as murder.
It’s not hard to say we (as in the west) murdered Yemenese, Afghans/Pakistanis (the drones attacking people), Palestinians, and more in recent years. Then we have the big name ones like murdering the Iranian general a year ago.
via equity, alliance, and diplomatic and financial support. Not directly, but murder charges in most countries can be charged to people who aren’t directly doing the killing too
The only real reason to single out OF (an objectively superior option to a median job, if you can get it) is precisely the puritanical morality.
> Religious morality is the only reason a much more safe, comfortable and lucrative option like OnlyFans is banned.
I do not think this is right either. Take away all the religious baggage and still parents will try to keep their daughters from doing porn. Change our neurobiology so we don't act that way and, well you have a different species.
You believe the long lasting consequences of doing porn and being a waitress are exactly the same? You've never been involved or talked to a porn performer. Suicide rates for the latter don't lie.
That said suicide rates at my engineering school were high enough that the administration had to close roof accesses :)
The fact that you can (at least in theory) quit, recover and find a better job, or get promoted. Unlike humiliating videos of yourself being on the internet forever.
Arguably one can claim that marrying upwards isn’t always bad and quite often they are loved and cared for but in the end this is nothing new.
with all due respect, most people are 'forced' into some sort of labor to get housing or escape abusive partners. It's the way society is built. If it's sex work or not, that's a different story but not by much. Work is work.
I absolutely agree. A society where people have to resort to prostitution in order to keep a roof on their heads FAILED, politically, morally and culturally. In fact, that's exactly how things go in third world countries...
I know there are 'shelters' in various cities (and the one in my town has been over 110% capacity for like 20 years (every time I've checked) afaik) - but I mean they can move into a place and start working a minimum wage job and not worry about paying the bills for the roof / utilities / child car / rice and beans?
I'd love to know about such places, I don't think this is possible in the US, and never heard of such options elsewhere, but could exist.
From the Taliban to Democrats to Republicans to Socialists to Libertarians. (except the aside about "If someone does OF by choice because they love it, good for them")
So I don't see the relevance.
OP offers a solution to keep the current maxima for these girls. Fight for their well being and ask OF and payment processors to let them stay.
The best actionable plan from your comment I can see is, lets dump these girls in the worst of it so it shames people into improving society.
I was just pointing out that technology's ability to reduce scarcity keeps increasing--so as time goes on, our obsession with scarcity as a motivator is increasingly embarrassing.
Well, it's still more dignified than telemarketing - the worker, the viewers and the platform all benefit from the transaction, unlike telemarketing call centres, where the worker is paid to screw over people at scale. If you want an indictment of a society, I'd first focus on people being forced into jobs that involve hurting other people.
OnlyFans is only a lucrative option for a small group of people - young attractive women. How is it that every other segment of the population can keep out of abusive relationships and beneath a roof (to the extent they can) without the benefit of OnlyFans?
Second, OnlyFans is an abusive relationship. It's using women during the few years they are attractive enough to exploit the instincts of men. The instant their looks wear off, they're out.
Note that OnlyFans doesn't kick out the older people, they just get less popular.
https://twitter.com/danprimack/status/1428420774449266691?s=...
What if they decide people can no longer buy dildos or lube or condoms or guns or alcohol or meat on Fridays?
There’s no law with respect to “payment neutrality”??
More info is needed to conclude, but it wouldn't surprise me if their upstream providers made demands.
These aren’t explicitly linked in the story but it would make sense IMO
Payment processors provide a utility. They should have the right not to process illegal transactions and illegal activities. But as long as the activity is legal, it shouldn't be up to them to police morality.
They should be treated like utilities. If we go down this path, the city's water and electric utilities can decide to shut down the new hooters, because it is obscene and against god (according to conservaties), or it uses women and is an oppressor (according to some liberals).
Utilities shouldn't be involved in morality policing.
These do not have the high rates of chargeback that adult content does.
However, unless something has changed lately, for decades the issue with adult content + online payment processors is not morality related. It's because of the high fraud/chargeback rates associated with online porn transactions.
Unless it's SESTA/FOSTA related, but I don't think anything's changed on that front for a while.
It seems to absurd to allow companies with an oligopoly on most of the transfer of those notes to pick and choose what sectors are appropriate for citizens to interact with financially.
https://www.quora.com/On-every-US-dollar-bill-the-message-Th...
My point was that you can spend your cash wherever you want, in whatever way the seller will accept.
My point was not that sellers ought to be forced to accept bags of pennies.
Also, that quote on the dollar has nothing to do with your argument. You seem to be projecting a layperson’s interpretation of those words instead of the relevant jurisprudence.
This is an important distinction. Credit card payments are not notes. They are not cash. So these companies have very little to do with the transfer of cash.
The point of "legal tender" is that if you try to pay off a debt in cash, they can't claim you haven't paid it and take you to court. If you try to pay for your meal in a restaurant with cash and they refuse, you can just walk out and they wouldn't have a legal case (probably. in theory. not legal advice).
What's tricky is this has to be a debt, as in past tense. If you try to buy groceries with cash and they refuse, you can walk out but you can't the groceries with you.
Participation in the cash market is mandatory on anyone who is owed money. Everything else on top (credit cards, checks) is essentially voluntary. Merchants can take it or leave it, the processors can come or go.
If you want to make an argument about the outsized effect that Visa has on the US monetary system, that's totally legitimate. It just has little to do with the concept of "legal tender".
If you try to pay a $10K debt in cash, it will likely be seized for no reason whatsoever, on suspicion of criminal activity.
And yes Civil Asset Forfeiture is pure evil, I agree.
I think they would have a case, because you still owe them a debt. But then after you lose the case you can pay in cash. Just how I understand it, could be wrong. Doesn't change your point though.
The pertinent portion of law that applies to your question is the Coinage Act of 1965, specifically Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled "Legal tender," which states: "United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues."
This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services.
~
The important distinction is payment for goods or services vs payment for a debt. Dine-in restaurants work on debt (you eat the food then pay for it), but grocery stores work on payment for goods (you get the food and pay for it in one transaction).
If I owe you $5, you have to accept my $5 bill as legal tender
But if I want to buy something from your store that doesn't mean you have to accept my $5 bill - that's not a debt
The electrical company is mandated to provide power to Onlyfans' datacenters, so long as they are paying for the service.
Also there's basically only four payment processors: Visa, Mastercard, Discover and Amex. None of them specialize in adult business. There are downstream processors along the lines of PayPal and Stripe, and some of them specialize in adult business, but they're entirely beholden to the big four.
General public agrees that explicit material is bad.
Right now we have in Poland shops closed each Sunday - it is annoying for me. Selling alcohol in Norway is heavily restricted and I see more and more restrictions on alcohol sales in Poland.
Explicit material is tied a lot to money laundering, there is also a lot of scams tied to it and lots of stolen cards are used to pay for explicit material. It is huge cost for payment providers, all the laws for anti-laundering trump any "payment neutrality".
If you want to see naked ladies go to "a place" and risk on your own, pay with cash.
Just like Comcast can't tell me I can't download porn, Visa shouldn't be able to tell me I can't buy it, either.
So you are going to run naked in the city center because public opinion about this does not match what you want.
Laws, democratic or otherwise, can indeed constrain what payment providers will allow themselves to be used for.
Public opinion short of law should not be able to add further constraints.
IMO the question of “what should Visa and MasterCard be allowed to restrict?” is the same category of question as “what category of app should Apple and Google be allowed to restrict?”
Isn't reputational feedback one of the key enablers of the free market? Unless you want to move to a system that is fully centrally planned and noncompetitive, you'll have reputational differences (read: public opinion) affecting the success of a firm. To the extent that reputation affects a firm's success, the firm will make decisions (including "do we carry this unpopular thing") based on its reputation.
Shall we require all firms to do business with all potential partners, regardless of reputational repercussions, or if the partner has an established history of abuse (say, a contractor who repeatedly under-delivers on contracts)?
I don’t think that’s true when asked anonymously.
Doing so means that a third party is involved in every transaction you make, and that someone else will always have veto power over your commercial transactions.
Having an electronic alternative to cash would be amazing, but so far there’s nothing close to it with respect to privacy and freedom.
Then PayPal wanted to go big, other virtual currencies were caught in fraud scandals of their own (not their users'), people just lost trust and interest when card processing became more common.
Some are still around but sellers can't be arsed to use them. Maybe they will, once again.
2. Freedom of speech includes choosing who I work with
3. It makes sense to have certain restrictions on freedom of speech, especially as it relates to clearly harmful discrimination (i.e. racial discrimination, gender discrimination)
4. It does not make sense to restrict freedom of speech in the case of pornography, specifically, whether a company can choose to work with pornographers or not
Unless Onlyfans actually has some decent traction outside sexual stuff. I find that hard to believe. If photos are still allowed, that’s something. But still.
Maybe I’m completely misinformed though!
Reminder that payment processor pressure is what has caused a lot of (legal) art to be pushed off of Patreon[0].
0: https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbqwwj/patreon-suspension-of... (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17432801 )
Bans some forms of anime art: https://www.dailydot.com/irl/patreon-anime-porn-ban/
Banning for activity/art outside of art hosted on Patreon: https://www.dailydot.com/irl/patreon-gay-hypnosis-artists/
(articles may contain nsfw imagery)
But that pretext for excluding sex workers from banking and payment processing really falls apart with OnlyFans. These are small, repeated, digital payments that are highly traceable because they're coming from and going to known people. And the existence of the underlying work product is easily verifiable: are the accounts actively posting content or not?
If human trafficking were the actual risk banks were trying to mitigate here then it would be difficult for any business sector that relies on migrant workers to obtain banking services but I've never heard of an almond grower having trouble opening a bank account.
Isn't this site just a bunch of naked girls twerking in front of webcam?
That would mean you just have to confirm performer, photo ID and bank account all match. And the cost of any manual checks can be funded by your margin on the viewers' payments.
For a long time, so they somehow dealt with all the supposed fraud.
Then they grew large enough to tell digital product sellers to fuck off and stepped hard on the medication sellers (pretty sure they banned anything that's more than a supplement).
PayPal did the same, or maybe it was PayPal leading that, they were the same company for a long time.
For decades, the specific issue was with the huge chargeback/fraud rates associated with online porn.
- People paying for porn with stolen cards
- Or, more frequently, people disputing the charges when their wives see the credit card statements and get mad, so they claim the card was stolen etc.
The payment processors take this attitude because that way they can tell congress they are “doing something about vice”, and in exchange not be subject to undesired regulations.
I suspect this kind of soft pressure is being applied to Apple in the background. Everyone remembers what happened to Joe Nacchio, and resisting such pressure is harder now than it was over the last four years.
Very much so. Adult businesses have extremely high rates of friendly fraud, which is worsened by the facts that 1) they don't deliver a physical product, so it's difficult for the merchant to prove that a charge was legit, and 2) some customers will charge back purchases which they regret making, or which a partner disapproves of. ("No, honey, I definitely didn't sign up for that porn site, I'll call the bank right away.")
> Pretty sure credit card companies won't let you "chargeback" stripe clubs as fraud even if it wasn't you.
I'm pretty sure they will.
Remember in 2012 the whole hubbub of "pre-checked cross-sales?"
The act of hiding the checkbox below the fold of the screen and make the visitor think there's nothing more below so they won't uncheck the box that says "Yeah, charge me $1 for this 3 day trial, but also sign me up for all these other programs that will bang my card for $60-120/each"
You'd think you were getting a 3 day trial for a buck but instead you'd be getting a $300-1000 charge on your card.
The same technique, though not to such an extreme degree, was used to make candidate loans in the last US election.
I think it led the porn processors like ccbill to become more diligent about agreements / checking on customers doing such things and making sure they were not hidden if employed.
Sadly it's crap like that that is cited in making it harder / more expensive for small operators to do business, yet from what I gather it's harder to unsubscribe from the NY times than it is multiple porn sites these days.
I wish the exorbitant fees they charge due to higher chargebacks like that were only charged to people who engage in such things - it sucks that people who do a fair above board business are charged extra - it's just an excuse to soak others at this point.
Of course you can. If your wallet was stolen and the perp went to the champagne room at a strip club, you would not be liable for it. The strip club knows that as well so the onus is on them to actually check that the ID matches the person and the card.
I guess you could buy a chain of Bureau de Change outlets and have them convert cash to bitcoin, monero etc. I'm surprised this isn't already happening to be honest - they have all the infrastructure and licenses already.
Apple Pay is widely accepted because of three things, ordered here from least to most important: Apple applying pressure on the processors to accept it, paying them when necessary, and the fact that giant card data breaches like Target and Home Depot meant that the whole market needed to move away from magstripe anyway. People taking grass roots action was not a part of the change in any meaningful way (at least partly because it never happened).
There's this very popular cryptocurrency story that individual people have power in this market. The problem with that narrative is that virtually nobody cares enough this issue because it's just not that important. Sorry.
I doubt ApplePay would support it.
Perhaps a membership service like Costco. Probably someone has tried it, like perhaps a casino chain.
However unless there exist payment rails outside Mastercard or Visa, no one is going to build ”Stripe.” The only way would be Stripe running on crypto, but then how people get crypto in the first place if not by a card?
EDIT: Crypto also lacks chargebacks (so called hard money).
It seems that was a big part of WireCard's business. Didn't turn out that well. (Though their vice business might've been one of the few parts that actually made some money...)
Well, not really. The whole point is that if you do that, the government will apply soft pressure on you, until you go out of businesses.
Its an end run around of the 1st amendment, basically. A senator doesn't have to make a law, targeting you specifically. They just have to threaten your bank, that they will be punished, sometime down the line, in an unrelated law, and then the bank will, shut you down.
Edit: update numbers to be correct
for example, I think a lot of people hear this and assume the fraud is like, caused by an OF model - not delivering what was promised for example..
However seeing your statement, I am thinking it's that much fraud because criminals are getting stolen card / Id details from the darker webs and they are using other people's cards for fun things - and OF is a popular place to blow other people's money.
Maybe it's a mix of both - but I would think it's more the other way.
I remember when there were big numbers of fraud pointed at adult sites back in the day - but the core reason was so many offered $1 trials, and it was a popular way to test if a card number you got was valid / not reported stolen yet - use a cheap porn site.
I saw a (possibly npr?) story a while back saying that many criminals are now using dominoe's pizza to test if (stolen ) cards are good, because it's cheap and they get a bonus free pizza for a friend.
So it's not the pizza place or the porn site that is really encouraging the fraud or creating it.. unless you get into the weeds of they accepted a card without the exact right address and so they are a target for card testers.. that's a different discussion and such.
Everyone paying attention. Most people have never heard of him, and don't know that the USG regularly exercises huge power against private enterprise in this way.
Which congresspeople were told that payment processors were "doing something about vice"? How long ago was this?
but they do work for most non-recurring type things akaik.
I have seen people have them fail - because they quickly try to use them, not knowing that many places require at a zip code to be entered that matches the card.. and if you have not logged into the pre-paid-card's portal and set a zip code.. well fail it will.
https://directpaynet.com/new-visa-rules-dating-adult-info-pr...
So I could see why issuing banks may not want to support adult content, but then there could be a porn friendly issuing bank that may charge higher fees or something.
The chargeback rate on online porn is huge. As a result, where a traditional payment processor may be 1.3–3.5% depending on the business and the assessed risk, for a high-risk business, the rate can be much much higher. While Onlyfans keeps 20%, I'm guessing that they'd be badly hurt if they had to give half that to their payment processor. I'm sure they've looked at their numbers and they find the non-porn providers are more profitable to them, especially if it means they can lower their processing fees. Booting the porn providers will likely also make it easier to recruit more non-porn providers.
But many comments here imply that chargeback is almost as easy as clicking a button or asking nicely. How's that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_in_Lending_Act
"I forgot to disable automatic billing" probably wouldn't be a valid chargeback, though.
You can log in to your credit card account, click on a transaction, and open a dispute. You have to choose a reason for the dispute. The reason has to be something like, "I was charged for a product, but never received the product."
This just starts the process. The end result may be a chargeback to the merchant.
If I have a legitimate charge on my debit/chequing account, I too don't know how to reverse it directly through bank.
But if I pay with visa or Mastercard (actual credit cards), I call the toll free number or go to website and start process and go through it.
Partially it's that highbibterest rates pay for policies and systems and options and insurance. Partially that credit card fraud is common so systems must be easy for consumer. E.g. I had my credit card used by somebody else probably 5 to 6 times over 15 years. They'd call me when they detect fraud,we'd go through list of transactions, and based on quick word over phone they'd cancel all transactions that weren't mine. It's a very different process than banking.
I can log into my banks website and, selecting any payment transaction within the chargeback period, initiate a chargeback claim by just clicking a few buttons.
Of course, if you keep on charging back, eventually your bank will give you a polite call to let you know that they're closing out your account. This provides the incentive to be relatively honest about charge backs in addition to the fact that a false charge back is a criminal offense (fraud).
Where's the rage against a 3rd party platform ripping off the users?
Naw, I think this site has lots of people personally having to pay that 30% cut, but when other people have to pay it they don't care because it's other people.
I highly doubt this. There’s like no way a site that’s known for porn makes more money on what Patreon does. 99.999% impossible.
> Booting the porn providers will likely also make it easier to recruit more non-porn providers.
Pornhub can allow regular content but nobody is going to ditch YouTube, especially PG content creators, because of the name association.
Or that no one would be able to properly use those payouts.
Unless people are getting paid directly in crypto, they are purchasing it from somewhere, and wherever that entry point is will have this problem.
While cryptos in of themselves are decentralized and inherently unregulatable, people forget that the interface with the real financial world is very much vulnerable.
You can’t buy it on Coinbase or many other exchanges, and the wallets are not as polished as the btc wallets I have used.
So if you’re trying to get your fans to pay you in XMR, you would be creating a lot of friction for them.
Maybe the state can find my addresses with a bit more effort than they can find my CC purchases but random people or friends and family not so much unless I want them to.
What I mean is if you ever send F&F money they'll see all your previous purchases too, and if OF is a well known wallet its easy for them to see that detail.
Your bank can't block shit and has to process whatever transaction you want short of the terrorist watchlist.
Is that true?
Yeah, I'm used to using that domestically and rarely for business. We usually use Giros[1] for business and now Swish for more personal stuff. I think most areas now have Klarna (even the US according to Wikipedia). I wonder how much they would interfere in things like this.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giro
Please cite a source(s) for your claim, re: "banks can't block shit"
Parent is making distinction between credit cards and banks.
I don't think this is true for things that are in a gray area - storing profits from cannabis where its legalized and purchasing cryptocurrency
https://decrypt.co/39226/banks-still-blocking-crypto-transac...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthoban/2020/08/18/the-cann...
(Although the cannabis one seems to have changed recently)
Try opening a bank account at BoA for your cannabis business.
But sounds like OnlyFans could have complied with verification requirements, like PornHub had done?
I think they should start taking Bitcoin or Monero. Fuck MasterCard and whoever dictates what they do. If you are going to be forced into bankruptcy, at least do it in style.
Or just buy a bank. Surely they could have raised the capital.
Here is opportunity #3928 for Stripe to step in and earn their valuation and flex their payment muscle and allow adult payments.
I would think the only reason is the chargeback/fraud rates are too high in this type of business, as well as not wanting to be involved in a business where there may be a high chance of illegal content.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-14/mastercar...
>The banks will now have to ensure that sellers require “clear, unambiguous and documented consent” in adult content, the payments network said in a blog post Wednesday. The firms will also be required to ensure websites document the age and verify the identity of anyone depicted in pictures and videos as well as those uploading the content.
>“The banks that connect merchants to our network will need to certify that the seller of adult content has effective controls in place to monitor, block and, where necessary, take down all illegal content,” John Verdeschi, Mastercard’s senior vice president of customer engagement and performance, said in the post.
Allowing merchants to sell pornography is probably not worth the hassle for the card networks.
"Extremely reasonable"
>The banks will now have to ensure that sellers require “clear, unambiguous and documented consent” in adult content, the payments network said in a blog post Wednesday. The firms will also be required to ensure websites document the age and verify the identity of anyone depicted in pictures and videos as well as those uploading the content.
>“The banks that connect merchants to our network will need to certify that the seller of adult content has effective controls in place to monitor, block and, where necessary, take down all illegal content,” John Verdeschi, Mastercard’s senior vice president of customer engagement and performance, said in the post.
The thing I don't understand is if those quoted terms above are the rules that onlyfans is falling foul of, then wouldn't it be easier to build a tracked system for documenting consent e.t.c. rather than banning things.
That would seem like a better strategy for OnlyFans since it seems like their entire business model will be in jeopardy without this.
I wonder if they want to do this, and then turn around and say "we've listened to the community and we're gonna integrate this consent system instead" so it won't be treated so negatively or something?
I assume we'll wake up a few years from now and say "oh, yeah, probably wasn't a good idea to let private companies get this powerful". Or maybe not.
"Why, honey! I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA why there is a charge for a Swedish Penis Pump on our Credit Card bill. An evil hacker must have gotten ahold of my card. I shall have the charges reversed at once!", etc.
Mastercard demands a lot of keyword blocks that are pretty definitely too obscure to be chargeback related.
CCbill itself couldn't exist if Visa and MasterCard didn't let it process payments for porn.
These rules are getting worse because MC's head has decided to give in to the scaremongering by far right religious group Exodus Cry.
If you can't absorb 0.5% in loss, then you shouldn't be in ecommerce. Same thing as being in bricks and mortar, if you can't absorb shoplifting you shouldn't be in business.
This whole cam-girls making a fortune this way seems somehow more dishonest than normal porn to me, maybe because it’s about these guys (who can never have relationships with these women) building a personal and intimate relationship as one of her “fans”. I almost see this as being like gambling where people need to acknowledge maybe how powerful sex is and being a technology that should be regulated similarly.
I wonder if nobody calls out this exploitation because society keeps suggesting that all men are privileged, which is definitely not true for at least 60% of the male population.
Anyway I’ll probably get downvoted for this but these double standards have been irritating me for a while :-)
Are they powerful though? Or rich even? They might have momentary reach like some celebrities and influencers but does that extend to effecting consumer behavior and would advertisers work with them?
There seem to be a lot of assumptions here that I don’t agree with. So perhaps this comment isn’t for me, in which case feel free to ignore the following.
People seem to add so many values into the mix when it comes to sex work. If these old lonely people paid carers to visit them at home, would that be somehow different? Are these old lonely people somehow exploited because there is sex involved? If they cannot make rational choices because sex is involved then I’d say that is the problem.
Also, where does being able to “have” someone figure into any of this? There is no ‘you must be at least this hot to enter’ scale, people get together for all kinds of reasons. Plus, “have” sounds a lot like possession of someone, which I think we all think is bad? Right?
I think there are a lot of values encoded in the above comment, but I also know it wasn’t intended negatively.
2. I think I’m suggesting some men (the most obsessive and biggest spenders?) would use onlyfans instead of having a relationship. I’m not saying it’s right that a proportion of men become obsessive but it happens right?
3. I’d say a lot of men don’t make rational choices about sex.
2 & 3. I agree that a lot of men don’t think rationally about sex, and I think that has various societal causes. But I also think that is the problem here, and that possible obsessive OF use is one of the more minor symptoms.
Really? I don't think so. My understanding is that sexual activity (or lack thereof) affects hormonal balance and that in turn affects mood. To make a very blunt example, if someone isn't getting any and the fake interaction provided by OF makes them feel better, do we really need to look for a societal explanation? If I give you a painful but harmless electric shock and you try desperately to get away, do I need to posit that it's because you've been culturally conditioned to be afraid of electric shocks?
The GP said "have relationships with these women", not "have these women".
On average I don't think it is particularly healthy to replace real social/ sexual relationships with parasocial ones and I think that is the primary use for these services. For the most part they lack real meaningful intimacy which is a significant benefit that real relationships provide. I don't think many who maintain healthy social and romantic relationships are the majority of users of the platform.
Male mental health is ignored a lot and it's sad.
Until it's dangerous. Some intervention between sad and shooter would serve society well.
https://www.engadget.com/2017-10-27-patreon-adult-content-cr...
Much of the pressure came from payment processing partners and banks, much like is described in this article.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbqwwj/patreon-suspension-of...
It seems like for any crowdsourced funding platform there is a volume cap for NSFW content imposed by the need of those platforms to seek wider audiences and funding sources.
Reddit seems to have resisted whatever calls it must be getting to eliminate porn. So far at least. It will ban or quarantine some heretical ideas, but porn is still there.
Worth noting this scenario is even less similar than as you wrote it.
Not only can’t you pay content creators on Reddit, but the awards, are you paying Reddit for hosting the creator.
Reddit gets money, creator gets a png. It’s a really bad deal, and I’m not sure what kind of lunatic buys Reddit awards.
Not entirely. They purged all NSFW subreddits from the r/all and r/popular meta subreddits. They also go on a purging binge whenever a remotely taboo subreddit makes the news.
But they also spent years promoting racism, hate, dangerous conspiracy theories, a neo-nazi rally that resulted in murder, etc. It's hard to look at all of that and think it was just "kind of taboo".
Over time, the signal to noise was low. But occasionally there was a good point or funny meme.
I can't say for sure I saw any racism worse than anywhere else. I really don't like when people use whatever this is ((( ))) to talk about Jews, saw that a couple times on t_d, but I've definitely also seen it on /r/politics /r/atheism etc
It was actually for "violence against police". Hillary Clinton's MediaMatters group found a few comments and made an article on it, this was pushed as far as possible, presenting Reddit with enough cause to "quarantine" them.
The specific anti-police messages were about a congressional walkout in Oregon, and threats to use the police to bring them back for a quorum. A rep replied "Send bachelors". This was the cause and theme of the comments MediaMatters focused on. None were made by mods, their own posts, or even upvoted (under 20 or so). Reddit used this to say the mods there were not removing extremist content, eventually forcing the sub allow only mods "approved" by Reddit Inc. They shuttered the sub before allowing this to happen.
The big joke to is that these anti-police messages were before the summer when it was non-stop ACAB, Kill The Police, etc, in practically every other sub-reddit as part of the riots and protests. Standards applied evenly, Reddit would be left with a knitting and a windsurfing section.
Reddit wanted the_donald gone, end of story. MediaMatters helped, and the reason was surface level deep, but they didn't need some iron clad reason. Interestingly, Reddit removed the "violence against police" reasoning, and replaced it with a more generic cause, as the hypocrisy was warming up.
I researched this shortly after it happened.
I never saw that back then, that subs would ban you for that, but recently I posted a negative comment to No New Normal. I was instantly banned from almost every popular reddit sub.
A couple of them sent me a think saying they might unban me if I promised never to post there again. It wasn't a supportive comment, I was mocking one of them. How insane is it that the people that admin and mod Reddit are so fragile that they literally ban anyone who talks to people they don't like?
This can't continue. I suppose I appreciate their acceleration.
For starters, the comments got considerably more explicit than "Send Bachelors". I'm unfamiliar with this specific event, but researching it, I see:
“none of this gets fixed without people picking up rifles” and “[I have] no problems shooting a cop trying to strip rights from Citizens.”
Perhaps these are what you meant by the "theme", but those seem considerably more explicit, especially for a subreddit already linked to an event that resulted in someone being murdered.
>Reddit wanted the_donald gone
Then why didn't they get rid of them until a year later? The event you're referencing seems to be part of the quarantine, not part of the banning. The banning took place after the mods of the subreddit tried to evade the quarantine by moving to another sub and continued to support breaking Reddit rules.
Except that what actually happened was they had moved off Reddit, locked the sub down as an archive, and then finally banned when they refused to accept the Reddit provided mods.
I just checked, and it looks like the website they moved to lasted only months, before the operator shut it down over concerns about racism, concerns from their host, and FBI inquiries. Painting it like it was just media matters picking up on one thing is far from the whole story. The place was septic.
It just seems that Reddit has a policy of cutting subreddits loose once they get mainstream media attention, in order to avoid overly negative press. It happened to T_D, WatchPeopleDie and quite a few other Subreddits; basically all bans came after they went into the spotlight despite existing (in some case, peacefully) for years. To me it seems that Reddit is totally fine with hosting controversial opinions as long as it doesn't generate press.
All of the porn subreddits that still exist banned domains that serve "unverified" content. The amateur porn scene has been leveled, most of which was legitimate content. Also a lot less user submitted content simply because the hassle of verification and also you have to formally identify yourself at one point. Claims of Reddit hosting illegal content is hugely overblown.
This is why many people who post fetish-y art (even stuff like mind-control kink) moved from Patreon to SubscribeStar. Even erotic roleplay site F-List moved to SubscribeStar.
That sounds outrageous. Is there a link to more info about this policy?
https://heavy.com/news/2018/12/patreon-sargon-of-akkad-jorda...
>Because you are raising funds on Patreon, we may be held accountable for what you do with those funds, so we may also look at what you do with your membership off our platform. As a result when we talk about “On Patreon,” it means the creations you are funding on and through Patreon. When reviewing a page, we look at how creations are shared, where the page is linked to and where the traffic comes from. No matter what happens, we always give creators the opportunity to appeal a decision by contacting us and sending any relevant information they believe was not considered. We may not change our minds, but we will always listen.
From: https://www.patreon.com/en-GB/policy/guidelines
This means that you only need to link to your Patreon, not even link from your Patreon for them to find you objectionabe.
About NSFW creators leaving the platform because of tighter content restrictions on fiction:
https://www.dailydot.com/irl/patreon-hypnosis-porn-ban-sexua...
https://thenextweb.com/news/patreon-continues-to-crack-down-...
Further, Patreon has communicated to artists that regardless of the age of a fictional character, certain art elements common to anime/manga style drawing (even of adults - "big head, big eyes, short height") may be considered as marking the artwork as a child - and even adding adult-like proportions such as large breasts may not be sufficient to evade Patreon's ban: https://twitter.com/Waero_Re/status/1238408555507539968
Another artist in the thread noted that Patreon decided their content was "violent" because their drawings featured people not smiling during orgasm.
Wow.
That is not good. Any hypothetical employer could justify any hypothetical abuse using that rationale.
> The company handled more than $2 billion in sales last year, and is on pace to more than double that this year. It keeps 20% of that figure.
So they're killing the golden goose to placate outside money when they already are making ~800M a year?
Something here doesn't really add up but I don't know enough about this field to see what I'm missing.
Based on the tweet, I would presume their ability accept payment via the established payment networks is being threatened.
When Google, Apple, Amazon, et al. simultaneously took actions that resulted in the shutdown of Gab it seemed a lot of people supported it.
Now they could very well be completely disjoint groups, but I’d be interested if anyone who opposes the payment processors pressuring OnlyFans but supported the actions taken against Gab could explain how they reconcile the two positions. In both cases we have companies with dominant positions in the market denying or threatening to deny crucial services to another company.
This feels akin to saying something like, "Oh, you were onboard when the government criminalized murder, how do you feel now that they're criminalizing weed?!"
So is every other social media site
The more that you let large and powerful organizations, get away with targeting groups that you don't like, the more likely that those powerful organizations are going to be able to turn the guns on you, or your favorite cause, when public opinion doesn't go your way.
Neutral platforms, that don't discrimination, protects your enemies as well as your self. The slippery slope is real.
The people who oppose neutral platforms have made their bed. Now we'll see if they change their mind once they have to lay in it.
Most people don't really want neutral platforms. If you go to a restaurant and another customer is violently drunk, yelling, and really just ruining the night for everyone, we hope they get kicked out so that we can appreciate the restaurant. The person saying, "Yeah but next they're gonna come for [insert whatever thing that shouldn't result in getting kicked out]" could be right and the restaurant may cross what you think the line should be, but that doesn't mean that the restaurant was wrong to kick out the violently drunk person.
Similarly, I've seen dang around on HackerNews giving folks warning about their comments not really being a great fit, because they're low-effort, out of place, etc. In general, it keeps the quality of discussion here /way/ better than you'd see on Reddit. I like that they work to keep it that way... but it could be a slippery slope in the same way.
Ok, then you if complain when stuff like this happens, then I am going to tell you "I told you so", and point out how stuff like this was a pretty inevitable result of this thinking.
You just have to sit back and say "Welp, this was the risk that I took, when I refused to support neutral platforms, so I guess I have to just suck it up, because nobody is going to defend me."
If you don't like this, then it is time for you to start supporting neutral platforms.
Pick one. Either support neutral platforms, or accept that I am going to make fun of you, and laugh at the irony, when the absence of neutral platforms comes back to bite you.
It seems like your argument really boils down to "Power can be abused therefore no power should ever be used". It's kind of silly. Going back to the same points you ignored, governments criminalize murder. Do you have a problem with that? What about governments using that same power to criminalize weed? Or treat prisoners effectively as slaves? Or enforce segregation? Most folk aren't big fans of the last three but wouldn't want to live in a society where we're too afraid to stop murderers out of fear those same systems could be used to stop good folk. The only real difference is that I have considerably more control over the payment system I'm going to use than I do the government I'm going to live under.
Or take it down a bunch of notches. Most platforms take measures to try and fight spam. Do you remember e-mail before spam blockers improved? It was rough! Imagine the same on here, Twitter, etc. It seems to me those services would become useless quickly. But a service that works to block that isn't neutral, they're making decisions about what they will and won't support. I find it hard to imagine that you would prefer to use sites like that, and yet, that's what you're arguing for.
Nope! You have misunderstood my argument, and everything else you say in your post doesn't actually address the singular point I am making.
Instead my argument boils down to "I told you so", and that things like this happening are a completely expected result of people and platforms becoming less and less interested, over time, in agreeing with the general principles of neutrality.
So, you can't really act surprised when stuff like this happens.
Just don't act surprised. Don't pretend like you couldn't have predicted stuff like this happening. Thats all.
That is the only thing that I ask. Is that you don't play dumb, and be surprised that stuff like this is the result of society caring less and less about neutrality over time.
And if you actually want to address this pretty simple argument, you need to actually talk about this fake surprise, which nothing in the rest of your post did.
If the restaurant kicked out a pair of customer because they happened to be in a same sex relationship, that would be less appreciated by other customers. They would ask the critical qualifying question "What harm have they done?", an question that distinguish the issue from the violently drunk.
I think most people would reconcile them fairly easily. Do you think there’s a surprising answer to be had here?
The other one is naked people.
It's the difference between suing someone because they yelled "fire!" in a crowded adult theatre and being an actor on the stage of that theatre.
Personally I don't really care about either of these scenarios and a whole lot of the people complaining about this one are doing it for pretty obvious self-interested reasons, but you're being disingenuous by acting like these are the same thing. Visa and Mastercard are a government-enforced duopoly (with a few minor similarly-enforced exceptions). No tech company is as meaningfully.
mounting pressure from banking
partners and payment providers
This looks like one.
* switch to crypto entirely
* keep credit cards, but block sexually explicit content
I doubt there was middleground where they could accept crypto for sexually explicit content, but still accept credit cards for everything else.
Which makes me think that a smart move here would be to spin off a second company that does allow this content, but only accepts payments in crypto. I suppose if they don't, there is a opportunity ripe for a competitor to take advantage of.
I'm not being facetious. I believe it's a one of a kind opportunity for crypto currencies to step in, show the middle finger to the established payment pipelines and prove that a smooth, reliable and safe payment system can be operated even for the adult industry.
According to the Guardian[1] the adult industry clears between $10bln-$100bln a year. That's a lot turnover and clearly they are not being served well by the current providers. I'd imagine the fees are also acceptably higher (due to the increased fraud, etc..) so the profit margins should also be potentially higher.
I'm already preparing myself to be appalled by whatever the NFT scene does with this.
https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/getting-started/add-a-...
But in the long run you are right: to avoid MasterCard and Visa we should move everything to crypto. It is the only way to control our own destiny.
This is against eBay's policies. All items sold through their site must be delivered physically. If you type "bitcoin" in today you'll only get hardware or novelties, not the coins themselves.
Or do the sale on some other platform that is similar to ebay.
If you make basic payment processing for services criminal, then, by definition, cryptocurrency's primary use case is for criminal activity.
I bet this move could somehow be traced to machinations from the big porn industry players. I think if people want to make money doing this stuff and they're legally of age in a place they do it, and if they're not hurting anyone, then you shouldn't get in their way. If it's a free choice to engage in it and they are not trafficed nor coerced nor debt trapped, it should be a way that people can access to generate income or express themselves is that if that's what they choose.
I've heard of onlyfans but I've never even seen any content on there and the screenshots I've seen have just been sort of racy but not explicit and i don't know anything about the background of this decision, but... just in general I think it's easy and useful to frame it from the point of view of freedom of expression and commerce versus a moral panic or crackdown on independent content creators who are empowering themselves with content in a market that pays premiums and they can achieve a better standard of life than by doing other things, and it's better than them working at the behest of or in contract to someone else. So from that point of view I think it's a great thing that people could do this (like uber for racy content or if you want to take it to the extreme: Uber for explicit content) and it's really sad that this platform seems to now be disallowing that I think to the great harm and detriment of all the people who could formerly freely engaged in making their money that way.
It seems to me that the government needs to take some of that power back from tech companies by clearly delineating which services can and cannot be refused and in what circumstances. For instance, I think it is perfectly right for Google to remove Gab from their app store if they wish, but I think it would be wrong if Gab was refused internet service by their ISP, for example. Similarly, as we transition to a cashless world I think there need to be limits on the authority that payment processors can exercise over which businesses are allowed to receive payments and which are not.
According to here[0], banks need approx $20 million in startup capital. Now I don't know what onlyfan's costs are, but they seem to be sitting on a lot more than that or alternatively they could get financing.
Is there a reason this isn't a direction they've explored? The fact that they've not swapped to a more expensive payment provider implies that it's not a good option, but that may be a simpler solution, or they could provide a competitive option in this space?
You can use proxies if you are a small company. But at onlyFans' level, the solutions are limited.
PS: By experience, I can also confirm that most of the CC acquirers evaluate your business not on its legality but on its morality.
PS2: With mandatory 3DS2, the excuse of high fraud/complains rates (which were true 10 years ago) does not make sense anymore.
That is such puritanical nonsense. You can show naked people rubbing together, but the moment you show a penis in a vagina, Satan comes to get you.
State-backed capitalism has its faults, but they usually try to move billions into a strategically important area that benefits a large enough section of the economy.
There are plenty of porn sites out there operating legally, wonder why the banks are giving them issue.
My guess is that they presented themselves to banks as just ordinary non-adult transactions and now the banks are seeing that they are almost entirely adult so they want to put them into the higher and more expensive "high-risk" category and OF won't be able to get away with only taking 20% from the models.
I guess I'm getting back into the adult website game. I work with tons of adult models as a photographer and got out of making websites due to OnlyFans.
Either PornHub/OF got too big even for CCBill's approach to dealing with fraud, or CCBill is pulling the plug on websites that take market away from "traditional porn" probably because of pressure from the later.
Money laundering and tax avoidance is a big deal and if OF isn't going out of their way to make everyone happy then they have a potentially multi-billion dollar a year money laundering business going on.
Congress, for one. There's a history of bills that are meant to target trafficking scooping up consensual practices as well (see also the Mann Act, SESTA/FOSTA). I'm not sure how influential the threat of something like this was here, but it can't help:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/human-trafficking-banking-bil...
"Ah shit, honey. Somebody must have stolen my card."
May people do have one (55%) as it sometimes comes with a payment package, but they are generally frowned upon as tech from the stone age and insecure.
This paragraph contradicts itself:
- The company will prohibit users from posting any sexually explicit
Versus
- Creators will still be allowed to post nude photos and videos
What is this article trying to say?
https://angel.co/l/2vyMwb https://angel.co/l/2vA8yr
HMU lucy@sunroom.so
https://angel.co/l/2vyMwb https://angel.co/l/2vA8yr
HMU lucy@sunroom.so
Atlassian Cloud, for example, forbids hosting any of that sort of content on their services, which could make development difficult. With their server subscriptions gone, this is even more of an issue.
Places like Azure will host the content internally, but don't allow you to share the content publicly in any way that ties it back to them. Such as sharing an explicit image on OneDrive or hosting a website that pings back to their IP space.
How do you get around these challenges in development?
That's one of the advantages of cash.
"The company will prohibit users from posting any sexually explicit conduct, starting in October. Creators will still be allowed to post nude photos and videos, provided they’re consistent with OnlyFans’ policy"
This is a real concern especially on the cam content. It’s quite tempting business for some pimp on low-income country to get house, few cameras and put ladies to work.
Kind of same issues with the porn in general, but I assume there’s lots of paperwork happening on background for large production companies.
OnlyFans does not seem to have that problem at any significant scale at all, so why can't they figure out a way to handle payments for porn?
This split - and it's going to be a split (as they'd be insane to let that much porn money walk) is just to leave behind a nice investable onlyfans to rival patreon.
Edit: Apparently the same thing happened to them too. Thank you to the person who linked the other discussion below.
Anyway, it seems like OF is about to accomplish an epic maneuver: raise money at a $1 billion valuation based on a product you just cancelled.
In general, internet is mostly about porn or sex (Tinder, Facebook which is really for hookups when it's not for paid political propaganda), or for illegal activity (fintech, darknets) or for scam (adtech, freelance sites). I wonder what people who opt for "none of the above" are thinking.
I genuinely struggle to understand the obsession of these payment processors have to block services that focus on displaying the naked human form. Are we as a species so despicable that a nipple offends us? We are all born naked and are essentially part of the larger ecosystem on this planet.
Sure, I could understand the high chargeback rates argument , but then again, huge Bahamuts like MC and Visa can surely absorb the cost here.
These systems provide a safe channel for sex workers to profit _directly_ from their services and yet here we have society pushing them to an unsafe alley to profit.
I hope the hypocrisy of western nations supporting the sexual liberation of women whilst cracking down on their ability to do as they please with their bodies should not go unnoticed .
The extreme religious institutions and people supporting these policies should go down in history as villains.
I sincerely hope that future generations drive change and that one day we can look back at this time and chuckle.
Prediction:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38963007
Also relevant... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_o8vYUU-jo
Don't even blame onlyfans because it's the demands of banks and VCs in this case and society at large who still treat sex workers like some kind of caste of undesirables they don't want to be associated with.
I mean also overseas, for sure the extra costs (if any) are better than basically killing the golden goose.
The odds of Onlyfans becoming the huge phenomenon that it is were so slim, it seems like a waste of luck to just throw it all away because of banking problems.
Besides PR in the age of revenge porn, what's the technical or legal element which changed compared to 2019?
Can't be social because if anything society is in love with porn.
For some reason payment processors have always viewed themselves as morality police.
I suspect they are currently not classified as adult and the banks are saying, look, you are almost entirely adult so you have to pay us more.
Akin to the problems legal marijuana grows and dispensaries have with accessing banking services (though in that case due to federal regs), the stances of the entrenched industry leaders seem to bring more negatives than would come from providing the needed services.
It seems like an obvious area for crypto to stake a claim, but that doesn't appear to have happened.
Fintech's finest financially suffocating OnlyFans, forcing them to ban explicit videos off of their platform.
Somebody has got to lose.
What's their argument here, is there a law being broken or is the pressure motivated by ethics or something else?
Arguments against it scale down to "because there is exploitation, we shouldn't have any porn". This is the drug war mentality. Guess where it leads
Why does an globally established and growing company with a proven business model want to raise a billion dollar investment?
It's money they'll have to pay back with interest and I assume there would be other strings attached (like the high risk implied by the title of this article). How is possibly better than organic growth at this point where they are probably close to market saturation (in the sense that further exponential growth is implausible)?
Makes sense
It feels like the only way to solve the payment processor issue is to somehow have a change to US laws that no longer criminalize sex work.
They're really just helping the adoption to mainstream crypto.
So nude is OK but it may not sexually explicit?
That seems like a very fine line to walk, with much associated drama.
For sex workers, there is ManyVids that will eat their lunch.
Only benefit out of this, maybe nsfw Reddit will be worth a visit again when most of the OF ~~spammers~~sellers have gone.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.h...
Not really affirming any conspiracy here since I'm very uneducated at the subject, I just thinks it's suspiciously interesting to a point I can't ignore, almost as if all those central banks were coordinating as part of a larger goal.
But if Bank A suddenly goes Bankrupt, Bank B might still owe Banks A's creditors but won't get paid. So Bank B is fucked now too, even though they weren't doing anything dumb. In turn other banks will be pulled down when Bank B fails. This is why Lehmans was bailed out (in theory, conspiracies aside)
This is called Contagion, it's a type of counterparty risk: the risk that you make good deals and everything works out in your favour but the people who are meant to pay you welch.
To reduce this, there has been a big push to cut the time between trades\deals and settlement of payments. Ideally we want it to be immediate.
This is one reason central banks might be pushing this.
Hopefully we'll see the same effect here with bitcoin or a single processor making a killing in the market for "sins"...
Anybody interested in building a clone and taking over of their core business?
Based on the Indie Hackers interview with two active Only Fans content makers, it also sounds like their app is kinda shitty and slow.
Seems like they're opening the door wide open to a new competitor.
Centralized services like this will always fail eventually. We need better models than our current megacorp/client stack and the incentives that creates for most services.
In this case though it may be a factor of liability changes on high risk content: https://www.wired.com/story/how-a-controversial-new-sex-traf...
It's not so much the tech companies and payment processors that are making policy, but a reaction from them to changes in government policy that increases their exposure.
Your entire business model was crushed by payment companies so you pivot in whatever direction you think you can.
But it will still effectively be a crackdown on marginalized sexualities seen as “deviant” (aka the trans and bdsm communities). That was honestly the majority of the sexual content on Tumblr back in the day; they were on Tumblr because the mainstream porn industry doesn’t create a space that isn’t exploitative and fetishy.
The same is true on OF - trans men and women making porn are way disproportionately represented in the top creators lists. Sex work is how a lot of trans people have had to survive, and OF has made sex work much safer than it’s ever been. It would be a shame to lose an outlet like this — tempts me to go out and create one specifically for porn.
Want to buy something? Open a Coinbase or Gemini account, hook up ACH or wire transfers, wait a week for the deposit to be made, then send 'dollars' to this really long and complicated looking address. If you send it to the wrong address you are SOL.
Well... I guess ultimately you still need that thing between the credit card and the service eg. stripe... idk if the porn thing is like a blanket protection against CP or something?
To reach the masses you probably have to go with "know your customer" (KYC) requirements that are going to scare lots of people away when they have to upload photos of their passport and stuff like that to a website.
And governments and banks are going to impose the same restrictions somehow.
Unless they use a coin that is private, all transactions are going to be recorded in the blockchain and publicly viewable to everyone. Nobody wants their porn purchases to be public knowledge.
It will probably eventually get there but probably at least 5 years out.
I'm curious about that, I agree that you can trace transactions of a wallet, but can you figure out who a wallet belongs to?
Wasn't (soft) porn their business model?
I see 2 losers here OnlyFans and the banks.
I never understood this subscriber minded concept of "Porn as a Service". Back in my day we'd just steal our dad's iPhone and share it among friends (assuming everyone took care of the iPhone and didn't spill any liquids on it). Even in the 80s and 90s you could just throw a rock and there was a 50% chance it'd land on an iPhone. It's even easier now, there's entire websites dedicated to hoarding images and videos of iPhones on various hosting sites. From an access-to-iPhone perspective, this is non-news. From a "MUH RIGHTS" perspective, I get why people are upset, but you also gotta see it from the billing perspective. It's their payment processing and they'll do with it what they want. But I mean ccBill exists and offers rates of 10-15%.. just earn less, I guess.
The argument seems to be that "our payment partners don't like explicit content". I think the same excuse was thrown around for Tumblr's porn ban too.
* If this was a single (or small number of) player(s) objecting, why aren't they being competed around? Any payment platform that refuses to service the porn industry is, by its very nature, leaving money on the table.
* Again, if we're dealing with a centralized point of objection, I could see "name and shame" pushback being very effective. Imagine the backlash from both porn enthusiasts and libertarians closing their accounts if they said "It's XYZ Bank, they don't want you buying pornography."
* The worst-case scenario I could imagine is that it's at the card-brand level, driven by non-US/EU regulations. They can switch from (for example) Stripe to Braintree to Auth.net, but they can't escape Visa and Mastercard so easily. They might feel the need to regulate because it's required as a condition of market entry in, say, China or the Middle East.
But that still opens the door for domestic-focused alternatives (ACH? The old ATM-centric debit card networks?) In fact, in today's politically charged environment, I could see momentum to explicitly develop a payment product designed for "Western Sensibilites and Values" with an explicit "Hell no, it doesn't work in Beijing/Moscow/Baghdad" message. Suddenly, supporting pornography is a patriotic endeavour that you can use to demand special treatment and subsidy.
* Why now, when they're trying to go public? It's not like people suddenly woke up and said "OnlyFans had PORN?" If they maintained their relationships with their payment processors until now, it's not like there's a sudden, earth shattering revelation here.
I'm wondering if maybe the truth is less dramatic and grand. The angle I could see is that a hypothetical "OnlyFans - Porn" is a lower merchant risk profile than "OF as it stands". The high merchant fees for that industry are a well-established cost centre. If they could say "we slashed our merchant fees nn%" it looks good while preening the balance sheet for the IPO. However, I'm skeptical if that's the case-- any sort of "digital video delivery" and "subscription service" are still pretty high risk merchant types. I'd also think it's still less of a revenue risk to just split the business: a high-fee porn-only site and a cheaper-to-operate non-porn site, using shared technology.
ftfy
Google blocks search and Twitter blocks politics
If there is a case for cancel culture, free speech or capitalism issue, this sounds like it. Few powerful players systematically destroying speech and business because they don't like it.
Makes sense
Does it?
Nude is ok, but sexual isn’t? What if I find nude sexual, what if I find sexual separate from nudity? Why business is it of payment processors to say what is OK when it comes to sexuality?
Onlyfans is extremely exploitative, and part of the business model is to groom underage girls into doing pornography. There have been many news reports of only fans ignoring reports that underage girls are selling pornography of themselves on their website; something which onlyfans profits off of.
They are pimps, and seem to be okay with pimping out children and encouraging children to enter the sex trade. I hope that some of them end up in prison.
(not a judgment on what they do but the reality of the situation)