17 ms·

Porn always reminds me of other classical debates that have no end like guns and abortion. The camps of folks in the middle who are cognitively capable of makin

by kodah 6y ago

Porn always reminds me of other classical debates that have no end like guns and abortion. The camps of folks in the middle who are cognitively capable of making a difference can't because the outsized voices on either side of them are screaming for either total freedom or total shutdown. They actively fear monger people out of action so no real progress is made. It prevents the best coders and business people from working on these problems and leaves a void for seedy people to fill. This is a human problem and I think largely a problem derivative of manipulative overthinking and over empathy. I see this article as more of an interesting take on how wealthy Silicon Valley men perceive each other. My basis for that is that virtually anything sex related, apart from toys, cannot be purchased with credit or debit cards. Banks created that paradigm so of course it would be difficult for any VC firm to justify using non-fiat currency to enrich themselves. To apply gender to this and to arbitrarily add to the list of problems that men created is dubious at best. If you want tech to create solutions for sex, the sex industry, and sex workers at large then people need to change. Already there are people on this thread attempting to correlate what I assume is BDSM to pedophilia, and echoing the voices I mentioned earlier. Protecting sex workers or even sex enthusiasts will always be an iterative game that requires constant attention. The worst thing we can do is to continue to ignore it and apply moralistic language from either end of the spectrum to the problem. Some people might really enjoy a fallacy like action is inaction here, which is telling.

fullshark 6y ago
> My basis for that is that virtually anything sex related, apart from toys, cannot be purchased with credit or debit cards. Most porn can be bought with credit cards, at least in the USA. Mainstream payment processing companies like stripe may not be willing to do it but if you go try to buy (legal) porn right now with a credit card you will be able to do it.
- kodah 6y ago
  Sort of! I remember this being discussed a number of years ago: https://fetlife.com/help/can-i-use-a-credit-card-to-support-fetlife https://fetlife.com/help/can-i-use-a-credit-card-to-support-... You could argue the merits of the website (I am not a member) but at the end of the day if you can only use BitCoin or a bank account then the policies have failed businesses, consumers, and content creators. I don't know where the lines lie for decency in credit card payments or what they consider acceptable risk, but I would point back to my original assertion. If you cannot pay the best coders, the best business people, then those worries will not be solved.
  - gizmo686 6y ago
    They support credit cards again. Although they had to tighten their content guidelines to meet non-existant requirements. > Over the last decade, I've spoken to easily over a hundred people in both the financial and adult industries, and asked them for a copy of the official content rules. Everyone says they've heard that there are rules, but nobody seems to have seen them or can even get their hands on them! https://fetlife.com/groups/311/posts/15046791 https://fetlife.com/groups/311/posts/15046791 (No login wall) https://pastebin.com/FK6Z7gMf https://pastebin.com/FK6Z7gMf I just checked their payment page and as of today, they accept credit cards.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- sn_master 6y ago
  A lot of working girls accept credit cards with "discreet billing" (IT/Computer services etc), and almost all accept Venmo/Square Cash/PayPal, all of which get filled by credit or debit cards. Some even refuse to set an appointment without paying a deposit online.
- stevenicr 6y ago
  There's a spectrum with this.. some banks will allow CC processing for a porn biz.. some get creative with how they label things... some will even get into details about types of content maybe.. but it's not as easy as mainstream, and often much more expensive to process and in some cases to even sign up. Last I looked into ccBill - they were collecting an extra 2 grand up front payment to enable process mastercard. These systems are taking advantage of niche classes imho. There is also the threat of getting deplatformed / de-processed? quickly because bad PR - something that a local hardware store would not be worried about. It's harder to find places to work with you, it's more expensive, and easier to loose your ability to get paid. Sometimes there are things like operation chokepoint that try to make it near impossible for a small independent operator to go out on her own.
postingpals 6y ago
SV is not going to disrupt the sex industry because the part that needs disrupting is the unethical nature of it. Profit is not optimised to do that.
- kodah 6y ago
  Who said disrupt? I certainly didn't. That said, tech (not Silicon Valley) could develop open methods for verification or DRM that could be useful in solving the problems people are talking about. Tech isn't all about making money. Silicon Valley probably is.
- anchpop 6y ago
  OnlyFans seems to have disrupted the porn industry in an ethical way I think. Profit obviously isn't always closely aligned with ethics, but being ethical is usually a good idea all other things being equal. People are more likely to support your company if they think you behave ethically (it helps if they believe in your mission), and if you have a history of acting honestly you can maybe derive gains from the fact that your customers may trust you more.
  - Kalium 6y ago
    Has it? It seems to me that OnlyFans is going to quickly create a winner-takes-most environment, where much like in music most people put in a lot of work for not a lot of pay. Atop that, there's a toxic parasocial aspect to it where consumers pay for semblance of an emotional connection. I don't know if an system that's so exploitative by design can really be called ethical. Or if a company that does it can be called so. You can claim it increases the agency of producers and that's true as far as it goes, but you have to ignore that the music industry also gives a lot of agency to broke wannabes in garage bands.
    - nullsense 6y ago
      Enter the Power Law Distribution
donquichotte 6y ago
> virtually anything sex related, apart from toys, cannot be purchased with credit or debit cards So after all those years, we have finally found a use case for cryptocurrencies!
- pstuart 6y ago
  Don't forget drugs.
- toyg 6y ago
  If performers could actually buy food and shelter with digital currency, rather than having to go through an exchange with wildly oscillating prices from one day to the next, I reckon they would switch very quickly. But they can’t, so they won’t.
watwut 6y ago
> The camps of folks in the middle who are cognitively capable of making a difference can't because the outsized voices on either side of them are screaming for either total freedom or total shutdown I really don't think this is accurate analysis of abortion debate in USA. First, I am not even sure what difference should the middle require in your analysis. What progress on abortion would you expect to happen had advocates stopped talking?
- worik 6y ago
  Women would get the services they need, safely. Well, duh!
throw0101a 6y ago
> Porn always reminds me of other classical debates that have no end like guns and abortion. The camps of folks in the middle who are cognitively capable of making a difference can't because the outsized voices on either side of them are screaming for either total freedom or total shutdown. Conservatives and progressives/liberals have completely different world views: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics_(book) There may be some underlying biological differences, that then get reinforced culturally (the old nature/nurture debate): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_political_orientation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_political_orientat... * https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/the-yuck-factor/580465/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/the-yuc... * https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-liberal-brains-might-have-some-real-differences/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-... * https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092984/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092984/ Political polarization hasn't helped in trying to find a middle path between these views in recent years/decades: * https://www.pewresearch.org/topics/political-polarization/ https://www.pewresearch.org/topics/political-polarization/ * https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/10/01/how-to-understand-global-spread-of-political-polarization-pub-79893 https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/10/01/how-to-understand-g... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_polarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_polarization Especially in the US, where it seems the Right has moved further over than the Left: * https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/yes-polarization-is-asymmetric-and-conservatives-are-worse/373044/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/yes-pol...
- kodah 6y ago
  Precisely. The culture of our main groups is what drives the loud voices. In the end, American culture is useless for solving these kind of problems, at least for the time being. There are people who buy into politics but not culture though (eg: it is possible for one to be politically liberal but then be more culturally free rather than culturally constrained). These people, in the sense of sex work and the porn industry may be able to produce viable solutions and products, but they'd constantly be on the defensive against both political cultures.
Semaphor 6y ago
> cannot be purchased with credit or debit cards. I remember buying porn with CCBill (from my experience, a payment company for porn and shareware) many years ago. I don’t remember there ever being a time when there was a problem purchasing porn.
bawolff 6y ago
> classical debates that have no end like guns and abortion. I think this is a pretty american centric point of view. These debates don't have anywhere near the same back and forth in other countries (thinking of canada in particular) that they do in USA. I imagine how taboo porn is is also very much a cultural phenomenon that varries a lot place to place.
- k__ 6y ago
  This. The debates in the US sound ridiculous to me. It's like the US is a first world country full of people from a few centuries ago.
  - chaosharmonic 6y ago
    I mean. That statement tracks pretty well if you look at our government, where the elderly are represented in elected offices at double or even triple their actual share of the population. According to the 2010 census Americans over 65 make up under 15% of... well, Americans[0], but currently occupy 147 seats in the House (out of a possible 435) and 48 in the Senate (out of 100), along with executive branches in 15 states (out of 50).[1] [0] https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf [1] https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/the-115th-congress-is-among-the-oldest-in-history/ https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/the-115th-congres... (note that this was originally posted in 2017, but was later updated for the 116th)
    - tyre 6y ago
      It’s less bad than that. 24% in the 2010 census were under 18 and 9.9% were 18–24. I don’t put those under “should be in Congress”, and constitutionally they’re not allowed to be until 25. So it is 13 percentage points out of 66 percentage points — about 20% of the population with 34% of the seats in the house. Senators have to be 30 so the over 65 crowd would be an even greater share there. Given that experience probably gives you _something_, it’s still out of whack but not crazy. All of that said, personally I believe it’s far too skewed and we should have an age cap in Congress.
ogre_codes 6y ago
> My basis for that is that virtually anything sex related, apart from toys, cannot be purchased with credit or debit cards. Hmm, the 3 adult shops I pass on the way into work beg to differ. You can buy anything from lingerie, to lube (with CBD Oil!), videos, handcuffs, ball gags... You can get any of this stuff online too. The only place where you might struggle to use Visa cards for sex is on sites that have been busted with illegal content.
- novok 6y ago
  Those are toys

by kodah 6y ago

fullshark 6y ago

> My basis for that is that virtually anything sex related, apart from toys, cannot be purchased with credit or debit cards. Most porn can be bought with credit cards, at least in the USA. Mainstream payment processing companies like stripe may not be willing to do it but if you go try to buy (legal) porn right now with a credit card you will be able to do it.

kodah 6y ago
Sort of! I remember this being discussed a number of years ago: https://fetlife.com/help/can-i-use-a-credit-card-to-support-fetlife https://fetlife.com/help/can-i-use-a-credit-card-to-support-... You could argue the merits of the website (I am not a member) but at the end of the day if you can only use BitCoin or a bank account then the policies have failed businesses, consumers, and content creators. I don't know where the lines lie for decency in credit card payments or what they consider acceptable risk, but I would point back to my original assertion. If you cannot pay the best coders, the best business people, then those worries will not be solved.
- gizmo686 6y ago
  They support credit cards again. Although they had to tighten their content guidelines to meet non-existant requirements. > Over the last decade, I've spoken to easily over a hundred people in both the financial and adult industries, and asked them for a copy of the official content rules. Everyone says they've heard that there are rules, but nobody seems to have seen them or can even get their hands on them! https://fetlife.com/groups/311/posts/15046791 https://fetlife.com/groups/311/posts/15046791 (No login wall) https://pastebin.com/FK6Z7gMf https://pastebin.com/FK6Z7gMf I just checked their payment page and as of today, they accept credit cards.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sn_master 6y ago
A lot of working girls accept credit cards with "discreet billing" (IT/Computer services etc), and almost all accept Venmo/Square Cash/PayPal, all of which get filled by credit or debit cards. Some even refuse to set an appointment without paying a deposit online.
stevenicr 6y ago
There's a spectrum with this.. some banks will allow CC processing for a porn biz.. some get creative with how they label things... some will even get into details about types of content maybe.. but it's not as easy as mainstream, and often much more expensive to process and in some cases to even sign up. Last I looked into ccBill - they were collecting an extra 2 grand up front payment to enable process mastercard. These systems are taking advantage of niche classes imho. There is also the threat of getting deplatformed / de-processed? quickly because bad PR - something that a local hardware store would not be worried about. It's harder to find places to work with you, it's more expensive, and easier to loose your ability to get paid. Sometimes there are things like operation chokepoint that try to make it near impossible for a small independent operator to go out on her own.

postingpals 6y ago

SV is not going to disrupt the sex industry because the part that needs disrupting is the unethical nature of it. Profit is not optimised to do that.

kodah 6y ago
Who said disrupt? I certainly didn't. That said, tech (not Silicon Valley) could develop open methods for verification or DRM that could be useful in solving the problems people are talking about. Tech isn't all about making money. Silicon Valley probably is.
anchpop 6y ago
OnlyFans seems to have disrupted the porn industry in an ethical way I think. Profit obviously isn't always closely aligned with ethics, but being ethical is usually a good idea all other things being equal. People are more likely to support your company if they think you behave ethically (it helps if they believe in your mission), and if you have a history of acting honestly you can maybe derive gains from the fact that your customers may trust you more.
- Kalium 6y ago
  Has it? It seems to me that OnlyFans is going to quickly create a winner-takes-most environment, where much like in music most people put in a lot of work for not a lot of pay. Atop that, there's a toxic parasocial aspect to it where consumers pay for semblance of an emotional connection. I don't know if an system that's so exploitative by design can really be called ethical. Or if a company that does it can be called so. You can claim it increases the agency of producers and that's true as far as it goes, but you have to ignore that the music industry also gives a lot of agency to broke wannabes in garage bands.
  - nullsense 6y ago
    Enter the Power Law Distribution

donquichotte 6y ago

> virtually anything sex related, apart from toys, cannot be purchased with credit or debit cards So after all those years, we have finally found a use case for cryptocurrencies!

pstuart 6y ago
Don't forget drugs.
toyg 6y ago
If performers could actually buy food and shelter with digital currency, rather than having to go through an exchange with wildly oscillating prices from one day to the next, I reckon they would switch very quickly. But they can’t, so they won’t.

watwut 6y ago

> The camps of folks in the middle who are cognitively capable of making a difference can't because the outsized voices on either side of them are screaming for either total freedom or total shutdown I really don't think this is accurate analysis of abortion debate in USA. First, I am not even sure what difference should the middle require in your analysis. What progress on abortion would you expect to happen had advocates stopped talking?

worik 6y ago
Women would get the services they need, safely. Well, duh!

throw0101a 6y ago

> Porn always reminds me of other classical debates that have no end like guns and abortion. The camps of folks in the middle who are cognitively capable of making a difference can't because the outsized voices on either side of them are screaming for either total freedom or total shutdown. Conservatives and progressives/liberals have completely different world views: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics_(book) There may be some underlying biological differences, that then get reinforced culturally (the old nature/nurture debate): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_political_orientation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_political_orientat... * https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/the-yuck-factor/580465/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/the-yuc... * https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-liberal-brains-might-have-some-real-differences/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-... * https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092984/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092984/ Political polarization hasn't helped in trying to find a middle path between these views in recent years/decades: * https://www.pewresearch.org/topics/political-polarization/ https://www.pewresearch.org/topics/political-polarization/ * https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/10/01/how-to-understand-global-spread-of-political-polarization-pub-79893 https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/10/01/how-to-understand-g... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_polarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_polarization Especially in the US, where it seems the Right has moved further over than the Left: * https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/yes-polarization-is-asymmetric-and-conservatives-are-worse/373044/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/yes-pol...

kodah 6y ago
Precisely. The culture of our main groups is what drives the loud voices. In the end, American culture is useless for solving these kind of problems, at least for the time being. There are people who buy into politics but not culture though (eg: it is possible for one to be politically liberal but then be more culturally free rather than culturally constrained). These people, in the sense of sex work and the porn industry may be able to produce viable solutions and products, but they'd constantly be on the defensive against both political cultures.

Semaphor 6y ago

> cannot be purchased with credit or debit cards. I remember buying porn with CCBill (from my experience, a payment company for porn and shareware) many years ago. I don’t remember there ever being a time when there was a problem purchasing porn.

bawolff 6y ago

> classical debates that have no end like guns and abortion. I think this is a pretty american centric point of view. These debates don't have anywhere near the same back and forth in other countries (thinking of canada in particular) that they do in USA. I imagine how taboo porn is is also very much a cultural phenomenon that varries a lot place to place.

k__ 6y ago
This. The debates in the US sound ridiculous to me. It's like the US is a first world country full of people from a few centuries ago.
- chaosharmonic 6y ago
  I mean. That statement tracks pretty well if you look at our government, where the elderly are represented in elected offices at double or even triple their actual share of the population. According to the 2010 census Americans over 65 make up under 15% of... well, Americans[0], but currently occupy 147 seats in the House (out of a possible 435) and 48 in the Senate (out of 100), along with executive branches in 15 states (out of 50).[1] [0] https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf [1] https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/the-115th-congress-is-among-the-oldest-in-history/ https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/the-115th-congres... (note that this was originally posted in 2017, but was later updated for the 116th)
  - tyre 6y ago
    It’s less bad than that. 24% in the 2010 census were under 18 and 9.9% were 18–24. I don’t put those under “should be in Congress”, and constitutionally they’re not allowed to be until 25. So it is 13 percentage points out of 66 percentage points — about 20% of the population with 34% of the seats in the house. Senators have to be 30 so the over 65 crowd would be an even greater share there. Given that experience probably gives you _something_, it’s still out of whack but not crazy. All of that said, personally I believe it’s far too skewed and we should have an age cap in Congress.

ogre_codes 6y ago

> My basis for that is that virtually anything sex related, apart from toys, cannot be purchased with credit or debit cards. Hmm, the 3 adult shops I pass on the way into work beg to differ. You can buy anything from lingerie, to lube (with CBD Oil!), videos, handcuffs, ball gags... You can get any of this stuff online too. The only place where you might struggle to use Visa cards for sex is on sites that have been busted with illegal content.

novok 6y ago
Those are toys