32 ms·

Under the skin of OnlyFans

343 points by adrian_mrd 5y ago

DaniloDias 5y ago
Seedy, sad product.
- girvo 5y ago
  I'd love for you to expand on that opinion. In some ways I think it's a good product that gives some measure of control (and a _lot_ of the money) back to the people who star in and create pornographic content. The existing industry is exploitative and predatory, and from my admittedly not-very-well-versed vantage point, OnlyFans is much less so due to the very nature of its product and who its content creators are.
  - recn14b 5y ago
    > OnlyFans is much less so due to the very nature of its product and who its content creators are. This is an extremely generous view. It's well known that cam sites often feature trafficked victims. Why wouldn't you also assume that an OnlyFans is also run by a trafficker? You cited yourself that the industry is predatory and exploitative. Do you honestly believe that most of these woman truly made this choice themselves?
    - ioseph 5y ago
      On one hand not requiring to go through a studio would make it easier for trafficking, but porn studios don't exactly have a fantastic track record when it comes to human rights. On the other hand for individual content makers using this platform gives them far more control over the type of content they produce and a fairer share of the profit.
      - girvo 5y ago
        You've summed up my opinion entirely in two sentences haha, well done. That's why my original comment was prefaced with "in some ways".
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
      I can't speak for the person you're responding to, but I don't think an assumption of human trafficking by the site's owners is supported given that some other site's owners did human trafficking. By all accounts I've been exposed to, models on OnlyFans earn much better than models on other sites. That seems like a prima facie reason to believe it's overall a good thing, and the evidence would need to be presented to demonstrate otherwise. Starting with the assumption the owner of something you don't like is a human trafficker is not a good way to make a convincing case against OnlyFans.
      - lxmorj 5y ago
        I believe he is not saying the site owners are traffickers but that some OF channels could be trafficker run.
        asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
        Oh, if that's so then I'm even less clear on what we expect OnlyFans to do about it, unless we are going to ban the whole sector of sex work. Some restaurants launder money for the mob too, but we still have restaurants. If there are sensible steps OF could take to reduce the incidence of this, then they should. But it's hard for me to think of what that might be, given any response made over the internet could easily be coerced. Are there ideas I can read up on?
        kyleee 5y ago
        Let's engage in a hypothetical to flesh out your position; if 10% of only fans accounts were victims of human trafficking, acting at the behest of their traffickers, what course(s) of action would you recommend for only fans (as a company), and from regulatory bodies?
        Cipater 5y ago
        How would OF know?
        5y ago
    - vmception 5y ago
      Earn, (which was acquired by Coinbase and shutdown/rebranded), did the same thing as OnlyFans, charging for direct messages. There are many services like that. Many content producers on OnlyFans switch away from subscription model to just freemium with paid direct messages. It is unnecessarily gendered to treat OnlyFans differently just because the many content creators on OnlyFans are women leading with their bodies. Maybe you weren't aware of other services that let people charge for DMs that simply didn't get associated with adult content, maybe that's not what you meant, but the comment you replied to said the OnlyFans platform is less about the nature of its product and more about who its content creators are, which you seemed to disagree with but then replied with a completely different comment.
      - the_doctah 5y ago
        >It requires pure misogyny to treat OnlyFans differently just because the content creators on OnlyFans are women leading with their bodies So if we took misogyny out of the equation no one would think OnlyFans favors attractive women?
        vmception 5y ago
        It is no reason to treat the platform differently than other platforms
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - base698 5y ago
    Doesn't seem to be the case: https://mobile.twitter.com/aella_girl/status/1335725267340251137 https://mobile.twitter.com/aella_girl/status/133572526734025... Has MLM level distribution where only the top 2% or so make anything of consequence.
    - girvo 5y ago
      That doesn't really disagree with anything I wrote. I was mainly implicitly comparing it to "regular" pornography and cam-sites. The latter take huge percentages comparatively, and the former don't give percentages to most of their performers at all.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      What that says is of the accounts that make anything the average person makes $500. Which is about 7% of all accounts. Which isn't bad.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    Not OP, but IMO onlyfans is especially predatory because it makes it look easy to trade nudes for large amounts of cash. In reality very few people are going to be making above minimum wage, onlyfans is just like the rest of social media - a lottery that pays millions to a few winners and asks all the other participants to create content for next-to-nothing just to enter the lotto.
    - runawaybottle 5y ago
      I’d posit that OnlyFans operates on the freemium video games model where a few select whales generate all their money. You just really need to catch one person who is into you.
    - chii 5y ago
      > onlyfans is especially predatory if this is what you call predatory, then why isn't sports stars and film/music celebrity culture not predatory in the same way? I don't see the difference. I say let people do what they want, as long as they understand what they're doing and is informed of the (potential) consequences.
      - afarrell 5y ago
        People do say that about the music industry. Ask Kesha or Britney!
      - labster 5y ago
        Sports is predatory, see the NCAA monopoly. Music was well known in the last century for predatory contracts. People like Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey from the film industry are often called predators, and the casting couch is legendary. Celebrity culture is highly predatory with obsessive fans and stalker paparazzi. You’re right, no real difference.
        nostromo 5y ago
        People are free to do something else if their dream job doesn’t pay them a wage they feel is fair.
- smabie 5y ago
  I think it's pretty great actually. How would you make it better?
  - DaniloDias 5y ago
    I guess I’d stop commoditizing young men and women who haven’t had enough time to develop a career.
- sergiotapia 5y ago
  I agree with you. It's yet another boil on the internet's ass. Shameful shit.
superkuh 5y ago
The BBC is really digging deep and far away from OnlyFans itself in order to try to generate the moral outrage needed to justify their puritan anti-porn stance. Most of this article seems to be about things that happen outside of the website or instances where users violated the terms of service.
- vmception 5y ago
  The summary, I think, is that they should list calls to action for OnlyFans, or point out that the biggest tech giants are struggling with the same issues on their own platforms, ie. hackers, stalkers, 2-factor authentication, lack of live chat for support. BBC could have done a bit more to summarize calls to action instead of helping readers conflate multiple issues with preexisting biases. It is also a pretty decent reality for what creators can expect, right now. But, despite that I felt it was decently balanced. They accurately say the site has associations and can be used for other things. Just saying Youtube, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and others have the same issues would have been useful.
- duxup 5y ago
  Is it "moral outrage" if they asked why a creator's account was closed and it was reopened? This article seemed to be about a number of issues, not so much about the content.
- rorykoehler 5y ago
  I can't understand your position. OF is designed in such a way that it perpetuates certain types of behaviour. You can't hand wave away TOS transgressions when the whole system is setup for weirdo's to easily and repeatedly break the TOS.
  - Manuel_D 5y ago
    It's not just TOS violations. Accounts getting hacked, unless there was a vulnerability on the company's side, is totally nonsensical to blame on the company. They have the ability to set up MFA but the creator didn't use it. And this happens on non-adult platforms, too.
cunthorpe 5y ago
I think that people need to understand that once they put themselves out there, especially in sex-fueled environments, they’re adding risk to their lives. They put their sex on full display and think “yeah this is totally fine” while it obviously carries some huge societal weight. I’m not justifying their actions, but also don’t be surprised when they happen. The world isn’t perfect yet. I don’t care much about OF, but I’m sure assholes send threats on any platform, and it’s not really a platform issue as long as they implement blocking and some sort of spam prevention.
- ipnon 5y ago
  We have a "women and children first" reflex. We seem to draw extraordinary attention to the troubles of beautiful, young women. Call it "damsel in distress."
- ipaddr 5y ago
  You get more threats posting about Trump pro or con these days. Using a platform like fansonly allows the star to moderate and use the platform to guard against safety issues. Fansonly is pay only which limits the spam can help identify the crazy.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  We used to say, "play stupid games, win stupid prizes."
  - aniforprez 5y ago
    Seems a bit harsh to call it "stupid". Sex work is work that will always have demand. It sucks that society looks down on it and the market for it is so skewed towards creeps that people feel unsafe doing it and face so much harassment when found out
    - EvilEy3 5y ago
      > Sex work is work that will always have demand Sure, doesn't make it a good or socially acceptable job though.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
650REDHAIR 5y ago
So our kids are getting older so I've been paying more attention to popular social networks and it's wild how many YouTubers, Twitch'ers, TikTok'ers, Instagram'ers have OF content directly linked from their non-porn bios. I don't like it, but I'm not sure what a good solution is. I mean, people are free to do what they'd like, but it's hard to police screen time 100% of the time and their peer group has a lot more access than they do so even if I can block it 100$ they'll be exposed to it somewhere else. We've talked about it and I feel like that's all I can do now. I just hate how normalized it feels when many of their social media "role models' turn to porn.
- seattle_spring 5y ago
  Related, it sucks that so much content nowadays is just a thinly veiled advertisement for OF pages.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    This is a result of youtube's policies. You can't run ads because your content is unacceptable but keep uploading videos, build your following and push fans to someone they can make money.
    - seattle_spring 5y ago
      Not just YouTube, but much of Reddit too. I'd hazard to say 50% of all /r/roastme posts are OnlyFans ads, for example.
  - digianarchist 5y ago
    You can blame OnlyFans themselves. No search. No way to advertise on the platform. No discoverability.
  - rawbot 5y ago
    Or for Patreon subs.
- ryandrake 5y ago
intended 5y ago
If moderation scaled, most of these discussions would be moot. The most common route is some automation and outsourcing. Although the typical outsourcer may simply not be able to take on only fans content.
onlyafan 5y ago
The overlap between small-time OnlyFans creators and people hypervigilant about their privacy feels small. Streamers and idols have faced this problem for some time - with cases of people finding out where a streamer lives based on minutiae like reflections - but add porn and inexperience to the equation and it's not at all surprising that stalking behavior can get dangerously extreme. Storytime - a girl at my uni mentioned in our school's subreddit that she does OnlyFans. She made the comment from the same reddit account she used to advertise her profile and she also wrote many regular SFW comments and posts. So... she was pretty hot, and me being a horny and curious college dude, I tried to see if I could casually ID them. Yes, kind of creepy, I know. Horniness aside, the point is, it took me like 10 minutes to find their real name and identity, based only on information they decided it would be safe to publicly associate with themselves. Rest assured, I didn't do anything with that knowledge and I have no intention of ever doing so, obviously. Really big school, completely different majors that spend time in completely different parts of campus, I doubt I'd even notice if I ever crossed paths with them. People who aren't techies who always have privacy on the mind often drastically underestimate how little information is needed to uniquely ID them. In this case, a) she posted in a specific school sub, b) she posted about her grades in a major-specific class, c) she mentioned her ethnicity in a regular SFW post, and d) she shared plenty of pictures of her body sans face from a variety of angles. Well now I can know that there's an X-ethnicity person in Y grade of Z major at ABC university who has an identifying tattoo and a relatively uncommon hairstyle... Literally 2 or 3 Google searches later and I had a result. As I'm sure is often the case, she wasn't particularly concerned about the privacy of her regular, real life identity, presumably with the assumption that it wouldn't ever be connected to her OnlyFans. Name on school project websites, articles in the school newspaper, LinkedIns, public instagrams, things like that. It doesn't take long to scroll through google images and recognize a body. And that's probably what's unintuitive about this risk - someone might think "well there are another 300 people who fit that description, so I'm good". But with computers, it's trivial to look through 300 people. Someone crazy enough could easily sift through 3000 pictures searching for you. They know roughly what you look like. And if the number of people fitting your description is only around 30, it's hard to even call that a search - a few seconds on a page or two is all it takes to ID you. The good thing is that the vast majority of people are probably harmless. The occasional overly curious person like me might cross some boundaries and find out who you are, but it's not likely they'll have any desire to contact you in any way. The bad thing, of course, is that it only takes 1 nutcase to instill a lot of fear. I don't think there's a solution other than more education - assuming this kind of content creation continues to exist without heavy regulation. Maybe OnlyFans could play a part. I'm sure most OF creators vaguely know the risks, but they may not be used to thinking carefully about sharing seemingly innocuous and vague details. Like, "Did you know you might be stalked? Yes. Did you know you might be stalked and identified if you share a picture of your dog at the park? Uh, what!?". A quick 15 minute video on protecting yourself from the crazies could probably prevent a lot of dangerous situations. "Don't share your school or major", "Don't take pictures near street signs or stores", "Don't wear jewelry you usually wear", etc.
throwmeawaydddy 5y ago
Fire up the throwaway! Not 100% related to the article, but directly related. I worked as developer for a product in the same niche ("democratizing adult content"). I spent almost 2 years working on the frontend, devops, and building out the analytics engine (all pre-covid). Anyway, on to the comment at hand. We had a small number of users compared to OnlyFans (when I left, there were about 20K active content creators). The average monthly payment was $5000 (skewed massively by the top 5%). We had phone support for our larger creator. One very common request was to instantly delete all data and stop processing future orders. Usually, the requester was in a pretty agitated/distraught state (I'd occasionally get escalated calls to "confirm" that all data would be deleted ASAP and no copies would be kept). I spoke to a few of our creators and most would be desperate to scrub all of their content form the internet because: a) A parent/relative found out. b) A fellow employee at their 9-5 stumbled on their account. c) A 'fan' went nuclear and was waging all out digital war. One creator had a former subscriber sending data dumps to all their Facebook and Instagram friends (they also spammed every public email address at their 'normal' workplace, which was a local government). We would occasionally get demanding letters requesting the removal of content from third party sites (Pornhub, Reddit, etc). The creators would somehow be surprised when they realised we couldn't remove content from other websites. The experience was very depressing.
- vlunkr 5y ago
  This summarizes my opinion on OF. I'm not sure if it's unethical or predatory, but I'm quite sure that most people posting content there are going to regret it very soon.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - standardUser 5y ago
    Why are you "quite sure"? What are the consequences of having naked photos of yourself out there in the world that would cause most people to regret it?
mkl95 5y ago
No piece of software can magically prevent its content from being shared. People were divulging private conversations and other stuff on Twitter years before OnlyFans was a thing.
- shadilay 5y ago
  That's why you need hardware. eg Pluton
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    No hardware or software can prevent copying of content. If something is visible on a screen or audible on a speaker you can copy and redistribute it without restrictions. It's only a bit trickier with video games because those actually need to stay in their original format to be useful, and may use DRM, but so far that didn't stop people either.
    - quenix 5y ago
      For those interested, a formalisation of this problem: the "Analog Hole" [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
happyweasel 5y ago
Aren't OnlyFans (and similar companies) another way to launder money?
- dehrmann 5y ago
  People have laundered money with Bing/Adsense arbitrage.
- jtokoph 5y ago
  Is there an efficient way to get cash into the system? Or are you saying people will donate via credit card on OnlyFans but they’re really paying for illicit things?
- jedberg 5y ago
  You can easily launder money through any two sided market. OF is no different in that regard.
  - strogonoff 5y ago
    In normal two-sided markets goods or services are being exchanged, making it feasible to check whether the price paid reflects reality in any way. On the other hand, it is very difficult to prove that someone is faking being a fan, so laundering can be as easy as giving a friend N dollars of suspect cash or cryptocurrency and having them pay you N minus the hassle fee through Twitch/OnlyFans/etc. from their credit card.
    - 12ian34 5y ago
      You could probably use web analytics to reasonably estimate engagement and calculate engagement per spend, comparing that between users.
- henrikschroder 5y ago
  If you have an internet service where you pay out money to users, you are required to have a plan for how to prevent money laundering. The SEC does not fuck around when it comes to that, and if you fuck up, your payment processors will drop you immediately. Also, only accepting credit card payments to move money into the system goes a long way to protect you from money laundering.
ChatterManlike 5y ago
This is a throwaway account and the account name is just serendipity from the Correct Horse Battery Staple password generator. Eerie but it's true. Unlike Patreon, they do not charge only once a month but continuously as subscriptions renew, as pay-to-view videos are purchased etc. A hundred dollar monthly Patreon bill is much more noticeable than a few bucks every few days. Also, it's possible to tip on posts but the minimum tip is five dollars. The sum of these policies mean using Onlyfans requires real careful budgeting and I do not think most people are good at budgeting especially at budgeting for porn... So I wouldn't be surprised if we were to read stories about people getting bankrupted by this site -- obviously most people would not be particularly forthcoming about getting bankrupted by porn...
- dannyw 5y ago
  Sites like OF thrive on whales. People spending thousands per month on a creator usually can budget.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  When OF started getting popular I was curious to see how much it was. Needles to say any inkling of paying for anything sunk below the flow when I saw people were charging $20 a month. Plus...it's a nude photo or video. How in the hell is that worth that price today? Pornography online has been free for basically 3 decades.
kristopolous 5y ago
Being curious about the onboarding, about 2 years ago I signed up and starting doing non-adult content on OF. It's really similar to patreon, substack or bandcamp; optionally paywalled content on a freemium model. The onboarding and experience of OF is somewhat odd in that it didn't ever say "this is for you to post explicit content". It's structured for it sure, but every page is isolated. Even on the splash it just kinda vaguely suggests it is for pornography. Their blog doesn't really suggest it either: https://blog.onlyfans.com/ https://blog.onlyfans.com/ In fact they seem to want to get away from it. Aaron Carter, Tyga, Cardi B are on it and earn millions from it. Actress Blac Chyna might be pulling in $20mil from it (https://influencermarketinghub.com/onlyfans-top-earners/ https://influencermarketinghub.com/onlyfans-top-earners/) I wonder how much non-pornography is on there. The tools and structure are generic enough for essentially any kind of content; say meditation, tutoring, someone doing an audiobook. A fitness instructor Jem Wolfie supposedly pulls in around $30,000/day, about 8 million total (https://blog.onlyfans.com/meet-jem-wolfie/ https://blog.onlyfans.com/meet-jem-wolfie/). I assume most of the accounts are porno though. All the messages I get are from sex related bots trying to sell me products/services assuming I produce adult content or are looking to consume it. I wonder if OF just sort of adopted the primary use case like Tumblr unintentionally became one of the biggest porn sites. It's an interesting platform to answer the problem of trying to monetize an online following.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- chasd00 5y ago
  It didn’t start out for porn but grew in that direction. Iirc when it started taking off there weren’t that happy about the porn but bank account deposits are a hell of a drug.
  - genewitch 5y ago
    one can see this on twitch, as well. A couple of years ago the least tame streamers were working out or doing "Let's Dance" - but since January of this year the number of people in "hot tubs" and bikinis has gone up exponentially. The primary issue (and one i have with it even if i am assuredly not a prude) is that Twitch is aimed at people under 20, their largest self-reported demographic is ages 13-19. Twitch (and let's be honest here, this is Amazon we're talking about) recently banned the top two female streamers for "showing hips in a suggestive way" or whatever. Both of these women have OF pages prominently advertised as well. Both are back now, and there's no indication that they've changed their overall model / operation on Twitch. I imagine that Twitch telling the 4,000,000 'followers' to these two streamers that they didn't want their money anymore probably backfired. My understanding is that money transacted through amazon for twitch is split in two - that is, the streamer gets $2.50 for every subscription, Amazon gets the other $2.50. If the conversion for those 4 million followers is 1% subscriptions, Twitch taking a hit of $200,000 a month might seem insignificant, but that's just the conversion for those two streamers - not the overall loss of subscriptions by annoying 4 million people!
stared 5y ago
I was surprised why OnlyFans is so popular. All in all, there is no shortage of free erotic materials online (https://observablehq.com/@stared/tree-of-reddit-sex-life https://observablehq.com/@stared/tree-of-reddit-sex-life for a small subset). I got an insight from "The Surprising Psychology Of OnlyFans Simps by Charisma on Command" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auG2E53dFas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auG2E53dFas) that subscribers buy attention rather than sex.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > I got an insight from "The Surprising Psychology Of OnlyFans Simps by Charisma on Command" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auG2E53dFas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auG2E53dFas) that subscribers buy attention rather than sex. That's like one of the oldest i and vest known insights about sex work generally, so I’m not surprised that it is reflected in OF. (Its even more obviously true of its more celebrity- but less porn-focussed cousin, Cameo.)
- throw_m239339 5y ago
  I think OnlyFans is "different" because unlike other pornsites or camsites, users kind of create a "closer" relationship to the porn performer since they have access to "exclusive" content. As you said it's called "simping" and IMHO it can go south pretty quickly given how crazy people can be. Some deluded fans genuinly think they are in a real and genuine relationship with the porn performer. It's dangerous.
- nly 5y ago
  It's more like "emotional prostitution" than porn
- ipnon 5y ago
  People enjoy the reciprocation of donating then receiving an award. It turns the passive activity of watching pornography into an interactive game.
- acatton 5y ago
  > subscribers buy attention rather than sex. That's how the Minitel[1] got popular in France. They had these chat services where one paid per minute to chat with "women in your area" (It was mostly male operators handling multiple conversation simultaneously[2]) These services have always existed, and were always in demand, the only difference is technology and business models. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel (basically the french version of the internet, ahead of its time) [2] In French: https://www.nouvelobs.com/rue89/rue89-rue69/20120629.RUE0957/je-m-appelle-jean-marc-et-j-ai-ete-animatrice-de-minitel-rose.html https://www.nouvelobs.com/rue89/rue89-rue69/20120629.RUE0957... "My name is Jean-Marc and I was 'female moderator' of erotic Minitel"
nazrulmum10 5y ago
'I'm going to hunt you down'
jeroenhd 5y ago
I think most of these problems stem from the fact that the lack of moderation and easy termination of subscriptions is exactly what has made only fans possible as a platform. When a website starts moderating user generated content, its legal status changes and suddenly the company could be held responsible for what happens on the platform. On a platform that's used mainly for sex work (which is still strictly legal in many countries around the world!), that distinction may be all that stands between fines, bans or even jail time, even in what would be considered more progressive countries. The easy refunds are essential because the payment provider networks will drop you the moment you get too many chargebacks filed against you. The sex industry in general has a problem getting payment from most credit card providers, because people will often do chargebacks when their significant other/family/friends find out about statements on their credit cards, increasing the risk for the payment provider. There's also a certain sense of puritanism in many payment providers, especially American ones from what I've read, and that doesn't help. As for copying and sharing illicit material, that's a risk that comes with selling any digital media. OnlyFans can't do anything about that. The biggest entertainment companies in the world have tried, and high quality rips from Disney+ and Netflix still reach the web. In general, OnlyFans is a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that it brings freedom to individuals to perform sex work from the safety and comfort of their own home, without shady back alley deals whatsoever. However, it's also a curse because popularisation of sex work inevitably reinforces the sexualisation (mostly) of women. Easy websites also have little to prevent abuse from forced sex work, and I'm sure the scum willing to trade human beings and force them into brothels have seen the opportunities here. Lastly, easy entrance to sex work might lead to more people joining in reluctantly because they see no other way to pay for rent or education. Sex workers are part of any society, have been for all of history and will probably always be in the future. I don't see that as a problem, as long as people do it out of their own volition. However, these websites don't exist in a vacuum, and as long as others stigmatise sex work, joining the industry will come with certain risks for exposure and blackmail. No platform can prevent social issues, no matter how hard YouTube and Twitter claim they're on top of things like misinformation and illicit material. The problem is simply not one of a technical or a business nature. Having said that, I'm sure there's a market for DeepFake-style face/environment replacements. Deepfake a convincing face from thispersondoesnotexist.com onto yourself, replace the background with furniture from a similar generator, and you could severely reduce the risks that come with selling explicit media. It still doesn't solve the core problem of blackmail and such (people can and will find out, and stalkers are obsessed enough), but it can reduce the risk of those conscious about their privacy despite the nature of their job.
Bayart 5y ago
Who knew a site which thrives on abolishing all personal boundaries in digital prostitution would have problems. You can't expect customers to be courteous and professional with you if the product is sex, all the more so if you're leveraging the illusion of a social relationship. It's a one or the other proposition. There's no in-between, there's no picking both. The entire thing is schizophrenic.
- throw_m239339 5y ago
  But hey, "sex work is work"! We're not going to solve anything with that kind of simplistic catchphrase that mask all the problems regarding this sort of activity. That has never helped and it's frankly flat out false. Prostitution or porn isn't just work for the majority of the women involved in that 'industry' that victimizes them.
  - Bayart 5y ago
    I completely agree ! I don't know what would lead you to believe I take sex work as just another trade. Quite the opposite, I assert that because it is not simply « a job », you can't treat it as such and blur boundaries while expecting to be safe, be it physically or mentally. I think the entire model is noxious, save for whoever's collecting the money and conveniently washing their hands of any responsibility.
- hnbad 5y ago
  You might want to reevaluate the reasons why you think this is self-evident and where they come from. It's true that these problems are unavoidable in the current status quo of society but that's almost tautological. The question is why that is, what factors contribute to this and whether we can and should overcome them. EDIT: To be clear, this does not mean that sex work wouldn't/shouldn't ultimately be abolished, but saying essentially "well, you try to sell sex as a service, so of course you'll be abused and violated" borders on victim blaming and doesn't address the problem anymore than a doctor saying "if it hurts when you touch there, just stop touching there".
- KaiserPro 5y ago
imwillofficial 5y ago
This ties into an interesting article I read today. Goes deep on the idea: “some moral laws might limit pleasure and enjoyment in the short term but in the long term minimize suffering and maximize human fulfillment.” Like a meta analysis on the societal level. Not an exact science, but an interesting concept in light of the depressing second order effects we see in how our current society operates sexually. https://www.kirkdurston.com/blog/unwin https://www.kirkdurston.com/blog/unwin
teekert 5y ago
They use the word "hacked", but I wonder if it is just "guessed" a simple password and failure to set mfa. Don't get me wrong, I despise the people that even try to guess the password, but calling it "hacking" is a missed opportunity to inform people about the dangers of simple passwords and single factor authentication. Again, not saying it wasn't "hacking" in this case. Or maybe I have the wrong definition of hacking (I'd even prefer they called it black hat hacking if it were real "hacking" but ah well).
- polote 5y ago
  > but I wonder if it is just "guessed" a simple password and failure to set mfa. She say, they kept stealing her password, so it was probably that the hacker had access to her email then he was able to keep changing the OF password
  - teekert 5y ago
    Yeah, if she would have had a nerd in her life she/he would have realized this and reset the email, applied 2fa, make sure the Phone is up to date, check for malicious apps etc (maybe reset phone and reinstall laptop OS even). The fact the password stealing happened more than once should really set of a lot of alarm bells. Indeed, very much focused on her email account. Again, not saying this was her mistake, I know many people that would react this way. I hope they call me when it happens.
throwaway287391 5y ago
> The company said Tina did not report the racial slur and it was not detected by the site's moderation system because it was pluralised. Wow, that's not a very robust moderation system...
- kderbyma 5y ago
  but they certainly feeler justified with 20% cut.....I thought apple was bad....but OF is truly despicable.....at least apple provided more value than it stole.....porn is free....advice is free....chatting is free....fuck....it's such a bad platform.
jarofgreen 5y ago
Meta question ; seems like a few pieces recently. Eg https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/jul/10/where-else-can-i-make-a-months-rent-in-two-days-the-unlikely-stars-of-onlyfans https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/jul/10/where-else-can... I think I saw a comment about how they are looking to IPO soon - is their press office working overtime?
Fnoord 5y ago
> For creators who do receive abuse, the site allows them to mute or block that fan. However, the platform automatically gives anyone who has been blocked - regardless of the reason - a refund of their active subscription. > Many creators who spoke to the BBC felt this policy was misused by fans and some said it can incentivise them to be rude or provocative, as their monthly subscriptions come to a close. Others added this made them feel penalised for being mistreated. Client-side block. They can still see your content, and pay for it, but you won't be reading their messages (whatever they are). Since its send by platform, and not E2EE, the content is available for the platform and/or LE. As for OnlyFans not responding to "I'm going to kill your children." and "I'm going to rape you." (among others), that makes me very emotional that they don't do anything with this. Threatening to rape someone should be illegal, and threatening to kill someone's children is for me worse than threatening to kill me. They should have reported this to authorities, but instead they went for short term benefits by pulling the ostrich card. Shame on you, OnlyFans.
- bjoli 5y ago
  How is it in the US? "Olaga hot" ("unlawful threat") is a crime in Sweden with a maximum punishment of 4 years in prison. 1 year maximum for the lower grade. 4 for the higher one. Time served is usually half that
- mullen 5y ago
  The woman should have called the police and filed a police report. Yes, the police are not going to do much, but you got the paperwork going. Then she could submit that to OnlyFans and inform them a crime is being committed on their platform. That puts everything on them. Unfortunately, expecting OF to take care of the issue is really naive.
  - Fnoord 5y ago
    They could get away with claiming it'd be an 'alleged crime'. The police should indeed get involved if person A says to person B 'I am going to rape you' (especially after 'I know where you live'), but for sure I would want to archive (hide) the data for forensic reasons. In that regard, it might be stupid to signal the (alleged) criminal, whereas after they view the police report they may assume the evidence is archived by the police (unless notified otherwise). Still, by not doing anything they allow themselves being a platform for such criminal activity. Is that worth the payment of 20% of the monthly subscription? Apparently it is. That's an incentive problem right there.
Khaine 5y ago
I’m not anti-sex or anti-sex work, but I think onlyfans is evil. They have a business model, that is perfected to extract as much money from whales as possible. Performers appear to have ‘relationships’ with their subscribers, encourage them to tip, buy ‘customs’, and ‘engage’ with them. These sad lonely sexless men spend all their money on this shit. It consumes them, until they are out of money, then it destroys them. It warps their expectations of relationships further impacting their datability, driving them even more towards onlyfans. Now, this is only a minority of their users, but makes a large proportion of their revenue. For healthy people, only fans can be great.
- zahrc 5y ago
  > These sad lonely sexless men spend all their money on this shit. It consumes them, until they are out of money, then it destroys them. It warps their expectations of relationships further impacting their datability, driving them even more towards onlyfans. IF I’d be that desperate I’d rather stick to a prostitute. Regular uploads aren’t even guaranteed. You could be paying something where you don’t even know the value of. I hate this world of, everything needs to be a subscription… On another note, I’m also glad that I’m in a healthy and happy relationship in my late 20’s because tinder in my area is 90% Instagram and OnlyFans ads.
  - Khaine 5y ago
    These people want a relationship, and intimacy. They want the feeling of being loved more than sex. That’s why its a para-social relationship. These people believe that the performer thinks they are special, that they have a different and special relationship with the performer. The performer truely understands them, and they understand the performer. They twist and warp anything so that its fits that worldview. Maybe they buy a video, and in it the performer says, “this is just for you”. Now, they may say that any lots of videos as part of the role play or whatever. But to these people, thats a sign of their special relationship. That’s why they can be dangerous. If that spell is ever broken for example they find out the performer has a boyfriend. They can lash out violently, or look to humiliate the performer by sending their work to friends and relatives.
RickJWagner 5y ago
I hope the BBC does a follow-up article in about 20 years. My theory is that the 'changed lives' will most often not be prosperous. Call me wrong, but I imagine it's going to be right.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
specialist 5y ago
I just want to call this out: > But in January, a hacker seized control of [Tina Bean's] account, blackmailed her for $150 and uploaded streams of IS terror videos. This is complete bullshit. And continues to worsen. What's the fix? How do we prevent sockpuppets, impersonation, account seizures? What should we call this category of crime? Stop using username & password credentials? Issue everyone key fobs? Use the secure enclaves in our phones (iOS, Android)? -- Repeating myself: One of my coworkers passed and their Facebook profile got pwned. And there was no recourse. I'm still so angry about this I could just spit. My family has been doing eldercare. The predation is just terrible. It's an industry. And the people targeted have zero ability to protect themselves. Of course, at some point I'll also become the prey. -- PS- FWIW, I'm trying to figure out how to advocate for a fix. I've made some pathetic attempts to draft a position paper, problem statement. Next step would be draft model legislation. Then start shopping it around. My first motivating "use case" is prevent profiles on DoorDash, Yelp etc from being seized by imposters. So do something like require those profile hosting services to link to IRL licenses. Most every trade has some kind of licensing and credentialing authority. Restaurants, nail salons, health care providers, etc. Ideas?
TheMagicHorsey 5y ago
I wonder why this level of scrutiny is not applied to strip clubs and the local Hooters franchise. The same grift and mental issues on Only Fans is present in strip clubs and Hooters too. Basically there's two sets of victims in these places. First, the girls are only learning one skillset. That is, how to identify marks who have money, and how to get that money in the least amount of time. Once they learn that skillset in their twenties, its very difficult for them to transition to an apprenticeship in any other profession, because the entry level in other jobs will never compare in earning potential to what they make with their sexual grift. Essentially they are mentally damaged forever and its difficult for them to become, for example, a nurse or a developer. The second set of victims are the guys who are getting fleeced. Perhaps the word victim here is wrong. Maybe the right word is marks. The guys who participate in these transactions are mentally what one used to call "losers" but again I hate labels. Lets just call it what it is. These are men, who for various reasons, are not able to attract the kind of female attention they want without entering into a monetary transaction with said females. That's very simple, and should be non-controversial to say. Just like we say, someone who goes to a restaurant enters into a monetary transaction for Chicken Vindaloo, because they aren't capable of getting the Vindaloo they want by using non-monetary means (i.e. cooking). There's no value judgment, but guys who use strip clubs, Hooters, and Only Fans are basically screwing their brains up permanently. They think the kind of attention they get from pretty girls at these venues, is the kind of attention they "deserve". So their expectations in the real world become badly calibrated. Have you ever seen a fifty year old doofus hitting on 20 year olds in a bar, getting rejected hard, and being surprised? That's a habitual strip club client right there. The other way their brains get screwed up is that these men hang around so many grifters that they think all women are grifters. I'm not going to get into George Bernard Shaws theory that all marriage is a grift, but I think we can all agree that the level of grift in the average marriage is much different and has a different effect on you then the kind of grift that happens in strip clubs and on Only Fans. Basically if you hang around strippers, you'll start to think every woman has a hand in your pocket. It's very sad. It's kind of like when a kid is abused they start to mistrust all adults. Same thing. These men can become misogynists because their sample data has become so skewed. Anyway, I'm' kind of sick of how media treats online grift as somehow creating a set of problems that wasn't already there. Go to any small town with poor economic prospects and there's some number of desperate young women who are training in the grift. And there's also some number of men who are the marks. Moving all of this online just makes it so more highly sought after people in both sides of the market have more opportunities. But the problems are the same no matter where the grift is happening.
psychlops 5y ago
"The company said Tina did not report the racial slur and it was not detected by the site's moderation system because it was pluralised." Drat! If only there were some way a moderation system could detect these clever variations. Hackers are always one step ahead with pluralization.
underseacables 5y ago
What I think it’s going to be more interesting is the personal responsibility aspect. In ten or fifteen years from now, when only fans content starts coming up as these folks are applying for regular jobs in the workforce, pursuing political office, etc. I expect many will claim that they were groomed and forced to do it. That is to say, I don’t think young people today really appreciate what they are doing and how having an OF is going to affect their life going forward.
- dogorman 5y ago
  > I expect many will claim that they were groomed and forced to do it. Many of them might well be. How can you really tell what kind of situation is going on behind the camera? Abusive relationships can hide in plain sight for years.
  - underseacables 5y ago
    That is very true. I’m interested to see how many will use that as a way to redirect responsibility away from the decisions that they made, and just saying hey it was not my fault. It will be difficult to tell who was groomed and who is just trying to minimize their own responsibility.
thepasswordis 5y ago
Who could have possibly predicted that a company which mechanized the process of targeting and turning young teenage girls into prostitutes would have a dark side? If onlyfans happened in person, the people behind it would be in prison. They market to teenagers, and as soon as they turn 18 encourage them to prostitute themselves to men over the internet. It is a disgusting, horrible company that we should be ashamed exists. This company, like other pimps before them, have persuaded young, often times desperate women, into packaging and marketing their humanity to people. It taught them that their friendship and companionship is a product to be sold.
- Taylor_OD 5y ago
  < Who could have possibly predicted that a company which mechanized the process of targeting and turning young teenage girls into prostitutes would have a dark side? While I might ethically disagree with their business model I don't think your assessment is fair. Their platform is certainly a step up from those same individuals getting into the industrial porn industry.
  - jeffreyrogers 5y ago
    But the vast majority of them wouldn't get involved in the industrial porn industry, so you reduce the harm to a small number of people while increasing the harm (by a lesser degree) to a much larger number of people.
    - edmundsauto 5y ago
      This sounds like a utilitarian argument. Unfortunately, that means the weights of the increased harm vs. decreased harm are what determines the morality. And those are arbitrary. one could believe it is low harm for a young person to use OF, but massive harm to be in the traditional porn industry, and conclude that OF is a net plus. Ie, this argument is circular and based on preconceptions rather than a critical examination of the evidence.
      - 5y ago
throwawayof1234 5y ago
Made a throwaway to post this. For various reasons I happen to know personally many (>10) women who've created an OnlyFans or otherwise participate in online sex work. I know these people well enough that we discuss things like our mental health state / conditions. One commonality that I have found is that many of the women who start an OF are already suffering from a mental health condition that has as a symptom hypersexuality or a need for attention / attention-seeking behaviors. One of the more common diagnosed mental health issues these women have is bipolar disorder, where in their manic states they experience hypersexuality. One perspective is that online sex work provides a monetarily lucrative outlet for urges these women have to cope with regardless of their participation online. On the other hand, the consequences for online sex work to your "regular" life are much more far-reaching vs expressing these urges with individuals in person. Of a bigger concern to me is that my conversations with these women have indicated that participating in OnlyFans actually deepens their trauma and mental health issues and may exacerbate their attention-seeking behaviors. Many of them have a traumatic past which directly ties into their relationships with men and sex, and participating in OF reinforces the outcomes of that trauma rather than providing them a pathway to reforge how they structure relationships with men and how they think about sex in their lives. Being involved in online sex work can be deeply traumatizing for the workers, and it is tied directly into the fact that they're both selling attention while seeking attention, and the facsimile but not the reality of a human emotional connection. I don't know what the answer is, but I really wish that in the US we had universal healthcare including for mental healthcare. There are whole generations of women who are deeply traumatized by their upbringing and the lack of strong male role models in their lives. The epidemic of single motherhood across demographic boundaries within the US has massively contributed to our current mental healthcare crisis, and lack of a father figure that is a /good/ father heavily contributes to broken relationship models with men for these women.
- throwawaay_3424 5y ago
  not my problem
- ausbah 5y ago
  I don't buy the narrative of children from single mother homes faring worse due to not having a "father figure". the hardships fared by such children stem from lack of adequate family finances and lack of parental interaction due to overwork. those families need more financial help, not lamenting about "two parents is always better than one"
bena 5y ago
Is the very concept of the parasocial relationship here the problem? Previously, only a very select few people would be able to be the subject of such a relationship. So, it's fairly easy to protect them from the pitfalls of it. Bodyguards, gated communities, limited in-person socialization with non-peers, etc. In other words, celebrities. Of any stripe. They've been dealing with this issue for years. But now, we have YouTube, Twitch, OnlyFans, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and probably dozens more I can't even think of and have never been exposed to. And someone making rent by slinging nudes on OnlyFans doesn't have enough cash for an entourage. They don't have the lawyers and accountants available to advise them and help them set up companies to make certain transactions to disguise certain facts about themselves. Like where they live. They also don't have anyone who is decent enough at public relations to help them navigate the fine line between seeming personable while not sharing too many facts about themselves. But they'll have a segment of people completely engaged with them in one of these parasocial relationships. And in a way they do encourage it. And in another real way, it's the job they've chosen. When any of them talk about "building relationships with viewers" and how it's important, that's the kind of relationship they are talking about: a parasocial relationship. The vast majority of people do not have the means to deal with parasocial relationships that go wrong. And even those with the means sometimes get hit. Ronald Reagan was shot by a man trying to impress Jodie Foster. And I think those building parasocial relationships that contain sexual intimacy are particularly at risk.
tablespoon 5y ago
> The perpetrator then spammed more than 40 of her fans, calling them the N-word, before stealing all of her photos and posting them on a porn site.... > The company said Tina did not report the racial slur and it was not detected by the site's moderation system because it was pluralised. Wow, what a shit-tier auto-moderation system.
foofoo4u 5y ago
Interesting discussion about OnlyFans recently released for anyone interested. https://open.spotify.com/episode/50q2Ff1ysf8lXT0XXQJEUb?si=LmmMSHd6QeKgMPbRi3DvTA&dl_branch=1 https://open.spotify.com/episode/50q2Ff1ysf8lXT0XXQJEUb?si=L...
- digianarchist 5y ago
  I'll pass on Bari Weiss but Courtland did an Indie Hackers episode with two OnlyFans creators. https://pca.st/a4elqfcm https://pca.st/a4elqfcm
icare_1er 5y ago
I'm curious, is there a gender-gap in terms of income on OnlyFans ? Are the liberals doing anything about that ?
AzzieElbab 5y ago
Here is a headline that sounds suggestive, and an article looking to vilify the safest form of sex work in existence.
failwhaleshark 5y ago
I'm sex-/sex-worker-/kink-positive, so I don't care what consenting adults do or do for work. I know an OnlyFans creator in my apartments. She's a conceited, entitled, selfish, horrible human being who I turned-down a BJ from because I didn't know where her mouth has been (think herpes). She's not even hot but still makes a living at it, so that means there's enough of an audience of men for basically any woman. She spent $13k on plastic surgery and doesn't have anything to show for it... not my type. Her voice is raspy-wrecked from hard living drinking and smoking too much. She's like a really bad restaurant owner without a scalable business or an exit strategy. I, OTOH, produce/edit/star as male hetero talent in unidentifiable, noncommercial content on PornHub for fun. I don't care what people do, but it's probably not a career without a personality, branding, exceptionally good genes, and a plastic surgeon. If it's your thing, go for it.
macrowhat 5y ago
God, these whores make me want to vomit

343 points by adrian_mrd 5y ago

DaniloDias 5y ago

Seedy, sad product.

girvo 5y ago
I'd love for you to expand on that opinion. In some ways I think it's a good product that gives some measure of control (and a _lot_ of the money) back to the people who star in and create pornographic content. The existing industry is exploitative and predatory, and from my admittedly not-very-well-versed vantage point, OnlyFans is much less so due to the very nature of its product and who its content creators are.
- recn14b 5y ago
  > OnlyFans is much less so due to the very nature of its product and who its content creators are. This is an extremely generous view. It's well known that cam sites often feature trafficked victims. Why wouldn't you also assume that an OnlyFans is also run by a trafficker? You cited yourself that the industry is predatory and exploitative. Do you honestly believe that most of these woman truly made this choice themselves?
  - ioseph 5y ago
    On one hand not requiring to go through a studio would make it easier for trafficking, but porn studios don't exactly have a fantastic track record when it comes to human rights. On the other hand for individual content makers using this platform gives them far more control over the type of content they produce and a fairer share of the profit.
    - girvo 5y ago
      You've summed up my opinion entirely in two sentences haha, well done. That's why my original comment was prefaced with "in some ways".
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
    I can't speak for the person you're responding to, but I don't think an assumption of human trafficking by the site's owners is supported given that some other site's owners did human trafficking. By all accounts I've been exposed to, models on OnlyFans earn much better than models on other sites. That seems like a prima facie reason to believe it's overall a good thing, and the evidence would need to be presented to demonstrate otherwise. Starting with the assumption the owner of something you don't like is a human trafficker is not a good way to make a convincing case against OnlyFans.
    - lxmorj 5y ago
      I believe he is not saying the site owners are traffickers but that some OF channels could be trafficker run.
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
        Oh, if that's so then I'm even less clear on what we expect OnlyFans to do about it, unless we are going to ban the whole sector of sex work. Some restaurants launder money for the mob too, but we still have restaurants. If there are sensible steps OF could take to reduce the incidence of this, then they should. But it's hard for me to think of what that might be, given any response made over the internet could easily be coerced. Are there ideas I can read up on?
        kyleee 5y ago
        Let's engage in a hypothetical to flesh out your position; if 10% of only fans accounts were victims of human trafficking, acting at the behest of their traffickers, what course(s) of action would you recommend for only fans (as a company), and from regulatory bodies?
        Cipater 5y ago
        How would OF know?
        5y ago
  - vmception 5y ago
    Earn, (which was acquired by Coinbase and shutdown/rebranded), did the same thing as OnlyFans, charging for direct messages. There are many services like that. Many content producers on OnlyFans switch away from subscription model to just freemium with paid direct messages. It is unnecessarily gendered to treat OnlyFans differently just because the many content creators on OnlyFans are women leading with their bodies. Maybe you weren't aware of other services that let people charge for DMs that simply didn't get associated with adult content, maybe that's not what you meant, but the comment you replied to said the OnlyFans platform is less about the nature of its product and more about who its content creators are, which you seemed to disagree with but then replied with a completely different comment.
    - the_doctah 5y ago
      >It requires pure misogyny to treat OnlyFans differently just because the content creators on OnlyFans are women leading with their bodies So if we took misogyny out of the equation no one would think OnlyFans favors attractive women?
      - vmception 5y ago
        It is no reason to treat the platform differently than other platforms
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- base698 5y ago
  Doesn't seem to be the case: https://mobile.twitter.com/aella_girl/status/1335725267340251137 https://mobile.twitter.com/aella_girl/status/133572526734025... Has MLM level distribution where only the top 2% or so make anything of consequence.
  - girvo 5y ago
    That doesn't really disagree with anything I wrote. I was mainly implicitly comparing it to "regular" pornography and cam-sites. The latter take huge percentages comparatively, and the former don't give percentages to most of their performers at all.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    What that says is of the accounts that make anything the average person makes $500. Which is about 7% of all accounts. Which isn't bad.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  Not OP, but IMO onlyfans is especially predatory because it makes it look easy to trade nudes for large amounts of cash. In reality very few people are going to be making above minimum wage, onlyfans is just like the rest of social media - a lottery that pays millions to a few winners and asks all the other participants to create content for next-to-nothing just to enter the lotto.
  - runawaybottle 5y ago
    I’d posit that OnlyFans operates on the freemium video games model where a few select whales generate all their money. You just really need to catch one person who is into you.
  - chii 5y ago
    > onlyfans is especially predatory if this is what you call predatory, then why isn't sports stars and film/music celebrity culture not predatory in the same way? I don't see the difference. I say let people do what they want, as long as they understand what they're doing and is informed of the (potential) consequences.
    - afarrell 5y ago
      People do say that about the music industry. Ask Kesha or Britney!
    - labster 5y ago
      Sports is predatory, see the NCAA monopoly. Music was well known in the last century for predatory contracts. People like Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey from the film industry are often called predators, and the casting couch is legendary. Celebrity culture is highly predatory with obsessive fans and stalker paparazzi. You’re right, no real difference.
      - nostromo 5y ago
        People are free to do something else if their dream job doesn’t pay them a wage they feel is fair.
smabie 5y ago
I think it's pretty great actually. How would you make it better?
- DaniloDias 5y ago
  I guess I’d stop commoditizing young men and women who haven’t had enough time to develop a career.
sergiotapia 5y ago
I agree with you. It's yet another boil on the internet's ass. Shameful shit.

superkuh 5y ago

The BBC is really digging deep and far away from OnlyFans itself in order to try to generate the moral outrage needed to justify their puritan anti-porn stance. Most of this article seems to be about things that happen outside of the website or instances where users violated the terms of service.

vmception 5y ago
The summary, I think, is that they should list calls to action for OnlyFans, or point out that the biggest tech giants are struggling with the same issues on their own platforms, ie. hackers, stalkers, 2-factor authentication, lack of live chat for support. BBC could have done a bit more to summarize calls to action instead of helping readers conflate multiple issues with preexisting biases. It is also a pretty decent reality for what creators can expect, right now. But, despite that I felt it was decently balanced. They accurately say the site has associations and can be used for other things. Just saying Youtube, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and others have the same issues would have been useful.
duxup 5y ago
Is it "moral outrage" if they asked why a creator's account was closed and it was reopened? This article seemed to be about a number of issues, not so much about the content.
rorykoehler 5y ago
I can't understand your position. OF is designed in such a way that it perpetuates certain types of behaviour. You can't hand wave away TOS transgressions when the whole system is setup for weirdo's to easily and repeatedly break the TOS.
- Manuel_D 5y ago
  It's not just TOS violations. Accounts getting hacked, unless there was a vulnerability on the company's side, is totally nonsensical to blame on the company. They have the ability to set up MFA but the creator didn't use it. And this happens on non-adult platforms, too.

cunthorpe 5y ago

I think that people need to understand that once they put themselves out there, especially in sex-fueled environments, they’re adding risk to their lives. They put their sex on full display and think “yeah this is totally fine” while it obviously carries some huge societal weight. I’m not justifying their actions, but also don’t be surprised when they happen. The world isn’t perfect yet. I don’t care much about OF, but I’m sure assholes send threats on any platform, and it’s not really a platform issue as long as they implement blocking and some sort of spam prevention.

ipnon 5y ago
We have a "women and children first" reflex. We seem to draw extraordinary attention to the troubles of beautiful, young women. Call it "damsel in distress."
ipaddr 5y ago
You get more threats posting about Trump pro or con these days. Using a platform like fansonly allows the star to moderate and use the platform to guard against safety issues. Fansonly is pay only which limits the spam can help identify the crazy.
throwawayboise 5y ago
We used to say, "play stupid games, win stupid prizes."
- aniforprez 5y ago
  Seems a bit harsh to call it "stupid". Sex work is work that will always have demand. It sucks that society looks down on it and the market for it is so skewed towards creeps that people feel unsafe doing it and face so much harassment when found out
  - EvilEy3 5y ago
    > Sex work is work that will always have demand Sure, doesn't make it a good or socially acceptable job though.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

650REDHAIR 5y ago

So our kids are getting older so I've been paying more attention to popular social networks and it's wild how many YouTubers, Twitch'ers, TikTok'ers, Instagram'ers have OF content directly linked from their non-porn bios. I don't like it, but I'm not sure what a good solution is. I mean, people are free to do what they'd like, but it's hard to police screen time 100% of the time and their peer group has a lot more access than they do so even if I can block it 100$ they'll be exposed to it somewhere else. We've talked about it and I feel like that's all I can do now. I just hate how normalized it feels when many of their social media "role models' turn to porn.

seattle_spring 5y ago
Related, it sucks that so much content nowadays is just a thinly veiled advertisement for OF pages.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  This is a result of youtube's policies. You can't run ads because your content is unacceptable but keep uploading videos, build your following and push fans to someone they can make money.
  - seattle_spring 5y ago
    Not just YouTube, but much of Reddit too. I'd hazard to say 50% of all /r/roastme posts are OnlyFans ads, for example.
- digianarchist 5y ago
  You can blame OnlyFans themselves. No search. No way to advertise on the platform. No discoverability.
- rawbot 5y ago
  Or for Patreon subs.
ryandrake 5y ago

intended 5y ago

If moderation scaled, most of these discussions would be moot. The most common route is some automation and outsourcing. Although the typical outsourcer may simply not be able to take on only fans content.

onlyafan 5y ago

The overlap between small-time OnlyFans creators and people hypervigilant about their privacy feels small. Streamers and idols have faced this problem for some time - with cases of people finding out where a streamer lives based on minutiae like reflections - but add porn and inexperience to the equation and it's not at all surprising that stalking behavior can get dangerously extreme. Storytime - a girl at my uni mentioned in our school's subreddit that she does OnlyFans. She made the comment from the same reddit account she used to advertise her profile and she also wrote many regular SFW comments and posts. So... she was pretty hot, and me being a horny and curious college dude, I tried to see if I could casually ID them. Yes, kind of creepy, I know. Horniness aside, the point is, it took me like 10 minutes to find their real name and identity, based only on information they decided it would be safe to publicly associate with themselves. Rest assured, I didn't do anything with that knowledge and I have no intention of ever doing so, obviously. Really big school, completely different majors that spend time in completely different parts of campus, I doubt I'd even notice if I ever crossed paths with them. People who aren't techies who always have privacy on the mind often drastically underestimate how little information is needed to uniquely ID them. In this case, a) she posted in a specific school sub, b) she posted about her grades in a major-specific class, c) she mentioned her ethnicity in a regular SFW post, and d) she shared plenty of pictures of her body sans face from a variety of angles. Well now I can know that there's an X-ethnicity person in Y grade of Z major at ABC university who has an identifying tattoo and a relatively uncommon hairstyle... Literally 2 or 3 Google searches later and I had a result. As I'm sure is often the case, she wasn't particularly concerned about the privacy of her regular, real life identity, presumably with the assumption that it wouldn't ever be connected to her OnlyFans. Name on school project websites, articles in the school newspaper, LinkedIns, public instagrams, things like that. It doesn't take long to scroll through google images and recognize a body. And that's probably what's unintuitive about this risk - someone might think "well there are another 300 people who fit that description, so I'm good". But with computers, it's trivial to look through 300 people. Someone crazy enough could easily sift through 3000 pictures searching for you. They know roughly what you look like. And if the number of people fitting your description is only around 30, it's hard to even call that a search - a few seconds on a page or two is all it takes to ID you. The good thing is that the vast majority of people are probably harmless. The occasional overly curious person like me might cross some boundaries and find out who you are, but it's not likely they'll have any desire to contact you in any way. The bad thing, of course, is that it only takes 1 nutcase to instill a lot of fear. I don't think there's a solution other than more education - assuming this kind of content creation continues to exist without heavy regulation. Maybe OnlyFans could play a part. I'm sure most OF creators vaguely know the risks, but they may not be used to thinking carefully about sharing seemingly innocuous and vague details. Like, "Did you know you might be stalked? Yes. Did you know you might be stalked and identified if you share a picture of your dog at the park? Uh, what!?". A quick 15 minute video on protecting yourself from the crazies could probably prevent a lot of dangerous situations. "Don't share your school or major", "Don't take pictures near street signs or stores", "Don't wear jewelry you usually wear", etc.

throwmeawaydddy 5y ago

Fire up the throwaway! Not 100% related to the article, but directly related. I worked as developer for a product in the same niche ("democratizing adult content"). I spent almost 2 years working on the frontend, devops, and building out the analytics engine (all pre-covid). Anyway, on to the comment at hand. We had a small number of users compared to OnlyFans (when I left, there were about 20K active content creators). The average monthly payment was $5000 (skewed massively by the top 5%). We had phone support for our larger creator. One very common request was to instantly delete all data and stop processing future orders. Usually, the requester was in a pretty agitated/distraught state (I'd occasionally get escalated calls to "confirm" that all data would be deleted ASAP and no copies would be kept). I spoke to a few of our creators and most would be desperate to scrub all of their content form the internet because: a) A parent/relative found out. b) A fellow employee at their 9-5 stumbled on their account. c) A 'fan' went nuclear and was waging all out digital war. One creator had a former subscriber sending data dumps to all their Facebook and Instagram friends (they also spammed every public email address at their 'normal' workplace, which was a local government). We would occasionally get demanding letters requesting the removal of content from third party sites (Pornhub, Reddit, etc). The creators would somehow be surprised when they realised we couldn't remove content from other websites. The experience was very depressing.

vlunkr 5y ago
This summarizes my opinion on OF. I'm not sure if it's unethical or predatory, but I'm quite sure that most people posting content there are going to regret it very soon.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- standardUser 5y ago
  Why are you "quite sure"? What are the consequences of having naked photos of yourself out there in the world that would cause most people to regret it?

mkl95 5y ago

No piece of software can magically prevent its content from being shared. People were divulging private conversations and other stuff on Twitter years before OnlyFans was a thing.

shadilay 5y ago
That's why you need hardware. eg Pluton
- alpaca128 5y ago
  No hardware or software can prevent copying of content. If something is visible on a screen or audible on a speaker you can copy and redistribute it without restrictions. It's only a bit trickier with video games because those actually need to stay in their original format to be useful, and may use DRM, but so far that didn't stop people either.
  - quenix 5y ago
    For those interested, a formalisation of this problem: the "Analog Hole" [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

happyweasel 5y ago

Aren't OnlyFans (and similar companies) another way to launder money?

dehrmann 5y ago
People have laundered money with Bing/Adsense arbitrage.
jtokoph 5y ago
Is there an efficient way to get cash into the system? Or are you saying people will donate via credit card on OnlyFans but they’re really paying for illicit things?
jedberg 5y ago
You can easily launder money through any two sided market. OF is no different in that regard.
- strogonoff 5y ago
  In normal two-sided markets goods or services are being exchanged, making it feasible to check whether the price paid reflects reality in any way. On the other hand, it is very difficult to prove that someone is faking being a fan, so laundering can be as easy as giving a friend N dollars of suspect cash or cryptocurrency and having them pay you N minus the hassle fee through Twitch/OnlyFans/etc. from their credit card.
  - 12ian34 5y ago
    You could probably use web analytics to reasonably estimate engagement and calculate engagement per spend, comparing that between users.
henrikschroder 5y ago
If you have an internet service where you pay out money to users, you are required to have a plan for how to prevent money laundering. The SEC does not fuck around when it comes to that, and if you fuck up, your payment processors will drop you immediately. Also, only accepting credit card payments to move money into the system goes a long way to protect you from money laundering.

ChatterManlike 5y ago

This is a throwaway account and the account name is just serendipity from the Correct Horse Battery Staple password generator. Eerie but it's true. Unlike Patreon, they do not charge only once a month but continuously as subscriptions renew, as pay-to-view videos are purchased etc. A hundred dollar monthly Patreon bill is much more noticeable than a few bucks every few days. Also, it's possible to tip on posts but the minimum tip is five dollars. The sum of these policies mean using Onlyfans requires real careful budgeting and I do not think most people are good at budgeting especially at budgeting for porn... So I wouldn't be surprised if we were to read stories about people getting bankrupted by this site -- obviously most people would not be particularly forthcoming about getting bankrupted by porn...

dannyw 5y ago
Sites like OF thrive on whales. People spending thousands per month on a creator usually can budget.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
When OF started getting popular I was curious to see how much it was. Needles to say any inkling of paying for anything sunk below the flow when I saw people were charging $20 a month. Plus...it's a nude photo or video. How in the hell is that worth that price today? Pornography online has been free for basically 3 decades.

kristopolous 5y ago

Being curious about the onboarding, about 2 years ago I signed up and starting doing non-adult content on OF. It's really similar to patreon, substack or bandcamp; optionally paywalled content on a freemium model. The onboarding and experience of OF is somewhat odd in that it didn't ever say "this is for you to post explicit content". It's structured for it sure, but every page is isolated. Even on the splash it just kinda vaguely suggests it is for pornography. Their blog doesn't really suggest it either: https://blog.onlyfans.com/ https://blog.onlyfans.com/ In fact they seem to want to get away from it. Aaron Carter, Tyga, Cardi B are on it and earn millions from it. Actress Blac Chyna might be pulling in $20mil from it (https://influencermarketinghub.com/onlyfans-top-earners/ https://influencermarketinghub.com/onlyfans-top-earners/) I wonder how much non-pornography is on there. The tools and structure are generic enough for essentially any kind of content; say meditation, tutoring, someone doing an audiobook. A fitness instructor Jem Wolfie supposedly pulls in around $30,000/day, about 8 million total (https://blog.onlyfans.com/meet-jem-wolfie/ https://blog.onlyfans.com/meet-jem-wolfie/). I assume most of the accounts are porno though. All the messages I get are from sex related bots trying to sell me products/services assuming I produce adult content or are looking to consume it. I wonder if OF just sort of adopted the primary use case like Tumblr unintentionally became one of the biggest porn sites. It's an interesting platform to answer the problem of trying to monetize an online following.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
chasd00 5y ago
It didn’t start out for porn but grew in that direction. Iirc when it started taking off there weren’t that happy about the porn but bank account deposits are a hell of a drug.
- genewitch 5y ago
  one can see this on twitch, as well. A couple of years ago the least tame streamers were working out or doing "Let's Dance" - but since January of this year the number of people in "hot tubs" and bikinis has gone up exponentially. The primary issue (and one i have with it even if i am assuredly not a prude) is that Twitch is aimed at people under 20, their largest self-reported demographic is ages 13-19. Twitch (and let's be honest here, this is Amazon we're talking about) recently banned the top two female streamers for "showing hips in a suggestive way" or whatever. Both of these women have OF pages prominently advertised as well. Both are back now, and there's no indication that they've changed their overall model / operation on Twitch. I imagine that Twitch telling the 4,000,000 'followers' to these two streamers that they didn't want their money anymore probably backfired. My understanding is that money transacted through amazon for twitch is split in two - that is, the streamer gets $2.50 for every subscription, Amazon gets the other $2.50. If the conversion for those 4 million followers is 1% subscriptions, Twitch taking a hit of $200,000 a month might seem insignificant, but that's just the conversion for those two streamers - not the overall loss of subscriptions by annoying 4 million people!

stared 5y ago

I was surprised why OnlyFans is so popular. All in all, there is no shortage of free erotic materials online (https://observablehq.com/@stared/tree-of-reddit-sex-life https://observablehq.com/@stared/tree-of-reddit-sex-life for a small subset). I got an insight from "The Surprising Psychology Of OnlyFans Simps by Charisma on Command" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auG2E53dFas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auG2E53dFas) that subscribers buy attention rather than sex.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> I got an insight from "The Surprising Psychology Of OnlyFans Simps by Charisma on Command" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auG2E53dFas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auG2E53dFas) that subscribers buy attention rather than sex. That's like one of the oldest i and vest known insights about sex work generally, so I’m not surprised that it is reflected in OF. (Its even more obviously true of its more celebrity- but less porn-focussed cousin, Cameo.)
throw_m239339 5y ago
I think OnlyFans is "different" because unlike other pornsites or camsites, users kind of create a "closer" relationship to the porn performer since they have access to "exclusive" content. As you said it's called "simping" and IMHO it can go south pretty quickly given how crazy people can be. Some deluded fans genuinly think they are in a real and genuine relationship with the porn performer. It's dangerous.
nly 5y ago
It's more like "emotional prostitution" than porn
ipnon 5y ago
People enjoy the reciprocation of donating then receiving an award. It turns the passive activity of watching pornography into an interactive game.
acatton 5y ago
> subscribers buy attention rather than sex. That's how the Minitel[1] got popular in France. They had these chat services where one paid per minute to chat with "women in your area" (It was mostly male operators handling multiple conversation simultaneously[2]) These services have always existed, and were always in demand, the only difference is technology and business models. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel (basically the french version of the internet, ahead of its time) [2] In French: https://www.nouvelobs.com/rue89/rue89-rue69/20120629.RUE0957/je-m-appelle-jean-marc-et-j-ai-ete-animatrice-de-minitel-rose.html https://www.nouvelobs.com/rue89/rue89-rue69/20120629.RUE0957... "My name is Jean-Marc and I was 'female moderator' of erotic Minitel"

nazrulmum10 5y ago

'I'm going to hunt you down'

jeroenhd 5y ago

I think most of these problems stem from the fact that the lack of moderation and easy termination of subscriptions is exactly what has made only fans possible as a platform. When a website starts moderating user generated content, its legal status changes and suddenly the company could be held responsible for what happens on the platform. On a platform that's used mainly for sex work (which is still strictly legal in many countries around the world!), that distinction may be all that stands between fines, bans or even jail time, even in what would be considered more progressive countries. The easy refunds are essential because the payment provider networks will drop you the moment you get too many chargebacks filed against you. The sex industry in general has a problem getting payment from most credit card providers, because people will often do chargebacks when their significant other/family/friends find out about statements on their credit cards, increasing the risk for the payment provider. There's also a certain sense of puritanism in many payment providers, especially American ones from what I've read, and that doesn't help. As for copying and sharing illicit material, that's a risk that comes with selling any digital media. OnlyFans can't do anything about that. The biggest entertainment companies in the world have tried, and high quality rips from Disney+ and Netflix still reach the web. In general, OnlyFans is a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that it brings freedom to individuals to perform sex work from the safety and comfort of their own home, without shady back alley deals whatsoever. However, it's also a curse because popularisation of sex work inevitably reinforces the sexualisation (mostly) of women. Easy websites also have little to prevent abuse from forced sex work, and I'm sure the scum willing to trade human beings and force them into brothels have seen the opportunities here. Lastly, easy entrance to sex work might lead to more people joining in reluctantly because they see no other way to pay for rent or education. Sex workers are part of any society, have been for all of history and will probably always be in the future. I don't see that as a problem, as long as people do it out of their own volition. However, these websites don't exist in a vacuum, and as long as others stigmatise sex work, joining the industry will come with certain risks for exposure and blackmail. No platform can prevent social issues, no matter how hard YouTube and Twitter claim they're on top of things like misinformation and illicit material. The problem is simply not one of a technical or a business nature. Having said that, I'm sure there's a market for DeepFake-style face/environment replacements. Deepfake a convincing face from thispersondoesnotexist.com onto yourself, replace the background with furniture from a similar generator, and you could severely reduce the risks that come with selling explicit media. It still doesn't solve the core problem of blackmail and such (people can and will find out, and stalkers are obsessed enough), but it can reduce the risk of those conscious about their privacy despite the nature of their job.

Bayart 5y ago

Who knew a site which thrives on abolishing all personal boundaries in digital prostitution would have problems. You can't expect customers to be courteous and professional with you if the product is sex, all the more so if you're leveraging the illusion of a social relationship. It's a one or the other proposition. There's no in-between, there's no picking both. The entire thing is schizophrenic.

throw_m239339 5y ago
But hey, "sex work is work"! We're not going to solve anything with that kind of simplistic catchphrase that mask all the problems regarding this sort of activity. That has never helped and it's frankly flat out false. Prostitution or porn isn't just work for the majority of the women involved in that 'industry' that victimizes them.
- Bayart 5y ago
  I completely agree ! I don't know what would lead you to believe I take sex work as just another trade. Quite the opposite, I assert that because it is not simply « a job », you can't treat it as such and blur boundaries while expecting to be safe, be it physically or mentally. I think the entire model is noxious, save for whoever's collecting the money and conveniently washing their hands of any responsibility.
hnbad 5y ago
You might want to reevaluate the reasons why you think this is self-evident and where they come from. It's true that these problems are unavoidable in the current status quo of society but that's almost tautological. The question is why that is, what factors contribute to this and whether we can and should overcome them. EDIT: To be clear, this does not mean that sex work wouldn't/shouldn't ultimately be abolished, but saying essentially "well, you try to sell sex as a service, so of course you'll be abused and violated" borders on victim blaming and doesn't address the problem anymore than a doctor saying "if it hurts when you touch there, just stop touching there".
KaiserPro 5y ago

imwillofficial 5y ago

This ties into an interesting article I read today. Goes deep on the idea: “some moral laws might limit pleasure and enjoyment in the short term but in the long term minimize suffering and maximize human fulfillment.” Like a meta analysis on the societal level. Not an exact science, but an interesting concept in light of the depressing second order effects we see in how our current society operates sexually. https://www.kirkdurston.com/blog/unwin https://www.kirkdurston.com/blog/unwin

teekert 5y ago

They use the word "hacked", but I wonder if it is just "guessed" a simple password and failure to set mfa. Don't get me wrong, I despise the people that even try to guess the password, but calling it "hacking" is a missed opportunity to inform people about the dangers of simple passwords and single factor authentication. Again, not saying it wasn't "hacking" in this case. Or maybe I have the wrong definition of hacking (I'd even prefer they called it black hat hacking if it were real "hacking" but ah well).

polote 5y ago
> but I wonder if it is just "guessed" a simple password and failure to set mfa. She say, they kept stealing her password, so it was probably that the hacker had access to her email then he was able to keep changing the OF password
- teekert 5y ago
  Yeah, if she would have had a nerd in her life she/he would have realized this and reset the email, applied 2fa, make sure the Phone is up to date, check for malicious apps etc (maybe reset phone and reinstall laptop OS even). The fact the password stealing happened more than once should really set of a lot of alarm bells. Indeed, very much focused on her email account. Again, not saying this was her mistake, I know many people that would react this way. I hope they call me when it happens.

throwaway287391 5y ago

> The company said Tina did not report the racial slur and it was not detected by the site's moderation system because it was pluralised. Wow, that's not a very robust moderation system...

kderbyma 5y ago
but they certainly feeler justified with 20% cut.....I thought apple was bad....but OF is truly despicable.....at least apple provided more value than it stole.....porn is free....advice is free....chatting is free....fuck....it's such a bad platform.

jarofgreen 5y ago

Meta question ; seems like a few pieces recently. Eg https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/jul/10/where-else-can-i-make-a-months-rent-in-two-days-the-unlikely-stars-of-onlyfans https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/jul/10/where-else-can... I think I saw a comment about how they are looking to IPO soon - is their press office working overtime?

Fnoord 5y ago

> For creators who do receive abuse, the site allows them to mute or block that fan. However, the platform automatically gives anyone who has been blocked - regardless of the reason - a refund of their active subscription. > Many creators who spoke to the BBC felt this policy was misused by fans and some said it can incentivise them to be rude or provocative, as their monthly subscriptions come to a close. Others added this made them feel penalised for being mistreated. Client-side block. They can still see your content, and pay for it, but you won't be reading their messages (whatever they are). Since its send by platform, and not E2EE, the content is available for the platform and/or LE. As for OnlyFans not responding to "I'm going to kill your children." and "I'm going to rape you." (among others), that makes me very emotional that they don't do anything with this. Threatening to rape someone should be illegal, and threatening to kill someone's children is for me worse than threatening to kill me. They should have reported this to authorities, but instead they went for short term benefits by pulling the ostrich card. Shame on you, OnlyFans.

bjoli 5y ago
How is it in the US? "Olaga hot" ("unlawful threat") is a crime in Sweden with a maximum punishment of 4 years in prison. 1 year maximum for the lower grade. 4 for the higher one. Time served is usually half that
mullen 5y ago
The woman should have called the police and filed a police report. Yes, the police are not going to do much, but you got the paperwork going. Then she could submit that to OnlyFans and inform them a crime is being committed on their platform. That puts everything on them. Unfortunately, expecting OF to take care of the issue is really naive.
- Fnoord 5y ago
  They could get away with claiming it'd be an 'alleged crime'. The police should indeed get involved if person A says to person B 'I am going to rape you' (especially after 'I know where you live'), but for sure I would want to archive (hide) the data for forensic reasons. In that regard, it might be stupid to signal the (alleged) criminal, whereas after they view the police report they may assume the evidence is archived by the police (unless notified otherwise). Still, by not doing anything they allow themselves being a platform for such criminal activity. Is that worth the payment of 20% of the monthly subscription? Apparently it is. That's an incentive problem right there.

Khaine 5y ago

I’m not anti-sex or anti-sex work, but I think onlyfans is evil. They have a business model, that is perfected to extract as much money from whales as possible. Performers appear to have ‘relationships’ with their subscribers, encourage them to tip, buy ‘customs’, and ‘engage’ with them. These sad lonely sexless men spend all their money on this shit. It consumes them, until they are out of money, then it destroys them. It warps their expectations of relationships further impacting their datability, driving them even more towards onlyfans. Now, this is only a minority of their users, but makes a large proportion of their revenue. For healthy people, only fans can be great.

zahrc 5y ago
> These sad lonely sexless men spend all their money on this shit. It consumes them, until they are out of money, then it destroys them. It warps their expectations of relationships further impacting their datability, driving them even more towards onlyfans. IF I’d be that desperate I’d rather stick to a prostitute. Regular uploads aren’t even guaranteed. You could be paying something where you don’t even know the value of. I hate this world of, everything needs to be a subscription… On another note, I’m also glad that I’m in a healthy and happy relationship in my late 20’s because tinder in my area is 90% Instagram and OnlyFans ads.
- Khaine 5y ago
  These people want a relationship, and intimacy. They want the feeling of being loved more than sex. That’s why its a para-social relationship. These people believe that the performer thinks they are special, that they have a different and special relationship with the performer. The performer truely understands them, and they understand the performer. They twist and warp anything so that its fits that worldview. Maybe they buy a video, and in it the performer says, “this is just for you”. Now, they may say that any lots of videos as part of the role play or whatever. But to these people, thats a sign of their special relationship. That’s why they can be dangerous. If that spell is ever broken for example they find out the performer has a boyfriend. They can lash out violently, or look to humiliate the performer by sending their work to friends and relatives.

RickJWagner 5y ago

I hope the BBC does a follow-up article in about 20 years. My theory is that the 'changed lives' will most often not be prosperous. Call me wrong, but I imagine it's going to be right.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

specialist 5y ago

I just want to call this out: > But in January, a hacker seized control of [Tina Bean's] account, blackmailed her for $150 and uploaded streams of IS terror videos. This is complete bullshit. And continues to worsen. What's the fix? How do we prevent sockpuppets, impersonation, account seizures? What should we call this category of crime? Stop using username & password credentials? Issue everyone key fobs? Use the secure enclaves in our phones (iOS, Android)? -- Repeating myself: One of my coworkers passed and their Facebook profile got pwned. And there was no recourse. I'm still so angry about this I could just spit. My family has been doing eldercare. The predation is just terrible. It's an industry. And the people targeted have zero ability to protect themselves. Of course, at some point I'll also become the prey. -- PS- FWIW, I'm trying to figure out how to advocate for a fix. I've made some pathetic attempts to draft a position paper, problem statement. Next step would be draft model legislation. Then start shopping it around. My first motivating "use case" is prevent profiles on DoorDash, Yelp etc from being seized by imposters. So do something like require those profile hosting services to link to IRL licenses. Most every trade has some kind of licensing and credentialing authority. Restaurants, nail salons, health care providers, etc. Ideas?

TheMagicHorsey 5y ago

I wonder why this level of scrutiny is not applied to strip clubs and the local Hooters franchise. The same grift and mental issues on Only Fans is present in strip clubs and Hooters too. Basically there's two sets of victims in these places. First, the girls are only learning one skillset. That is, how to identify marks who have money, and how to get that money in the least amount of time. Once they learn that skillset in their twenties, its very difficult for them to transition to an apprenticeship in any other profession, because the entry level in other jobs will never compare in earning potential to what they make with their sexual grift. Essentially they are mentally damaged forever and its difficult for them to become, for example, a nurse or a developer. The second set of victims are the guys who are getting fleeced. Perhaps the word victim here is wrong. Maybe the right word is marks. The guys who participate in these transactions are mentally what one used to call "losers" but again I hate labels. Lets just call it what it is. These are men, who for various reasons, are not able to attract the kind of female attention they want without entering into a monetary transaction with said females. That's very simple, and should be non-controversial to say. Just like we say, someone who goes to a restaurant enters into a monetary transaction for Chicken Vindaloo, because they aren't capable of getting the Vindaloo they want by using non-monetary means (i.e. cooking). There's no value judgment, but guys who use strip clubs, Hooters, and Only Fans are basically screwing their brains up permanently. They think the kind of attention they get from pretty girls at these venues, is the kind of attention they "deserve". So their expectations in the real world become badly calibrated. Have you ever seen a fifty year old doofus hitting on 20 year olds in a bar, getting rejected hard, and being surprised? That's a habitual strip club client right there. The other way their brains get screwed up is that these men hang around so many grifters that they think all women are grifters. I'm not going to get into George Bernard Shaws theory that all marriage is a grift, but I think we can all agree that the level of grift in the average marriage is much different and has a different effect on you then the kind of grift that happens in strip clubs and on Only Fans. Basically if you hang around strippers, you'll start to think every woman has a hand in your pocket. It's very sad. It's kind of like when a kid is abused they start to mistrust all adults. Same thing. These men can become misogynists because their sample data has become so skewed. Anyway, I'm' kind of sick of how media treats online grift as somehow creating a set of problems that wasn't already there. Go to any small town with poor economic prospects and there's some number of desperate young women who are training in the grift. And there's also some number of men who are the marks. Moving all of this online just makes it so more highly sought after people in both sides of the market have more opportunities. But the problems are the same no matter where the grift is happening.

psychlops 5y ago

"The company said Tina did not report the racial slur and it was not detected by the site's moderation system because it was pluralised." Drat! If only there were some way a moderation system could detect these clever variations. Hackers are always one step ahead with pluralization.

underseacables 5y ago

What I think it’s going to be more interesting is the personal responsibility aspect. In ten or fifteen years from now, when only fans content starts coming up as these folks are applying for regular jobs in the workforce, pursuing political office, etc. I expect many will claim that they were groomed and forced to do it. That is to say, I don’t think young people today really appreciate what they are doing and how having an OF is going to affect their life going forward.

dogorman 5y ago
> I expect many will claim that they were groomed and forced to do it. Many of them might well be. How can you really tell what kind of situation is going on behind the camera? Abusive relationships can hide in plain sight for years.
- underseacables 5y ago
  That is very true. I’m interested to see how many will use that as a way to redirect responsibility away from the decisions that they made, and just saying hey it was not my fault. It will be difficult to tell who was groomed and who is just trying to minimize their own responsibility.

thepasswordis 5y ago

Who could have possibly predicted that a company which mechanized the process of targeting and turning young teenage girls into prostitutes would have a dark side? If onlyfans happened in person, the people behind it would be in prison. They market to teenagers, and as soon as they turn 18 encourage them to prostitute themselves to men over the internet. It is a disgusting, horrible company that we should be ashamed exists. This company, like other pimps before them, have persuaded young, often times desperate women, into packaging and marketing their humanity to people. It taught them that their friendship and companionship is a product to be sold.

Taylor_OD 5y ago
< Who could have possibly predicted that a company which mechanized the process of targeting and turning young teenage girls into prostitutes would have a dark side? While I might ethically disagree with their business model I don't think your assessment is fair. Their platform is certainly a step up from those same individuals getting into the industrial porn industry.
- jeffreyrogers 5y ago
  But the vast majority of them wouldn't get involved in the industrial porn industry, so you reduce the harm to a small number of people while increasing the harm (by a lesser degree) to a much larger number of people.
  - edmundsauto 5y ago
    This sounds like a utilitarian argument. Unfortunately, that means the weights of the increased harm vs. decreased harm are what determines the morality. And those are arbitrary. one could believe it is low harm for a young person to use OF, but massive harm to be in the traditional porn industry, and conclude that OF is a net plus. Ie, this argument is circular and based on preconceptions rather than a critical examination of the evidence.
    - 5y ago

throwawayof1234 5y ago

Made a throwaway to post this. For various reasons I happen to know personally many (>10) women who've created an OnlyFans or otherwise participate in online sex work. I know these people well enough that we discuss things like our mental health state / conditions. One commonality that I have found is that many of the women who start an OF are already suffering from a mental health condition that has as a symptom hypersexuality or a need for attention / attention-seeking behaviors. One of the more common diagnosed mental health issues these women have is bipolar disorder, where in their manic states they experience hypersexuality. One perspective is that online sex work provides a monetarily lucrative outlet for urges these women have to cope with regardless of their participation online. On the other hand, the consequences for online sex work to your "regular" life are much more far-reaching vs expressing these urges with individuals in person. Of a bigger concern to me is that my conversations with these women have indicated that participating in OnlyFans actually deepens their trauma and mental health issues and may exacerbate their attention-seeking behaviors. Many of them have a traumatic past which directly ties into their relationships with men and sex, and participating in OF reinforces the outcomes of that trauma rather than providing them a pathway to reforge how they structure relationships with men and how they think about sex in their lives. Being involved in online sex work can be deeply traumatizing for the workers, and it is tied directly into the fact that they're both selling attention while seeking attention, and the facsimile but not the reality of a human emotional connection. I don't know what the answer is, but I really wish that in the US we had universal healthcare including for mental healthcare. There are whole generations of women who are deeply traumatized by their upbringing and the lack of strong male role models in their lives. The epidemic of single motherhood across demographic boundaries within the US has massively contributed to our current mental healthcare crisis, and lack of a father figure that is a /good/ father heavily contributes to broken relationship models with men for these women.

throwawaay_3424 5y ago
not my problem
ausbah 5y ago
I don't buy the narrative of children from single mother homes faring worse due to not having a "father figure". the hardships fared by such children stem from lack of adequate family finances and lack of parental interaction due to overwork. those families need more financial help, not lamenting about "two parents is always better than one"

bena 5y ago

Is the very concept of the parasocial relationship here the problem? Previously, only a very select few people would be able to be the subject of such a relationship. So, it's fairly easy to protect them from the pitfalls of it. Bodyguards, gated communities, limited in-person socialization with non-peers, etc. In other words, celebrities. Of any stripe. They've been dealing with this issue for years. But now, we have YouTube, Twitch, OnlyFans, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and probably dozens more I can't even think of and have never been exposed to. And someone making rent by slinging nudes on OnlyFans doesn't have enough cash for an entourage. They don't have the lawyers and accountants available to advise them and help them set up companies to make certain transactions to disguise certain facts about themselves. Like where they live. They also don't have anyone who is decent enough at public relations to help them navigate the fine line between seeming personable while not sharing too many facts about themselves. But they'll have a segment of people completely engaged with them in one of these parasocial relationships. And in a way they do encourage it. And in another real way, it's the job they've chosen. When any of them talk about "building relationships with viewers" and how it's important, that's the kind of relationship they are talking about: a parasocial relationship. The vast majority of people do not have the means to deal with parasocial relationships that go wrong. And even those with the means sometimes get hit. Ronald Reagan was shot by a man trying to impress Jodie Foster. And I think those building parasocial relationships that contain sexual intimacy are particularly at risk.

tablespoon 5y ago

> The perpetrator then spammed more than 40 of her fans, calling them the N-word, before stealing all of her photos and posting them on a porn site.... > The company said Tina did not report the racial slur and it was not detected by the site's moderation system because it was pluralised. Wow, what a shit-tier auto-moderation system.

foofoo4u 5y ago

Interesting discussion about OnlyFans recently released for anyone interested. https://open.spotify.com/episode/50q2Ff1ysf8lXT0XXQJEUb?si=LmmMSHd6QeKgMPbRi3DvTA&dl_branch=1 https://open.spotify.com/episode/50q2Ff1ysf8lXT0XXQJEUb?si=L...

digianarchist 5y ago
I'll pass on Bari Weiss but Courtland did an Indie Hackers episode with two OnlyFans creators. https://pca.st/a4elqfcm https://pca.st/a4elqfcm

icare_1er 5y ago

I'm curious, is there a gender-gap in terms of income on OnlyFans ? Are the liberals doing anything about that ?

AzzieElbab 5y ago

Here is a headline that sounds suggestive, and an article looking to vilify the safest form of sex work in existence.

failwhaleshark 5y ago

I'm sex-/sex-worker-/kink-positive, so I don't care what consenting adults do or do for work. I know an OnlyFans creator in my apartments. She's a conceited, entitled, selfish, horrible human being who I turned-down a BJ from because I didn't know where her mouth has been (think herpes). She's not even hot but still makes a living at it, so that means there's enough of an audience of men for basically any woman. She spent $13k on plastic surgery and doesn't have anything to show for it... not my type. Her voice is raspy-wrecked from hard living drinking and smoking too much. She's like a really bad restaurant owner without a scalable business or an exit strategy. I, OTOH, produce/edit/star as male hetero talent in unidentifiable, noncommercial content on PornHub for fun. I don't care what people do, but it's probably not a career without a personality, branding, exceptionally good genes, and a plastic surgeon. If it's your thing, go for it.

macrowhat 5y ago

God, these whores make me want to vomit