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OnlyFans banning sexually explicit content b/C of MasterCard rules starting Oct
- admax88q 5y agoSounds like an opportunity for a clone using Bitcoin or some other cryrpto to launch.
- killingtime74 5y agoWhy not just declare bankruptcy? It’s faster
- Waterluvian 5y agoStartups gotta pivot.
- senojretep356 5y agoCan they genuinely survive this. I mean doesn't it just become patreon without the porn?
- quickthrower2 5y agoIn this case stop pivoting
- christkv 5y agoWhy are we accepting that a payment transaction company that is part of a duopoly with visa gets to define itself as the moral arbiter of legal business.
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoBecause for the most part this situation has been only weaponized against those who are out of ideological compliance with the tech industry. As long as it is a tool for punishing what a small geographical area considers wrong-think, it will go on with the blessing of Bay Area tech scene. With OnlyFans there's some uneasiness because suddenly those who have been cheering on the use of this weapon are starting to realize it might expand into areas that could harm them.
- mynameisash 5y agoThe NCAA instituted a rule[0] on the confederate flag that led to Mississippi changing their state flag[1]. Some changes, like them or not, come from very unexpected places. [0] https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/29334498/ncaa-extends-policy-banning-championships-where-confederate-flag-flown https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/29334498/ncaa... [1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/mississippi-lawmakers-vote-remove-confederate-battle-emblem-state/story?id=71504126 https://abcnews.go.com/US/mississippi-lawmakers-vote-remove-...
- pixxel 5y agoI can’t open the Twitter thread without hitting a login / install app wall. When did Twitter implement this?!
- junon 5y agoRemember reading others facing this as well and that it was pretty recent.
- jjgreen 5y agoIf you're on Firefox, try the Privacy Redirect extension which re-routes to Nitter.
- cm2187 5y agoI have noticed that this nagging happens on iOS/safari but not on Windows/Firefox (unless my adblockers took care of it).
- chii 5y agoi'd just use https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1428584131835748359.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1428584131835748359.html rather than the twitter web.
- ratww 5y agoIt started about 2-3 weeks ago. It seems it's being rolled-out progressively, because some people don't see the nag screen. It's very annoying.
- paulgb 5y agoKind of ironic how Jack has been all about Twitter's new decentralized (“Blue Sky”) effort, whilst Twitter under his leadership has followed the path of the worst-behaving centralized services (locking down APIs[1], these nag screens, paywalling dumb features with no option to remove ads/tracking, turning verification from a security feature into a popularity contest). [1] I remember some of this happening before Jack's return, but still.
- TheChozoKnight 5y agoWhen I think of OnlyFans, I literally only think of pornography and the sex industry, this is based on everything I've heard about it. This alone tells me that this seems like a bad idea.
- cblconfederate 5y agoThe "creators" should cooperate to buy the company. It will be cheap enough soon enough
- input_sh 5y ago...and then that company will face the same MasterCard-imposed issues as OnlyFans does now.
- cblconfederate 5y agoof course. but they could use crypto or whatever to salvage part of their income. And they 'll benefit from the brand recognition that they created.
- sidcool 5y agoI am curious. Why does this news around OnlyFans strike a nerve with HN crowd? I hadn't heard about OnlyFans before this news exploded. Is OF known for their tech capabilities?
- benjaminwootton 5y agoSame here. Honest, guv.
- bserge 5y agoBecause payment companies or banks with a history of shady shit are dictating morals.
- ricardonunez 5y agoLike somebody mentioned, companies trying to impose on people what their morals should be. The first time I heard about it was when a nurse/doctor got fired. Although some restrictions can be consider, what people do in their private life should not be anybody’s business unless it affects others.
- cblconfederate 5y agobecause they moved the porn industry to the digital era, the same way that things moved from tv to youtube. there are no porn studios in OF but individual performers and this is a "disruption". Of course nobody knows if this will work for other types of content, but at least it worked for porn. OF pulled what youtube and google do when they "demonetize" people they don't like. It's generally a downgrade from an open market to one where there is not even the possibility to be in a low-volume nice.
- watwut 5y agoOnlyFans were mentioned on HN quite regularly before these news. Whenever topic of porn or relationships or social networks appeared. I learned about OnlyFans from here, months ago.
- fragmede 5y agoIt's a pretty trivial CRUD app, if you want to be dismissive about the actual tech involved, but if you've read any of the discussion, you'd see that the tech largely isn't what's being discussed here. (And I'll bet the tech stack that powers FB messenger or Snapchat is endlessly fascinating, but you could similarly derisively call those CRUD apps.) OF is fun to talk about because, well, it's porn. But looking past the empowerment of mostly young women (top earners make O($100,000/month)), OF is of particular interesting to the HN crowd because it exposes a lie: digital money is not the same as physical cash. Having a gatekeeper say what you're allowed to spend your money on, is antithical to freedom. Whiiiiiiiich leads to cryptocurrency, which many a reader here finds interesting. The other theory that was previously being floated about was FOSTA-SESTA laws, which purports to be against sex trafficking, but ends up hurting the very group it says it's against, sex workers. Those laws are what closed down Craigslist personals and Backpages, for better or worse. (Which, according to sex workers, worse, since it has lead to sex workers being killed.) But see this is also of interest to HN readers because those bad laws mean a founder-CEO could face jail time if the police believes their MVP app/website promotes sex work in a primary way.
- benjaminwootton 5y agoRather than pivot, wouldn’t a better bet be on crypto payments? They might be able to pull it off with the right UX or partnerships.
- dogma1138 5y agoToo volatile and takes too long to process, and you still need to convert it to fiat to make actual money.
- benjaminwootton 5y agoRight now they are putting a multi billion revenue line at risk. I would have absorb the volatility in their case, or pass it onto their content producers.
- dogma1138 5y agoThey aren’t actually banning nudity or even “porn” they are restricting explicit content for free and unverified accounts and putting some additional restriction on the type of content that can be posted. If the majority of the revenue is generated by cosplayers who show some boobs and bush and girls in borderline transparent bikinis selling bath water they might be alright. Crypto isn’t a solution really if they go that route their revenue would drop like a rock. If their biggest cash cows don’t do hardcore stuff or their fan base would be ok with the content under the new policy I think they’ll survive.
- Taniwha 5y agoOnlyflans will still allow explicit content https://twitter.com/OnIyFlans/status/1428483692834566145 https://twitter.com/OnIyFlans/status/1428483692834566145
- felixbraun 5y ago> Consumers spent $6bn on Onyfans last year. If the payment industry won't or can't support that, this is another arbitrage opportunity, like it or not. Is there a payment tech that doesn't have centralised gatekeepers, and uses a bearer model to address fraud? https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1428737349979095040?s=21 https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1428737349979095040...
- MontyCarloHall 5y agoI think the arbitrage opportunity isn’t nearly as large as people imagine. Payment processors aren’t run by ideological zealots who refuse certain transactions on moral grounds. On the contrary, they are ruthless capitalists who’d love to get a slice of any and every multibillion dollar market under the sun. I’m sure actuaries at MasterCard ran the numbers and found that the risk of accepting payments for live adult content (e.g. high level of chargebacks, extreme legal consequences for processing payments for blatantly illegal material, e.g. child pornography, that’s hard to filter out owing to the transient nature of live streams) far outweighed the benefits. And if you’ll excuse my appeal to authority, I assume those actuaries are correct, given the amount of money such a profit-focused company is walking away from.
- juggleup7 5y agoI imagine OnlyFans can survive and thrive by switching their payment methods away from credit cards to fully private Monero or even create their own token. Also by moving their servers to a jurisdiction less oppressive than the Democratic Republic of America.
- paulgb 5y ago> Also by moving their servers to a jurisdiction less oppressive than the Democratic Republic of America. It's a UK-based company.
- dogma1138 5y agoYou still need to convert between a token and money, until you can use your Coinlyfans to buy food at your local grocer and pay rent it doesn’t actually help. Current cryptos are too slow to process and have too many onboarding steps many of which are also quite slow and require more involved from the customer which increases drop outs. You can’t buy crypto with a credit card easily, even on the big exchanges and you have to go through a KYC process and then use debit or bank transfer usually. Also Onlyfans is a British startup I’m not even sure it’s hosted in the US.
- marderfarker2 5y agoIt takes the same amount of effort and KYCs to sign up at a crypto exchange and sign up for a credit card.
- dogma1138 5y agoMost people already have a credit card or a bank card. Also at least in the UK I can open a bank account with a utility bill to get a crypto account on any major exchange I need to upload a photo ID usually a passport as well as a proof of address. Then I need to make a bank transfer and even then the account is still usually limited till some arbitrary time frame has passed or number of transactions have occurred. Transferring crypto is still much slower than using a card. Get the address / scan the QR code, log into your exchange, do the transfer and then wait until X number of confirmation has passed which can take 20-30 or even more minutes. This is antithetical to an impulse buy which quite likely how most of the people that pay for Onlyfans and other porn sites get hooked in the first place.
- LatteLazy 5y agoExactly like PornHub. Payment providers need to be classed as utilities and required to serve any legal business.
- kwhitefoot 5y agoWhy should a payment processor get to decide anything about the product that one is buying? Especially one that is part of a nearly global duopoly.
- michaelt 5y agoBecause the US government told them to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
- kwhitefoot 5y agoSo how come the US is still the worlds leading producer of porn? Why does Mastercard not refuse to deal with all porn related sites?
- alistairSH 5y agoFraud rates are often higher on porn sites than elsewhere on the web. At least that used to be the case.
- mettamage 5y agoThis seems to be a usecase for a fast scalable crypto. Note: it’s not the only contender. And it doesn’t need to be decentralized. I am purely talking from a pragmatic perspective.
- beezischillin 5y agoI find it fascinating that people get into fights over this, just as they did when payment processors forced the deplatforming of conservative political commentators as if it wasn’t the different sides of the same coin. Not only that but people also celebrate it as a sort of victory for their side. Which is why I find it sad that in the end everyone loses and the Internet becomes a bit less free every day.
- ykevinator3 5y agoWhat's more free than Mastercard doing what it wishes?
- merricksb 5y agoDiscussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28245221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28245221
- dang 5y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28245221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28245221 - Aug 2021 (411 comments) Previously: OnlyFans to block sexually explicit videos starting in October - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237274 - Aug 2021 (1306 comments)
- anonymousab 5y agoMasterCard has claimed otherwise, sorta. https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/20/tech/onlyfans-explicit-content-ban-payment/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/20/tech/onlyfans-explicit-conten... > Seth Eisen, a spokesman for Mastercard, told CNN Business it was not involved in OnlyFans' decision to restrict the content it would allow on the platform. "It's a decision they came to themselves," Eisen said