3 ms·

There is a time-honored path that this choice to ban NSFW stuff is part of. 1. Make a way for people to get paid over the Internet for making stuff. 2. Be oka

There is a time-honored path that this choice to ban NSFW stuff is part of. 1. Make a way for people to get paid over the Internet for making stuff. 2. Be okay with horny stuff, possibly as an explicit choice in the beginning, possibly as a pivot when people who make horny stuff start shifting a lot of money through the pipeline you're providing. 3. Get big enough for Visa/Mastercard/Apple/Google to notice that you sure are pushing a lot of horny money through their payment systems. Which have a lot of clauses that basically boil down to "no horny". 4. You have a choice here: figure out how to work completely outside of whichever payment system's owner is saying "no horny", or ban horny. I've never seen anyone take the former option. 5. Make a wishy-washy blog post about how you are banning horny stuff that completely fails to come out and say "this really sucks and we hate to do it but we can either drop our horny creators and keep existing as a company, or we can pretty much pack up the entire affair; here are some ways you can go put pressure on Visa/MC/Google/Apple/your lawmakers/etc to maybe change this state of affairs for the next people to follow this path, seriously this is 100% happening because V/MC/G/A finally noticed we have been blatantly skirting these rules". This has happened many times before, and it will continue to happen many times in the future until someone chooses "fuck all existing payment processors, we're finding a new way to get money from customers to creators" and makes it work.

rideontime 4y ago
Despite all my anti-crypto ideals and principles, this feels like a potential use case. If I have to make an ethereum wallet to get all my niche furry porn, so be it.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  It does, doesn't it. But it's been almost fourteen years since Bitcoin hit the world and it's never become a major way to pay for porn, despite everyone who makes porn knowing damn well that this keeps happening. Sex.com was making millions a mere five or so years after the WWW made it out of CERN.
xapata 4y ago
Branding matters, too. It may be difficult to serve both horny and "no horny" consumers, so you need to decide which market you prefer.
remram 4y ago
Spinning up a separate branch with slightly different branding is probably easier than a different organization setting up shop and re-implementing from scratch. From your post, you make it seem like OnlyFans cannot possibly exist. It does, and therefore Patreon could have built it.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  I am pretty sure that the payment processors giving you the choice of banning horny stuff or getting the boot would not look kindly upon “a separate branch with different branding”. OnlyFans could exist, sure, but like every other horny service ever it had a built-in time limit. When Visa/MC/Apple/etc notice how much porn money you’re doing, then the axe falls. Maybe you continue without the porn. Maybe you fold up. Either way all the pornmongers leave and look for a new way to get paid. In a few years they will be doing this again. Patreon could have built OF, in theory, but this would require them to have more than the vaguest interest in actually building anything new. I’ve been using Patreon to get paid for my art since a few months after they launched and this is not a thing they have. I’m not sure they even actually have anyone who can do backend development any more. Mostly they just fuck up the front end every few years.
  - remram 4y ago
    I don't mean that they have to do it with the same payment processor... different branding AND processor, sorry, I thought that was clear. As to why, Patreon was ALSO the organization most apt to sniff the size of that market. Those were their current customers! If OnlyFans managed to glimpse to potential revenue and build their platform, Patreon would have been aware. They had the platform, they had a known brand, they had relations with some of the clients, they knew how many people they were kicking out. This was such a huge advantage over anybody else.

rideontime 4y ago

Despite all my anti-crypto ideals and principles, this feels like a potential use case. If I have to make an ethereum wallet to get all my niche furry porn, so be it.

egypturnash 4y ago
It does, doesn't it. But it's been almost fourteen years since Bitcoin hit the world and it's never become a major way to pay for porn, despite everyone who makes porn knowing damn well that this keeps happening. Sex.com was making millions a mere five or so years after the WWW made it out of CERN.

xapata 4y ago

Branding matters, too. It may be difficult to serve both horny and "no horny" consumers, so you need to decide which market you prefer.

remram 4y ago

Spinning up a separate branch with slightly different branding is probably easier than a different organization setting up shop and re-implementing from scratch. From your post, you make it seem like OnlyFans cannot possibly exist. It does, and therefore Patreon could have built it.

egypturnash 4y ago
I am pretty sure that the payment processors giving you the choice of banning horny stuff or getting the boot would not look kindly upon “a separate branch with different branding”. OnlyFans could exist, sure, but like every other horny service ever it had a built-in time limit. When Visa/MC/Apple/etc notice how much porn money you’re doing, then the axe falls. Maybe you continue without the porn. Maybe you fold up. Either way all the pornmongers leave and look for a new way to get paid. In a few years they will be doing this again. Patreon could have built OF, in theory, but this would require them to have more than the vaguest interest in actually building anything new. I’ve been using Patreon to get paid for my art since a few months after they launched and this is not a thing they have. I’m not sure they even actually have anyone who can do backend development any more. Mostly they just fuck up the front end every few years.
- remram 4y ago
  I don't mean that they have to do it with the same payment processor... different branding AND processor, sorry, I thought that was clear. As to why, Patreon was ALSO the organization most apt to sniff the size of that market. Those were their current customers! If OnlyFans managed to glimpse to potential revenue and build their platform, Patreon would have been aware. They had the platform, they had a known brand, they had relations with some of the clients, they knew how many people they were kicking out. This was such a huge advantage over anybody else.