I really don’t understand what they are trying to do. They have their niche market, it is profitable, and they are going to ditch that to get into something that is already dominated by youtube and patreon and whatever else and it makes zero sense to me. Who wants to get in on the ground floor on an IPO of a company that is banning the only thing they do that makes money. Like getting in on the ground floor at McDonalds when the chain decides to stop selling gut bomb burgers and switch to selling 9-tracks and vinyl. It makes NO SENSE.
On top of that is the hypocrisy of it all, because you know it’s about banksters not wanting to associate with titties. Banks and money processors will fall all over themselves to launder drug money and there isn’t a despot from here to Hitler they won’t deal with, but some redhead from Poughkeepsie named Miss Juggs wants to sell a video of her pegging her boyfriend and they lose their shit. It’s the equivalent of our establishment banning Marcy Wheeler for saying blowjob on MSNBC but inviting the entire Bush admin on to promote carpetbombing brown people and advocate for torture.
Not to mention, unlike other porn/sex worker sites, Onlyfans is a place where the sex workers are in charge. It’s not folks posting underage kids or revenge porn, it’s content creators posting only shit they want to post. It’s the least exploitative sex industry market there is, and it’s the safest. And unlike pornhub and other places, it’s harder for kids to access.
Fucking puritanism will kill us all.
Jerome G
Tumblr went from a being a billion dollar company to being sold for 5 million after they banned erotica/porn
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
I don’t really follow the ins and outs of this kind of thing, but it does seem odd and dumb. I look forward to getting some 8-tracks from McDonald’s soon though.
mrmoshpotato
@Jerome G: I was about to say…
Leslie
Just said the same thing, but in less detail, down below. Stupid freaking hypocritical banksters.
steve g
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.): My browser says they will be 9 tracks, which is better because it is one more.
Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]
Only Fans should have just filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, it would has saved many steps.
Also, since this is an open thread, I’ve stumbled down an interesting YouTube hole. It’s called Gresham College, which is an actual college that has been giving public lectures since the 16th century in greater London. The college has been livestreaming their lectures since 2018, and have over 2000 lectures (about an hour each) on YouTube. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/
Really amazing lectures.
Ohio Mom
This blog is an education. Tonight I learned about Tia Maria, that in California, asparagus is ready to pick in August (around here the season is early spring), and that there is an Etsy-like version of a porn site.
Full-service, indeed.
Lyrebird
@Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]: Thanks, that’s a cool link! My extended family includes some retired folks with a lot of brain power and enough sense to keep staying masked & staying home. This could make the next few months a lot more fun for them.
Jacel
@Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]: But with OnlyFans changing from its reason for existing, does Gresham have any lectures on nudity?
mrmoshpotato
@Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]: How did they get lectures from the 16th century recorded, much less online?
Xantar
Apparently businesses related to sex work such as OnlyFans and PornHub are subject to lots of chargebacks i.e. people make a payment and then dispute the charge on their credit card. The speculation is either people make a payment and then get embarrassed or they just never planned to spend money in the first place. Dealing with all these chargebacks costs money. So this may actually be driven in part by the internalized shame of the audience themselves.
OnlyFans should probably just suck it up and eat the cost of doing business though. I don’t understand how they plan to make money otherwise.
mrmoshpotato
@Ohio Mom: And that Tumblr used to be a pornopolis.
Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]
@mrmoshpotato: That would be cool, but only since 2000 alas.
dww44
@Lyrebird: i agree and I will share with similar folks. A well traveled brother in law sorta confined for the last year and a half.
Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]
@Jacel: Possibly! I’ve been working through their archive, do you think it would fall under History, Politics or Divinity?
Steve in the ATL
Was not expecting an editorial on this subject here!
Lyrebird
@Ohio Mom: Sure is!
I had heard of OnlyFans because of this EMT gal who was posting photos and some reporters decided to publicize her personal business. She was clearly the better person than the reporters!
Eolirin
As long as the very small number of companies capable of doing payment processing at the scale necessary for these sites keep being anti sex this is just going to keep happening.
It is maddening. And ultimately more harmful to sex workers than anything else. But it’s been a long standing pattern for well over a decade now. Some sites and services successfully navigate the transistion, but porn was still their growth engine starting out. And then they’re more or less forced to ban it or lose any possible revenue stream.
Frank McCormick
From what I’ve read on Twitter, it’s due in large part to “reformers” and politicians accusing the site of exploiting children, which, of course, Only Fans disputes.
James E Powell
@Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]:
Gresham College was founded by Sir Thomas Gresham of Gresham’s Law fame. Its mission is to give those public lectures. It has no students and awards no degrees.
Those lectures go back to 2001. They are generally very good to excellent.
Poe Larity
I still don’t know what anyone is talking about, but can I do a SPAC or NFT on it?
LeftCoastYankee
If I had to guess, getting ready of naked-itity will result in only free content, and then they can add in advertising and sell ads for boner pills next to the youthful yoga instructors who ain’t getting paid.
Briefly profiting off of free labor while running the brand into the ground? That’s still mo’ money in the next few financial quarters.
Same shit different day.
MattF
Yes, the whole situation is stupid and hypocritical, but it’s not exactly a secret that the porn biz is adjacent to the prostitution biz, and prostitution is illegal almost everywhere. So there’s a real sort of added risk, which the financial powers-that-be will be keenly aware of (being aware of risks is what financials do) but won’t talk about.
Peale
@Frank McCormick: yeah. The question is whether OFs policies are in compliance to shield it from liability. I don’t know if they are. The BBC story in my mind is inconclusive. What the story seems to be is “look….we found really obnoxious stuff and some child porn so obviously there’s a failure”. Not sure what the extent of the issue is from the article. Makes it sound like everyone is given 5 warnings regardless of violation, which is not good.
SiubhanDuinne
@Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]:
This looks like a treasure trove! Thank you so much for the link.
ETA: I’m talking about Gresham, not OnlyFans. Just in case there was any ambiguity in anyone’s mind.
HumboldtBlue
@Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]:
Brilliant channel, I’ve been watching for years.
MattF
@MattF: ETA: And also, solicitation for prostitution is illegal and it’s difficult to argue seriously that the OF business doesn’t involve solicitation. So OF is just stuck with this.
Anne Laurie
If you’re thinking of the BBC story I saw a couple weeks ago… IIRC, there were a couple younger (14-16 year old) teens who used their parents’ credit cards to lie about their age, and maybe an older (post-16) teen who lied about being younger as a sales gimmick, and therefore… All adult women & gay men* should be forbidden to sell pics of themselves for money, because that might give some pervert a chance to have dirty pervert thoughts?
(*There was a notion that only men were OnlyFan subscribers, and of course men wouldn’t pay for pics of straight men doing sex things.)
But the OnlyFan owners want to sell out while the selling is good, and venture capitalists (VCs) or VC bankers don’t want to be associated with sex work. Everyone knows the joke about the oldest profession, but really: It’s finance. And it’s a lot less honest than prostitution!
HumboldtBlue
@SiubhanDuinne:
I can’t believe you, I’ve been linking to Gresham for what seems a decade and you take the new guy, with his new cool nym and his sexy ways and just ignore the rest of us.
Shocking.
HumboldtBlue
@James E Powell:
See?
James (I must use a middle initial) Powell was right there too!
I smell a rat.
Also, here’s an excellent read from an Afghan insider.
NotMax
Frog sex sites the next Big Thing.
“The Celebrated Humping Frog of Calaveras County.”
//
craigie
This seems a tad specific…
TriassicSands
@steve g:
Oh, yeah, well Nigel has an 11-track!
SiubhanDuinne
@HumboldtBlue:
Gosh. Now I feel terrible.
Does Gresham offer a lecture series on “The History and Practice of Returning to Good Graces”?
Probably.
HumboldtBlue
@craigie:
Who “worked the pole last night” said with a knowing leer and a whiff of old man.
Mary G
This is white supremacists demanding that women not be allowed to control their own lives and incomes. Same as anti-abortion.
Since HRC lost to TFG, the amount of misogyny alive and well in the world has revealed itself, like racism, to be a bigger force than I ever understood. They just kept it on the down low until conditions werre right to wave that Gilead flag high. These fuckers play a long, long, game.
In better news, the MSM’s campaign to make Biden look like a senile incompetent idiot who fucked up Afghanistan all on his ownself, put TFG’s handing over 5,000 fighters down the memory holes, and whatever else they’ve been making up is meeting reality. H.R. McMaster has spilled the beans to the NYT ( I used a click and will excerpt:)
Esper is also on the outbound train.
Pompeo and TFG still claim they did everything right and Biden shouldn’t have gone along with the agreement they made:
Pompeo lies his ass off about what was in the agreement, of course. NYT actually points that out!
Bolton plays both sides of the fence, as usual:
Lying about processing the visas for our Afghan allies:
Nikki Haley is incoherent on Twitter:
ETA: Jake Tapper retweeted so he may have taken his blinders off.
Schadenfreude feels so good.
Peale
@Anne Laurie: yep. Agreed. There was a lot of noise in that article. “We found pictures of”…o.k. I could tell they actually didn’t find much because they drifted away from child exploitation and beastiality into examples of things that most readers would find distasteful, but which aren’t actually illegal. So I don’t think they found much. And if those things are removed when reported…well what’s the story then? That said, the employee they interviewed seemed to imply that someone posting up selling a link to a server of child porn would be given the same warning that someone advertising an “incest” video, and those aren’t the same thing and shouldn’t be treated the same. At least I don’t think they should be. But then I’m not really trained in the area of porn site compliance and legal risk.
West of the Rockies
I’ve never heard of Only Fans until this post. I must be getting old.
Major Major Major Major
Ugh am I going to have to write a post about FOSTA/SESTA
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The Russian Troll bots on twitter just don’t have their heart in it anymore. Their English is horrible. All kinds of nonsensical and incoherent phrases like “Trump got shit done” , what does that even mean?
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
a gorgeous blue moon is forming tonight. Not a sight to be missed
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Do you have a link for that – asking for a friend.
HumboldtBlue
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
Ours is smoke-orange.
Ruckus
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Either he spoke and shit came out or he sat on the toilet and shit came out. One end or the other, shit came out.
Alison Rose
@Xantar:
Too bad such things are no longer allowed on their site.
JCJ
@Alison Rose:
Well done!
Jay
@HumboldtBlue:
same here.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
yet there porn all over instagram (photo)
Roger Moore
@Frank McCormick:
I don’t think it’s specific to OnlyFans. My impression is that the law in this area is written so the banks can get in trouble if they’re found to be processing money for child pornographers or human traffickers. In practice, this means that banks are reluctant to deal with pornography, and anyone who is producing porn needs to keep very careful records to prove everyone involved was an adult and fully consenting. That’s manageable for a traditional porn company that hires all its own performers, but it’s just insanely difficult for a site like OnlyFans that is displaying user-generated content. Without that kind of reassurance, the banks won’t deal with them, and they won’t be able to process payments.
Roger Moore
@Anne Laurie:
If I’ve read the OnlyFans press release correctly, simple nudity will continue to be allowed; it’s only depictions of sex acts that will be banned.
Kent
I was thinking the same thing. I never heard of it and would have assumed it was something to do with fantasy football or online gambling on NFL games or something like that.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
“Trump got shit done” = “Trump accomplished things.”
You need to get out more. This is pretty standard low-class American usage.
JWR
Who woulda thunk it?
Now that I read this crapola, I remember hearing about some of it before. C’mon, California. Vote NO, fer chrissakes!
oldster
Yup, never heard of OF before.
No surprise to me that I’m old. I’ve been old for a while now.
But that’s not really the issue. I was equally clueless when I was less old.
Anyhow — I’ll leave you to discussing optimal conditions for sex work.
Optimal ones certainly do not include my involvement, in any capacity.
West of the Rockies
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
Here in California it’s a fiery orange moon, not a welcome sight.
Brachiator
People are hypocrites. Americans are hypocritical about sex.
I have mainly stopped paying attention to this stuff.
The one thing I have noted is that a lot of tech innovation used to come from the sex industry. Now it is directed to a large degree by gaming.
SC54HI
@Frank McCormick:
Knew nothing of onlyfans before today but it was this tweet that introduced me to the website.
Ann Wagner is in her 5th term as a US rep from MO.
If I had an Alexa, I’d be ordering ALL the popcorn.
The Dangerman
Ms. Jugs is playing cribbage with her boyfriend? Kinda gives new meaning to having the knobs.
Earl
I suspect it may be more of the pornhub crackdown triggered by that nyt article alleging the presence of widespread abusive material on pornhub. It triggered a set of problems with their payment providers, and — while I have no idea how real the allegations made in the nyt article were — it was gleefully exploited by the jesus set to damage pornhub’s business by cutting off the $$.
In particular, pornhub had to take down millions of videos — the vast vast majority consenting adults — and force people to go through a verification process, including uploading ID and video of their faces (though apparently, this doesn’t have to be public). Previously, you could essentially be anonymous.
For everyone familiar with companies history of safeguarding private information (Tmobile just leaked my info last week! Again!) that’s… well, I bet a lot of people stopped sharing their kinks.
I’m not sure if Mastercard and Visa went through with the ban or not. Anyway, I’d bet a decent lunch that OF is a casualty of the same group of people.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7k94be/mastercard-will-stop-processing-payments-to-pornhub
For those of you who haven’t had the joy of working with a payment provider, you have to work with a merchant bank. There’s only a handful that will touch porn or porn-related businesses, and they function as a pinch point for access to the payments system outside of nonsense like cryptocurrency.
I don’t think it’s chargebacks; chargebacks just get accounted for in the rate a company pays to their bank and how long / how much payments are held during clearance.
NotMax
@oldster
Count me as another one to whom it is new (and uninvited) knowledge.
When it comes to skittish investors, sounds like the chit hit the OnlyFans.
Mallard Filmore
https://democraticunderground.com/10142788102
Dan Patrick says “Let the darkies die.”
Seems to be worse than I thought … “we will look after our own, everyone else can FOAD.”
?BillinGlendaleCA
@JWR:
Spector’s mansion wasn’t in Hollywood, it’s in Alhambra(east of downtown LA).
NotMax
I really, really hope someone sees fit to front page the first twelve minutes of Lawrence O’Donnell’s Thursday show.
Cameron
@Steeplejack (phone): Yeah, it’s not that it’s meaningless, it’s that it’s false.
rikyrah
They are about to FAAFO
Turning on what makes them $$$?
And, for what ???
rikyrah
@West of the Rockies:
I hadn’t heard of it until yesterday.
Dan B
@Brachiator: My fantasy utopia is a place in nature where no one wears clothes, the weather is perfect, and everyone including couch-potato me is a model of physical fitness.
And everyone validates everyone’s sensuality. No work, all loving, no restrictions except living sensually as long as you and everyone around want.
The noisy folks who scream about “freedom” do not envision free sensuality. It would decimate their Utopia of “order and control”. It would show their lives devoted to denial of their physical dreams were nothing but denial of paradise for themselves and for all of humankind.
rikyrah
@NotMax:
That was great
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Xantar:
Or intimate partners asking “what the hell is THIS charge?”
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@MattF:
The only person I know with an OnlyFans is an extremely attractive young female lawyer who is a unicorn, in an open marriage and is making a ton of money banging men and women on her OF pages, which she also uses to openly solicit sex for money. She’s also set herself up as a manager type for young people to get into the biz. I honestly think she makes more from OF than she does from her practice, which involves a lot of windmill tilting and some cheap stuff.
rikyrah
Alabama doctor about the collapse of their medical system
https://youtu.be/9YmB5ivE9Ds
Yutsano
@Mallard Filmore:
The MSN link that came from. Fortunately linked in the article.
(I’m going to try sleep again now I swear!)
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Do you got a link to that? I’m looking for a good lawyer.
Nick D
BBC was about to come up with a damning investigation. Apparently, Only Fans has been bad, very bad…
As in looking the other way from illegal and exploitative content and having inconsistent policies.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/19/22633411/onlyfans-banned-explicit-porn-sex-content-after-bbc-investigation-leak
Obdurodon
@MattF: As John already pointed out, the financial industry itself is equally “adjacent” to the drug business, and the large-scale murder business, and so on. Similar “adjacency” to illegal activity exists many places. It’s just a slippery-slope argument, and selectively applied in the case of pornography as well.
Balconesfault
@Peale: BBC porn story … heh.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Nick D:
That BBC article was garbage. Basically said that sex workers were soliciting through OF (oh no!) and others were exhibitionists of really gross, but harmless, kink. Sounded like they did a decent job of shutting down underage displays (which I don’t call “child porn) and zoophilia.
Ramalama
Thanks for the reminder of Marcy’s potty mouth. I’d forgotten why she’s not everywhere on tv. She’s still doing the Lord’s work over at her blog and on Twitter.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
She’s not real good at lawyering. Green and overenthusiastic about her fact patterns and analysis. I suspect that her high energy serves her well in her other gig….
sherparick
@Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]:
Thanks.
sherparick
@Nick D:
Well, that is definitely the kind of thing that will scare off the bankers. However, not having a viable business model after 1 October 2021 will also scare off the bankers.
lee
Reading through a bit of the BBC article about OF, I concur that the BBC ‘investigation’ was garbage.
They set up an account(s) with a description with ‘young teens’ and didn’t post any content and then got butt-hurt when OF didn’t notice it.
Yeah do you know how many OF channels have similar descriptions?
And there might be some in-person sex work being facilitated by OF.
CasablancaGamblingQuote.jpg
I agree once an Angel Investor (they typically don’t need banks) gets over their fear of funding online sex work they are going to make enough money to terraform Mars.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@mrmoshpotato: mc fly.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@mrmoshpotato: the whole dang internet was a pornopolis.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@Balconesfault: greg lansky energy.
RaflW
Late to this, but an acquaintance of mine who is a radical Black feminist woman was just tweeting her fury at Nick Kristoff (who I personally think is a scammy, slef-important hack because he basically ripped off a beloved org I participate in. He gave a shit, super-brief ‘speech’ and then hucked his book at the back of the room. I’m sure he was paid a ton as the headline of a big anniversary gala. But I digress.)
It sounds as if Kristoff got personally involved in the decision by the banks to pull back on Only Fans? And of course that means that many in the sexwork industry are suddenly struggling to earn a needed living. I would imagine that pulling this online work option puts SWs at higher risk – both for in person exploitation, but also Covid. It’s fucked up. (Not that there isn’t exploitation possible at Only Fans – but the blunt instrument method of cutting off payments is likely disempowering a bunch of SWs who weren’t in the street level, high risk line of work.)
Monomakh
It’s the payment processors. MasterCard using specious reasoning to abuse their monopoly position. OnlyFans is being coerced.