Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

Second rate reporter says what?

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Not all heroes wear capes.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

American history and black history cannot be separated.

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

The revolution will be supervised.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / I Don’t Understand the OnlyFans Thing

I Don’t Understand the OnlyFans Thing

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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.

Reader Interactions

87Comments

  1. 1.

    Jerome G

    Tumblr went from a being a billion dollar company to being sold for 5 million after they banned erotica/porn

  4. 4.

    Leslie

    Just said the same thing, but in less detail, down below. Stupid freaking hypocritical banksters.

  6. 6.

    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.

  7. 7.

    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.

  8. 8.

    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.

  11. 11.

    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.

  15. 15.

    Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]

    @Jacel: Possibly!  I’ve been working through their archive, do you think it would fall under History, Politics or Divinity?

  18. 18.

    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. 

  19. 19.

    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.

  20. 20.

    James E Powell

    @Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]:

    It’s called Gresham College, which is an actual college that has been giving public lectures since the 16th century in greater London.

    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.

  22. 22.

    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.

  23. 23.

    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.

  24. 24.

    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.

  25. 25.

    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.

  27. 27.

    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.

  28. 28.

    Anne Laurie

    @Peale: The BBC story in my mind is inconclusive.

    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!

  29. 29.

    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.

  36. 36.

    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:)

    “Our secretary of state signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban,” Mr. Trump’s second national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, said of Mr. Pompeo during a podcast interview with the journalist Bari Weiss on Wednesday. “This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020. The Taliban didn’t defeat us. We defeated ourselves.”

    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:

    But the Taliban have not violated any of the written conditions of the four-page agreement signed in Doha, which bore a title reflecting the awkwardness of the talks with an insurgent group: “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan between the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban and the United States of America.”

    Nor is there evidence that top Trump officials prioritized planning for the eventual evacuation of Americans, or of Afghans who might be subject to Taliban reprisals for working with the United States.

    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:

    Nor did Trump officials place any public emphasis on the need to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies.

    Asked about Mr. Trump’s statements, and whether he was aware of discussions about such evacuations, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser John R. Bolton suggested there had been none.
    “It’s striking how Biden’s decision-making here so closely follows the Trump pattern,” Mr. Bolton said. “Biden wanted out; he apparently didn’t want to be bothered with details that might have thwarted or slowed down executing his decision. So he left. Very Trumpian.”

    Lying about processing the visas for our Afghan allies:

    The Trump administration’s processing of applications by Afghans eligible for a Special Immigrant Visa, under a program created by Congress to resettle Afghans who had assisted the U.S. military, moved at a pace that frustrated refugee rights activists. In 2018, the International Refugee Assistance Project filed a lawsuit against Mr. Pompeo and other U.S. officials, accusing them of “systemic delays” in approving such visas.

    Former Trump officials protest that they approved far more visas than the Obama administration did, although President Barack Obama never sought to remove all troops from Afghanistan.

    Nikki Haley is incoherent on Twitter:

    Ms. Haley, who played no role in the Trump administration’s talks with the Taliban, took aim at Mr. Biden. But, wittingly or not, she also incriminated Mr. Trump and Mr. Pompeo — all potential rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

    “Negotiating with the Taliban,” Ms. Haley said, “is like dealing with the devil.”

    ETA: Jake Tapper retweeted so he may have taken his blinders off.

    Schadenfreude feels so good.

  37. 37.

    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.

  40. 40.

    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?

  41. 41.

    David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch

    a gorgeous blue moon is forming tonight. Not a sight to be missed

  42. 42.

    David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch

    redhead from Poughkeepsie named Miss Juggs wants to sell a video of her pegging her boyfriend

    Do you have a link for that – asking for a friend.

  49. 49.

    Roger Moore

    @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.

    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.

  51. 51.

    Kent

    @West of the Rockies:I’ve never heard of Only Fans until this post. I must be getting old.

    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.

  53. 53.

    JWR

    Who woulda thunk it?

    Elder’s ex-fiancee said he brandished a gun at her

    … The alleged gun incident occurred in the midst of a heated conversation as their relationship was unraveling, according to Datig. “He was in the bedroom, and I was standing by the door,” she said. “We talked to each other.’’ He became silent, she said, and then slowly “walked over to the nightstand, opened the door, took out the gun,’’ a .45 pistol.

    “And he checked if it was loaded — while I was talking,’’ she said. “He wanted to make sure I saw that he had it.”

    “It was an act of silent scorn — and anger,’’ she said.

    “For a minute there … I thought it was a Phil Spector moment,’’ Datig said, referencing the famed Hollywood record producer who shot and killed actress Lana Clarkson in his Hollywood mansion in 2003. “My fear was great, and I understood I needed to de-escalate.”

    At that point, “he was threatening to throw me out on the street … and rather than answer back or throw something, I tried to use every tool I had in recovery… I just walked out,’’ she said. “I locked myself into the bedroom downstairs.’’

    Now that I read this crapola, I remember hearing about some of it before. C’mon, California. Vote NO, fer chrissakes!

  54. 54.

    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.

  56. 56.

    Brachiator

    On top of that is the hypocrisy of it all

    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.

  58. 58.

    The Dangerman

    Ms. Jugs is playing cribbage with her boyfriend? Kinda gives new meaning to having the knobs.

  59. 59.

    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.

  60. 60.

    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.

  61. 61.

    Mallard Filmore

    https://democraticunderground.com/10142788102

    Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick Blames Black Community, Democrats For COVID Spread

    Dan Patrick says “Let the darkies die.”

    “Most of the numbers are with the unvaccinated and the Democrats like to blame Republicans on that,” said Patrick. “Well, the biggest group in most states are African Americans who have not been vaccinated. The last time I checked over 90 percent of them vote for Democrats in their major cities and major counties, so it’s up to the Democrats to get just as that it’s up to Republicans to try to get as many people vaccinated.”

    Seems to be worse than I thought … “we will look after our own, everyone else can FOAD.”

  62. 62.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @JWR:

     I thought it was a Phil Spector moment,’’ Datig said, referencing the famed Hollywood record producer who shot and killed actress Lana Clarkson in his Hollywood mansion in 2003.

    Spector’s mansion wasn’t in Hollywood, it’s in Alhambra(east of downtown LA).

  67. 67.

    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.

  70. 70.

    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.

  75. 75.

    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.

  77. 77.

    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.

  78. 78.

    Ramalama

    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.

    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.

  81. 81.

    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.

  82. 82.

    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.

  86. 86.

    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.)

  87. 87.

    Monomakh

    It’s the payment processors. MasterCard using specious reasoning to abuse their monopoly position. OnlyFans is being coerced.

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