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Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?

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211–220 of 305 posts

Re: Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?

#211
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inverse of this. Here's their exact, hilarious wording: >Our banking partners recently notified us that they are no longer willing to support the sales of realistic sex toys. I understand that your products were designed to depict the body parts of mythological and fantastical creatures, and we have indicated this to our banking partners in an effort to advocate for continuing to support your business here on Str…

I have no skin in this game, but I have to wonder who is making these decisions and what their thought process is. What is the threat model, exactly? What eventuality is the bank seeking to avoid? Are there edge-case regulatory issues at play? Are there moral-consumer groups out there that run public pressure campaigns against banks that transact on adult toys that look too realistic? Is a corporate lawyer somewhere…

What I find weird is the thought process of:

- pretend to fuck a human? No. Don't want to encourage that.

- Fuck a unicorn/dragon/Dionysus? Sure, why not...

Who is conservative enough to want to discourage the one thing literally required for humanity to survive; and yet is OK with mythical creatures?!?

Re: Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we need the financial industry Do we, though? I don't know whether the answer is distributed blockchains, or the Department of the Treasury creating an API for USD, or both; but the current banking system seems to me like the legacy code of feudal landed aristocrats. (I will never stop being disappointed that we didn't let the financial system crash in 2009.)

An API for USD centrally controlled by the Treasury? Kiss your financial freedom goodbye. You gotta demand it be distributed blockchains or you'll be living in chains.

It would be cool to also have an API for USD.

Re: Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?

#213

Cascading payments might be the real answer, and shuffling higher risk charges to non-Stripe providers, but in my experience, Stripe can get pretty moralizing pretty quickly. We built an adult ecommerce site (purely toys for purchase, no porn) and because other adult toy sites had been successful on Stripe, Stripe assured us this wouldn't be a problem. Six months and several million dollars processed later, Stripe in…

Unfortunately exactly 0% of this story surprises me. > That processor sucks and their fraud protections are weak and their interface is garbage I have three guesses and they're all CCBill.

LOLZ I was waiting for someone to call them out. I haven't looked at their interface in decades, but last time I looked it was decades out of date. Payments is the most profitable niche in the porn industry.

Re: Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?

#214

Cascading payments might be the real answer, and shuffling higher risk charges to non-Stripe providers, but in my experience, Stripe can get pretty moralizing pretty quickly. We built an adult ecommerce site (purely toys for purchase, no porn) and because other adult toy sites had been successful on Stripe, Stripe assured us this wouldn't be a problem. Six months and several million dollars processed later, Stripe in…

We need all platform providers, such as payment utilities, to stop bringing their personal morals and politics to the table. If not, we need to regulate them or build government provided equivalents that don’t have the same vulnerabilities or split them up on anti trust grounds.

Re: Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An API for USD centrally controlled by the Treasury? Kiss your financial freedom goodbye. You gotta demand it be distributed blockchains or you'll be living in chains.

At least you'd have due process and couldn't be deplatformed for legal activity. Now you have neither. The current system has zero privacy, so no change there. Not seeing the downside. Federally illegal activity like marijuana wouldn't benefit, but most things would.

Technically, any occurring "federally illegal" activity is just not successfully policed criminal activity. (States can't actually make something legal the federal government says is not legal. They can just decline to use their own resources to police it.)

Generally speaking, most people would consider "not usable in crime" to be a feature rather than a bug. ;)

Re: Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?

#217
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

loading across multiple providers won't alter the chargeback ratio so what is the point?

Chargeback ratio's are per account, but also have a minimum absolute threshold. So it's say, 2% chargeback AND at least 200 chargebacks before penalties kick in. In a past life I worked for a place who had a few hundred processing accounts to load balance it all out because their chargeback rates were way too high. If an account gets close, you just don't use it for a month, or you throw a bunch of "safe" recurring c…

Execs went to prison? Seems like they didn't like to share with local politicians...

Re: Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?

#218
post #201
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand the motivation behind this puritanism. I get why respectable institutions don't want to touch things like selling weed or prostitution since that's not legal everywhere and they could get in trouble. But sex toys? Who cares? Like, that's not a rhetorical question, literally "who cares?" Are people going to stop using Wells Fargo because they very indirectly help in the commerce of sex toys?

> I get why respectable institutions don't want to touch things like selling weed or prostitution since that's not legal everywhere and they could get in trouble. But sex toys? If that is the reason for the former, it's probably the reason for the latter too.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for sharing your experience. It absolutely disgusts me the power that payment processors have over businesses. The sooner that industry is dismantled and made agnostic the better. I remember watching some BDSM website's documentary where they talked about how their payment processor dictated the kind of content they were allowed to make. It boggles my mind that people are okay with that. I also find it surp…

>> _help_ the sex industry thrive There are dark sides. It is not the friendly industry oft portrayed. It is an industry that thrives on the young and naive. It is regulated because it needs to be. Most common complaint heard by lawyers in the field: "I did the shoot, the movie is on the website, but I haven't been paid." Followed worryingly by: "They said I had to because I had signed a contract." The advice I give…

Yes, conventional porn is a dark place. In my study of the problem, this fact underscores the importance of the Snapchat/Onlyfans revolution rather than taking away from it.

Prohibition creates problems. It doesn't solve them. Prohibiting anyone from using conventional payment infrastructure simply pushes them into the arms of the (sometimes abusive) people who have the resources to work around the system. In this scenario, an individual can't work around the system. The nameless/faceless owners of the large porn groups can.

This situation creates an inherent power imbalance that incentivizes coercion.

In the Snapchat/Onlyfans model, coercion is eliminated by virtue of allowing people to express themselves, when they want and as they want in the privacy of their homes. They are the directors, gaffers, editors etc. and no one else can tell them what they can or can't do.

A decentralized system is better at taking power away from those objectively awful people than any regulation or personal tips or oversight could.

Re: Ask HN: How does onlyfans.com work around the “no porn” Stripe rule?

#220

OnlyFans isnt a porn site in the same way that Twitter isnt a porn site. Many of the high profile users are in the adult industry but people use onlyfans for other types of content as well.

Yea me mum sells erotic art on there
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