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

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

#251

Post by ocdtrekkie »

sneak wrote: post #240
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. ;)

I don’t think there is as quite widespread consensus that all federal crimes are legitimately crime as you seem to think. Marijuana sales, for example, seem extremely popular. Just because there’s a law in place at some remote level of jurisdiction doesn’t mean it’s just, or has popular support.

Widespread consensus doesn't determine what is and isn't a crime. The law does. Until the federal law changes, marijuana sales are a federal crime. Technically speaking, no state can actually "legalize" it.

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

#252

Post by [deleted] »

8192kjshad09- wrote: post #237
tzs wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the CVV you can't store it even if you have passed PCI compliance. You are only allowed to collect it for a specific transaction, and are required to forget it when that transaction is complete.

That can't be right. I entered my credit card information once into uber eats and I can buy food whenever without entering a CCV and my credit card is immediately charged. If this were true 1000s of large companies would not be PCI compliant.

[deleted]

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

#253

Post by esrauch »

lovegoblin wrote: post #181
HenryBemis wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read this on some legit news site a few days ago: apparently Bella Thorne, a formed Disney actress-turned-pornstar(?) joined OnlyFans and hit $1m in 24 hours. I don't follow OnlyFans progress and I have no idea how many "content creators" they got and what is the "fanbase", but if a 20yo nobody with a nice body can take $1m in 24h (then I assume that is with 1-3-6-... months subscriptions)(so she won't bring in ano…

lmao Bella Thorne is not a "20yo nobody". She had tens of millions of followers before joining OnlyFans.

I think "nobody" was relative here. I had never heard of her before this thread and looking at her career she isn't a nobody but she is very far from being an A-lister.

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

#254

Post by behringer »

zamfi wrote: post #150
disillusioned wrote: post #115

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…

I know exactly how this happens because I have to deal with this all the time. Here's my guess:

The boss ten years ago now dead said if it looks like a penis and is the right color of a penis then we can't sell it. Therefore, you gotta change the color. - Wells Fargo, probably.

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

#255

Post by ocdtrekkie »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #249
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually more or less my preference: Straight metering. People who use the network less pay less, people who use the network pay more. And ISPs could then deliver all users access at the highest speeds their network can handle, rather than artificially speed throttling traffic. Internet billing should look more like your electric and natural gas bills.

That's not possible: CDNs exist not just to reduce latency, but to reduce data-transfer costs by having content within the ISP's own network where data transfer is literally gratis to the ISP because it's running on their own hardware: they just charge companies like Netflix and Akami rent to sit within their network. By your proposal I would be paying the same per-byte rate for both Netflix and Vimeo, even though Ne…

Data doesn't have to have an exact fungible value for it to be a good way to divide up costs. Users torrenting terabytes a month should pay more than someone who mostly uses email and reads news articles.

Also, note that Netflix gets its CDN boxes hosted for free. It "lets" ISPs host them, rather than paying for colocation space. Charging equally for data use regardless of CDNs or not would rebalance this effect.

And finally, the largest cost for building out residential ISP networks is last mile. It's the most expensive part to build, maintain, and upgrade to support increasing usage. The CDN boxes are on the far end of this, so mostly irrelevant anyways to this point.

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

#256

Post by volkl48 »

CarbyAu wrote: post #211
zamfi wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?!?

Usually there's overlap in those "designs" with the....appendages of common animals (even if not explicitly labeled as such).

Someone on a moralizing crusade would probably label the company as supporting bestiality.

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

#257

Post by jcranmer »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #245
thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CEO knows their business model; it's to scratch out every last penny they can, however they can, just to fulfill some quarterly earnings report. Almost every public company is now a growth company, so it doesn't matter how much they already profit–what matters is that they profit more in the next 90 days. He/She doesn't need/care to know about onlyfans–they simply care about hitting their targets.

...so why would they want to leave money on the table by forcing Stripe to ditch a clearly profitable client company?

Reputational risk. Some journalist gets wind of an ad on Youtube that's playing for a neo-Nazi video, it gets written up as "$COMPANY is supporting Nazis!" despite the fact that it's largely out of the control of $COMPANY, several companies collectively freak out and pull advertising money, and everyone goes hunting for where their pipelines might lead to similar pearl-clutching associations and PR disasters.

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

#258

Post by sky_rw »

Le0n_ wrote: post #226
disillusioned wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my exact rant. Even more galling was that Wells Fargo was virtue signaling about something that... had no optics to them. Literally no one knows who our payment processor was, but if you even got as far as "Stripe," a _vanishingly small_ number of people know that Wells Fargo is their banking partner for US transactions. This isn't to suggest that WF should run their merchant processing business with no one…

I think you're misinterpreting the scale of Wellsfargo. The CEO probably doesn't even know what onlyfans is, and they manage almost 2 trillion dollars.

I think you are underestimating the scale of operation choke point.

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

#259

Post by technion »

lovegoblin wrote: post #181
HenryBemis wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read this on some legit news site a few days ago: apparently Bella Thorne, a formed Disney actress-turned-pornstar(?) joined OnlyFans and hit $1m in 24 hours. I don't follow OnlyFans progress and I have no idea how many "content creators" they got and what is the "fanbase", but if a 20yo nobody with a nice body can take $1m in 24h (then I assume that is with 1-3-6-... months subscriptions)(so she won't bring in ano…

lmao Bella Thorne is not a "20yo nobody". She had tens of millions of followers before joining OnlyFans.

She is also not a porn star. None of this content is nude. The running joke is that there are pap photos showing more skin than what people paid for here.

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

#260

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

jcranmer wrote: post #257
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...so why would they want to leave money on the table by forcing Stripe to ditch a clearly profitable client company?

Reputational risk. Some journalist gets wind of an ad on Youtube that's playing for a neo-Nazi video, it gets written up as "$COMPANY is supporting Nazis!" despite the fact that it's largely out of the control of $COMPANY, several companies collectively freak out and pull advertising money, and everyone goes hunting for where their pipelines might lead to similar pearl-clutching associations and PR disasters.

But that doesn't explain the documented unethical - if not illegal - conduct of Wells Fargo overall. Otherwise they'd be more like the Disney Co.
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