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A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

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Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

#61
post #29

Seen this thread going around, but it seems like it skips over the important bit. > So why the rule changes? Because last December the New York Times published an opinion piece by Nick Kristof caller “The Children of Pornhub” that accused the site and its parent company of profiting off revenge porn, child porn and sex trafficking. How do you get from 'opinion piece in a newspaper' to 'gigantic transnational financia…

> How do you get from 'opinion piece in a newspaper' to 'gigantic transnational financial infrastructure company changes its rules'? In my experience, huge companies do not make changes like this purely on the basis of newspaper columns.

The amounts are minor as far as payment processors are concerned, but those payment processors want to avoid governments getting up their grill.

By acting "proactively" on anything which smells of controversial or bad PR (and nothing does that more than accusations of child trafficking, not even actual child trafficking), regulators see "self regulation" and go look at something else.

Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

#62
Another good thread explaining the leverage Visa/MC and banking generally have in companies, and impact of vague FOSTA/SESTA legislation in the US.

Puritanical and evangelical lobby groups pushed these laws through Congress, and now they are reaping the rewards. It's unfortunate that the rest of the world has to suffer for this failure.

https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1428442523001831425?s=19

Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

#63
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Volatility and exchange with fiat are the main issues. In terms of simply effecting a payment Bitcoin has worked since launch (aside from a few times when transaction fees got pretty silly). The scaling problem can at least temporarily gotten around with multiple currencies. (Which seems to have been adopted in practice when Bitcoin hit its txn soft cap a while back.) IMO here in Canada it's near-feasible. Most peopl…

Open Question. Why don't more places accept stablecoin like USDC and USDT? The number of places that accept crypto is exceedingly low but even those that do usually only accept BTC. I wonder why stablecoins aren't used more for these sorts of transactions? Is it just that BTC is the most well known? Or are the underlying technical differences that prevent that from happening.

Most places which accept Bitcoin don't plan on holding it as cryptocurrency; it's converted quickly to USD (or whatever). They would do the same with ETH or USDC, convert directly to USD, or Bitcoin then USD. In short most USDC purchases would probably be fiat -> ETH -> USDC -> ETH -> fiat anyway. But fiat -> BTC -> fiat is a more established channel, and with lower txn fees at the moment.

Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

#64
At least this explains why normal porn sites keep living on perfectly well using MasterCard and Visa. They already have to follow regulatory requirements to demonstrate they are complying with age and consent laws, each video includes a front-matter frame saying where you can get the documentation of their compliance, and many include behind-the-scenes extra content showing all of the performers presenting government-issued IDs and signing consent forms.

This brings this conflict out of the realm of adult entertainment and into a broader conflict between incumbent central providers that are held to regulatory standards and apps providing a platform for individual contractors that don't follow those requirements. It's in the same field as people arguing AirBNB is only able to exist because it's allowing people to operate hotels without having to comply with hotel regulations, and Uber allows people to operate taxi services without complying with taxi regulations. OnlyFans was giving individuals a way to produce adult films without having to comply with adult film regulations related to age and consent verification of the performers.

Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

#65

The concern that various kinds of legal sex work might be a de-facto haven for human trafficking is at least many decades old, does not solely or even mainly originate from people identifying as Christians, and seems to have a pretty solid factual basis - at the very least, there is a consensus on the broad argument if not the details. The Twitter thread does not even attempt to fairly acknowledge these facts. Very s…

Is it worth continuing to push sex workers into illegality, thereby putting them in danger? Put another way, do we have a right to sacrifice one population to protect another? Allow me to doubt it.

Is it really the case that most OnlyFans girls would turn to more dangerous things like prostitution?

It kinda feels like OnlyFans has somewhat normalized/popularized young women going from Instagram 'influencer' (sometimes starting underage unfortunately, HS kids use it) to pornstar, for young women who otherwise probably wouldn't have entered the world of porn if it weren't for the fact that the hot Instagram girl -> monetize IG popularity via OnlyFans porn pipeline hasn't become so normalized.

Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

#66
post #29

Seen this thread going around, but it seems like it skips over the important bit. > So why the rule changes? Because last December the New York Times published an opinion piece by Nick Kristof caller “The Children of Pornhub” that accused the site and its parent company of profiting off revenge porn, child porn and sex trafficking. How do you get from 'opinion piece in a newspaper' to 'gigantic transnational financia…

Specifically the how is covered here.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/bill-ackman-...

Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

#67
Saying that the evangelists are anti-Semitic is laughable. If it wasn't for the evangelists in America, Israel would not have the billions in military aid they get from the US every year and the country wouldn't exist today. Not to mention how insane it is to bring up anti-Semitism for absolutely no reason at all. Being "against sex" may be stupid, but... anti-Semitic?

Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

#68
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Volatility and exchange with fiat are the main issues. In terms of simply effecting a payment Bitcoin has worked since launch (aside from a few times when transaction fees got pretty silly). The scaling problem can at least temporarily gotten around with multiple currencies. (Which seems to have been adopted in practice when Bitcoin hit its txn soft cap a while back.) IMO here in Canada it's near-feasible. Most peopl…

Open Question. Why don't more places accept stablecoin like USDC and USDT? The number of places that accept crypto is exceedingly low but even those that do usually only accept BTC. I wonder why stablecoins aren't used more for these sorts of transactions? Is it just that BTC is the most well known? Or are the underlying technical differences that prevent that from happening.

The root of money as a medium of exchange is trust.

Most people don't even know what USDC or USDT are, so there's no trust there. Among those who do, there's concern that they're too unproven; there may be not-yet-identified attack vectors on the stack of technologies they depend upon that could some day allow one attacker to crash the coin. BTC has withstood a test of time that lets people who can't walk all the way through the implementation details to sanity-check them for themselves trust it.

Money is a lot more like a social network than a standalone technology.

Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

#69
I'm not knocking down anyone's decision for how to earn money or spend their time, but the porn industry in general (corporate or indie) is notorious for exploitative attitudes and behavior, whether it's Pornhub exploiting unverifiable nature of some videos and favoring turning a blind eye to the whole thing until tension mounted, or a someone being in a relationship with someone else and doing videos together because god knows how much fucked up shit they've been through by the time they became 18.

I'm not in favor of big corporations, but in this case, the rules made by Mastercard seem sensible to me, and I'm not surprised that the Pornhub/Onlyfans are gonna position themselves as "being forced by the big companies to abandon the creators they support".

Re: A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong

#70

"So why the rule changes? Because last December the New York Times published an opinion piece by Nick Kristof caller “The Children of Pornhub” that accused the site and its parent company of profiting off revenge porn, child porn and sex trafficking....which, to be clear, they kinda were." Kinda, huh? Of course the more important point, according the thread's author, is that: "Kristof’s story might have been correct…

My right-wing friends would be very surprised to learn that the New York Times and Nick Kristof now represent them.

Yep. The Tweet thread is so easily proven wrong. Nick Kristof is not right wing by any means based on his articles:

https://www.nytimes.com/column/nicholas-kristof

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