A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong • Hacker News Board

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

#391

Post by jbverschoor » Sat, Aug 21, 2021, 6:33 AM UTC

yarcob wrote: post #170

surge wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same crap as the ad-pocalypse. Journalists with an agenda use a disingenuous tactic, if they have a problem with a person or entity, they'll call up their sponsors, business partners, vendors, etc, and say "we're writing an article on X's platform which has been found to have (controversial material framed in a negative context), are we to believe that you're supportive and would your company care to comment…

No. If a journalist asking uncomfortable questions about your business endangers your business, then the problem is not the journalist, the problem is your business. If a journalist blows a story out of proportion, then usually nothing happens and the story is forgotten after a few months. But in the porn hub story, the uncomfortable truth is that there was a lot of involuntary porn on the platform. The NYT story jus…

Except the ones that make them big $$$. Same with banks. It’s never about anything moral or legal.

It’s always a risk-reward issue. Banks are more than happy to work, as long as they can profit enough

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

#392

Post by jollybean » Sat, Aug 21, 2021, 6:56 AM UTC

yarcob wrote: post #170

surge wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same crap as the ad-pocalypse. Journalists with an agenda use a disingenuous tactic, if they have a problem with a person or entity, they'll call up their sponsors, business partners, vendors, etc, and say "we're writing an article on X's platform which has been found to have (controversial material framed in a negative context), are we to believe that you're supportive and would your company care to comment…

No. If a journalist asking uncomfortable questions about your business endangers your business, then the problem is not the journalist, the problem is your business. If a journalist blows a story out of proportion, then usually nothing happens and the story is forgotten after a few months. But in the porn hub story, the uncomfortable truth is that there was a lot of involuntary porn on the platform. The NYT story jus…

"If a journalist blows a story out of proportion, then usually nothing happens and the story is forgotten after a few months."

Definintely disagree. Stories can be published that are sided, contain bad facts, are missing highly relevant facts, and the narrative can be set in the public consciousness as a matter of record forever.

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

#393

Post by johnnyanmac » Sat, Aug 21, 2021, 7:13 AM UTC

twic wrote: 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'?

Easy. the reporter isnt just launching the page and waiting for a reaction. They probably used those accounts to report to authorities and timed their story with an expected result from the investigation.

There's no magic to it except for the ability to post the news piece and have the public think "they are just reporting on it"

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

#394

Post by johnnyanmac » Sat, Aug 21, 2021, 7:23 AM UTC

webkike wrote: post #81

twic wrote: 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…

According to the thread > Which, to be clear, they kinda were. PornHub was notoriously bad among the tube sites for its reckless lack of content moderation and exploitation of the people whose videos ended up there. Because of the story, Visa and MasterCard both cut PornHub off. This should be fairly easy to verify and would corroborate the thread

The issue is that they "were" in the same way that the ocean does indeed "contain" fecal matter in it. I doubt their moderation was "reckless" For how many actual offending videos they are compared to the sheer amount of uploads the site had.

Any and all websites that allow user published content runs into this issue. It's just a matter of how fine a comb the investigations want to put on it.

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

#395

Post by johnnyanmac » Sat, Aug 21, 2021, 7:30 AM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #229

xg15 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the thread wasn't defending trafficking. It's claiming that the forces that push the anti-trafficking rules have a hidden agenda, which is not about trafficking at all: They want to get rid of the whole sex industry for religious reasons, specifically including the legal and consensual part. That's a different goal altogether.

The problem with that kind of argument is that these rules are what everyone pushes to deter traffickers. No one has seriously managed to come up with a viable alternate policy that averts this kind of collateral damage on bona-fide sex work. It's much like saying that all the efforts that are now saving elephants from being poached to extinction are just some shadowy "anti-ivory agenda" rather than being undertaken…

>The problem with that kind of argument is that these rules are what everyone pushes to deter traffickers.

yes,and I argue there is a severe amount of false negatives caught up in the crossfire because legal entities don't understand the scale of digital platforms. So these rules are made with no regards to how feasible they are and how big a problem this actually is.

Let's be honest here, the real silk road/black market aren't browsing Pornhub/OnlyFans to get their fix. This would be like money laundering on eBay. being on a big platform ruins the point.

>It's much like saying that all the efforts that are now saving elephants from being poached to extinction are just some shadowy "anti-ivory agenda" rather than being undertaken for the sake of the elephants. Terribly bad faith argument.

I don't really care about the intent to be honest. I just hate the loopholes over things that every digital platform needs to perform being taken advantadge of to cause these asinine decisions.

It's like throwing the baby out with the bathwater to kill a cockroach. The baby is hurt, the water is wasted, and the roach is probably still alive. I don't think it was a deliberate attempt to support baby murder, but the entire thought process was stupid and will spread to everything else in the house. While failing to kill any bugs.

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

#396

Post by johnnyanmac » Sat, Aug 21, 2021, 7:38 AM UTC

tootie wrote: post #130

twic wrote: 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…

I understand the thread, but if Kristof's reporting is accurate, then you can hardly blame him. He's not responsible if payment providers decide to freak out over potential liability. Or that OF can't figure out how to verify their creators.

I don't blame the reporting rather than usual human understanding that never learned how statistics worked.

Someone peed in the ocean and they are draining the entire sea to "fix it". That's not the fault of the pee-er nor even the person who yelled "someone peed". It's the fault of people who didn't understand what that meant before draining some 20% of the matter on earth.

Until that happens, pretty much every single website with user generated content is at risk in some degree.

>Or that OF can't figure out how to verify their creators.

OG does in fact verify every creator. The problem is no company at that scale is going to site down and review every single piece of content they post after that verification which may or may not include other participants that they could not verify. That's what this policy change wants to enforce (which any webmaster would know is prohibitively expensive to do without being Google).

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

#397

Post by johnnyanmac » Sat, Aug 21, 2021, 7:44 AM UTC

PoignardAzur wrote: post #351

relax88 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably because of the costs of verification and record keeping. A single adult video studio might have a maximum of a few hundred people who they have to keep records for. Those people are paid per shoot, and the content is owned by the studio. There is a high ratio of revenue to number of people whose records must be kept. On OnlyFans, they have a huge amount of people producing a small volume of content and mak…

That can't possibly be it. We're talking about a billion dollars business burning its main revenue source to the ground, and the main reason would be that they can't afford to do the easily-automated paperwork? The math doesn't make sense.

>that they can't afford to do the easily-automated paperwork?

if this tweet is true, that's the issue. they don't want just automated paperwork:

>, but review all posted content before publication, including real-time review of livestreams

It's virtually impossible to discriminate criminal content with an algorithm (and extremely hard to even with a human, but I disgress. This policy isn't rooted in logic to begin with), so any non-professional studio is basically being demanded to have some massive team pre-screen every single piece of content before it lands on site. The labor would either be massive and/or they'd have to massively delay how quickly the site can deliver content.

Imagine needing to wait in a queue for 1-4 weeks before a single post can be shown publicly. That's unacceptable in modern websites. And expesnsive in 2 ways.

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

#398

Post by aembleton » Sat, Aug 21, 2021, 7:49 AM UTC

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #111

mchusma wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. If you are going to be a legal dualolopy, then you can't cut off payments like you can't cut off power or water. Personally I breaking thei anti-trust behavior entirely, so people have options.

It's the high chargeback rate.

Don't they pass the costs of the charge back onto their merchants?

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

#399

Post by johnnyanmac » Sat, Aug 21, 2021, 7:50 AM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #281

icegreentea2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People with only outrage won't think about their payment processors. Those with outrage who think through their options to enact change will think of their payment processors, and direct group pressure on them.

Has anybody in history ever said "I'm cutting up my MasterCard because this porn site takes it!" Organizing a boycott like that seems almost impossible. There just isn't enough realistic competition and going back to paper checks is just not happening, especially online.

Not many, but it just takes a few of the "right" people who know how to pull the strings: https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1s9f698vwhczr...

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

#400

Post by rnd0 » Sat, Aug 21, 2021, 7:55 AM UTC

jmull wrote: post #301

Scaevolus wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The payment processors banned MindGeek soon after that NYT article. Do you think that was a coincidence? MasterCard's new rules appear to be a direct response to the concerns the article raised. Is that coincidental?

And your theory is that a progressive journalist is calling the shots as Mastercard? I'm pretty sure MC would look a lot different if that were true.

It's more likely that the progressive journalist was a hired gun working for someone who told him what to write about.