141–150 of 238 posts
You may have a cool product in the field of sports betting, casinos, or lotteries. But almost all social networks and search engines won’t let you advertise without a license from the required jurisdiction. Good . You should face social stigma for creating products that literally ruin people's lives.
She finally gave it up, moved to Texas, and now manages influencer networks.
What's the author trying to say here? It's good that the law isn't the only line between good and evil. A bit of stigma is a bottom-up way for people to shape society. If nobody invites you to dinner parties because you run a startup that combines payday-lending and day-trading, that's a good thing. It's free alpha for companies doing more worthwhile things.
Add in crypto and some AI, and there’s a $50m funding round waiting for you.
What I would LOVE to see in the United States in particular is a system where we tax pornography and then plow that money back into sex education in public schools. The state of sex education in the United States is so far beyond a joke it is a travesty.
That said, I also feel a lot of folks who are pro-legislation are quite dishonest about the negative side-effects of legalization. They definitely exist!
Why do you think Onlyfans is the reigning platform for what it does.
Not because it's technically superior, or has the best advertising, or any other logical reason you might summon.
It's because they have a sweetheart deal with a payment processor (Stripe).
I put some time into seriously investigating what it'd take to get an adult-content platform off of the ground, here is one of the emails I received from a self-advertised "high-risk processor":
> "Yes, we do have some Payment Facilitator solutions. However, none of these processors will accept Adult content."
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While the porn industry has issue, at its core it isn't constructed to extract money from you. Boiling Gambling down to just being "entertainment" is a bit too reductionist in my opinion.
> While the porn industry has issue, at its core it isn't constructed to extract money from you. For what purpose do you think that industry was indirectly created for, if not to make money from people? Even if it might not have been created with that intent (although I'd still argue it was), today it surely is mainly driven and maintain with the (at least) implicit purpose of extracting money from people, that's lit…
The original poster has not expressed this correctly, but I assume that the intention was to say that the gambling industry is different from all other industries, not because it extracts money like any other industry, but because it does not return a product or service for that money.
The porn industry is no different from any other entertainment industry and it provides a service for money.
Gambling does not really provide any service, it just exploits the hope of the gamblers that they might gain something by gambling, which at least on average, never happens.
I do not think that one can call the stimulation of this hope of gaining as entertainment. There are some gamblers for which gambling is really entertainment, i.e. they are rich and they do not seriously expect to gain anything, but the majority of the gamblers do not do this to be entertained but because of the irrational hope of gaining enough to solve all their problems.
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I don't like mixing of everything 18+ in the article. I think the author wants to put all the stigma in one basket, and I don't it's as simple. For example, porn meets some actual human needs and has a certain function - but gambling? Simple abuse at scale. I think like you argue, society shaping business is good. And some people should really reevaluate what they're going for if that's too much for them.
> For example, porn meets some actual human needs and has a certain function - but gambling? Simple abuse at scale. Now I'm as as free-minded as people typically gets, but both of those are just "entertainment" for me, one is not more "essential" than the other, what exact "human need" does pornography meet that somehow gambling doesn't also meet, since we're not talking about "fun" or "entertainment" here but someth…
Compared to something else that sells a tangible good on the internet, or some ordinary software as a service thing... If you have 10,000 charges to 10,000 different people placed from an ordinary merchant, and you compare that to 10,000 charges from a porno website, there will be a vastly larger number of chargebacks and human-caused fraud disputes with the porno website. It's a continual and ongoing pain in the ass for any credit card processor that does business with such a merchant.
The major processors (stripe and its top competitors) have decided that it is not worth the hassle and are completely happy to cede this niche market to specialists. Basically for the same reason that a car loan through a subprime lending company originated by a "buy here pay here" car sales lot will have a much higher percentage interest rate, because of the risk to the lender, credit card processing for the adult entertainment market will have a much higher percentage fee charged to the merchant to run those cards.
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I mean, you also can't advertise illegal drugs either. Doesn't seem to curb demand though. It may actually be more beneficial to allow these things more broadly, because then social safety features can be wedged in between consumers and suppliers more easily and they don't have to deal with a gigantic shadow market that already gets stigmatised to death by the rest of the population. Just accept that a certain percen…
> then social safety features can be wedged in The bans and strict regulations are the social safety features.
If gambling is illegal then the profits go to organized crime and they don't follow any of the other laws either.
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So true. I wish alcohol, tobacco, gun and insurance companies and their employees faced the same stigma.
One of these things is not like the others. Insurance is a tool for spreading risk, and modern society could not operate without it.