151–160 of 615 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there were about 20K active content creators). The average monthly payment was $5000 20k times $5,000 = $100M/month. Still quite impressive.
… heavily skewed by the top 5%. So the number is likely way, way lower than $100M (perhaps $8-10M?)
Aren't OnlyFans (and similar companies) another way to launder money?
The problem is that the amount of money you could flow through it would be very little before it starts raising red flags compared to other methods.
Would be ideal for a small time drug dealer who wants an easy way to get cash though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The average monthly payment was $5000 (skewed massively by the top 5%). I used to work in the direct carrier billing department of a large telco and I'm still amazed by the phenomenon of whales. We'd get 98% of people spending 20 bucks on Spotify and the odd app here and there, and then there were people who would consistently spend 15k+ on Candy Crush (and pay their bills). Not the same level as what you're talkin…
> people who would consistently spend 15k+ on Candy Crush (and pay their bills). Sounds like a very successful money laundering operation.
I got an insight from "The Surprising Psychology Of OnlyFans Simps by Charisma on Command" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auG2E53dFas) that subscribers buy attention rather than sex.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All valid points. I guess it’s difficult to simultaneously de-stigmatize and urge caution. Instead what happens is we encourage new people to try it, and then some of the people who have tried it share their experiences with the community. That’s how people end up learning about problems with it. Since it is an experimental phase there are more failures (went poorly for some folks). We might say the same thing happen…
And then the cycle of stigmatization begins again… Almost as if there is a purpose to it. Is stigmatization always an objectively bad thing? I suppose it depends on your frame of reference. I don’t think any person should be stigmatized for what they do, but certain activities may well deserve it. I suppose that’s also a recurrent theme in the New Testament. One thing I think ought to be stigmatized more is video gam…
I still play some titles sometimes that feed my SciFi or History interests, like MassEffect or Ck2/TotalWar, but I don't enjoy them like I used to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can testify that I went through a lonely period a few years ago, and stumbled upon Twitch, and was immediately weirded out by how much of an effect it had on my emotions. It felt like I could point and click and immediately have the experience of hanging out with someone, belonging, having something that felt anchoring, without making any of the hard social effort that's always been a challenge for me. I couldn't p…
One issue with streaming/youtubers in particular is that you can get all of that fun-social-fuzzy feeling without actually participating and forming a real connection, it's different to other online communities in that way. Unless you dive deep into their community you don't actually know the streamers and they don't know you. You come out the other-side of a binge with nothing. If you've got a robust social network…
Fire up the throwaway! Not 100% related to the article, but directly related. I worked as developer for a product in the same niche ("democratizing adult content"). I spent almost 2 years working on the frontend, devops, and building out the analytics engine (all pre-covid). Anyway, on to the comment at hand. We had a small number of users compared to OnlyFans (when I left, there were about 20K active content creator…
> The average monthly payment was $5000 (skewed massively by the top 5%). I used to work in the direct carrier billing department of a large telco and I'm still amazed by the phenomenon of whales. We'd get 98% of people spending 20 bucks on Spotify and the odd app here and there, and then there were people who would consistently spend 15k+ on Candy Crush (and pay their bills). Not the same level as what you're talkin…
This “whale” phenomenon describes exactly why online poker is so profitable for the site operators.
The profits don’t come from the masses of people cautiously playing on micro stakes tables, but the whales, who will give the poker rooms thousands each month in rake.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that those people are the "whales" for these content creators. Normal people with healthy real-world relationships don't spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a month on online parasocial porn addictions. It's like someone selling crack and complaining about how they have to deal with crack addicts.
Except it’s nothing like selling crack and the platform isn’t doing enough to keep performers safe.
The overlap between small-time OnlyFans creators and people hypervigilant about their privacy feels small. Streamers and idols have faced this problem for some time - with cases of people finding out where a streamer lives based on minutiae like reflections - but add porn and inexperience to the equation and it's not at all surprising that stalking behavior can get dangerously extreme. Storytime - a girl at my uni me…
Of course, OF itself would never scare off prospective sources of income like that.
Fire up the throwaway! Not 100% related to the article, but directly related. I worked as developer for a product in the same niche ("democratizing adult content"). I spent almost 2 years working on the frontend, devops, and building out the analytics engine (all pre-covid). Anyway, on to the comment at hand. We had a small number of users compared to OnlyFans (when I left, there were about 20K active content creator…
I think in general there are some pretty big costs that aren't fully understood to doing sex work, even outside of the social stigma of being found out by your friends and family, there are mental health costs that are often not talked about. A lot of sex workers overtly reinforce social behaviors towards women (sexualization and objectification among other things) in order to appeal to men, which hurts them in the l…
On the contrary, everyone is talking about mental costs, implying that they do not know what they are doing. I know a person who changed her work from being a cashier at a supermarket to a sex worker. Mentally, she benefited a lot. In one job, she felt like an automaton serving people. I other she had personal relationships with her clients. You can guess which is which.
Or another one, also from a sex worker:
"We don’t ask the barista, the plumber, or the mail person whether they really like their job as a measure of whether their industry should be criminalised. Imagine criminalising the whole clothing industry because of bad working conditions in some factories. Or health care. No, we understand that people who work under bad conditions need labour rights. That that is going to help them much more than criminalising their jobs. Why is this so difficult to understand when it comes to the sex industry?"
https://web.archive.org/web/20200220124433/http://rosieheart...
To make it clear - yes, there are risks, short and long-term. I guess some underestimate long-term risks (e.g. revealing one's face online, which is a point of no return; or if they ever do unprotected sex). Yet, "sex workers don't know what they are doing" is a patronizing approach.