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

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191–200 of 305 posts

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

#191

Cascading payments might be the real answer, and shuffling higher risk charges to non-Stripe providers, but in my experience, Stripe can get pretty moralizing pretty quickly. We built an adult ecommerce site (purely toys for purchase, no porn) and because other adult toy sites had been successful on Stripe, Stripe assured us this wouldn't be a problem. Six months and several million dollars processed later, Stripe in…

Wow.

Thanks for sharing

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

#192
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

loading across multiple providers won't alter the chargeback ratio so what is the point?

Chargeback ratio's are per account, but also have a minimum absolute threshold. So it's say, 2% chargeback AND at least 200 chargebacks before penalties kick in. In a past life I worked for a place who had a few hundred processing accounts to load balance it all out because their chargeback rates were way too high. If an account gets close, you just don't use it for a month, or you throw a bunch of "safe" recurring c…

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

#194
post #180

Cascading payments might be the real answer, and shuffling higher risk charges to non-Stripe providers, but in my experience, Stripe can get pretty moralizing pretty quickly. We built an adult ecommerce site (purely toys for purchase, no porn) and because other adult toy sites had been successful on Stripe, Stripe assured us this wouldn't be a problem. Six months and several million dollars processed later, Stripe in…

I don't really understand the motivation behind this puritanism. I get why respectable institutions don't want to touch things like selling weed or prostitution since that's not legal everywhere and they could get in trouble. But sex toys? Who cares? Like, that's not a rhetorical question, literally "who cares?" Are people going to stop using Wells Fargo because they very indirectly help in the commerce of sex toys?

Alabama, Georgia, and Texas have laws restricting the sale and possession of sex toys.

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

#195
post #180

Cascading payments might be the real answer, and shuffling higher risk charges to non-Stripe providers, but in my experience, Stripe can get pretty moralizing pretty quickly. We built an adult ecommerce site (purely toys for purchase, no porn) and because other adult toy sites had been successful on Stripe, Stripe assured us this wouldn't be a problem. Six months and several million dollars processed later, Stripe in…

I don't really understand the motivation behind this puritanism. I get why respectable institutions don't want to touch things like selling weed or prostitution since that's not legal everywhere and they could get in trouble. But sex toys? Who cares? Like, that's not a rhetorical question, literally "who cares?" Are people going to stop using Wells Fargo because they very indirectly help in the commerce of sex toys?

Sadly there are still US states where some sex toys are illegal (this is me rolling my eyes). https://www.mic.com/articles/131616/14-outdated-sex-laws-tha... is a pretty funny summary. Did I say funny? I meant tragic.

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

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hollywood isn't daemonized, but I used to give basically the same advice. Industries that run on attractive young people, people looking at very short careers, tend towards evil. Ask any successful recording artist about their first record contracts. Taylor Swift is writing songs about that dark place.

Fair enough, I can see that. I think a good portion of the evil in those industries comes from sexism, but that's really tangential to the topic and I appreciate your point. EDIT: I would like to expand my previous comment though. Whenever prostitution is legalized we see massive improvements in the lives of sex workers. It seems clear to me that further reducing the demonization of sex, sex workers, etc would lead t…

porn already works within a well-defined legal framework. There are model releases, people getting paid etc. So if a reputable porn company interacts with their models and their consumers, everything is well. However, there are still non-legal reasons that make it a special case - see the ancestor post about a bank wanting to dictate what a merchant can offer to their credit card customers, or the post about models being treated badly (not getting paid or having to do things that they didn't sign up for). In that case, there still seems to be a difference to non-porn modeling and acting in terms of standards and of recourse available. part of this is that there are more people paying for badly made porn than for badly made action movies

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

#197

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…

So dragon and unicorn dildos are OK, but human ones aren’t? WTF?

That actually makes sense (in a bizarre way) - fantasy vs. reality I guess...

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

#198
post #183
post #153

Often, when the market doesn't provide an essential gateway service to a law-abiding subpopulation, some sort of 'public option' is proposed. Not enough market housing, offer public/subsidized options. Not enough low- or no-cost private education, offer public schools. Too little affordable healthcare/insurance, offer Medicaid, a 'public option', single-payer. Public transport. Should the government offer a 'public o…

You have this already. It's called "using checks and money orders." The problem is that people want the convenience credit cards use, and don't want to wait for the check to clear to get their stuff.

Banks can and will close your account for any reason under the Sun. How do you write a check or receive one without a bank account? I'm not familiar enough with money orders, but I assume the same applies.

Then, on top of all of that, you can't run a business through a personal account. So you still require a business type bank account, and the above options are terrible for any eCommerce site, which is pretty much the only kind of business that will be discussed here on HN.

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

#199

Cascading payments might be the real answer, and shuffling higher risk charges to non-Stripe providers, but in my experience, Stripe can get pretty moralizing pretty quickly. We built an adult ecommerce site (purely toys for purchase, no porn) and because other adult toy sites had been successful on Stripe, Stripe assured us this wouldn't be a problem. Six months and several million dollars processed later, Stripe in…

This is an incredibly frustrating read. I know, I know there are far worse things in the world but fucking Wells Fargo dictating to people when they evict homeowners who have no relationship with Wells Fargo, commit wholesale wire fraud, destroy people's credit and then turn around and lecture a honest business. This is why banking is a rent-seeking and though we need the financial industry they are ghoulish vampires…

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 watching for fraudulent or wantonly scam transactions, but to step in out of nowhere because the volume of actual real charges for real customers for real products was too high and you were busy clutching your pearls over what was being sold is just insane. As if it could somehow splash back on to Wells Fargo and, what, further sully their reputation?

"Sure they may ruin people's lives and spawn fake accounts to hit numbers and silence anyone who speaks up and evict people incorrectly but at least they don't process transactions for flesh colored fantasy sex toys. That, sir, would be a bridge too far."

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

#200

Cascading payments might be the real answer, and shuffling higher risk charges to non-Stripe providers, but in my experience, Stripe can get pretty moralizing pretty quickly. We built an adult ecommerce site (purely toys for purchase, no porn) and because other adult toy sites had been successful on Stripe, Stripe assured us this wouldn't be a problem. Six months and several million dollars processed later, Stripe in…

This is an incredibly frustrating read. I know, I know there are far worse things in the world but fucking Wells Fargo dictating to people when they evict homeowners who have no relationship with Wells Fargo, commit wholesale wire fraud, destroy people's credit and then turn around and lecture a honest business. This is why banking is a rent-seeking and though we need the financial industry they are ghoulish vampires…

> we need the financial industry

Do we, though? I don't know whether the answer is distributed blockchains, or the Department of the Treasury creating an API for USD, or both; but the current banking system seems to me like the legacy code of feudal landed aristocrats. (I will never stop being disappointed that we didn't let the financial system crash in 2009.)

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