The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks

Digging a bit more, I don’t think so. The company that owns PornHub does about half a billion dollars per year in revenue: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindGeek

That includes revenue from other brands too, but I believe PornHub is their top brand, and likely accounts for a good portion of that. Also, how much money flows through PornHub that doesn’t count as revenue? I don’t know much about their business model, but say if a content creator generates $100 in total revenue on PH, and $40 goes to PH while $60 goes to the content creator, I’d guess that’s $100 in payments processed, but only $40 in MindGeek revenue?

Based on that, I’d estimate the volume of $$ flowing through PH at somewhere around $100,000,000-$1,000,000,000 annually. Even on the low end of that, around a billion should have flowed through them so far, over the lifetime of the site. And I think multiple billions is quite possible.

> All of these big corporate moves are making me think more and more of decentralization of platforms. Is that coming?

Absolutely not. Decentralized and self-hosted alternatives to doing anything on the internet have been available since the beginning, but

1) people choose convenience, every single time

2) popular things get popular

3) corpos have what it takes to make a thing popular

4) popular things get popular among the audience because all the content is there

5) popular things get popular among the "content creators" because all the audience is there

6) it's hard to make an artificially popular decentralized service without centralized investment into it; platforms that rely on individual users meshing their internet connections and $5 VPSes start small and stay niche

7) central investing into a platform without moderation and censorship is very risky, so it's unlikely to happen and if it does happen, it's likely to draw the same fire from banks, hosting providers, regulators, etc.

8) any platform that offers moderation and censorship and gets big enough will eventually get between what people want and those who provide that

9) lots of people actually want moderation and censorship, not freedom

10) the "scene" behind decentralized stuff is also divided on the issue of moderation

11) if a decentralized platform with no moderation were indeed to get big, it would again draw fire from various parties (see how various file sharing protocols and sites died)

There's more to it but point is, a "big" decentralized platform cannot happen (or at least cannot last) unless it also has a central entity that wields the power to do the same things that happen on centralized platforms. And people really just want to use one big platform.

And it's not a technical issue, it's a social & political issue.

To make a system that won't bend under the powers that be, people would also have to accept that they're hosting child porn, terrorist materials, drug trafficking, and other fun stuff. That's never going to happen.

The alternative is decentralized platforms that are and stay niche. They exist already, they've existed since the beginning. Are you using them, or are you just using the big few popular centralized platforms? I'm guessing you're not using them because "Is that coming?" kind of implies you think it's something that doesn't exist yet.

If people really want to fix this, they'll go back to creating independent web sites... Social media lures people in, takes a significant part of real money generated from creators, and then slowly tightens rules to protect it's own interests and profit while forsaking creators and that includes gradual suppression of promotional equality for creators.

The whole scheme to make creators pay to run ads is a failed ideology if creator content is the very thing that platforms depend on to succeed.

This is why I always edit/record to files I can re-use/re-distribute rather than using native record options on platform-specific apps.

I make music, not adult content though just FTR.

Brilliantly put.