OnlyFans drops planned porn ban • Hacker News Board

Re: OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

#321

Post by dannyw » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 2:50 PM UTC

jfoster wrote: post #88

They know their platform. I presume that prior to the announcement they had tried everything they could to continue BAU. The fact that they're able to now reverse the announcement makes me wonder what changed. Did they find a new banking or payout partner? Existing ones had a change of heart? Feels like there would be more to it than these possibilities.

Banks: if we ban onlyfans and other widely popular services, a decent number of people might actually turn into crypto and make our business extinct.

Re: OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

#322

Post by PeterisP » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 2:52 PM UTC

onlyfansfan wrote: post #134

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investments aren’t loans, so you don’t have to pay it back the way a loan might be.

Thanks, I guess I was wrong on that count. It makes sense. The first part continues to baffle me. If I have a proven profit of $X/year and I have the market captured (speaking on the order of 10% or 50%, doesn't matter), how does it make sense to seek investment in the order of 100*X? What's the goal? Why not just keep milking the proven cash cow and stop growing and risking?

One aspect is that it's a way for the founders get to take some money off the table. It's not prudent to have 99% of your wealth tied up in a single "cash cow" no matter how proven it is, you do want to diversify.

Re: OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

#323

Post by mschuster91 » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 2:53 PM UTC

after_care wrote: post #249

busymom0 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would also like to know on whether it's possible for someone to start their own payment processors? There are tutorials on how to start an ISP, so should be possible for payment processors too no?

I think the traditional Visa/MasterCard/American Express/Discover payment processor has established a significant enough moat to make joining them unattractive. There are several challengers like Paypal, Venmo, Zelle, Coinbase, etc that attack from a slightly different angle. I think the thing that is most common is that have super low cost bank transfer options, and they encourage users to maintain a balance. Proces…

PayPal is even worse for sex workers, they're banning people left and right if they even suspect you might be involved into anything relating to it.

Their official stance always has been that this is due to the credit card companies, the reality rather is that Paypal doesn't want to deal with the rampant fraud (aka post-nut clarity) in porn.

Re: OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

#324

Post by raztogt21 » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 2:54 PM UTC

laputan_machine wrote: post #306

lugged wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know Devs can relatively easily get around 250k in NY / SF right? Trades are solid career choices but it's hard work and you expire at about the same rate as a software dev.

So sick of seeing these wildly inflated numbers, they increase after every post I'm sure. Most of us here who are software devs are not earning close to 150k, stop using a few SF salaries as the baseline for the rest of us. It is really annoying.

Is easily doable have 2 100k jobs without burnout. Do you really spend 8 hours coding each day?

Re: OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

#325

Post by toofy » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 2:54 PM UTC

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #310

whymauri wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It helps, but for many it was/is not enough. Trust me, the job search was brutal even as a computer science graduate from MIT. I had an offer and it was revoked (and companies that I had offers from pre-pandemic would not engage anymore). I'm almost certain that I have classmates who had OF at one point during the last year and I know for certain from Twitter there's Ivy League, Cal, and Stanford students on there. E…

> I have classmates who had OF What is OF?

OnlyFans. OF is what it’s called often in common conversations.

“What’s your OF?” “I setup an OF at blahblahblah”

Re: OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

#326

Post by Oras » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 2:55 PM UTC

treesknees wrote: post #112

traveler01 wrote: post #66

As a Gen-Z also recently graduated (less than 5 years), I can assure you, the fact these platforms are so big is because being graduated isn't worth anything these days. You are lucky or you are not.

That's not exactly true. It's not that an undergraduate degree is worthless, but it's become pretty standard. You may not stand above the rest with just a degree, but you certainly fall below the rest without one. I don't mean this from an intelligence or skill perspective, some of the smartest people I know don't have college degrees. But when the big companies are recruiting from college career fairs or listing it…

To confirm your point, Google Jobs has introduced a beta field called "educationRequirements" which can be any of the following values:

- high school. - associate degree. - bachelor degree. - professional certificate. - postgraduate degree.

Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure...

Re: OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

#327

Post by dlp211 » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 2:55 PM UTC

laputan_machine wrote: post #306

lugged wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know Devs can relatively easily get around 250k in NY / SF right? Trades are solid career choices but it's hard work and you expire at about the same rate as a software dev.

So sick of seeing these wildly inflated numbers, they increase after every post I'm sure. Most of us here who are software devs are not earning close to 150k, stop using a few SF salaries as the baseline for the rest of us. It is really annoying.

Ok, so let's not use inflated Numbers for the trades either. According to the BLS, the median Software Developer makes $110k. The median carpenter makes $34k. There are also nearly 5x the number of Developer jobs then carpenters.

It's a similar story for other trades, machinist is $47k, welder is $44k, plumber is $56k, HVAC is $50k.

Then when we look at other technology jobs, PM, IT, etc, the story is similar to developers, high median salary with a multiple of jobs available over the trades.

Re: OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

#328

Post by amarant » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

actually_a_dog wrote: post #15

LeftHandPath wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If so, I think that's a good thing. This should bring attention to payment processors' ability to effectively kill any type of business they don't agree with. I'm not sure what the solution is. Should banks be forced to behave as a common carrier? Or do we want private companies to be able to ban the public from purchasing things like pornography and firearms by stopping adults from completing legal transactions?

Let's turn the question around instead: why shouldn't banks be forced to behave as common carriers, at least when it comes to things like processing payments, providing checking accounts, and other such basic services? What good does it do to start a business, only to be told by the banking industry that you can't open a bank account for your perfectly legal business? I'm not sure if I'd include lending in "basic ser…

Lending and banking should be considered separate, if related business IMO. And bankers should absolutely be considered common carriers. Lenders should not.

Re: OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

#329

Post by isatty » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

zimpenfish wrote: post #122

lostgame wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the hell did they think would happen? Does anyone remember Tumblr? No? We’ve already experienced what it’s like for a brand to lose any relevance by abandoning the very community that made it successful.

> Does anyone remember Tumblr? No? Yes? I check my Tumblr timeline pretty much every day - there's a lot of content there (and I only follow a handful of people.) Anyone suggesting Tumblr is dead is mistaken. (And yeah, the daily posts are way down but that's after 8 years of neglect and mishandling. Any social network would suffer the same!)

Tumblr went from >1B valuation to ~3M right after it was announced. It wasn't the 8y of neglect that did it.

Re: OnlyFans drops planned porn ban

#330

Post by dspillett » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

mkl95 wrote: post #185

I've never understood the appeal of OnlyFans. If your goal is to consume adult content, then you can get it in massive amounts for free, and without using an app. If your goal is to make money from online sex work, the ~$180 average monthly earnings are simply appaling when you compare them to traditional porn sites, where some workers earn that money in a day.

> ~$180 average monthly earnings … compare to traditional porn sites, where some workers earn that money in a day.

That is not a valid comparison. Some OF publishers probably make that much in a day. Comparing the average on one venue to the outliers of another doesn't really tell you anything useful.

Furthermore, I suspect most traditional porn work is paid per shoot with nothing per view or per repeat, and there are relatively limited opportunities for fresh shoots because of the reusability of the content from each shoot. OF is a completely different model, the recurring income is likely to be considerably more significant than one-off income in that model. You'd have to do some proper analysis on figures gathered over months (or longer) to get any useful picture comparing overall income from these platforms.

Additionally, OF less likely involves interacting with people you don't know, in environments you are not familiar with, and other potential safety or level-of-ickyness concerns, so money is not the only consideration.

> compare to traditional porn

And another thing: Cam girls have been around for decades. OF in the sense being discussed here is traditional porn of a sort.