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Under the skin of OnlyFans

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Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#431

Post by sebmellen »

watwut wrote: post #424
sebmellen wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know… I think people are cynical these days in large part because the world around us is dominated by this status angst. But it wasn’t always this way. Not even close. I’ve met many people who grew up in pre- and post-WWII Germany, and from how they describe it, the concept of status didn’t really exist then as it does now. Yes, there were rich and poor. But people fell in love with and married people in thei…

Your description of pre-WWII Germany is overly idyllic. We would not had WWII if pre-WWII Germans were that happy. The Germany was pretty violent, unstable place with serious economical problems including homelessness. The whole phenomenon of young men fighting on the streets with political opponents had a lot to do with them being unhappy about their place and options in society. Some people and marriages were happy…

Surely, that's why I added "with the exception of the war (a significant exemption, true)". I only describe Germany in this way because it's the country where I have the deepest roots and speak the language. I am sure this sentiment would mirror across most of Europe, absent the many horrors and tragedies of the 20th century.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I'd like to go back and live in the 20th century, but I do think some ways of life in those times were simpler and better acclimated to human nature.

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#432

Post by StevePerkins »

leppr wrote: post #330
hnbad wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Can anyone who downvoted comment on the reasons? I actually found this post insightful and particularly level-headed so I'm curious if it's something I've missed.

1. At a quick skim, the opening sentence can seem critical of "leftists".

2. The opening sentence a couple of paragraphs down seems critical of "capitalism".

Hacker News is better than most forums on the contemporary Internet. But even here, I believe that most readers are just skimming most of the comments. And at a quick skim, keywords that make you angry jump off the screen more prominently than ideas you might agree with.

There was a time in which expressing critiques of "all sides" made one sounds more reasoned, or credible. But today, if you seem to be throwing shade on the left AND on capitalists in the same comment, then it's kind of a crapshoot. Either someone will upvote it, and a hive will follow suit, or the opposite. You're as likely to just piss everyone off as you are to seem balanced.

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#433

Post by dragonwriter »

sebmellen wrote: post #426
nightcracker wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, yes, the same old story. The exact same things has been said by the previous generations about books, comic strips, radio, television, computer games, etc...

Ok..? In the case of computer games, I don't think unfettered use is a good thing. This isn't "juvenoia", I was born in and am living in this generation. The vast universe of freely available junk and time wasters available now is a radical shift from even my early childhood, when there were distractions, but they were not purposely made addictive by teams of psychologists and programmers to increase the profits of h…

> The vast universe of freely available junk and time wasters available now is a radical shift from even my early childhood, when there were distractions, but they were not purposely made addictive by teams of psychologists and programmers to increase the profits of huge corporate advertising behemoths

If you were born in and living in this generation, for any living generation younger than maybe the Baby Boomers, that's only even potentially technically true because the teams optimizing stickiness of entertainment of all kinds including youth entertainment, didn't involve programmers (in the computing sense) until fairly recently. But they absolutely have for a long time included psychologists, and the have been serving the intereste of corporate behemoths including in the advertising field.

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#434

Post by bryan_w »

dabbledash wrote: post #260
dannyw wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sexualisation is a reflection of society. Ask women what they experience if they show up to work without makeup. In my view, onlyfans is a net positive for society. Would you rather like sex trafficking? Because face it, humans have hormones, and our social norms encourage men to go for status and women for appearance. These facts create the atmosphere for sex work.

“Ask women what they experience if they show up to work without makeup.” My experience of not wearing makeup in lots of places, over many years: Nothing happens. It’s fine.

Exactly. I've never heard a guy say "she would be cute if she wore some mascara" or "I can't believe she's not wearing lip liner".

I learned long ago that woman "get pretty" either for other woman or for themselves.

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#435

Post by monkeybutton »

anotherman554 wrote: post #376
Telemakhos wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a time when family members intervened when they saw loved ones engaging in self-harm. This husband is watching his wife expose herself to trauma so great that she feels compelled to seek therapy, a therapy provided by the same corporation that is profiting off her trauma. The easy conclusion is that the corporation provides this therapy to keep the traumatized people who drive the company's profits from qui…

"There was a time when family members intervened when they saw loved ones engaging in self-harm." Some people would call removing you loved one's agency to make their own decisions abuse.

I agree that the question further up did come off as rather paternalistic in a bad way but their central point has merit: by continuing to support his wife's decision to work in that environment, doesn't that make him an enabler for the abuse?

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#436

Post by jeffreyrogers »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #401
thepasswordis wrote: post #397

Who could have possibly predicted that a company which mechanized the process of targeting and turning young teenage girls into prostitutes would have a dark side? If onlyfans happened in person, the people behind it would be in prison. They market to teenagers, and as soon as they turn 18 encourage them to prostitute themselves to men over the internet. It is a disgusting, horrible company that we should be ashamed…

While I might ethically disagree with their business model I don't think your assessment is fair. Their platform is certainly a step up from those same individuals getting into the industrial porn industry.

But the vast majority of them wouldn't get involved in the industrial porn industry, so you reduce the harm to a small number of people while increasing the harm (by a lesser degree) to a much larger number of people.

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#437

Post by packetslave »

chasd00 wrote: post #312
kristopolous wrote: post #125

Being curious about the onboarding, about 2 years ago I signed up and starting doing non-adult content on OF. It's really similar to patreon, substack or bandcamp; optionally paywalled content on a freemium model. The onboarding and experience of OF is somewhat odd in that it didn't ever say "this is for you to post explicit content". It's structured for it sure, but every page is isolated. Even on the splash it just…

It didn’t start out for porn but grew in that direction. Iirc when it started taking off there weren’t that happy about the porn but bank account deposits are a hell of a drug.

From what I recall, OF really took off in the porn world when Patreon banned adult content.

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#438

Post by neonbones »

throwmeawaydddy wrote: post #33

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 can tell something from a POV of a webcam. My ex-girlfriend was a webcam model on the biggest website (chatur), and she was successful. It was even before the rising and growth of OF, somewhere around 2017.

She was happy with her job, and as I know, she is still satisfied with the money she gets from it. Usually, it's around $500-1000 and even $2-3k for one day of work. It's happened because we live in a poor country where it's hard to find a job even with a degree, so you need to survive somehow. And we were younger and more naive.

Anyway, the thing is that she was part of the community of webcam models, and most of them working 4-8 hours a day and got around $300-500 in a week. Most of the money goes to 5% of models that appear on the first page.

It's a super competitive job, and your only way is to find regular customers who will visit all your streams to tip and talk about random things. There was an old dude who takes private and talked about his daughter and family issues. He was lonely and just want to speak anonymously to someone.

But there are also real creeps, one of them even somehow found out where we live and our city and travel here (to Eastern Europe from Korea) to report my ex to the police. He demands that she must have sex with him if she wants that to stop. He was nice to her, and everything was fine, but one day she rejects his request (some crazy fetish things), and he goes mad, and all that happened. You're right. The most significant fans are also the ones who go apeshit when something goes wrong for them, and it's scary to think about people like that and what they can do to break someone's life.

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#439

Post by flutas »

NGRhodes wrote: post #172
KirillPanov wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people who would consistently spend 15k+ on Candy Crush (and pay their bills). Sounds like a very successful money laundering operation.

Money laundering is a challenge even in the more tightly regulated industry I worked in. Conversely at one of my previous employers some of our big spenders were publicly known high end rich.

At one of my former jobs, we had a tipping system where we took 15% off the top.

We stored every transaction and user in a graphDB. It was fun seeing normal flows, until you see the money laundering flows show up.

It was above my pay grade to deal with them, so I still don't know how that turned out.

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#440

Post by jszymborski »

dfxm12 wrote: post #414
throwmeawaydddy wrote: post #33

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 creators would somehow be surprised when they realised we couldn't remove content from other websites. Don't you have skin in this, too? I would expect that you would want to protect your content in much the same way a film studio protects their content when it pops up on 3rd party sites. I don't know if you're being obtuse with your wording here, but whether or not your customers realized that you can't physical…

If I'm totally honest, I never thought of it this way, but humour me this: if OF and the like are considered distributors in the traditional sense of the entertainment world, would they typically be responsible for engaging in legal disputes over unauthorized distribution?

My feeble understanding of the law is that it would be more appropriate for copyright holders to sue in instances of illegal distribution. I understand why this isn't an option for most people (they don't have the resources a studio does), but I'm just trying to trace back who has the right to press for charges.

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