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 creators). The average monthly payment was $5000 (skewed massively by the top 5%).

We had phone support for our larger creator. One very common request was to instantly delete all data and stop processing future orders. Usually, the requester was in a pretty agitated/distraught state (I'd occasionally get escalated calls to "confirm" that all data would be deleted ASAP and no copies would be kept).

I spoke to a few of our creators and most would be desperate to scrub all of their content form the internet because:

a) A parent/relative found out.

b) A fellow employee at their 9-5 stumbled on their account.

c) A 'fan' went nuclear and was waging all out digital war. One creator had a former subscriber sending data dumps to all their Facebook and Instagram friends (they also spammed every public email address at their 'normal' workplace, which was a local government).

We would occasionally get demanding letters requesting the removal of content from third party sites (Pornhub, Reddit, etc). The creators would somehow be surprised when they realised we couldn't remove content from other websites.

The experience was very depressing.

Social media in all forms grooms young naive women into feeling these types of careers are lucrative (which they can be) and even empowering, but I almost see it as drug dealing, with the drug being intimacy and attention, and by nature it is a transaction where the dealer always uses their own supply.

I feel like these dangerous aspects of sex work are often ignored in the current zeitgeist of de-stigmatizing, or of rebranding sex work in western society. While things like onlyfans have helped with issues of exploitation, it has really changed the game into one that is not well understood yet.

This is something that's really been bugging me when looking at Reddit's porn subs. There has been a really noticeable change in the last 2 years. Back then, a majority of the posters seemed to actually be amateurs getting their kicks from online exhibitionism. Now it's 99% OnlyFans advertising. I guess that professionalization was bound to happen.

But what bugs me are the titles: they used to be descriptions of the content, sometimes addressing the audience as a whole. But now, most titles personally address the viewer with things like "Be honest, would you lick it?".

I bet that raises engagement and gets subscriptions, but seems like a really bad idea in terms of, as you wrote, mental health for the women, and reinforcing toxic attitudes among the men.

I'm guessing that is just a thing some men do but it is bound to be made worse by women correctly figuring out the high-engagement equilibrium is tantalising without promising. But a lot of them probably aren't going to realise that they're dealing with unexploded ordinance; that could foreseeably lead to some spectacular meltdowns for men who were already mental health edge cases when it dawns on them that their time is being wasted.

That's why in places like strip-clubs you usually have at least a couple of strongly-built bodyguards who can address this issue right there on the spot, on the Internet there is no such thing.

Of course not all fans are like this but it just takes a very vocal minority to create a big problem.

But then again, it takes some insanity to become a brand fan in the first place.

I’m sure that when trading desires and emotion like on OnlyFans, the things I’ve mentioned become 100x worse.

Stock and currency trading forums were early instances of these challenges.

After all, the origin of the term Stan is exactly about this kind of parasocial toxicity.

I've never experienced it as a target but I've seen fan rage explosions (not necessarily direct customers, depending on the particular industry, but entitled downstream fans targeting the upstream objects of fandom) in all of these non-sex-work industries:

film/television, music, video games, tabletop hobby gaming (particularly RPGs), sport, software (particularly open source), ...probably some that I am forgetting.

https://collider.com/last-of-us-2-controversy-explained/

Too many people have too much time on their hands.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/506723/how-did-o...

Another cultural thing, they've recently started automatically translating the titles to my native language, and I don't know why but the titles sound so much more vulgar in Dutch than they do in English to me. Automatic translation is always annoying but here it's especially jarring.

It's the other way around: you're less emotionally connected to your second language. You're not phased by the most scurrilous elements of English, because of a combination of factors (like the way your brain processes a second language, and the fact that you did not grow up in a native English culture). Whereas you have a primary connection to Dutch and its native culture, so you instinctively know what is vulgar or disgusting in a much more direct way.

I'm a native English speaker and I've noticed that swearing no longer feels like a big deal. Our media and online discourse are saturated with the worst swears our language has to bear, to the point none of it hits with gravity.

I also think some of it has to do with changing generational attitudes. Millennials and Gen Z use swearing as friendly banter. You can call your casual friend a "fucking asshole", and as long as you're smiling and laughing, it's an endearing gesture. And if it were truly meant as a jab, it doesn't even sting.

The only words you can't (and shouldn't!) say are racial epithets. Those are untouchable. It's almost like what swear words themselves felt like when I was a child and knew I would be punished for saying "shit" or "damn".

> In medieval Bristol, one casually referred to a glade called Fuckinggrove, while up in Chester, one could proudly sport a name like Roger Fuckbythenavel. Only later did fuck become a word so dirty that generations of lexicographers pretended that it didn’t exist. And just as a word can attain the power of profane status, it can lose it....

> More broadly, while the sacred status of most of the words Carlin mentioned has weakened considerably, new words have arisen that occupy the same place in the culture. Aunt Ruth might have walked out of the room rather than listen to Carlin's disquisition when her nephew Craig played it on his record player. She seems so old-fashioned today, but how many of us would be up for watching a hot new comedian on Netflix gabbing cockily about how we need to get over n[*****] and f[*****]?

Edit: in reply to dead comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27896373: I'm pretty sure your comment is dead because you didn't "prudishly" redact the words I did, but I can add the brackets if it makes you happy.

If you are using symbols indicating quotations, then you don't do unmarked editorial alterations. The quote from the article is “...get over nigger and faggot?”

By making the changes without marking them as editorial alterations (e.g., “...n[*****] and f[*****]”) you are misattributing your prudishness to the source article.

Shit and damn used to be taboo, but they haven't been now for a while. However (in the American dialect, I think) "cunt" is pretty taboo, as well as the various racial terms, and "fuck" can be taboo depending on the context (i.e. you wouldn't use it to address your server at a restaurant).

I feel the same way about apologizing in a 2nd language.

I'll overly apologize on minor inconveniences because the words don't carry the weight of saying "sorry, sorry, sorry" in English.

I was astonished at their offense and didn't understand it for a long time.

I don't feel quite the same about Spanish, although the expletives that are more layered in metaphor amuse me more than anything else. Me cago en la leche!

I suspect that has more to do with your own culture's relationship with Russia than something specific to the language.

For example, if you're just browsing for thumbnails that look good, and you click forward to the action, there's a decent chance you're unknowingly watching some kind of rape or exploitation scenario. Some are just silly, like stepmom's arm is stuck in the couch, but others are sleazy and many would be crimes in real life. I don't think such content should be censored, but it doesn't make a great fantasy for me, and I don't like the undercurrent of wondering if my engagement with whatever video I'm watching is contributing to some marketing drone saying, "The stepdad-punishing-teen-daughter-with-sex genre is trending, let's push it hard today!"

Another thing that vividly stuck in my mind was seeing a photo of an actress I recognized in a news headline: teen victim of car accident identified as 19-year-old runaway. The reason it stuck in my mind was the realization that I had been jerking off to her videos for easily four years, maybe longer. Such a thing shouldn't be shocking. If people will obtain forged proof of age documents to win Little League tournaments, they'll do it to make money, right? But that was pretty sobering and made it hard to look at young attractive women on my laptop without wondering how old they are and if maybe I should watch something else instead.

Don't get me wrong; I don't abstain completely. I've just developed a distaste that keeps me away a lot of the times when otherwise I would gladly partake.

Youtube also - sometimes - translates video titles, which in some cases is convenient (like Japanese videos). But that's the thing, from a Dutch standpoint you can read English titles just fine, but sites like Pornhub, Youtube are international affairs, and assuming everyone knows some English, while fair enough, is not actually a global truth and there's plenty of non-western countries where English is a lot more uncommon. I do believe 'our' generation (in NL) knows good English because we grew up with the early internet, which was a lot bigger if you could read and write English. But the current generation is landing in a much more internationalized internet.

Huh, I wonder if there are tools to do A B testing on sites like Pornhub..

I don't agree. Even the most misogynistic stuff there doesn't actively try to draw in the viewer to the same degree, and most importantly, it allows the women a much clearer separation of what they're doing before the camera and who they really are. They don't have to advertise it and tell random strangers "you can have that too!".

Every word you add is another tag or search your video is related to.

It was, but the last couple of years have accelerated the process significantly beyond where it would otherwise have moved in this amount of time.

The pandemic had created changes in both the supply (people jobless without support, or at least support that fully covered their living costs, people at home and bored, etc.) and demand (people working at home taking breaks in a way they couldn't at the office, people at home not working and bored and able to pay for it (supported by furlough schemes for instance), and people unable to pay but similarly bored and so future "I spent my savings and got into dept on porn" stories.

> now, most titles personally address the viewer with things like

That sounds like the good ol' "call to action" of the advertising world, it engages the mind, even if only subconsciously, especially if the wording means it could be directed personally, and gets more attention. If course when most titles follow the pattern the benefit will drop off precipitously but the pattern will stick around until the next big idea comes along and saturates the market.

> and reinforcing toxic attitudes

Including the "abuse of power" fantasies, either directly or through "she made me do it" inversions. Though porn has always had these there seems to have been a mad scramble towards "step family" crap in the role play as porn makers have realised it is legal in most places and recent (or recently surfaced) big scandals have made their previous go-to options (like the casting couch) less palettible. All the mainstream providers pushing the same thing, and the smaller/independent ones following so they appear in "related content" lists, poses a threat of normalising these dynamics in some minds which can put already vulnerable people at greater risk.

The internet connects people, sometimes 1:1, sometimes 1:N.

A Youtuber asking for comments they may or may not have the time to read is one thing, a camgirl writing 200 subscribers "Haven't seen you in a while, touching myself now imagining your dick inside me" is a very different thing.

Or it could just be normal, expected behaviour.

I bet that raises engagement and gets subscriptions, but seems like a really bad idea in terms of, as you wrote, mental health for the women, and reinforcing toxic attitudes among the men.

I believe since this is HN, it isn't a radical claim to suggest reading/ comprehension isn't the problem. But since I can't make guarantees I'll give a succinct answer in the interests of time.

Expected by whom?

The Pope.

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.

The men who drive by want to cum as fast as possible with as little damage to their pocketbook as possible. So they drive in, maybe critique her appearance, say, "tits" or "ass" (usually it's just singulars as imperatives), cum, then leave.

She's started keeping a list of clients who say thank you. Almost none.

The far left has really hijacked the discourse around sex work and used language of empowerment to encourage young girls to get in and get what's theirs. Mostly what they're getting is trauma that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

However, I think it’s dangerous to shape the conversation about sex work solely around such cases. A person from my old flat share was a nurse on a terminal cancer ward for mostly children. > 90% of the patients died. They burned out within two years on the job. My aunt had to quit her job as hospital nurse because it physically ruined her body. She’s still suffering from that, decades later. A friend of mine spent his (then mandatory) social service caring for a quadriplegic person who deliberately tried to destroy my friend mentally, sort of their revenge for what happened to them. It took less than half a year for my friend to end up in stationary therapy, due to risk of self-harm and suicide. Yet, we don’t discuss these cases in terms of “being a nurse is a ruinous job. It needs to be banned.” - nor should we. Those cases need to be discussed in terms of “how can we ensure these jobs are safe and receive the support needed.” I believe that making sex work illegal and driving it back underground is not helping that conversation.

I never indicated either of these would be solutions. I don't believe elevating sex work to a pedestal in the cultural consciousness is right or ethical. That is primarily what I am taking issue with. It can be lucrative but the toll on young women, often very young women, can be great. It's a damaging profession both to its consumers and to its creators.

Banning it will not stop it. What we need is to have a frank discussion about what it entails and stop the trend of fetishizing or glorifying it as a desirable career. It is by and large ugly and violent.

On the other hand it's also weird to me to see progressive elements talk of normalizing such a personal commodification -- perhaps like some progressives, I am not sure there is as big a difference as we'd like to believe between selling one's spring days to be a cog in any commercial operation and selling participation in sexual gratification. But nobody talks of normalizing or glorifying the former! On the other hand, no one stigmatizes being a cog in a commercial operation. Maybe what's going on is that it's hard to argue for the dignity of removing personalized stigma without overcorrecting.

So the solution is probably conversations (like this one) elaborating on the dynamics of the ways it can go wrong. No one's freedom to choose or dignity if they choose sex work is hurt by clear-eyed explanations of the hazards.

There is! In the first case, you work with colleagues who may become friends, you learn how to treat people and build stronger relationships. The "cog in [a] commercial operation" quip is an abstraction. Generally, people have relationships with their peers and are not "cogs."

Whereas on the other hand, the sex worker deals with people who treat them badly precisely because they've paid to do that. They even enjoy it. This is a twisted model of human relations, and the sex worker is both the enabler of that awful exchange and has a target on his or her back.

So the progressive "view" of this thing is absolutely insane. It's constructed from a position of privilege where the reality constructed by toying with such ideas need never be encountered.

Speak to statistical distributions within each if you must (preferably from well-researched statistics including polls of people involved) but what's actually less than sane is the construction of a rigid dichotomy in which the abuse happens over here in this sex-work-bad-place and the positive-human-interaction stuff happens over here in happy-commercial-peer-space.

However, if MY attitudes are adopted, then the locus of control returns to the individual. Who will do better in the end: the one who goes home every night feeling that the "enterprise [is] badly suffused with exploitative and adversarial interactions" or the one who takes personal responsibility for each interaction in which he or she is involved?

I know who I think will do better. Who will have a more positive impact on their surrounding environment. This may be unsophisticated.

It's not being put on a pedestal. It's being pulled up from the gutters.

> It's a damaging profession both to its consumers and to its creators.

There are far more damaging professions that are well respected and accepted in the modern world. However, because the stigma attached to them is generally positive, they get more assistance and help with that damage. Sex workers don't get that benefit.

> What we need is to have a frank discussion about what it entails and stop the trend of fetishizing or glorifying it as a desirable career. It is by and large ugly and violent.

That starts by not treating it like it's "by and large ugly and violent." If you want to have meaningful change, start by respecting it. Otherwise, you are really just part of the problem.

My wife is a sex worker. She has been for five years, four of those together with me. Before I met her, I was a part of a community of sex workers I had known since I was in my twenties so add 5 years more of direct experience with the lives and minds of those workers. My friend who has worked as a domme for the last decade once called me "a friend to sex workers". I deeply care for the people who choose this profession. Ten years ago, five years ago I would say you were right. But I have seen the damage first, second, and third hand.

> It's not being put on a pedestal. It's being pulled up from the gutters.

There is nothing to "pull up". To touch it is to touch a viper that will bite and hold on until you let go. The vast network of clients, which I hear of every day objectifies, commits violence, and minimizes the humanity of the people engaged in sex work.

Yes, it is "by and large ugly and violent". Violent to the prostitutes who risk their lives every time they meet a client, violent to the peace and stability of the mind. Ugly to peel back the spectacled layer and discover the worst of ourselves: covetous, vain and brutal.

I do not make this observation as one uninitiated. I write with the weight of a decade of contact with these people I call my wife and friends.

[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@profitfromtrauma/video/6926281617094...

I could say the same thing to you.

Because I have. I've been doing it for 20+ years now.

But also because you literally admit to ignoring sex workers. You can't just pick and choose those that support your narrative.

I'm done with this conversation. It's clear you aren't interesting in having a real discussion, and just pushing an agenda while at the same time insulting your friends, your wife, and ignoring the people you pretend to support.

I never admitted to this, anywhere. In fact, I stated I've been listening for the last decade. Sex workers, especially women, experience extraordinary levels of violence, daily. [1] Sex work is violent, one of the most violent professions in the world.

My father used to drive prostitutes between their appointments to keep them safe because the level of danger to their person was so high. This is in Denmark, one of the safest countries in the world to live in. My friend who works as a domme in the Bay Area was stalked and physically harassed for a year by one particularly obsessive client.

I don't appreciate you using accusatory language to describe me or my relationship to my wife or friends. I never did anything of the sort to you, so please treat me with respect.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2725271/

With age and life experience, I'm actually finding it increadibly difficult to agree with this statement. Sex work might be damaging for many providers, that's for sure (although, as others mentioned, so are other professions deemed essential); but damaging for consumers, I don't know. If it were so bad, it wouldn't be "the oldest profession". (Male) society undoubtedly needs periodic release, and sex work is one of such valves.

"Whatever a monk keeps pursuing with his thinking & pondering, that becomes the inclination of his awareness. If a monk keeps pursuing thinking imbued with sensuality, abandoning thinking imbued with renunciation, his mind is bent by that thinking imbued with sensuality."

We have a choice every time a thought, a desire, a feeling comes to us. We can follow it, pursue it, foment it. Or we can see it, acknowledge it, and drop it. People will do what they want and never have I advocated we tell people they can't do with their bodies whatever they want to do with them. But we can encourage a wiser eye in our consumption.

As Online sex work as increasingly adopted the 'influencer' mentality to it's marketing, I think it is damaging to consumers. Maybe you think things like NLP don't have an impact on you, but they certainly do on others. As other comments on this thread have mentioned many of the ads/content have become a lot more targeted.

Just because normal jobs suck, doesn’t mean sex work is good.

What I’m saying is that deriving policy from anecdotes is dangerous.

What policy should we derive from your friends personal experience? None! Because we should consider all the data and not your friends story.

My explicitly expressed view is “do not base any policy discussion on anecdotes, even the ones I cited.” Recounting the anecdotes only shows that I can pick sufficient anecdotes to support both sides of the argument and as such, basing any reasonable discussion on them is futile.

> What policy should we derive from your friends personal experience? None! Because we should consider all the data and not your friends story.

Exactly.

Just because sex work sucks doesn't mean that you improve sex workers conditions by criminalizing their work while creating no legal opportunity.

Criminalizing sex work just makes it suck more, and the reduces the best case for people for whom it was their best available option (whether or not it still is.)

Why do we make killers lives worse with criminalization of murder?

Because there are negative effects to individuals and societies at large.

Sex work is not the only way for people to support themselves, anymore than professional killers who can also find other means of work.

Well, no, because most illegal trades aren’t illegal to protect people voluntarily engaging in one side or the other of the trade.

> Why do we make killers lives worse with criminalization of murder?

No one argues for criminalization of murder to protect people who would be murderers if it was legal, but people do argue for criminalization of sex workers to protect people who would be sex workers from exploitive labor conditions (but tend to fail to have a narrative, when so doing, about how narrowing their options to include only options that they would, were legal sex work available, see as worse than legal sex work—including illegal sex work—does that.)

This cannot be true. Anyone can find ample porn online (definitely enough to cum) for free. Therefore it follows that people engaging with OnlyFans and other paid-for porn services must be getting something else out of it - the illusion of an intimate (two-way) relationship, the feeling of dominance (uttering commands that the performers then act out), novelty (a bit far-fetched, there's almost certainly more free porn online than anyone can watch in a lifetime, except maybe extremely niche interests...), or something else...

My porn tastes are not fully mainstream, but not far off the path either. You can definitely hit a point where it feels like every clip that matches your interests is one you've seen before. Every actor is one you've seen before. When visiting Pornhub or similar I noticed myself going straight for the "sort by newest" option more often.

And that's why I went to Chaturbate for the first time, because it's live video I've never seen before.

Chaturbate and other live cam sites have their own issues...the two-way stuff can be pretty creepy in both directions. But it is always fresh video and that is its own attraction, even with what seems like an endless sea of porn available.

Camsites are expensive, especially camsites catering to the one-to-one format. Per minute the rate is extremely high and most men can't afford it so they take what they can get. The ones who pay for longer shows often have both specific fetishes not easily catered to and disposable income exceeding what most clients come prepared to spend. Or else the peak experience gets them cumming earlier than they expected and their guilt and shame drives them to leave as soon as they finish.

Arguing that the facts seem to contradict your (or your wife’s) interpretation (an argument I am observing, not endorsing) of the situation is not questioning either of your honesty. People can draw false conclusions without lying.

When there exist no labor protection, the traditional approach when someone died on the job was to replace them with a new desperate person. Livestock in, livestock out.

Becoming a sex worker today in most countries is like becoming a coal miner of old. The only thing that matter is what you produce, and if you get hurt you will be replaced by someone just as desperate.

You are narrowly focusing on a single sentence from a larger rebuttal to the notion that sex work is a healthier pursuit for women than retail.

(I also believe sex work is necessarily self-destructive, as it commodifies, commercializes and depersonalizes the closest, most intimate way of relating to and bonding with another human that we have.)

Your phrasing of "why do you let your wife..." implies OP can and should control whether his wife does this self-destructive behavior.

He can't, literally, and he should not try to.

He is responsible for his choices, not hers.

Yes, if he sees this as hurting her and he's not trying to persuade her to stop doing it, he's responsible for that inaction on his part, and I'd say he should take action.

But, he needs to always remember he does not and should not control her.

Some people would call removing you loved one's agency to make their own decisions abuse.

I don't think any of us have any idea what the facts of the situation is. So it's not clear to me anyone is "enabling" anything.

In the abstract, though, I think yes, if you see someone being abused repeatedly and you support and encourage them to continue going back to the abusive relationship, you are enabling the abuse.

Obviously you should not use violence or force to cause a change but if my wife was working in a profession such as this I would absolutely give an ultimatum of either stop or the kids and I are leaving. Sometime tough love is still love. With that said I don't know OP's situation and they will do whatever they think is best in a situation.

That is knowing what you are going to do, and when, and communicating that to your partner.

It is not about controlling what they do, which is what the wording of "let your wife" implies (whether intentionally or not).

But you can't make them stop choosing to take the next hit.

All you can do is try to persuade them to stop.

Sometimes defining boundaries of what you'll tolerate is part of that, as I've described elsewhere in the thread.

That's about knowing what you will do and when, then communicating it to the others in the situation. It's not about controlling what they choose to do.

OnlyFans creators aren't all from the US, or even the developed world, and minimum wage isn’t a global constant; also, the stat on median income you cite excludes tips, so it understates things potentially quite significantly.

Being able to make some money with a self-defined schedule is appealing, and the idea of selling your own porn probably starts out as a thrill.

Like anything else, any job turns into a grind. A gig where you’re essentially a circus animal performing sex acts for a crowd probably becomes fairly numbing.

Never being thanked never came up, but I suspect most people dealing with the public could relate to how shitty people can be. I wish we made a bigger deal about the mental health of folks working regular service/hospitality jobs and that companies made a better effort to protect their employees from rude customers and abuse.

Webcam stuff at least seems somewhat ideal in terms of safety and in reducing exposure to drugs. It also gives people the ability to instantly drop anyone making them uncomfortable or being obnoxious. I can't imagine most people going that route will have any lasting harm, especially as we move toward a society that wont judge and condemn men and women who do that kind of work. Right now, there are still risks to people when their employers or others in their lives find out they do sex work, but eventually I'd like to think that'll be a thing of the past.

No, it hasn't. The far left is anti-capitalist, and includes both pro-and-anti-sex-work factions; the attitude you describe is more that of the pro-sex-work portion of the pro-(possibly somewhat tamed)-capitalism center-to-center-left.

The pro-sex-work portion of the anti-capitalist (including far) left sees sex work largely as just work, and agrees with many of the (not explicitly gender-based) popular arguments about harms associated with sex work as accurate of sex work within a capitalist system, but not as particular too sex work, but rather as endemic to labor within capitalism.

It's a far left I've experienced both in the US and here in Denmark and I think it's largely the far left people think of when it is mentioned.

I wouldn't describe you as having any useful knowledge of the left (even to the extent of being able to identify the part that is the “far left”.)

> What I've observed is a political group largely held together with

The far left isn’t “held together” at all, but riven with fairly deep internal divisions. Whatever group you see that seems unitary and held together by anything is a much narrower faction than “the far left”, even if it happens to coincidentally overlap with it. In the particular case of the one held together by:

> an obsessive compulsion to root out any element not in line with its own brand of correct thought, which contains a variety of maximalist interpretations on everything from sex and gender to race and institutions.

It’s mostly a fairly narrow vocal largely petit-bourgeois faction of dilettantes inspired mainly by a weird blend of identity politics messages concocted by center-right groups to look progressive while preventing class solidarity occasionally (but not consistently; a lot of them are pretty much exclusively focussed on non-economic-class identity politics) mixed with progressive economic slogans that that are, at best, dubiously compatible with their particular brand of identity politics.

Being extremely generous based on the subset incorporating, however poorly, leftist economic messaging as a component of their platform, one might consider this group to overlap with the far left, but it certainly is not the same as the far left.

Problem is that is in direct conflict with actual reality.

No, they don't.

I mean, if you stop before “free from” that’s almost a good, though somewhat exaggerated, description of extreme libertarianism (whether left, right, or center) but even far left libertarians don’t believe in that being free from judgement, responsibiliry, repercussions, or accountability (but would probably agree with free from prejudice.)

And the non-libertarian far left doesn't even approximately match the description even before the “free from” part.

My friend works for MFC, and is a "contractor", not an employee.

Thanks so much. Its awesome to know there is a site that cares enough about their models to provide support for therapy.

All influencers hoping to make decent money on OFs already need to have some kind of platform, so they already massively traded away their privacy. Selling a nudie is the next step if you're struggling to make money.

This guy (a fellow Software Engineer actually) is a growing YouTube channel who's doing a sort of vlog / reality show about his family and friends. Once he started approaching 1mln subs by consistently putting out great content, his friends and family launched their own social channels as well to benefit from the clout.

His mom and his girlfriend have their own YouTube channels but they're not as popular. Still, their onlyfans passed his YouTube's channel revenue in a very short time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQsp54kyMwE

I would say every culture around the world before the last 20 years or so understands this perfectly well. It's just the conclusions that this vast majority have come to do not agree with the current society.

That leads us now to express misunderstanding and bewilderement.

We might say the same thing happens with bad crypto schemes. Young people get excited and they can lose a lot of money. Though the stakes are potentially higher when you lose your reputation.

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 game usage. I know many people (mostly men) my age (late adolescence) whose lives have been/were destroyed by chronic video game addiction. Similar with porn and “sex-work adjacent” things (on the consumer side).

The decline in alcohol addictions is often attributed to gaming, particularly among men. I also personally prefer people who are addicted to games over those addicted to alcohol, and long term it is much safer for everyone involved.

> [0] "Descriptive data showed no general decline in binge drinking across European countries. In contrast to our prediction, the association between binge drinking and computer gaming was not negative [b = 0.26, one-sided 95% confidence interval (−∞, 0.47), P = 0.98, Bayes Factor = 0.21]. We found the same pattern of result in a secondary analysis on six Nordic countries that have experienced declines in adolescent drinking recent years. In analyses with covariates reflecting engagement in other activities, we only observed statistical evidence for an effect of going out."

[0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dar.13226?af=R

> [1] "Low-level gaming was positively associated with patterns of problematic alcohol use in the crude analyses; these associations became non-significant when controlling for demographic variables. High-level gaming was inversely associated with patterns of problematic alcohol use when controlling for demographics, personality, and mental health covariates."

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235285321...

I have never seen this. Like, this is literally first time I see this attribution being made.

While I have not seen a study on it, I would expect to see a correlation between the need to escape reality and the use of tools that allow escaping. With this follow also a link with social status and class. It is why alcohol use traditionally was associated with the lower classes, and laws directed at consumption of alcohol was basically laws direct at the lower classes.

Why stigmatize something instead of the addiction itself? I knew someone who poured themselves into music production and fantasy to the detriment of everything else. Would you stigmatize music?

Perhaps if something is almost always destructive then some social or legal regulation is warranted. I don't see that with gaming, despite the damage caused by outliers.

That said, perhaps there are some activities which are not addictions which are still destructive and should be stigmatized mainly to protect the person performing the activity (such becoming an "OnlyFans creator").

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.

I agree entirely. I heard of one young lady who started an OnlyFans, apparently did quite well, but decided to stop it because of the psychic damage.

I'm going to be heavily downvoted for this, but I'm going to say it anyway ...

We need to stop all the bullshit about how it empowers women. Certain sections of the Women's Lib movement are particularly to blame for this, and it is right to heavily censure them.

Sites like OnlyFans exploit lonely young men who are poor at making connections with women. It's morally wrong to engage in exploitative behaviour. Period. I don't care if they're "beta cucks", "incels", "losers", or whatever de-humanising manshaming words one cares to use, exploitative behaviour is still wrong.

Sure, if you bounce your tiddies over on OnlyFans then it doesn't make you literally worse than Hitler, but these people should be discouraged from what they're doing.

I don't see why I should be denied access to all of this fun paid sex stuff (consuming and producing) just because other people can't handle themselves. Should I also not be allowed to drink or gamble or play video games just because some other people abuse these hobbies in a dramatic and harmful fashion?

Sex work is empowering because it gives opportunities to people that they wouldn't have otherwise.

It's also very exploitative and risky, both for workers and clients.

In an ideal world, we would find a way to make sex work less exploitative and risky. In the real world, prostitution is a complex problem as old as humanity itself...

That is a common assumption shared both by social conservatives who think any sex outside marriage is wrong anyway, and certain feminist circles who seem to have a problem with seeing male sexuality as anything but a threat.

But I don't think that assumption is correct. Sure, sex work can be exploitative, and it often is. But it doesn't have to be. Just like the hospitality industry has an endemic problem with workers being exploited financially and tolerating verbally abusive behaviour from customers - yet nobody suggests restaurants in general are morally wrong and should be discouraged.

It is possible to do sex work in a non-exploitative way that maintains respect and boundaries between sex worker and client.

The problem is that you can increase short term profits by blurring boundaries, and the network effects of online platforms probaby magnify that.

The appeal of sexwork products is that they can be used to simulate a needful human interaction, one that implies the highest degree of intimacy even when intimacy is explicitly not present.

The necessary deception inherent in the consumption of sexwork products is normally voluntarily performed by the consumer of the product, but even so, failure to successfully self deceive shifts the onus of deception onto the performer, either with or without their knowledge.

The complex and inherently (usually consensually) deceptive nature of sexwork makes it a minefield of misadventure and unintended consequences. Add some unstable people in there, and you have all of the necessary elements for extreme negative outcomes.

I think there is an argument to be made that for the 30 percent of the population on the backside of the bell curve of intelligence, emotional agency, or socialization there is a high probability of an inherently exploitative interaction with most live sexwork.

> stigmatizing… rebranding…

People are just seeking equal treatment of what they do as men treat things like video games. While I would never wish upon anyone to be abused, and while I develop video games, I am not a blowhard, there are in absolute terms more people sick people aggregating in League of Legends than in Only Fans.

That is to say that some underlying trauma, like major depression or poverty, is concentrating people in endless video games playing and sex work, and that is the underlying problem.

The biggest problem is that their professional skills are fleecing men out of money.

"Who has deep pockets and how can I get the most money out of them?"

It's not like you can just turn off that mentality once they quit.

Um, blaming the victim much? Those men have full agency not to be psychotic jerks towards them. No one is forcing them to abuse, harass, and/or threaten sex workers.

But I agree sex workers are being groomed and subsequently exploited by sites like onlyfans with unrealistic promises of quick money for relatively little work. But so are tech workers by sites like this and other VC funds, so should we ban venture capital too? It's once again the inclusion of sex that makes sex work distinct, no?

I wish we had a society that provided better preparation and opportunity to everyone, but we don't right now, and sex work beats living on the street or getting stuck in an abusive household IMO.

"I almost see it as drug dealing, with the drug being intimacy and attention, and by nature it is a transaction where the dealer always uses their own supply."

Which is an entirely new subject wherein societies that experimented with total legalization got a better outcome than societies that hyperfocus on drug wars. Neither choice seems ideal, but one does appear to be unambiguously better given the available data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasing_the_Scream

I started using a cam-girl's services when I was dealing with a break-up.

Where things went wrong was, this worker happened to be local to me, and happened to know the person who I broke up with. When I said I wanted to find someone with a personality like theirs but in real life, they offered to meet me in person.

The short version? I was catfished for 2 years while helping them build their career (their partner, who I never knew about despite asking if they had one before trying to enter a 'relationship', didn't want to be active in helping her, since he was a pre-med student and was worried about the social fallout between that and his family.)

I got to learn a lot about the industry, more specifically around Reddit. I also got to deal with the pain of trying to get my videos removed, polite requests didn't work and I had to go right up to legal threats to finally make it happen.

What I was able to figure out:

  - There are cases where this line of work results in a grooming 'feedback loop'. A surprising number of these girls had partners, many times said partners were successful individuals in other careers. And also involved in various other scenes (BDSM comes to mind.) It often struck me as a cover for predatory behavior; some of these workers will find it hard to shy away from the money that can be made, yet at the same time the constant barrage of misogynistic behavior from clients almost certainly has an effect on them. Their partner gets someone conditioned by the environment.
    - My abuser, last I was aware, was fairly resigned to working small office jobs and/or sticking to camming until they finally decide to have a child. When I first met them they wanted to be a teacher. Make of that what you will.

  - There were cases of extremely controlling behavior within the communities themselves. I heard stories of one of the more successful workers having a sort of 'ranch' for workers that wanted to come by and up their game (and, of course, play with them and their partner.) The ranch itself was almost cult-like with it's management of time and tasks.

  - A lot of these workers have serious mental health issues, often unresolved. Some of these women are abusive and manipulative towards their clients. I experienced this firsthand, and when I made the mistake of trying other camgirl's services long after the incident noted above, I had my consent regarding hypnosis violated by more than one. Unfortunately, the common case of stalkers/creeps means that predators are usually able to get away with their actions, because any attempts to call them out results in the perception that the victim is a stalker/creep for trying to pierce the corporate veil behind a bad actor in the industry.

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.

My experience of not wearing makeup in lots of places, over many years: Nothing happens. It’s fine.

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

They don't expirence anything directly, but through time they get better treatment versus their non makeup wearing counterparts.

Source? My office expirence, also my gf's master thesis was on how apperence affects office atmosphere.. (something in this line)

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 talking about but I couldn't help but wonder about the millionaire sitting on their couch playing terrible mobile games all day.

Thing is when they asked him if he felt bad spending all that money on a game he said "oh no, I'm saving money, before I picked up this game I would go out in NYC with my friends and blow a grand every weekend".

I guess it's all relative.

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.

Poker is weird because the largest chunks of all monies go from one player to the other. But I assume rakes, at higher stakes, do add up really quickly...

I used to deal poker in a past life, here's an anecdote.

We started a low limit game and everyone (10 players) bought in for 60$ - 100$. Over the course of the next hour no one rebought and no new players came in. It was a pretty average game, no one was really 'hot'. After an hour one player noticed that everyone had less money than when the game started (even players that only won hands). He got up and left and I never saw him again.

We took a 5 + 1 rake (1 for jackpot) per hand. 40 hands an hour. 240$ removed from the table in that time span. Basically taking ~3 players money off of the table an hour.

I feel like people have this default reaction to assert that median is as or more important than mean. When, in reality, median is useful for in only specific distributions.

I think people say "median", but what they are really interested are the moments of the distribution. Median just is a key moment in Guassian distributions, other distributions have different important moments, and median isn't necessarily one of them.

Given assumptions about the distribution, you may even be able to fit (or at least narrow down) the exact shape based on these two values.

It ain't exactly a dry cleaners

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.

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.

c) Was this done as blackmail? There is a somewhat common dating site scam where someone gets you to friend them on FB, and then to sext with them-- then they threaten to send the material to your FB friends. I'd imagine OF girls would almost be a captive audience for this.

--- While I find OF personally distasteful, I realize that I paid for sex the old fashioned way, "With a wedding ring, a house, a child and half the stuff when you leave." I can't help but see this as an acceleration of that. I know plenty of people in miserable marriages.

Women have always traded beauty for money. Just before it was through marriage.

---

and lastly... I think we're ignoring the elephant in the room.

I'd wager that a much higher percentage than average of OF girls have likely been abuse victims at some point in their lives. There's this paradoxical thing where, yes, they're adults they have every right to sell pictures, but often what leads them to this is... abuse, which makes the whole thing very murky.

Source? Anecdotal-- having dated a cam girl, and my SO works with girls who have been abused and it's just depressing. I have very causal interactions with this girls, but, they'll either be afraid of you because you're a man, or recklessly flirt because you're a man, or in the case of neglect/absentee fathers-- cast you in the role of the male role-model they need. I have about 6 girls who call me "dad." :-/

One girl here actually gave someone a blowjob for a Lunchables snack pack (worth $2.99).

No, it wasn't blackmail. The creator never received any messages from the fan that went nuclear (they only know it was a 'fan' since they had the entire catalogue of pay-per-access content and some had very few purchases).

It seems they just woke up one day and said 'fuck it, time to wreck a life'. They persisted for a few months. From memory, they started with the creators LinkedIn account and then moved to Facebook -> Instagram -> mass emailing the creators 9-5 company.

The creator deleted most online accounts and started using an alias (which sadly the ex-fan also discovered and continued spamming).

> and lastly... I think we're ignoring the elephant in the room.

Yeah, I think you're on the money with your core point. Very few of the creators I interacted with directly seemed to be thriving in other parts of life sadly.

A childhood friend I had turned out to be one of the "crazy stalker" type individuals. I do not know what psychologically leads to this position, but I do know his family was very dysfunctional. I cut him off as a friend when he had a blowup because he discovered his g/f was also dating another friend of ours, and he went to the guys house to beat him up.

So, 20 years later I'm reading the local Facebook feed, and some poor woman has posted this crazy guy she met at a bar was sending her death threats and stalking her and the police were looking for him. And yea, it's my former friend. I replied that I had known him previously and hoped this was all a misunderstanding, but I'd be happy to talk to the police if needed.

And then the sardonic moment: numerous women replied saying, "Yea, he stalked me too." Including one gal I was fairly close to.

My point is only-- mental illness sucks and is widespread. I can see by some twisted logic he felt that stalking this woman was sort of, doing the work in the relationship, being devoted to her, and then being angry when she wasn't returning his affections, and somehow thinking that anger, would get her to fall in line.

I think OF invites these types of creeps and while unfortunate, it should not be unexpected.

I got one once by posting a single comment on an internet forum. I like to use aliases (thankfully) so all he could do is burn that one alias. They started following me around on different topics to continue the conversation.

My wife had a guy who would randomly show up at her work, house, friends, stores... He confused that they were in a band together that somehow she would want to hook up with him.

For this case some of these people think they have a relationship with the other end. They get emotionally attached but when they realize it is not going to be what they want they become unglued. It does not take much to set them off.

When my wife was pregnant and we didn't know the gender yet I did a lot of reading on attachment theory and what truth there is to "daddy issues" etc. in case it was a girl. It's a trope, but there's something to it.

As it turns out we have a lovely baby boy. Now, to avoid traumatizing him...

Source needed. A quick Google search turned up nothing.

The whole point of this thread is about how poorly OnlyFans is managing this complex space.

Sites like OnlyFans could have mandatory training about not revealing sensitive details (close the curtains before you shoot, take your diploma off the wall, use a stage name, etc.). But yes, your face is a giveaway; and every day it becomes easier to turn a couple breadcrumbs into a full dossier of someone's life.

That's a practical proposal that would help.

Onlyfans creator Aella did a guide on camgirling a few years back: https://knowingless.com/2018/11/19/maximizing-your-slut-impa...

But also possibly be besides the point: the internet doesn't keep secrets.

A choice to put content out there in public form, is de-facto a choice to make it available to anyone. Whether they paid the $10 or not.

That's a reality that has to be contended with wherever someone sits on the fence about the morality of it all.

I totally agree the content creators should assume the content will remain public forever and they will be doxxed at some point.

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/16/16654800/twitch-gaming-t...